This paper analyzes the protest culture of dissenting Protestantism and its challenge to American imperialism during a watershed period of American foreign policy. By focusing on two sites of US imperial policy––the Philippines and China––we can see how radical Protestants called to account both formal and informal aspects of American imperialism. While scholars have drawn attention to how many religious leaders exerted their influence to sway public opinion in favor of American expansion during the Philippine-American War and the Boxer Rebellion in China, little attention n has focused on religiously motivated anti-imperialists at the turn of the twentieth century. One example of religious dissidents was the American-born religious movement called Seventh-day Adventism. Biblical apocalypticism provided the rhetoric to critique American imperialist policies, and to decry the collusion between the church and the state. They articulated their protest by claiming that the book of Revelation depicted how the United States engaged in the violation of human rights and national sovereignty by the subjugation of peoples in foreign lands. This paper highlights the intersections between American foreign policy, religion and politics, and American empire. Shedding light on the subversive conceptualizations of American history fostered by religious outsiders offers fresh insights often overlooked in traditional narratives of American religious and political history.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the Arab world saw the development of an anti-colonial strand of thought and activism known as Easternism (sharqiyya, al-fikra al-sharqiyya), which envisioned the Arab and Muslim world as part of a larger ‘East’ (sharq) – ranging from North Africa to Japan – all sharing a collective project of emancipation from the colonial West. Easternism, and its ideas of an interconnected ‘East’, has often been interpreted as a derivative discourse negatively defined by its opposition to the Western colonizer; or alternatively, as an ambiguous discourse that continuously intermixed with elements of Ottomanism, pan-Islam, secular nationalism and pan-Arabism to such a degree that it failed to emerge as a current of thought in its own right. While these perspectives hold some merit, this paper proposes to recalibrate our understanding of Easternism as a much more distinct current of thought than hitherto recognized. Zooming in on the writings and activities of a range of thinkers and activists in early 20th century Egypt, the paper shows how Easternists pushed forward a distinct vision of Afro-Asian solidarity and communality before it was actualized in postwar Thirdworldism. This Easternism was rooted not exclusively in the logic of colonial difference, but also in an emerging ecumenical imagination of ‘Eastern’ religions and wisdom traditions as sharing similar – even entangled – spiritual values, epistemes, histories and challenges. Through this case, the paper discusses the role of religious and interreligious connectivity in the process of political and cultural decolonization.

In Christianity, God is typically referred to as the Father. However, in early twentieth-century Japan, a radical concept emerged: God as a multi-gendered Mother-Father, with far-reaching social implications. This paper examines the transnational history of this overlooked anti-colonial and anti-imperial religious counterculture from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century. Central to this study is Arai Ōsui (1846–1922), a samurai defeated in Japan’s civil war, along with his collaborators from Japan, Russia, Britain, and the United States. Their transnationalism was both physical, as they crossed national borders, and intellectual, as they challenged the very notion of the nation-state and the ideological foundations of Western modernity through the concept of the multi-gendered Mother-Father God. Various studies have explored how religious changes and reforms in modern Japan (and beyond) were rooted in the processes of Westernisation and nativist countermovements, where the modern West served as the benchmark for civilisational progress. However, this paper argues that the Mother-Father God concept directly challenged the masculine logic underpinning these civilisational discourses. This included a rejection of imperial wars, male dominance, and other social hierarchies. The paper concludes by showing how this forgotten strand of Christian thought was put into practice and how it influenced prominent social figures and movements, such as Tanaka Shōzō, the leader of Japan’s first modern environmental movement.

In America and in India, we know that we are all born for a higher purpose: to reach toward our fullest potential, to work toward excellence and perfection, and to give all glory to God.” This statement came from an unexpected source: Donald Trump. It was part of his speech delivered at the “Namaste Trump” event staged in Ahmedabad in February 2020. The sentiment that Americans and Indians shared a divine purpose reflects the prominence of religion in political discourse in contemporary India and the USA as well as its appeal in bilateral politics. It also reveals a continuity in Indo-US entanglement. This paper explores the evolution of religious discourse as a bridge between India and America from the late nineteenth century to the present day. It examines how religious expression of anticolonialism bridged Indian activists and their American counterparts, paying particular attention to the gendered nature of transnational religious anticolonialism, and tracing its evolution into contemporary religious nationalism and masculinist politics. Religion not only continues to shape national and regional politics but also international relations. The paper demonstrates how surveying the role of religion and religious discourse as a transnational vehicle can offer a new understanding of a global history of the present.