What does a motor company and its founder have to do with religion in America? A lot, it turns out. Henry Ford did not just mass produce cars. As a member of the Episcopal Church, reader of New Thought texts, believer in the “gospel of reincarnation,” mass marketer of antisemitic material, and employer who institutionalized a social gospel, Henry Ford’s contributions to American models of business were informed by and produced for an America he understood to be broadly Christian. Though Ford’s efforts at the head of the Ford Motor Company have commonly been understood as secular, the Motor King was explicit that his work in engineering and auto production was prophetic and meant to remake the world. This talk offers a religious history of Henry Ford and the Ford Motor Company, repositioning them within critical studies of religion and examining how Ford transformed American religion in the twentieth century.

Kati Curts is a historian of religion, specializing in the history and culture of nineteenth- and twentieth-century America. She teaches courses and researches at the intersections of religion, capitalism, and popular culture. Dr. Curts studied economics and marketing as an undergraduate before earning M.A. and M.Phil. degrees in Religious Studies at New York University and Yale University. She completed her Ph.D. in American Religious History at Yale in 2016.

Her recent publications have considered religious assemblage at world’s fairs; and the relational worlds of secular icons as produced in composite photography and devotional performance. She is currently working on her first book – a religious history of Henry Ford and the Ford Motor Company – tentatively titled “Fording Religion in the Automobile Age.” This book project contributes to and reflects broader interests in genealogical relations of religion and the technologies, chronologies, aesthetics, economies, and entertainments that are otherwise assumed to be secular.

In addition to the book project, Dr. Curts’ ongoing research centers on theories of religion, history, modernity, and sociality as formed through silver mining operations in the Gilded Age, scrapbooks and vernacular collecting practices, Hollywood filmmaking, Cold War operatics, cigarette advertisements, contemporary art mash-ups, mobile technology platforms, and corporate-sponsored reading clubs.