Much More than Salem: America Bewitched

Emily Suzanne Clark

In the early hours of the morning on January 5, 1895, Mrs. Baptiste, “a colored woman,” found “a small black coffin” in front of her residence in New Orleans at Royal Street and Caffin. Once Baptiste realized what was on her stoop, a large crowd of residents congregated at her house and “considerable excitement prevailed.” Sergeant Hevron of the Fifth Precinct arrived and “took charge of the box.” With a hatchet he pried off the coffin’s lid and inside revealed “several candles, a wire mask, and a shirt made out of a oat sack” arranged in such a way as “to represent a body.” For her part, Baptiste was “badly frightened” of the coffin since she “terms herself a voudou.” Her own house had been raided by the police before and “a lot of snakes in bottles, bones, and bundles of letters from her victims” had been uncovered. While it was unknown who placed the coffin at her door, it was clear that they meant her harm. (Story and quotes from “A Voudou Victim. A Coffin on the Doorstep Creates a Sensation,” 6 January 1895, The Daily Picayune; image from George Washington Cable, "Creole Slaves Songs," The Century Magazine, April 1886).

Stories like this, of people seeking supernatural powers to work their will, proliferate throughout American history. As Owen Davies’s recent book America Bewitched: The Story of Witchcraft After Salem (OUP, 2013) demonstrates, America’s relationship with witchcraft did not conclude with Salem in 1692. America Bewitched is an enjoyable read, and one that served as a nice break from working on my dissertation. The book is geared towards a popular audience and so it reads at a pleasant pace with little theory. The chapters are full of story after story of witches and witchcraft in American history from the seventeenth century through the twentieth. The bulk of the prose is narrative surrounding these stories, which range from entertaining or funny, but are more often tragic and gruesome.


As a book written for a wide audience, the book is not argument driven, but this does not mean that it makes no contributions. One of the book’s main strengths is Davies’s attention to the interactions and overlap between the witchcraft beliefs, practices, and fears of early Euro-Americans, recent immigrants, Africans and African Americans, and Native Americans. The porous nature of ideas regarding witchcraft illuminates the realities of what happens when various groups live close together in towns, on plantations, and in tenements. The result is a fascinating tale with a myriad of actors. Additionally, Davies covers witchcraft in all different places and spaces—Alaska; the West; New Orleans; western Pennsylvania; Santa Fe; Norfolk County, Virginia; Galveston, Texas; San Francisco; Memphis; and the Five Points of New York City. Davies finds accusations, folklore, and court cases involving witchcraft from all across the country, dispelling any notion that “superstitious” people are found in any one kind of place or one kind of community.

Davies chose to organize the book thematically rather than chronologically, though the final chapter concludes with Wicca. Those interested in religion and law will find Chapter 3, “The law” and Chapter 7, “Insanity,” of particular interest for Davies’s attention to how court cases involving witchcraft accusations proceeded, how slander cases often resulted from accusations, and how some murder trials of supposed witches helped shape the insanity defense. Material culture scholars too will find much in America Bewitched’s pages, including witch balls, feather wreaths stuck in pillows, tree plugs, and amulets. And anyone interested in cultural interactions and exchanges will find the whole book worth reading.

My main complaint with the book (outside of not liking the cover, and yes, I know that’s a bit of a trite gripe) is its lack of a definition of witchcraft. From my read, witchcraft is understood to mean what his historical subjects take it to mean, which is not inherently a scholarly move with which I disagree. But it obscures how and why certain practices were taken to be witchcraft in one time period. It also leaves me wondering why certain practices might be witchcraft and others not. Were all appeals to the supernatural witchcraft? Mesmerists and Spiritualists were perhaps accused of witchcraft in the newspaper, but Davies writes that “the [news]stories were not always concerned with witchcraft per se, but the actions of mesmerists and spiritualists” too (90). It seems as though Davies had a particular understanding of witchcraft in mind, and this reader would have liked to seen it clearly in print. This could clarify why Davies felt the need to speculate on certain topics, such as whether or not certain “witch murderers” may have suffered from real mental illness or disorders.

Davies states that “we should not consider all such magical practices as timeless and static,” and this statement, along with Davies’s book, open a space for another book: one that interrogates how and why the category of witchcraft has changed in American history. Davies’s definition of witches does identify some helpful markers for the reader. “Motivated by the disruptive forces of spite and envy,” he says of witches, “they were troublemakers, the spreaders of sickness, sowers of discord” (67). As such, witchcraft is always a negative thing in Davies’s narrative, until witches are reinvented in the later twentieth century by Wiccans.

