Charles McDaniel, Ph.D.

Dr. Charles McDaniel joined the faculty of the Baylor Interdisciplinary Core (BIC) in 2007 as an assistant professor with a specialization in the relationship between religion and politics/economics after serving the five previous years on the faculty of the J. M. Dawson Institute of Church-State Studies at Baylor, where he also served as associate director of the Institute. After successfully navigating the tenure track in the BIC, he was promoted to the rank of associate professor in 2015.   

Teaching

In the Dawson Institute he taught five different courses and chaired/served on countless graduate committees (both at the master’s and doctoral levels). After joining the BIC, he shifted to teaching undergraduates exclusively. His teaching load primarily has been 2/2 each year and has taught a range of classes, including Social World I, Social World II, World Cultures IV, Biblical Heritage and Contemporary Ethical Issues, and two capstone courses. He served as course coordinator of Social World II for approximately 10 years, and has coordinated World Cultures IV for the past 8 years. His primary capstone course is titled “The Moral Ecology of Capitalism,” a course that traces the development of the market system from a moral perspective; in particular, it assesses the ethical impacts of the global economy’s “financialization,” the rise of consumer eugenics, and the advent of artificial intelligence (AI). 

Research

His primary research interests include American Christian economic thought, Christian Realism, Christianity and eugenics, and the financialization of civil society. He has published three books engaging those subjects: God and Money: The Moral Challenge of Capitalism (Rowman and Littlefield, 2006); Civil Society and the Reform of Finance: Taming Capital, Reclaiming Virtue (Routledge, 2015); and, most recently, Christian Realism and the Revival of Public Theology (Routledge, 2025). In addition to these monographs, he has published a total of 22 shorter works, either as peer-reviewed articles in scholarly journals or chapters in edited volumes. 

Service

In addition to serving as associate director of the Dawson Institute mentioned previously, he has served as Interim Director of the BIC (2021) and associate director of the BIC in the spring of 2022. He directed the Baylor in St. Andrews Study Abroad Program in the fall of 2017, and was the inaugural director of Baylor’s Global Scholars Study Abroad Program in Dublin, Ireland, in the fall of 2022. He also served as the Book Review Editor for the Journal of Church and State since 2002 and as the associate editor of the JCS since 2023. He represents Baylor’s Honors College on the Provost’s Artificial Intelligence Task Group and serves on the Honors College’s Faculty Sabbatical/Research Leave and Award Committee.