America's Religious History

Faith, Politics, and the Shaping of a Nation

Thomas S. Kidd

• Publisher: Zondervan Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780310586180
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Historia del cristianismo

Religion, race, and American history.

America's Religious History is an up-to-date, narrative-based introduction to the unique role of faith in American history. Moving beyond present-day polemics to understand the challenges and nuances of our religious past, leading historian Thomas S. Kidd interweaves religious history and key events from the larger story of American history, including:

• The Great Awakening
• The American Revolution
• Slavery and the Civil War
• Civil rights and church-state controversy
• Immigration, religious diversity, and the culture wars

Useful for both classroom and personal study, America's Religious History provides a balanced, authoritative assessment of how faith has shaped American life and politics.

Chapter 1

RELIGION IN EARLY AMERICA

Most of early America’s colonizing powers wanted to bring the Christian gospel to the native peoples of North America. Sometimes they did so, but too often the colonizers’ evangelistic overtures were paired with the threat of imperial coercion. The seal of the Massachusetts Bay Company featured a Native American man with a banner coming out of his mouth declaring “Come over and help us.” This was a reference to Paul’s vision of an imploring “man of Macedonia” in Acts 16:9, a verse that helped the founders of Massachusetts to see their colonizing enterprise as evangelistic to the core. Even before significant missionary work got under way, however, New Englanders were already fighting with Indians, most notably in the Pequot War of 1636–38, which saw the near extinction of the Pequot as a tribe. Far from a sign of salvation, the coming of Europeans seemed to many Native Americans to be an existential threat.

Once evangelistic work did begin in the colonies, some Native Americans under English, French, or Spanish rule committed themselves to Christian faith and to religious practice in a European style. Some internalized the precepts of Christian doctrine. On Martha’s Vineyard off the Massachusetts coast, Wampanoag Indians peppered English missionaries with theological inquiries. “How many sorts of sinners are there in the world? . . . How many sorts of faith are there? . . . What are the keys of the kingdom of heaven?” The celebrated English missionary John Eliot helped to ordain a Wampanoag man named Hiacoomes as a pastor in 1670. Hiacoomes was the first ordained Indian pastor in colonial America, and one of a cadre of native leaders in the Indians’ churches.

Not all was well between the colonizers and the Indians, however. Anger over killings, trade, and land claims in New England led to King Philip’s War in 1675–76. Led by the Wampanoag sachem “King Philip” (Metacom), allied Indians destroyed more than a quarter of New England’s settlements. New Englanders responded with retaliatory ravages against the Indians, including against many of the “praying Indians” whom they thought had converted to Christianity.

Mary Rowlandson, who chronicled the horrors of her captivity among the forces of King Philip, reserved special contempt for the praying Indians allied with Metacom. She claimed to have witnessed one turncoat Christian Indian, “so wicked and cruel, as to wear a string about his neck, strung with Christians’ fingers.” The early European colonies generally expressed godly ambitions for the new societies, but those ideals often crumbled as the realities of colonization set in. In early America, Indians, Europeans, and Africans (who typically came to the Americas as slaves) had different languages, cultures, and religious systems. Those differences, combined with the imperial aims of the Europeans, made violence likely in these early encounters. Conflict was more likely than any successful evangelization of colonized, conquered, and enslaved people. Nevertheless, Christianity took root among small groups of Christian Indians and African Americans, a development which would have enduring significance for the shape of American religion.

Christopher Columbus’s voyages from Europe to the Americas signaled the beginning of clashes between Europeans, Africans, and Native Americans. The result of these encounters was a distinctly Atlantic mix of cultures and religions. The exact religious beliefs and practices of early Native Americans and West Africans can be difficult to discern because of a relative lack of surviving sources documenting their faiths. Native Americans did leave archaeological evidence with traces of information about their religions. These remnants range from small stone artifacts to massive earthen mounds, often representing the shape of animals. Among the most impressive of these mounds is the earthen “bird mound,” or pyramid, at Poverty Point in present-day northeastern Louisiana, in the Mississippi River floodplain. The bird mound was probably erected around 1400 BC. The uses of the bird mound are not entirely clear, but its scale is stunning. Though time and erosion have taken their toll on the mound, the seven-story hill is still a striking monument on the mostly flat landscape. It took about 238,000 cubic meters of soil to build, or about twenty-seven million large baskets of dirt. More surprisingly, excavations have suggested that the work at Poverty Point was completed in ninety days or less. This short time frame and prodigious size means that the mound builders must have used thousands of workers. It presumably went up for a specific purpose, likely ceremonial and spiritual. Some have suggested that the bird mound may have represented a red-tailed hawk. It may also have had connections to the solar calendar, as mounds elsewhere in America did.

