After earning his doctorate in Religious Studies with an American Studies minor from Indiana University, Andrew Monteith served as an associate instructor at Indiana University from 2013 to 2017 and a Future Faculty Teaching Fellow at Butler University from 2017 to 2018.

He joined Elon University in 2018 as an assistant professor, where he has excelled as a teacher and scholar. He has designed and taught innovative courses, such as Religion and Power, Irreligious and Secular Traditions and Religion and Popular Culture, while distinguishing himself as a thoughtful, dynamic and effective teacher.

During its Opening Day ceremony to launch the 2021-22 academic year, Monteith was named the Distinguished Emerging Scholar in Religious Studies, an endowed professorship designed to support a junior faculty member in the Department of Religious Studies who exhibits the potential for a distinguished academic career.

Monteith’s research examines questions of secularism, religion, and power in American life, both past and present. He is also interested in the ways that America itself can serve as its own kind of religion. His first book, Christian Nationalism and the Birth of the War on Drugs (New York University Press, 2023) explains how religion, race, and US colonialism germinated the early Drug War during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It asks readers to think of “religion” as something that shapes social thought and behavior in far-reaching ways, drawing on primary source material from colonial missionaries, Bureau of Indian Affairs agents, eugenicists, Christian activists, and the League of Nations.

Monteith is under contract with Routledge for a textbook tentatively titled Religion and Power (2024), which introduces undergraduate students.to how religion has mattered for power structures like colonialism, race, gender, and so on, as well as how “power” can operate beyond its recognized manifestations (such as “war” or “law”). The book aims to help students understand both “religion” and “power” as categories that describe wide swaths of human activity.