Sarah Hammond

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.
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Departmental website:
http://www.yale.edu/religiousstudies/index.html

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.