Overall Research Project Description From mega-surveillance on the mind-boggling scale of the National Security Agency’s controversial bulk collection of cellular metadata to the banal head-counting embodied in census records, citizens routinely accept—and, increasingly, resist—state-sponsored oversight. Likewise, business surveillance techniques—whether in the form of frequent-shopper cards that track every purchase, CCTV systems that follow a customer’s every move, or “cookies” that monitor web traffic—are a routine aspect of contemporary life. Far less understood and virtually ignored by scholars of American history and average citizens alike are the surveillance practices of voluntary associations, especially in the expansive private sector of churches, parachurch organizations, patriotic groups, and non-sectarian moral reform organizations with religious connections. Yet, the very state and corporate surveillance systems that most Americans take for granted today have emerged from the nexus of governmental, business, and religious interests that coalesced at the dawn of the twentieth century.