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Welcome to American-Born Faiths: Latter-day Saints, Jehovah's Witnesses, and Black Religious Movements
Welcome to American-Born Faiths: Latter-day Saints, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Black Religious Movements.
America has been called a nursery of new religions. Freedom of religion, open land, and constant change allowed prophets, preachers, and seekers to build faiths that did not exist anywhere else in the world. Some of those faiths now count their members in the millions and have spread far beyond the United States.
In this course you will study three of the most important families of American-born religion: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and the Black religious movements of the twentieth century, including the Moorish Science Temple, the Nation of Islam, Father Divine’s Peace Mission, Daddy Grace’s United House of Prayer, and the Black Hebrew Israelites. For each, you will learn the history, the beliefs as members themselves describe them, the place of women, and the controversies that surround them.
These faiths are often called cults. This course does not use that word as a label, because it tells you more about the speaker than about the group. Instead, you will learn to look at evidence: what a group teaches, how it treats its members and its critics, and how it handles abuse when it happens. You will also learn how to minister with respect to members, to families divided by these faiths, and to people who have left them.
How This Course Works
| Topic | Details |
|---|---|
| Prerequisite | Five completed 100-level courses. This is a 200-level course. Cults and High-Control Groups (104) and New Religious Movements (118) are helpful background but not required. |
| Pace | Self-paced. Most students finish in five to seven weeks, studying about five hours a week. There are no deadlines. |
| Structure | Eight modules. Each module has a lesson, a reading assignment, and a ten-question quiz. |
| Book report | Read one of the books offered, pass its ten-question quiz, and write a one-paragraph summary, after Module 8. |
| Final exam | Fifteen multiple-choice questions and one essay of 1,500 to 2,000 words, taken after Module 8. |
| Credit | 3 credit hours toward further titles and degrees. |
Grading
| Part | To pass |
|---|---|
| Module quizzes (8) | Pass each with 70% or higher. Retakes allowed. |
| Book report quiz (10 questions) | Pass with 70% or higher. Retakes allowed. |
| Book report summary (one paragraph) | Approved by the school |
| Final exam, Part 1 (multiple choice) | Pass with 70% or higher. Retakes allowed. |
| Final exam, Part 2 (one essay, 1,500 to 2,000 words) | Approved by the school |
Required texts
- Mormonism: A Very Short Introduction, Richard Lyman Bushman (Oxford University Press, 2008)
- Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Secular World: From the 1870s to the Present, Zoe Knox (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018)
- Muslims in America: A Short History, Edward E. Curtis IV (Oxford University Press, 2009)
- New World A-Coming: Black Religion and Racial Identity during the Great Migration, Judith Weisenfeld (New York University Press, 2016)
Many of these books are available from public libraries, used bookstores, and as ebooks. Each group’s own websites, such as churchofjesuschrist.org and jw.org, are free online and are worth reading so that you hear each faith in its own words.
What you will study
Module 1: Religion Made in America Module 2: The Latter-day Saints: A Prophet and a People Module 3: The Latter-day Saints Today Module 4: Jehovah’s Witnesses: History and Beliefs Module 5: Jehovah’s Witnesses: Life in the Truth Module 6: Black Islam in America: Moorish Science and the Nation of Islam Module 7: God in Harlem: Father Divine, Daddy Grace, and the Black Hebrew Israelites Module 8: When Leaders Abuse Power
Book report choices
The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Malcolm X, as told to Alex Haley; A House Full of Females: Plural Marriage and Women’s Rights in Early Mormonism, 1835 to 1870, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich
Academic honesty
All written work must be your own. You may quote and discuss the course readings and other sources, but you must say where the words and ideas came from. Submitting work written by someone else, including work generated entirely by AI tools, is not permitted.