Much of my current work involves the theme of empire, and of empires, largely but not exclusively in a religious context. My forthcoming book is Kingdoms of This World: How Empires Have Made and Remade Religions (Baylor University Press, 2024). This argues that any scholar of religion really needs to know something about how empires function. I argue that this is a key missing dimension in the study of any and all of the great faiths.
US scholars tend to pay less attention to this imperial approach because until recently, we tended to think that empires were something that happened elsewhere, and to other people. That perspective has changed utterly in the past twenty years or so, and every year now major presses turn out many, many books featuring phrases such as “American empire,” or American imperialism. It really has been a historical revolution in progress.
The United States was absolutely an empire long before its attention turned to overseas territories such as the Philippines or Cuba. The implications go far beyond the story of removing Native Americans, frontier missions and so on, and gets to the whole topic of settler colonialism, which few really applied apply to the US context until quite recently. Today, that theme is omnipresent in the literature, and inescapable. Even so, the religious aspects of that academic turnaround have not been much explored, or not as much as they could be.
As I say, I am very interested presently in developing my empire theme in that US context, perhaps even as a free-standing book project.
I have compiled a (substantial!) working bibliography on these ideas, which I offer here:
On a closely related theme, I have a page on Native American history.