Kati Curts, "Assembling Religion: The Ford Motor Company and the Transformation of Religion in America" (NYU Press, 2025)

June 2, 2026

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Henry Ford once told an interviewer that he believed in reincarnation. He called Thomas Edison an "old soul" who had acquired knowledge across many lifetimes, and he reportedly understood a young relative to be the reincarnation of his own mother. This was not a private eccentricity. It was part of a systematic theology of human inequality that Ford used to justify his labor policies, his racial hierarchies, and his vision of American capitalism. In Assembling Religion: The Ford Motor Company and the Transformation of Religion in America (NYU Press, 2025), religious studies scholar Kati Curts argues that Ford should be taken seriously as a religious thinker—not because he was orthodox, but because he assembled existing American religious traditions into a new, mass-produced form of corporate spirituality that still shapes how we think about work, value, and national identity.

The $5 Day as a Religious Program

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What you'll learn

1 (00:26) **Introducing the Book and Guest** - Dr. Miranda Melcher welcomes Dr. Kati Curts to discuss *Assembling Religion: The Ford Motor Company and the Transformation of Religion in America*.
2 (04:14) **Methodology: Writing a Religious History of a Brand** - How Curts approached the "bigness" of her topic by drawing on existing scholarship and religious studies theory.
3 (07:09) **Case Study: The $5 Day and the Social Gospel** - Analyzing the famous wage policy through a religious studies lens.
4 (16:15) **The "Right to Work" Religion** - Defining Ford's specific theology of labor and its political implications.
5 (17:41) **Mechanizing Time and the Prophetic Engineer** - How Ford's understanding of industrial efficiency was rooted in a religious vision of the future.
6 (21:26) **Ford, Race, and White Nationalism** - Connecting Ford's theology of work to his racist and antisemitic beliefs.
7 (27:28) **Public History as Magical Practice** - Ford's creation of an industrial museum and living history village as a religious act.

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Show Notes

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, Ford himself was explicit that his work in engineering and auto production was prophetic and meant to remake the world.

In Assembling Religion: The Ford Motor Company and the Transformation of Religion in America (NYU Press, 2025), Dr. Kati Curts presents a religious history of Henry Ford and the Ford Motor Company repositions them within critical studies of religion, examining how Ford transformed American religious practice in the twentieth century. Drawing directly on documents from Ford’s archive, it examines Ford’s mass production methods and bureaucratic reforms as examples of prosperity gospel traditions, illuminating the ways manufacturing and technology intersect with American religious practice. Bridging American religious and industrial history, Assembling Religion offers a new and surprising way to understand Ford’s impact on culture, commerce, and the technology of labor.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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