Rate My Professor John Turner

Turner's research focuses on the history of religion in the United States, particularly Mormonism, evangelicalism, and seventeenth-century Puritanism. He is the author of several influential books: Joseph Smith: The Rise and Fall of an American Prophet (Yale University Press, 2025), They Knew They Were Pilgrims: Plymouth Colony and the Contest for American Liberty (Yale University Press, 2020), The Mormon Jesus: A Biography (Harvard University Press, 2016), Brigham Young: Pioneer Prophet (Harvard University Press, 2012), and Bill Bright and Campus Crusade for Christ: The Renewal of Evangelicalism in Postwar America (University of North Carolina Press, 2008). In 2016-2017, Turner received the Fenwick Fellowship from George Mason University Libraries as an associate professor, providing funding to acquire library materials, conduct a study trip to Plymouth, Massachusetts, and obtain archival scans from the United Kingdom for his research on English separatists, which formed the basis of his 2020 publication. He co-created the podcast Antisemitism, U.S.A. with colleagues and contributes to the American Religious Ecologies project at the Center for History and New Media, digitizing the 1926 Census of Religious Bodies.