Davies does provide a nice breakdown of the three main “sorts of witches” one finds in American history: the outsider witch, the conflict witch, and the accidental witch. Accusing someone of witchcraft could do political work for the accuser, could serve as a strategy in feuds, or could be the result of some unhappy coincidence. All three of these categories underline an important strength of Davies’s work: his attention to the cultural interactions of his subjects. I wonder if centering the book’s focus on the story of witches in America, rather than witchcraft, might have been a clearer organization. Regardless, America Bewitched is an enjoyable read and covers a wide geographic and temporal spectrum. It could work well either in sections or in whole in various American religious history classes. Students will appreciate its readability and vast array of stories. And it helps demonstrate the numerous ways communities in the U.S. interact with and influence one another.

Virtue Rewarded, and the Righteous Exalted: Or, Our Blog Contributors and Friends in the New York Times

Paul Harvey

We interrupt this programming to bring you this late-breaking news.

Books from friends of and contributors to this blog are discussed in Wednesday's New York Times: Jennifer Schuessler, "A Religious Legacy, with Its Leftward Tilt, Is Reconsidered." Featured in it are blog contributor Elesha Coffman and her new book on The Christian Century, friend-of-the-blog Matt Hedstrom, whose great book The Rise of Liberal Religion gets extensively discussed, and various other books we have covered here including Jill Gill's Embattled Ecumenicism, David Burns' The Life and Death of the Radical Historical Jesus, and others. Congrats to all, thanks to the author for a very nice overview of a field of scholarship we're obviously all interested in here, and to Elesha whose blog comment from about 1 1/2 years ago is (anonymously) quoted: "It’s heartening that dead, white, powerful Protestants are getting another look."

Next up, I hope: a similar sort of article about the recovery of religion, labor, and working-class history, being led by our blog contributors Chris Cantwell, Janine Giordano Drake, and Heath Carter. Pretty please, New York Times? 

The Radical Middle Path: Jesus According to Ingersoll, Herron, and Debs

Paul Putz

The twentieth of every month is about to get a whole lot less interesting for readers of this blog. That's because instead of getting a dose of historian extraordinaire Ed Blum, you'll get to read words typed by a first-year doctoral candidate whose last name doubles as an old-timey derogatory term. If you're a regular reader, then you'll finally know how Chicago Bulls fans felt when Pete Myers replaced Michael Jordan in 1994.

By way of introduction, I suppose I should mention my area of research (Gilded Age/Progressive Era religion in emerging American West urban settings), my school (Baylor), my favorite rap album (Mos Def's Black on Both Sides), my previous occupation (high school social studies teacher in Omaha, Nebraska), and my most annoying habit (using parenthesis way too much).

Now onto more interesting things, like David Burns' The Life and Death of the Radical Historical Jesus (Oxford, 2013).

At the heart of Burns' work is a seeming paradox, an argument for what he calls the "radical middle path." This path was trod by "secular-minded religionists" of the late-19th and early-20th century who sought to find some way to balance the demands of reason and religion, and ultimately found their answer by infusing a secular worldview with religious imagination, or, as Burns puts it, "finding divinity in Jesus' humanity." These freethinkers, socialists, and anarchists, Burns claims, have been overlooked by previous historians of religious history partly because the standard interpretation is that religious modernism was a movement controlled by the liberal professional theologians and academics embedded in elite universities and seminaries. Thus, radical modernists who were outside the stratosphere of the elites have been neglected. Burns believes that his book serves to correct the standard narrative. 

Of course, it takes three paths to make a middle path. For Burns, it seems that his radical middle only emerges when the right has been entirely cropped out of the picture. In other words, his is a middle path for those already oriented to the religious left, a path nestled somewhere in between the evangelical center-left and the scientific modernist left.  

Central to Burns' narrative stands the figure of Jesus, or at least the Jesus constructed by radical religionists like Robert Ingersoll, George Herron, Bouck White, and Eugene Debs. This radical historical Jesus was a blend of fact and fiction, a fossil excavated with the tools of biblical criticism and brought to life via the imagination of radical religionists who "secularized the sacred." As the title of the book suggests, Burns believes that the radical Jesus was a distinct American phenomenon. Although he notes that it was part of a larger tradition of challenging religious authority, he argues that the radical historical Jesus can be traced from its beginning in the 1860s to its ultimate end during World War I.

