Gabriel Raeburn, University of Pennsylvania
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
“After an extensive search and long deliberations, I am delighted to announce that the Grants Committee of the National Institute of Social Sciences has selected the winner of its 2020 Dissertation Grant competition,” said President of the National Institute, Fred Larsen.
Doctoral candidate Gabriel Raeburn, a Ph.D. candidate in Religious Studies and History at the University of Pennsylvania, won the prestigious award for his proposal to research and complete his dissertation entitled “Preaching Prosperity: Pentecostals and the Transformation of American Evangelism.”
“Mr. Raeburn won against stiff competition from several other excellent candidates,” Grants Committee Chairman Jonathan Piel added, “and this year’s competition was the most extensive the National Institute has conducted in the history of its Seed Grant (now Dissertation Grant) program.”
Mr. Raeburn’s dissertation explores how Pentecostal evangelists created the “Prosperity Gospel” and used their growing influence to remake the American religious and political landscape. Pentecostalism has received limited attention from American historians to date, and Mr. Raeburn’s work promises to reshape our understanding of how religion, politics, and money fused together in the 20th and 21st Centuries.
The National Institute is delighted to continue its direct support of graduate studies in the social sciences by helping to fund this promising and groundbreaking research.
You can learn more about the National Institute’s Grants Program here.
Gabriel Raeburn
Gabriel Raeburn is a doctoral candidate in Religious Studies and History at the University of Pennsylvania. He studies twentieth century U.S. religion and politics and the histories of race, inequality, and evangelicalism.
His dissertation traces the rise and influence of the Prosperity Gospel, the belief that material wealth is a sign of God’s blessing and that poverty results from a lack of faith, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Raeburn centers Pentecostals in the Southwest and Midwest rather than mainstream evangelicals on the East and West coasts as key drivers of religious transformation in postwar American politics and culture. Longtime religious outsiders, Pentecostals remade the American religious landscape through institution building and an explosion in religious broadcasting that embraced wealth and produced colorblind defenses of inequality. Rather than viewing the Religious Right as a political movement focused purely on conservative social issues, such as opposition to abortion rights or feminism, he explores the ways in which religious actors simultaneously provided support for free-market capitalism and economically conservative policies.
The 2020 National Institute Dissertation Grant supports research in two political and religious archives that help illuminate the relationship between Pentecostals and conservative politicians and strategists throughout the 1980s. Prior to the University of Pennsylvania, Raeburn received his M.St. in U.S. History from the University of Oxford and his B.A. in American Studies and Politics from the University of Sussex.