Sarah Hammond
November 30, 2011 - It is with much sadness and shock that we inform you of the passing of our 2009 Lake Dissertation Fellow, Sarah Hammond. Those of us who had the chance to meet Sarah and listen to her discuss the dissertation which we helped fund will recall her enthusiasm, depth of knowledge, and vast curiosity in the research fields the Lake Institute hopes to expand. We regret that this young scholar will not be with us to carry on the work, but we are grateful for our brief contact with her and for what she has already contributed to the understanding of faith and giving.
Please read a reflection on Sarah at the Religion in American History blog here, as well as New York Times religious writer Mark Oppenheimer’s memorial here.
A native of Oberlin, Ohio, Sarah Hammond graduated magna cum laude with a B.A. in Religious Studies from Yale University in 1999. After working on HIV/AIDS prevention among high-risk young women, she returned to Yale in 2003 to earn a Ph.D. in American Religious History. Her academic interests include nineteenth- and twentieth-century evangelicalism; the intersection of religion, business, and gender; and religion in popular culture.
Dissertation Abstract
“God’s Business Men”: Entrepreneurial Evangelicals in Depression and War
For decades, historians of American religion have labored to correct a pervasive narrative that takes secularism as the twentieth-century norm and treats religion as a “jack-in-the box,” springing up on the sidelines of the main story and vanishing until events call for another cameo. Nowhere is this neglect more apparent than in representations of twentieth-century Protestant fundamentalism. Other historians treat conservative evangelical Christianity as a dinosaur that periodically roars in distress: resisting modern science at the 1925 Scopes Trial, for example, or hitching cultural traditionalism to the Reagan revolution.
Such marginalization both reflects and perpetuates a dearth of case studies framing fundamentalists as actors in national and international politics and culture. My dissertation examines a subgroup that had no choice but to act: Depression and World War II-era businessmen. Their significance is twofold. First, their workplace philosophies, public lives, and philanthropy show that many fundamentalists retained the world-transforming vision of nineteenth-century revivalism. Second, their interweaving of conservative theology and politics suggests that right-wing evangelicalism remained both robust and mainstream after the 1920s. Like many Americans, fundamentalist businessmen invested in a democratic, capitalist, and Protestant world. The “resurgence” of Christian conservatism in the 1970s is part of an ongoing story.
Read Complete Dissertation (PDF)
