Cogut Institute for the Humanities

Daniel Vaca is Associate Professor of Religious Studies. His research and teaching focus on histories of religion and culture in the United States, with an emphasis on the relationship between religious and economic life. Much of his research has focused on cultures of business and media. In his award-winning book Evangelicals Incorporated: Books and the Business of Religion in America (Harvard University Press, 2019), he traced the history of the evangelical book industry and its audience since the end of the 19th century, examining how commercial strategies and corporate ambitions helped evangelical Christianity to become socially coherent, prominent, and pervasive. His current research explores understandings of and responses to inequity in the United States. His current project, provisionally titled “A Religious History of Taxes in America,” focuses on the religious history of taxes and taxation in the United States, where taxation continually has been a primary site of political, economic, and moral conflict. In addition to examining how religious thought and practice has shaped understandings of what taxes are and what they do, this project reveals how tax regimes continually have transformed perceptions of what religion is and should be.