If you'll allow me to vastly oversimplify and stretch a metaphor to the point of breaking, here's how I would summarize Burns' narrative argument: French scholar Ernest Renan's Life of Jesus (published in English in 1864) was the "radical historical Jesus" seed, and Robert Ingersoll's role was to till the soil and spread the seed around within his vast network of freethinkers, anarchists, and socialists. The seed was watered by George Herron and Cyrenus Osborn Ward on militant socialist soil, sprouting from their work as "a combative carpenter in a socialist account." From there, the radical historical Jesus flowered under Bouck White (whose 1911 The Call of the Carpenter was the "definitive radical rereading of Christ"), before taking its ripened form under the care of Eugene Debs (the "most powerful disciple of the radical historical Jesus during the Progressive Era"), only to be choked to death by the weeds of the World War I-era nationalistic "Prince of Preparedness." By the 1920s the corporate-capitalist Christ and the white-supremacist Christ were too prevalent in the popular consciousness to allow for any renewed growth of the radical Jesus. Furthermore, the secular-revolutionary mindset of the radical religionists was not able to hold sway over subsequent leftist Christs, including the social justice Christ or the black liberation Christ. Thus the radical historical Jesus continues to lie dormant, another of the many casualties of the Great War. 

Burns' decision to begin with and focus on Renan's Life of Jesus perhaps obscures the influences of other conceptions of Jesus that were already prominent in America by the 1860s. For example, in Prophetic Encounters: Religion and the American Radical Tradition (profiled here by Janine Giordano Drake) Dan McKanan credits George Lippard with introducing and advancing the working-class, carpenter-Jesus in antebellum America, and even traces the influence of Lippard's Jesus down to Eugene Debs. It seems that Burns differentiates his radical Jesus from other types by suggesting that the radical Jesus 1) emerged from modern biblical criticism, 2) possessed no traces of divinity, 3) was depicted in imaginative detail to fill in biographical gaps, 4) opposed institutions and organized Christianity, and 5) was interested in social revolution, especially anarchism or socialism.

But did the individuals studied by Burns self-consciously believe that those traits constituted a unique radical Jesus? To what extent is this radical historical Jesus first constructed by Burns and then read back into the radical protagonists’ thoughts and words? Was there really a distinct and traceable radical Jesus that dominated the mindset of Ingersoll, Herron, and Debs, and was mostly independent of the influence of, say, the working-class, carpenter-Christ of George Lippard? I ask these questions without feeling like I have the historical acumen to answer them for myself quite yet. But I think they are worth considering.

Burns has an obvious admiration for the subjects of his study. Their stories, he writes, "provide evidence that flawed and fallible individuals can learn, grow, and become more thoughtful and empathetic." And their discovery of the radical historical Jesus led them to "become more sympathetic and understanding beings capable of reaching out to and embracing different groups and people." The implication seems to be that liberal modernists and religious traditionalists were not quite as capable of such things.

Burns also brings his historical subjects into a modern context, lamenting the disappearance of the radical historical Jesus from current public discourse. He dismisses the Jesus of the Jim Wallis-led contemporary evangelical left on the grounds that he is too moderate and too tolerant of religious traditionalists. And rationalists like Sam Harris come under fire for possessing an ideology that is closer to Lyman Abbot's imperialism than Robert Ingersoll's humanism. Instead of our current system of hard and fast lines between religion and reason, the sacred and the secular, Burns believes that the American radical religionists of 1870-1920 can point us toward a middle ground that recognizes both the "sordid and sublime" in religion, and allows for the power of imagination to bring religious life to a secular mindset.

One is left wondering at the end of the book if Burns sees his project as a continuation of the project of his radical protagonists. Herron, White, and Debs imaginatively reconstructed the historical Jesus to provide inspiration for their own social projects. In some ways, this books reads as if Burns has imaginatively reconstructed the radical religionists to infuse life and inspiration into his vision of a radical middle path in our own day. But then, to what extent do all historians, particularly those of religion, imaginatively reconstruct history to advance their own ideals? Alas, that is a question that I assume I will be dealing with for the rest of my career, however long or short.

