Temples and Turnpikes in “The World of Tomorrow”: Religious Assemblage and Automobility at the 1939 New York World's Fair

This article examines three exhibits at the 1939 New York World's Fair, where religion and religious subjectivity were automobilized and reassembled: the Temple of Religion, the General Motors' Futurama, and the Ford Exposition. In each exhibit, interwar religious visions trafficked with secular futures, demonstrating both the inherent messiness of religion and the secular as analytic categories and the shared patterns and paths by which they have been historically produced, traversed, and transformed. As popular articulations of more deeply entrenched heuristics, each Fair locale reveals descriptive and diagnostic contours for what too often serve as obfuscating scholarly shorthand: religious liberalism, secularization, and industrial religion. This article interrogates these slogans of religious studies as historical and interpretive artifacts and argues that the 1939 Fair can help scholars trace futurist descriptions of religion in the twentieth century as well as shared forms of subjectivity and scholarship reproduced in relation to them.