Government Surveillance of Religious Expression: Mormons, Quakers, and Muslims in the United States

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Kathryn Montalbano (Young Harris College, USA)

Government Surveillance of Religious Expression

Mormons, Quakers, and Muslims in the United States

Kathryn Montalbano (Young Harris College, USA)

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English

Routledge
30 June 2020

Religion & politics; Religious freedom & freedom of worship; Political oppression & persecution

Series: Routledge Studies in Religion

Recent revelations about government surveillance of citizens have led to questions about whether there should be better defined boundaries around privacy. Should government officials have the right to specifically target certain groups for extended surveillance? United States municipal, territorial, and federal agencies have investigated religious groups since the nineteenth century. While critics of contemporary mass surveillance tend to invoke the infringement of privacy, the mutual protection of religion and public expression by the First Amendment positions them, along with religious expression, comfortably within in the public sphere.

This book analyzes government monitoring of Mormons of the Territory of Utah in the 1870s and 1880s for polygamy, Quakers of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) from the 1940s to the 1960s for communist infiltration, and Muslims of Brooklyn, New York, from 2002 to 2013 for suspected terrorism. Government agencies in these case studies attempted to understand how their religious beliefs might shape their actions in the public sphere. It follows that government agents did not just observe these communities, but they probed precisely what constituted religion itself alongside shifting legal and political definitions relative to their respective time periods.

Together, these case studies form a new framework for discussions of the historical and contemporary monitoring of religion. They show that government surveillance is less predictable and monolithic than we might assume. Therefore, this book will be of great interest to scholars of United States religion, history, and politics, as well as surveillance and communication studies.

By: Kathryn Montalbano (Young Harris College USA)
Imprint: Routledge
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 234mm, Width: 156mm,
Weight: 453g
ISBN: 9780367584337
ISBN 10: 0367584336
Series: Routledge Studies in Religion
Pages: 168
Publication Date: 30 June 2020
Audience: College/higher education , Primary , A / AS level
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Kathryn Montalbano is an Assistant Professor of Journalism (Communication Law) at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina. She earned her B.A. in English with a minor in sociology from Haverford College in 2009, and her Ph.D. in communications from Columbia University in 2016. She specializes in communication history and law, religion and media, and surveillance studies.

Reviews for Government Surveillance of Religious Expression: Mormons, Quakers, and Muslims in the United States

While Montalbano makes her professional home in communication studies, she deftly engages with religious studies scholarship, and scholars such as David Sehat, Saba Mahmood, and Talal Asad richly inform her work. Her book is principally concerned with questions that will resonate with religion scholars investigating issues of secularity, surveillance, and the American state-and scholars of these topics would do well to consider the insights Montalbano offers. - Michael McLaughlin, Florida State University, Reading Religion