Mr. Kyle Belanger

Professional Background 

Kyle Belanger is a master’s of theological studies candidate at Harvard Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he studies post-Enlightenment intellectual history and theology, especially its intersections with Jewish-Christian relations, antisemitism, and the Holocaust. Belanger earned his bachelor’s in classics and history from Brigham Young University, where his undergraduate thesis contrasted the social criticism of Thomas Carlyle and John Stuart Mill.

Belanger’s previous training includes Mormon Studies, Interfaith Relations between Jews, Christians, and Muslims with the Woolf Institute at Cambridge University, and archival training on unpublished religious writings from George Bancroft, as part of the transatlantic reception of the so-called “Higher Criticism” project.

Fellowship Research

While at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum as a Summer Graduate Student Research Fellow, Belanger will work on his project, “Christian Nationalism and the Holocaust in American Mormonism." Belanger’s work investigates the complicity of German Mormons in Nazi Germany and its comparison with German theological justifications for Naziism and contemporary Latter-day Saint articulations of Christian nationalism, including the legal reverberations of these concepts. Belanger sets this discourse against Latter-day Saint theologies and cultural conceptions of Israel and Jewishness and the faith’s response(s) to the Holocaust, especially in its practice of proxy-baptism. Through these interrogations, Belanger aims to articulate a Latter-day Saint theological ethos of resistance to antisemitism and Christian nationalism, leaning upon the developments in Jewish-Christian theological reckoning in the late 20th Century. 

Residency Period: June 1, 2024–August 31, 2024