Whatever the exact uses of the bird mound, it illustrates the way that the Native Americans’ landscape was filled with spiritual significance. The particular beliefs of individual tribes varied considerably, and we should remember that there were perhaps five hundred different tribes living in the future United States when Columbus “discovered” America. However, indigenous American religions did share some common themes, such as the pervasive spirituality of their worldview. Most Native Americans saw no substantive difference between the spiritual and natural worlds. Medieval Europeans also saw the world as filled with spiritual powers, but their monotheistic convictions maintained a distinction between the things of God and the things of the world. For Indians, all living things had spiritual forces living within them, and the world of dreams was just as real as the waking world.

Most Native Americans believed that people should treat animals, including those they hunted, with respect. Europeans tended to believe that only humans had souls, but Indians saw animals as having spirits that they needed to handle with caution. The Micmacs of eastern Canada hunted beavers for fur and meat, but they had strict codes about how to treat the beavers. Menstruating women were not allowed to eat beavers, since the women were considered ceremonially unclean. When hunters butchered a trapped beaver, they tried not to spill any blood on the ground. If they mistreated the bones of a beaver, they believed that the “spirit of the bones . . . would promptly carry the news to the other beavers.” This could bring bad fortune or cause the living beavers to flee the region in order to escape maltreatment.

Some Native American and African religions reserved a place for a supreme god. And there were other gods and lower spirits too. West African rituals focused on these spirits and on the people’s ancestors, invoking both through special dances and music. To many Africans, lesser spirits were not necessarily good or evil, but disrespecting them invited trouble. In the Yoruba language of modern-day Nigeria, the spirits were “orishas.” One way to protect against the power of the orishas was through the use of “gris-gris,” or pouches containing items with magical or spiritual powers. These items could include amulets or verses of sacred scriptures, including those from the Qur’an. Some West African people in the era of the slave trade were familiar with Islam. Other West African slaves had been influenced by Catholic missionaries, prior to their forced transport to the Americas.

Medieval European Christians believed in a plethora of spiritual powers too. Yet Catholic and Protestant Christians from Europe had a clear sense of the overruling power of God the Father, and they felt that their faith compelled them to convert the non-Christians they encountered. The era of European colonization in the Americas began just a quarter-century before the Protestant Reformation started. The German monk Martin Luther inaugurated the Protestant movement in 1517, and soon tensions between Catholics and Protestants became constant themes in Europe and in the development of the American colonies. The wars of the Reformation in Europe gave extra urgency to the effort to evangelize the native people of the Caribbean (where Columbus landed) and of North and Central America. Protestants feared that the non-Christian people of the Americas would fall under Catholic sway, and vice versa. Spain and France brought thousands of Catholic priests in successive waves to the entire continent—from present-day Mexico to Canada—in order to evangelize Indians and to provide religious services for the European residents of the New World. Most of the priests were members of the Franciscan, Dominican, or Jesuit orders.

Some of these priests accepted the cruelty of colonization and even participated in it by using Indian slaves to work on plantations, but others became critics of European empire-building. Bartolomé de Las Casas was a Dominican priest who had witnessed the conquest of the islands of Hispaniola and Cuba in the early 1500s. Las Casas went on to own Indian and African slaves himself, but he soon became remorseful about the way that Spanish conquerors viciously treated the Caribbean natives. In his treatise The Destruction of the Indies (1552), Las Casas indicted Spanish colonizers for coming to the New World only to “dismember, slay, perturb, afflict, torment, and destroy the Indians.” The writings of Las Casas and other dissident priests caught the eye of the pope and other Catholic authorities, who called for an end to the colonizers’ worst abuses.

In spite of the harshness of many early encounters between the colonizers and native people, Christianity’s influence did grow in the Americas. Arguably the most important development for the future of Hispanic Christianity was the reported appearance of the Virgin Mary to Juan Diego, an indigenous Mexican man, in 1531. Mary performed several miracles through Juan Diego in order to prove to a local Catholic bishop that she really had appeared. The shrine to Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City became one of the most significant Catholic devotional sites in the world, and it receives millions of visits from Catholic pilgrims annually. Pope John Paul II would canonize Juan Diego as a saint in 2002. Devotional images of the Virgin of Guadalupe are ubiquitous in Mexican and Mexican-American culture today.

