Michael J. McVicar
Contact Information
By appointment
Michael J. McVicar (Ph.D., Ohio State University) researches the relationship between religion and politics in twentieth-century U.S. history, focusing specifically on the emergence of the American conservative movement in the post-World War II era. He also focuses on the relationship between religion, the state, and corporations in twentieth century American culture. His first book, Christian Reconstruction, offered the first academic study of the theology of Rousas John Rushdoony and the development of Christian antistatism and the homeschooling movement. McVicar’s second book project, God’s Watchers, explores how the surveillance systems that most Americans take for granted today emerged from the nexus of governmental, business, and religious interests that coalesced in the twentieth century.
Research Interests
“Charts, Indexes, and Files: Surveillance, Information Management, and the Contested Boundaries of American Protestantism.” Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation, 30(3), 1-54.
“Christian Reconstruction and the Austrian School of Economics.” In Hayek a Collaborative Biography, Part IX: The Divine Right of the “Free” Market, edited by Robert Leeson. Archival Insights into the Evolution of Economics. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.
“Apostles of Deceit: Ecumenism, Fundamentalism, and the Contested Loyalties of Protestant Clergy During the Cold War.” In Religion and the FBI: Faith and National Security before and after 9/11, edited by Sylvester A. Johnson and Steve Weitzman. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017.
“The Religious Right in America.” In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion, edited by John Barton. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016.
“Take away the Serpents from Us: The Sign of Serpent Handling in the Development of Southern Pentecostalism,” Journal of Southern Religion, 15 (2013).
“‘Let Them have Dominion:’ ‘Dominion Theology’ and the Construction of Religious Extremism in the U.S. Media,” Journal of Religion and Popular Culture, 25 (Spring 2013): 120-145.
“Aggressive Philanthropy: Progressivism, Conservatism, and the William Volker Charities Fund,” The Missouri Historical Review 105 (July 2011), 191-212. Awarded the Missouri Conference on History Lawrence O. Christensen Article Award, 2012.
