Event

A celebration of Professor Thomas's 2019 University of Chicago Press book, which received an Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion (Analytical-Descriptive Studies) from the American Academy of Religion in 2020. 

Blurb from University of Chicago Press:

Religious freedom is a founding tenet of the United States, and it has frequently been used to justify policies towards other nations. Such was the case in 1945 when Americans occupied Japan following World War II. Though the Japanese constitution had guaranteed freedom of religion since 1889, the United States declared that protection faulty, and when the occupation ended in 1952, they claimed to have successfully replaced it with “real” religious freedom.

Through a fresh analysis of pre-war Japanese law, Jolyon Baraka Thomas demonstrates that the occupiers’ triumphant narrative obscured salient Japanese political debates about religious freedom. Indeed, Thomas reveals that American occupiers also vehemently disagreed about the topic. By reconstructing these vibrant debates, Faking Liberties unsettles any notion of American authorship and imposition of religious freedom. Instead, Thomas shows that, during the Occupation, a dialogue about freedom of religion ensued that constructed a new global set of political norms that continue to form policies today.

From the AAR Analytical-Descriptive Studies Jury:

In Faking Liberties: Religious Freedom in American-Occupied Japan, Jolyon Baraka Thomas presents the reader with a robust example of how religious freedom is not a self-evident thing, but a category always under negotiation, and always with winners and losers. Thomas shows how the pre-war Japanese were demonized by American forces as lacking a variety of fundamental rights, most notably, a “freedom of religion,” this despite the fact that the Japanese actually embraced such a constitutional concept. Thomas argues that American ideals of “religious freedom” were part of a much larger project of Occupation that, in the case of Japan and the category “religion,” constrained as much as they freed.