Austin Clements joined the Cushwa Center in summer 2026 as a research fellow. A historian of the United States trained in religious and intellectual history, Clements studies the interaction between religious ideas and the global process of secularization during the 20th century. He earned his Ph.D. in United States history with a certificate in American religions from Stanford University, where he also earned his M.A. in history. His current research concentrates on the relationship between religion and right-wing thought in the first half of the 20th century. He has taught courses on extremism, war, and revolution in modern America. During his time at Stanford, he founded and co-chaired the Blokker Research Workshop in Religion, Politics, and Culture, which recently completed its fourth year.
Shane Ulbrich recently corresponded with Clements about his graduate school experience and dissertation as well as the year ahead.
Shane Ulbrich: Tell us about your time at Stanford. How did your research focus emerge and develop? What were some defining moments?
Austin Clements: I thoroughly enjoyed my time at Stanford. My advisor, Jennifer Burns, immediately made me feel welcome, as did the Department of History faculty and students. As the inaugural graduate student fellow in the American Religions in a Global Context program, and thanks to the tireless efforts of the program’s founder, Kathryn Gin Lum, I also joined a ready-made community of fellow scholars working on American religion. Stanford has such an intellectually rich and personally collegial atmosphere.
I arrived at my research focus in the usual way historians do—in the archives, while researching something else. When I came to Stanford, I was initially interested in studying interwar American varieties of fascism. But in going through “radical right” and “far right” sources, I found not fascism but an assortment of anticommunist literature produced by a variety of American religious movements. Tracing the authors and publishers of this literature back to their specific sects, denominations, and traditions, I then studied the range of religious expressions of anticommunism that I had found—in Catholicism, Lutheranism, Holiness and Pentecostalism, Christian Science, Anabaptism, Fundamentalism, Mormonism, Disciples/Churches of Christ, Adventism, Quakerism—to understand how they all fit together to build the modern American right.
SU: Tell us about the Blokker Research Workshop in Religion, Politics, and Culture. Why did you start it? How has it developed?
AC: I initially started the workshop as a means of bringing scholars—graduate students, postdocs, and faculty, inside and outside Stanford—into an interdisciplinary space to explore the social implications of religious belief. I hoped to build a community of scholars who studied religion across time and space as something that moved people, that gave meaning and purpose to their lives. The open-ended nature was the point: students like myself who worked on, say, American religious history, could work alongside and learn from scholars whose focus was something vastly different—political theology in Islamic thought, for example. I was pleasantly surprised at how quickly the workshop grew and how much support it has had, not only from colleagues and faculty but also from our generous sponsor, Joanne Blokker. The workshop has since hosted scholars working on everything from religious freedom and divorce law to Mormonism and race in Tonga; from Quakers and solitude in early modern Britain to Jewish law and environmentalism.
SU: Tell us about your dissertation. You defended in May. Congratulations! How did you arrive at the topic? What was your favorite chapter to research and write?
AC: Thank you for the congratulations! In my dissertation, “Defending the Kingdom of God: Religious Origins of the American Right, 1917–1941,” I explored the effects of globalization and secularization on American religion and politics in the first half of the 20th century. I focused on how, as different American religions each confronted modern liberalism and secularism, conservatives within formerly antagonistic traditions began to see one another as fellow defenders of religion, and therefore of moral order and salvation.
My favorite chapter to research and write was probably “Thoroughly Modern Millenarians” (I remain unapologetic about the title). I trace how believers in prophecy from Mormonism and various Protestant sects and denominations developed a shared anti-liberal, apocalyptic worldview in the 1920s, one that no longer saw the Antichrist as the pope (as many Protestants had since the Reformation) but rather a secular world leader—maybe Mussolini, Stalin, or some future dictator. This helped to blunt, though never completely eradicate, anti-Catholic prejudice among many Protestants and Mormons, enough to forge anticommunist alliances with Catholics. I have always been fascinated by prophecy belief, and I had fun reconstructing the worldviews of different premillennial traditions as they tried to make sense of an increasingly secular culture.
SU: Tell us about your decision to apply for (and eventually accept) this fellowship with the Cushwa Center.
AC: I first got to know the Cushwa Center when they funded a research trip I did to the Hesburgh Library some years back. I enjoyed my research trip, both on Notre Dame’s serene campus and on my occasional wanderings into South Bend, even if I was in the archives most of the day. As I got to know the campus and the community, I hoped that someday I might be able to study American religion here. So when I saw that Cushwa had a postdoctoral position, I eagerly applied and was thrilled to accept.
SU: We’re thrilled to have you with us. What are a few things you’re looking forward to in the year ahead?
AC: Getting to know people at Notre Dame, having conversations and building a network of fellow students of American religion, and participating in the extensive and exciting programming at Cushwa and the wider campus are at the top of my list. I’m also looking forward to living somewhere with a fall season and snow again!
Two other postdoctoral fellows also joined the Cushwa Center in summer 2026. Read our conversations with them:
Missionary women and Indigenous resilience: Five questions with Alice Laburthe
French Catholic thought across borders: Five questions with Jacob Saliba