Gabriel Raeburn

Gabriel Raeburn is a Senior Fellow in the Religious Studies department and a Dean's Fellow for Teaching Excellence. He works at the intersection of religion and politics, and the histories of race, inequality, and evangelicalism in the United States throughout the twentieth century.

His dissertation traces Pentecostal movement building and political activism in the United States from the depths of the Great Depression to the end of the Reagan era. It shifts focus away from the East and West coasts and towards Oklahoma, which served as a key space for the development of the Prosperity Gospel in the postwar period. Through the spread of the Prosperity Gospel, the rise of powerful Pentecostal television networks, and in their relationship to political actors and state institutions, Pentecostals shaped how evangelicals understood the causes of and solutions to inequality. At the very moment that questions surrounding inequality and the welfare state became most contested, the Prosperity Gospel provided an alternative explanation for the persistence of racial and economic inequality. This not only shaped evangelical attitudes to capitalism and created coalitions between Pentecostals and conservative political actors but produced a cultural infrastructure for neoliberalism. Raeburn’s research brings together political history, material culture, lived religion, and public policy to show how an array of state, religious, and private sector influences constructed the Prosperity Gospel and how it transformed modern American politics and culture.

Raeburn also works on a series of side projects that explore the history of radical and leftwing historians in the American academy in the postwar period. He recently published an article on the historian Eugene Genovese and the radical journal Marxist Perspectives in Modern Intellectual History.