Joshua Sander

Joshua Sander (PhD University of Alabama, 2026) is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of History. He is a historian of law, religion, and politics in the United States and primarily researches the role of Christian denominations in the debate over the separation of church and state since the end of World War II.

His current book project explores how Catholic and Southern Baptist theologies affected the views of each tradition’s members on the separation of church and state in the twentieth- and twenty-first-century United States. It also explores how the transformations in those views within each tradition that brought them together contributed to the formation of the Religious Right and resulted from shifts in how members viewed certain theological doctrines in the midst of the country's legal, political, and cultural changes. Expanding on the existing scholarship of legal and religious historians, his work uniquely analyzes the significant effect on American church-state politics and law of ecclesiological and hermeneutical doctrines in each tradition that are ostensibly unrelated to church-state issues.

His work has appeared in the Journal of Law and Religion.