As for Burns' book, I haven't even mentioned the attention that he provides to the labor movement and the Socialist Party, both of which make this book a work of labor and political history as much as it is a work of religious history. In fact, the blurbs on the back come from three people outside the field of American religious history: Charles Postel, Robert D. Johnston, and the Jesus Seminar's own John Dominic Crossan. It is a fascinating read throughout, in no small part because Burns is able to deftly navigate his way through multiple historical fields. I'd recommend it to religious historians interested in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, the labor movement, the American radical tradition (if there is such a thing), or the increasingly blurry line (if there is such a thing) between secularism and religion.

American Nietzsche

John Turner

Clarence Darrow, in his closing argument in defense of Nathan Leopold, blamed his role in the murder of fourteen-year-old Bobby Franks on Friedrich Nietzsche:

He grew up in this way. He became enamored of the philosophy of Nietzsche. Your Honor, I have read almost everything that Nietzsche ever wrote. He was a man of a wonderful intellect; the most original philosopher of the last century. Nietzsche believed that some time the superman would be born, that evolution was working toward the superman. He wrote one book, Beyond Good and Evil, which was a criticism of all moral codes as the world understands them; a treatise holding that the intelligent man is beyond good and evil, that the laws for good and the laws for evil do not apply to those who approach the superman. He wrote on the will to power. Nathan Leopold is not the only boy who has read Nietzsche. He may be the only one who was influenced in the way that he was influenced.

...Why should this boy's life be bound up with Frederick Nietzsche, who died thirty years ago, insane, in Germany? I don't know. I only know it is. I know that no man who ever wrote a line that I read failed to influence me to some extent. I know that every life I ever touched influenced me, and I influenced it; and that it is not given to me to unravel the infinite causes and say, "This is I, and this is you." I am responsible for so much; and you are responsible for so much. I know that in the infinite universe everything has its place and that the smallest particle is a part of all. Tell me that you can visit the wrath of fate and chance and life and eternity upon a nineteen-year-old boy! If you could, justice would be a travesty and mercy a fraud. 

Many readers of this blog will recall that at the next year's Scopes Trial, William Jennings Bryan made hay out of Darrow's Nietzsche-based defense of Leopold and Loeb.

In her recently published American Nietzsche, Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen elegantly traces the history of the many ways Americans responded to the German philosopher and cultural critic. For an appreciative and critical review of the book, see this in the NYT. The reviewer calls it a "sober work of intellectual history," which is true, though it's also written in clear and engaging prose and thus is more interesting and more accessible than most such sober works.


Two things caught my attention as I paged through Ratner-Rosenhagen's book. First, in her prologue she discusses Nietzsche's fervent admiration for the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who anticipated at least some of the former's ideas. She notes that Nietzsche's volumes of Emerson were "worn from repeated use, their texts scarred with underlines, and covers, margins, and even flyleaves covered with notations." The notations included "eruptions of approval": "Bravo! "Ja!" "Sehr Gut!" "Herrlich!" "Das ist wahr!" I will now make it a habit to shout "Ausgezeichnet" periodically whenever I read "Self-Reliance." Nietzsche discovered Emerson at a young age, when at a boarding school. Emersonian skepticism was a major factor in the corrosion of his faith. "It was Emerson," Ratner-Rosenhagen writes, "who first instructed Nietzsche about the joys and terrors of the intellectual life without firm land beneath one's feet, of life on the open waters of indeterminacy without compass or guide." By no means did Nietzsche ape Emerson's ideas. Instead, Emerson was a guide, a writer who helped Nietzsche understand how a philosopher should proceed.

One of the most fascinating chapters in American Nietzsche concerns how American Christians assessed the German's philosophy in the early twentieth century. Naturally, many were alarmed, given Nietzsche's withering criticism of religious faith and Christian moralizing. In particular, Nietzsche pointed out that the abandonment of the "Christian God" necessarily called into question the perpetuation of "Christian morality." "When one gives up Christian belief," he argued, "one thereby deprives oneself of the right to Christian morality." The latter argument confirmed the worst fears of theological conservatives while making theological liberals more than a bit nervous. Nevertheless, Ratner-Rosenhagen takes the time to carefully document a broad range of American Protestant and Catholic reflection upon the meaning of Nietzsche's critiques. A fair number of modernists in particular saw Nietzsche's philosophy as a needed critique of ossified faith and one that "could also serve as a balm that might help strengthen and revitalize the core of Christian belief." Many, indeed, agreed that Nietzsche had provided a "service" to the church by identifying genuine the problems of modern spirituality. Nietzsche was a bitter tonic, but it was better to take one's medicine and get on with the cure. Some also appreciated Nietzsche's characterization of the "strenuous life." A few even posited the German philosopher as a "model ascetic," akin to a secular savior.

