A novel account of the relationship between sincerity, religious freedom, and the secular in the United States.
“Sincerely held religious belief” is now a common phrase in discussions of American religious freedom, from opinions handed down by the US Supreme Court to local controversies. The “sincerity test” of religious belief has become a cornerstone of US jurisprudence, framing what counts as legitimate grounds for First Amendment claims in the eyes of the law. In Sincerely Held, Charles McCrary provides an original account of how sincerely held religious belief became the primary standard for determining what legally counts as authentic religion.
McCrary skillfully traces the interlocking histories of American sincerity, religion, and secularism starting in the mid-nineteenth century. He analyzes a diverse archive, including Herman Melville’s novel The Confidence-Man, vice-suppressing police, Spiritualist women accused of being fortune-tellers, eclectic conscientious objectors, secularization theorists, Black revolutionaries, and anti-LGBTQ litigants. Across this history, McCrary reveals how sincerity and sincerely held religious belief developed as technologies of secular governance, determining what does and doesn’t entitle a person to receive protections from the state.
This fresh analysis of secularism in the United States invites further reflection on the role of sincerity in public life and religious studies scholarship, asking why sincerity has come to matter so much in a supposedly “post-truth” era.
About the Author
Charles McCrary is a postdoctoral scholar at the Center for the Study of Religion and Conflict at Arizona State University.
Industry Reviews
"McCrary casts this complex subject in a new light. Readers will gain valuable insights into the politics of religion in America."
Publisher's Weekly
"How did this idea of the sincerely held belief become so pervasive in the first place? And why does it continue to appear so frequently within the landscape of American religion and law? . . . McCrary answers these questions in a comprehensive, thought-provoking way as he deftly narrates and investigates the history and origins of sincerely held belief in American life. . . . We should take note of McCrary's call to interrogate this current legal framework and deconstruct, or at the very least, reexamine, our understanding of religious freedom."
Church & State Magazine, Featured Book of the Day, New Books Network
"Charles McCrary's brilliant Sincerely Held shows the declining fortunes of truth and the steadily appreciating value of sincerity to be sides of a single American coin. As the acceptable face of religion under secular law, sincerity severs belief from veracity, hedges it with protections, and exempts it from democratic accountability. McCrary's genealogy of sincerity moves deftly among con artists, purveyors and suppressors of vice, war resisters, and conscientious objectors to secular law to show sincerely held belief to be a technology of racial governance and an engine of state violence. Remarkably, he excavates from the same history the radical possibility that sincerely held belief might yet be summoned to advance good-faith engagement across differences rather than shut it down. A book of uncommon intelligence, daring, grace, and verve, Sincerely Held is cultural criticism a secular age deserves."
Tracy Fessenden, Arizona State University
"Anyone interested in the politics of U.S. religion must grab a copy of Sincerely Held. Over eight chapters populated with con artists, credulous dupes, earnest petitioners, conscientious objectors, indignant inmates, principled paper-pushers, and discriminating judges, McCrary sketches the multifaceted and mercurial figure of the true believer. And just as the legal category of sincerely held belief imagines a world of external guises and hidden truths, McCrary skillfully balances his main text with illuminating discursive footnotes that both perform and subvert the practices of disclosure he so ably describes. Others have written convincingly about the form of secularism, but McCrary captures its irregularly beating heart."
Jolyon Thomas, University of Pennsylvania
