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Jason Bivins

Dr. Jason Bivins is a religious studies and philosophy professor at North Carolina State University.

About Me

Jason C. Bivins is a specialist in religion and American culture, focusing particularly on the intersection between religions and politics since 1900. He is the author of Spirits Rejoice!: Jazz and American Religion, a study of the intersections of jazz and American religions in and across comparative themes/categories like ritual, community, and cosmology. The book is enjoying coverage from mainstream and academic media, including National Public Radio, the Washington Times, All About Jazz, and elsewhere. Bivins has published most actively in the area of U.S. political religions, the subject of his first two books, Religion of Fear: The Politics of Horror in Conservative Evangelicalism (Oxford University Press, 2008) and The Fracture of Good Order: Christian Antiliberalism and the Challenge to American Politics (University of North Carolina Press, 2003). He has also published multiple articles, review essays, and occasional pieces on religion, politics, and culture in the United States, and - increasingly - on theory and method in the study of religion. He is currently working on his next monograph in political religions: Embattled Majority, a genealogy of the rhetoric of “religious bigotry” in conservative Christian politics since the 1960s (as this category is manifested in Christian textbook narratives, conferences such as Justice Sunday, and political organizations like the JCCCR) and of the varied responses to such claims. Instead of focusing simply on the coalescence of these claims, Bivins interprets the agonisms of “religion” as a public category by focus on technology, affect, and conflicted fundaments of democratic life as a way of giving shape to how Americans think broadly about “religion” as a register of public panic and/or public virtue.

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