Roger Baumann joined the Hope College Department of Sociology and Social Work in 2020.

His research and teaching focus on questions about collective identity and social action. He is especially interested in how overlapping racial, religious and national identities contribute to how members of religious groups collectively understand who they are, where they come from and what they should be doing in the world.

His book — Black Visions of the Holy Land — analyzes African American Christian engagement with the global issue of Israel and Palestine. It examines how different groups of Black Christians invoke and contest the identity, history and mission of “the Black Church” as they approach that issue.

Another current project — American Evangelicals, Islam & the Competition for Religious Authority — analyzes hundreds of books written by and for evangelical Christians about Islam and Muslims in the last half century. It asks: What is the religious, political and social significance of American evangelical struggles over the authority to define Islam and Muslims? And what are the implications of this particular struggle for how evangelicals draw boundaries of inclusion and exclusion in the American public sphere?

Dr. Baumann is also the director of Hope’s interdisciplinary Peace and Justice Minor.

Areas of Expertise

• Race and Ethnicity
• Religion
• Collective Identity
• Social Movements
• Qualitative Research Methods
• Social Theory
• Cultural Sociology
• Global and Transnational Sociology
• Peace and Justice Studies

Education

• Ph.D., sociology, Yale University, 2020
• MTS, religion, ethics and politics, Harvard University, 2009
• B.A. (Hons.), religious studies, University of Waterloo, 2007

Selected Publications

Book

• Black Visions of the Holy Land: African American Christian Engagement with Israel and Palestine. Columbia University Press, 2024

Articles and Essays

• “Journeys to and Among the Margins: Transnational Religio-Racial Identity on American Christian Palestinian Solidarity Tours,” with Sara A. Williams,Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Online First, 2024
• “Israel, Palestine, and Martin Luther King Jr.’s Civil Rights Legacy,” Columbia University Press Blog, 2024
• “American evangelicals, Islam, and defining the ‘other,’” The Immanent Frame, 2023
• “Race, Religion, and Global Solidarities: W.E.B. Du Bois and ‘The Black Church’ as a Contested Category,”Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 62 (S1), 2023
• “Race and the Politics of Pilgrimage for African American Christians in Palestine and Israel,”Religions 13 (10), 2022
• “A Social Fields Theory of Pilgrimage: African American Christians in Israel and Palestine,”Sociological Forum, 34 (3), 2019
• “What Are ‘Political’ Black Churches?” Oxford University Press Blog, 2017
• “Political Engagement Meets the Prosperity Gospel: African American Christian Zionism and Black Church Politics,”Sociology of Religion, 77 (4), 2016

Visit Roger Baumann’s personal website