All of the above suggests, as Ratner-Rosenhagen argues, that in "their vigilance to identify secular sources of American Nietzscheism, theologians and clerics failed to appreciate their own roles in spreading his gospel." After all, they repeatedly talked to their flocks about how dangerous and influential Nietzsche's ideas were and sought ways to appropriate those ideas for their own religious goals.

These few brief glimpses do not begin to introduce the elegance and sophistication of American Nietzsche. Much like the German philosopher himself, Ratner-Rosenhagen's book merits careful study.

Is there a American Radical Tradition? Is it a Faith-Tradition?

Janine Giordano Drake

Is there an American Radical Tradition in the United States? That is, was there a continuous thread of American leftist ideas which have been passed on through generations through political parties and important individuals? What evidence would you need to convince you that there is?

In his recent book, Prophetic Encounters: Religion and the American Radical Tradition, Dan McKanan takes this relative continuity of an American radical tradition as fact. He uses it to argue that this "American radical tradition" is yet another of our American prophetic traditions--another set of believers committed to belief in a relatively similar picture of a better world. For this reason, this Radical Tradition ought to be understood as a kind of religious tradition.

As he put it,

"When we see that religious practices, ideas, and institutions are thoroughly intertwined with the Left, we will be able to tell richer stories from every epoch of American radical history. No single book, of course, can rewrite the history of radicalism. My goal is to highlight important religious threads within the fabric of the Left....

In telling the story of religion and radicalism, I recognize that some readers who share a commitment to liberty, equality, and solidarity will not embrace the 'Left' and "radical" labels. Some activists who appear in this narrative shared that reluctance...

Today's radicals inherit a rich tradition, a heritage of prophetic forebears who struggled against enormous odds, won signal victories, and created a repertoire of practices that we may adapt to the challenges of today...."

McKanan chronologically sketches selected radical visions from a wide assortment of American radical communities of faith, and shows how their oppositional stance toward the religious and cultural authorities of their day, combined with their common set of beliefs in a better world, qualifies their tradition as a community of faith.

I find the book eminently readable and a wonderfully provocative discussion piece for an undergraduate course in American Religion, American Radicalism, or American Politics.  (In fact, I think it would pair wonderfully with Kip Kosek's book on the nonviolent tradition, as the conclusions the two scholars reach about the most important "origins" of Christian nonviolence are ultimately quite different. Kosek finds the Fellowship of Reconciliation a more-or-less Christian tradition, while McKanan's work insists that it really deserves a different context.)

Truth be told, I am not sure what I think yet, because I am still stuck on the suggestion that there is such a thing as an American Radical Tradition in this country.


Sure, there is an American Marxist tradition. Paul and Mary Jo Buhle have done, and continue to do, terrific work in tracing this lineage. This book on the formal Marxist tradition overall and this one on the role of women in American socialist traditions have been some of my favorite books on the subject. In great contrast to McKanan's premises, they both build off the argument made by historians in the 1950s that there are multiple Leftist/Marxist traditions in the United States. They even created an encyclopedia to help us keep track of all these!

The different radical groups can be traced in dozens of directions, but the Buhles and most other historians of the Left generally agree that these Leftists must overall be grouped into at least two categories-- those which migrated to the United States from Europe (German and Russian in particular, especially after the revolutions of 1848), and those which derived from the American experimentalist and agrarian traditions. This binary is likely false (as all dichotomies are), but there are good reasons historians continue to use the categories in a broad sense. Most importantly, the European radical traditions derived from a mixture of rural peasants and urban, proletarianized workers, while the American radicals grew from a tradition of settler colonialism and American slavery. Even if we don't believe in American exceptionalism, we must admit that the US had a Civil War around the same time others had a socialist revolution.

 American historians of the Left recognize that over course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, these European and settler-colonial traditions mixed in the United States, and the distinction among them became less important and less clear as different groups aligned for common causes. But, scholars of the American Left usually emphasize that there were always multiple and very furiously competing visions for what a "Cooperative Commonwealth" should look like. This fact was further made obvious by the in-fighting among the politicized American working classes in response to the European revolutions of 1848, the American Civil War, and the Russian Revolutions in 1905 and 1919.

