Sylvester A. Johnson - The FBI and Religion: Faith and National Security before and after 9/11

This book shares something in common with both the FBI and the religious communities that it has encountered over the decades: it is a collaborative effort, a project that has involved many people. Our goal was to produce a book much more cohesive than a typical edited volume, and to tell a fairly continuous story from the beginning of the FBI to the present. This required more patience and flexibility from our contributors than is typical. We want to express our gratitude to the scholars who have contributed to this volume, both for their essays and for their continued commitment as we worked to create an integrated whole. They responded quickly to deadlines, honored every request for revision, and never complained despite the pesky queries we kept sending their way. It has been a rewarding pleasure to coauthor with them.

Each of us also has separate debts that we want to acknowledge. The FBI, American religion, security studiesall these topics represent a very significant departure from the sort of research Weitzman normally pursues (ancient Jewish Studies), and his first foray into the subject was only a few years ago, an essay published in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion (Religious Studies and the FBI: Adventures in Academic Interventionism, JAAR 81 [2013]: 95995, which forms the basis of his contribution in this volume). As he made his way into a new topic, he benefited immensely from conversations with several people, including Gregory Saathoff, Jean Rosenfeld, Eugene Gallagher, Nike Carstarphan, Steve Herrick, Bruce Lawrence, Kathryn Lofton, Shazhad Bashir, Holly Folk, Michael Barkun, Catherine Wessinger, and Kathryn Gin-Lum (the latter three represented in this volume). For the colleagues who suppressed laughter when he told them that he was working on this project, he will not name names, but he is grateful to them too.

As our introduction makes clear, Weitzman also learned a lot from one of his students at Stanford, Sharia Mayfield. He is grateful to her for sharing her own experience, not to mention that she was a terrific student, and he hopes this book makes some small contribution to overcoming the problems that created such turmoil for her family. As in everything he does, Weitzman is also indebted to his wife, Mira Wasserman, and his four children, Yosef, Hillel, Lev, and Naor.

Sylvester Johnsons gratitude extends to numerous colleagues and supporters as well. The faculty and graduate students in the Department of African American Studies, the Department of Religious Studies, and the Center for African American History at Northwestern University provided generous feedback on an early version of the chapter on the Moorish Science Temple of America during a campus colloquium. Johnson is especially grateful for the written feedback and extended conversations provided by Martha Biondi, Nitasha Sharma, Robert Orsi, William Caldwell, Jeffrey Wheatley, Matthew Smith, and Aram Sarkisian. In addition, Edward Curtis IV has been a longtime friend and intellectual colleague who has enriched Johnsons work on this subject in many ways. Johnson also extends warm gratitude to the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences for helping to fund assistance with research, editing, and indexing. Thanks are due as well to the Religious Studies Department of Stanford University for hosting a colloquium to discuss the book project.

Countless friends and colleagues have encouraged us to pursue this project upon hearing about it. Thinking about the relationship between religion and the FBI is not exactly second nature to most scholars of religion, and we were initially uncertain of just what the reception to this project might be. So it has been especially gratifying to see this book come to fruition and to intersect with a broad range of interests. Most of all, the unmatched support of Heather Nicholson, Ayanna Efiom, and Rainah Johnson have buoyed Johnsons work on this project since its inception, and he remains forever grateful.

No undertaking like this can succeed without efficient and skilled assistance. Jeremy Rehwaldts attentive editing and careful fact-checking of the manuscript has been essential. The assistance provided by Niomi Patel and Aanchal Saxena was also important in communicating with contributing authors and preparing the manuscript for production.

We feel privileged to have worked with our editor at the University of California Press, Eric Schmidt: his enthusiasm and supportiveness were outstanding, and we can only hope we get an opportunity to work with him again. His assistant, Maeve Cornell-Taylor, was the consummate professionaldiligent, patient, and always helpful. We are deeply thankful to them both. We are also both grateful to the anonymous reviewers of the book for their encouragement and excellent recommendations for improving the manuscript. Finally, as every author knows, no manuscript becomes a book without the skilled work of the production team, and we express to them our deep thanks as well for helping to bring this project to completion, especially Jessica Ling and Cindy Fulton for overseeing the production process; Steven Baker for his expert copyediting; Lia Tjandra for designing the cover; and Jen Burton for producing the index, to mention those we know by name.