VIDEO—Tisa Wenger, “Religious Freedom: The Contested History of an American Ideal”

Tisa Wenger’s MI Guest Lecture is now available to watch online: “Religious Freedom: The Contested History of an American Ideal.”

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The ideal of religious freedom is rightly celebrated, but historian Tisa Wenger observes that the history of its uses is a “cautionary tale,” too. Religious freedom talk in America has tended to privilege the dominant white Christian population and to support U.S. imperial expansion. At the same time, minority groups at home and colonized people abroad have invoked and reinterpreted this ideal to defend themselves and their ways of life.In this lecture, Tisa Wenger asks how we can understand the history of Latter-day Saint religious freedom talk within this broad comparative frame.

About Tisa Wenger

Tisa Wenger is Associate Professor of American Religious History in the Divinity School, American Studies, and Religious Studies at Yale University. She is author of “Religious Freedom: The Contested History of an American Ideal” (University of North Carolina Press, 2017)