F&M Stories

Professor John Modern is arguably the top — and inarguably among the top three — scholars of American religious history today. He is also among the foremost practitioners of an approach to Religious Studies that seeks to denaturalize seemingly naturalized conceptions about the place, role, and definition of religion in the modern world.

Professor Modern’s scholarship combines the ferocity of a genealogist with razor-sharp analytical instincts with the painstaking patience of a rigorous historian who dazzles his audiences with his panoramic command over an archive. Much of Professor Modern’s prolific scholarship has converged on the intellectual mission of questioning and rethinking the popular assumption that secularism represents the inverse, or the opposite, of religion. Throughout his voluminous publications, Modern shows and insists that secularism represents an often ineffable form of power that has shaped the widely held view that “good religion” is that which is consigned to inner piety and private belief.

Moreover, Professor Modern has argued — perhaps more forcefully and convincingly than any other scholar — that the very unquestioned common-sensicality of such a view of religion is itself indebted to the conditions, logics, and technologies of secular power.

His 2011 monograph “Secularism in Antebellum America” is perhaps the most widely debated and discussed book in the field of American religion. This book not only fundamentally reoriented our understanding of secularism in the modern American context, but it also showcased a model of methodological care, creativity — and indeed, courage — that dethroned existing orthodoxies of the field and inspired the research questions, vocabulary, and theoretical toolkit of the next generation of scholars of American religion. Professor Modern’s more recent and award-winning 2021 book, “Neuromatic, Or, a Particular History of Religion and the Brain,” examines the intimate entanglement of religion, secularism, and modern science, and is already destined to become a classic.

In addition to his extensive and deeply influential scholarship, Professor Modern is also the co editor of the most prestigious book series in religious studies, “Class 200” from the University of Chicago Press, which has published some of the most consequential books in the field during the last decade.

Professor Modern is not only an exceptional scholar; he is also a maker of exceptional scholars.