Stephanie Muravchik
Bio:
Stephanie Muravchik is a visiting assistant professor at Claremont McKenna College. She is the coauthor, with Jon A. Shields, National Fellowship alumni (NF ’05), of “Trump’s Democrats,” which will be published in September 2020 by the Brookings Institution Press. It is a political ethnography of three blue strongholds that flipped Republican in the 2016 election. Her research explores the intersections of politics with class, family, and religion. Her first book, “American Protestantism in an Age of Psychology” was published by Cambridge Press in 2011. She has taught at Claremont Graduate University and the California State University at San Bernardino.
Thesis Description:
New Creatures in Christ: American Faith in an Age of Psychology
In her dissertation, Muravchik explores how after World War II, though they did not realize it, Christians began a successful project of redeeming millions of alienated Americans by fortifying pastoral care, fellowships, and evangelism with secular ideas and techniques adapted from psychology. They thereby shepherded millions of the nation’s most disaffected citizens - especially the homeless, addicts, the sick, and the dying - into faith’s fold. Muravchik traced their efforts and its effects in three contexts: the psychiatric training of ministers, Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, and The Salvation Army rehabilitation centers. She ultimately argued that the model of selfhood developed in these settings, by merging individual happiness and self-determination with transcendent and communal relationships, could support an American democratic culture in the latter half of the 20th century.
