Charles McCrary (Ph.D., Religion, Florida State University) is an assistant professor of religious studies at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Florida. He researches and teaches broadly on American religion, especially topics related to politics, race, secularism, and science. His first book, Sincerely Held: American Secularism and Its Believers (University of Chicago Press, 2022), examines the history of “sincerely held religious belief” and how that became a standard for legal understandings of religion in religious freedom cases. He is currently in the early stages of a project about a “crank,” in which he explores how religious, scientific, and political fringes are defined as such. McCrary has written in scholarly journals as well as popular outlets such as The Revealer, Religion & Politics, and The New Republic.

Read The Making of a Crass Religious Freedom Celebrity: https://newrepublic.com/article/175783/praying-coach-book-religious-freedom

Visit Sacred Writes: https://www.sacred-writes.org/acls-cohort-winter-2024