The Virgin of Guadalupe

The Spanish established footholds throughout New Mexico and Florida by the 1600s. In 1565 the Spanish founded Saint Augustine, the oldest permanent European settlement within the future United States. In 1607, they founded Santa Fé, New Mexico, in the northern reaches of Spain’s American empire. Franciscans evangelized the Pueblo people of New Mexico. Many Pueblos affiliated with the missions, accepting Spanish protection, adopting farming, and attending Catholic services. Yet the Pueblo population of New Mexico dropped precipitously as they faced epidemic diseases, seasons of famine, and attacks from rival Indians. Pueblos who turned back to native religious practices faced retributive whippings and torture. So Pueblo resentment toward Spanish rule simmered below their apparent Catholic adherence.

The Spanish whipped one Pueblo religious leader named Popé for suspicion of sorcery in the mid-1670s. Popé retreated to Taos, New Mexico, where he said that he received revelations encouraging him to lead a revolt against the Spanish. The spirits told him that the god of the Spanish was nothing but “rotten wood” and that the traditional gods of the Pueblos would protect him. Popé became the leader of the Pueblo Revolt, the most successful Native American uprising against European colonial rule. The coordinated attacks on Spanish leaders began in August 1680. The religious character of the revolt was unmistakable, as the Pueblos killed dozens of priests and desecrated Catholic icons and chapels. At Popé’s behest, his followers engaged in reverse baptisms, washing themselves in rivers with a native root to repudiate Christianity. The defeated Spanish evacuated New Mexico, only returning thirteen years later.

In the long story of Spanish colonization, Franciscan missions came fairly late to California. Father Junípero Serra was the key early leader of the California missions, establishing nine stations between 1769 and 1784. One of these was the mission at San Diego, California, in 1769. The arrival of the Spanish coincided with a devastating decline of population among California Indians, one even worse than what the Pueblos had experienced in New Mexico. Some of the dispersed California tribes simply ceased to exist, with survivors absorbed into neighboring tribes. Serra and other priests ruled over the mission Indians, sanctioning the use of harsh punishments when necessary to enforce discipline. Serra claimed that he “came here for the single purpose of doing [the Indians] good and for their eternal salvation.” Many missionaries figured that the eternal rewards awaiting Indian converts would make up for whatever earthly suffering they endured. Pope Francis canonized Serra as a saint in 2015 despite protests from Native American groups who blamed him for the destruction of California’s indigenous peoples.

Father Junípero Serra

France had little success in establishing missions in their Caribbean colonies, among either the dwindling native populations or the legions of enslaved Africans that came to island colonies such as Saint-Domingue (modern Haiti). French Catholic missionaries made more progress among the native peoples of Canada. Although Indian slavery in Canada was not uncommon, the French colonization of Quebec and Ontario was relatively less disruptive to native peoples than were British or Spanish colonies elsewhere. Fewer French people settled in Canada, so the colonizers were not as eager to seize native lands. Colonial Canada’s economy was dominated by the fur trade. French hunters went deep into Indian territory in search of pelts and better hunting grounds. Jesuit missionaries would often accompany these fur traders and live among the Indians themselves. The Jesuits of New France made some of the most impressive efforts among the Europeans to learn native languages and study native cultures. Still, the Jesuits’ incursions were fraught with danger. The Jesuits found some of their greatest successes among the Hurons of Ontario in the 1630s, but tribes affiliated with the Iroquois League overran the Huron missions in 1649. When decimating the Hurons, the Iroquois also captured several of the Jesuit missionaries and tortured them to death.

Bronze statue of Saint Kateri Tekakwitha, Lily of the Mohawks, by artist Cynthia Hitschler, at the Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe in La Crosse, Wisconsin

As with Juan Diego in Mexico, there were some signs of native internalization of the missionaries’ message in Canada. In spite of Iroquois depredations against the Hurons and the French missionaries, by the 1660s Jesuits had founded mission stations among the five tribes comprising the Iroquois League. Among the Mohawks, the most famous convert to Catholicism was Catherine Tekakwitha. In 1676, Tekakwitha received Christian baptism from Jesuit missionaries in New York. She later relocated to a mission village in Quebec. Catherine helped organize a women’s devotional group that practiced rigorous—some said harsh—forms of devotion, including ice baths and self-flagellation, as means to mortify their fleshly desires. When she died in 1680, she developed a following as a saint who could heal devotees. Tekakwitha also received formal recognition from Rome as a saint in 2012.

The English colonies in America were relative latecomers as compared to the Spanish ones in New Mexico and Florida. Some of the English colonies, such as Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, were founded for explicitl...