Now, I say all this not to dismiss McKanan's argument, but to highlight the ways that his suggestion that we can even do a history of "the American Radical Tradition" is truly provocative. McKanan suggests that all these distinctions among Leftists, and in dividing Leftists from reformers or Progressives, are much less important than one has been led to believe. He defies demands that wealthy abolitionists are really that different from radical socialists two generations later, because his emphasis is that the specific content of their ideas is less important than their positionality relative to the dominant American cultural and religious traditions. He even examines Wiccans as part of this prophetic radical tradition, suggesting that Christians, Jews, freethinkers and atheists have no monopoly on the American radical tradition.

As an historian of religion in the American Left, I am naturally skeptical about assuming that the labor movement and other political and non-church movements were nurtured more in this "American prophetic tradition" than they were in the establishment-driven American religious institutions themselves. I see the abolitionist movement growing as much (or more) from American and British religious traditions as it did from radical/ freethought religious traditions. I agree, of course, that the abolitionist movement birthed several other movements (women's movements, religious movements, labor movements, etc). I admire McKanan's work in reclaiming this reformist movement culture of the nineteenth century as "religious"-- in the sense of political/religious faith and recognizing that this set of beliefs was not really a mainstream religion, but it was truly a uniting faith. This is a very important intervention. It is also important to note the prophetic/religious connections between the abolitionist movement and the next generation's socialists.

Moreover, I agree that we find again in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century a network of quasi-religious reform movements which was similar to those of nineteenth century reformers. The Progressive Era indeed only saw tangible reform because of the broadly-held, prophetic hope in reconstructing or rebuilding the nation on some vague terms of a "Cooperative Commonwealth." I agree that this tradition, too, needs to be seen as a political faith of a sort--a somewhat coherent vision of American perfection and progress.

In many respects, this is all McKanan asks of us--to recognize that we can find institutionalized faith in this country within the archives of American radicals and reformers. But, I keep tripping over this suggestion that there is such a thing as an American Radical Tradition which continually nurtures new leaders and members.

What I see in the history of the American Left is a vast array of short-lived organizations, most of which collapsed through internal arguments or the successful passage of legislation. New organizations build upon some of the ideas of their forebears, but rarely do they really share the same vision or strategy for changing the world as that of the groups they most directly knew before them. My gut tells me that this is too incoherent to be "a" kind of religious tradition in any traceable sense. But, the more I chew on this, perhaps this is really not that different from mainstream American religious traditions. Perhaps there is as much an American Radical Tradition as there is a History of the Black Church, a History of American Evangelicalism, or a History of the Roman Catholic Church in America. I'm not sure yet, but this is a deeply interesting line of inquiry.

The book is sure to start discussions among scholars and students alike about the meaning of "religious history."

The Zombies Are Coming!

Kelly Baker

"How do we know they are coming?"--Karin Lane (Mireille Enos)

"They're coming."--Gerry Lane (Brad Pitt), World War Z

Zombies are everywhere. Brad Pitt battles them in the film adaptation of World War Z.  AMC's The Walking Dead follows human survivors in a post-apocalyptic zombified world. You can download Plants vs. Zombies for your smart phones, or be chased by these monsters for 5K fun runs. Zombies, particularly portrayals of the zombie apocalypse, are also my current area of research as I have mentioned before (how an American religious historian comes to study zombies is another matter entirely).

Recently, I had the opportunity to think and write about zombie apocalypses for beyond my usual audience of fellow scholars. Bondfire Books approached me about writing about zombies for a general audience, and the result of our partnership is my ebook, The Zombies Are Coming! The Realities of the Zombie Apocalypse, which is now available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and iTunes. My goal for this project was to interrogate how the zombie apocalypse shifted from fantasy to possible reality for some Americans. Thus, I examine government and civilian emergency preparedness campaigns, doomsday preppers, guns and ammunition created for the destruction of the undead, zombie shooting targets, and a spate of cannibalistic attacks. All of these case studies lay the groundwork for me to show how zombies emerge as real threats rather than Hollywood monsters. The fictional becomes the actual. This is the only the beginning of my work on zombies, apocalypticism, and American religions, so I welcome any feedback. If the zombies are coming, somebody has to study them. (Though, I will probably be eaten.)