A History of Religion in America

From the First Settlements through the Civil War

Bryan Le Beau, Bryan F. Le Beau

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780415819244
• eBook ISBN: 9781136688911
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

A History of Religion in America: From the First Settlements through the Civil War provides comprehensive coverage of the history of religion in America from the pre-colonial era through the aftermath of the Civil War. It explores major religious groups in the United States and the following topics:

• Native American religion before and after the Columbian encounter

• Religion and the Founding Fathers

• Was America founded as a Christian nation?

• Religion and reform in the 19th century

• The first religious outsiders

• A nation and its churches divided

Chronologically arranged and integrating various religious developments into a coherent historical narrative, this book also contains useful chapter summaries and review questions. Designed for undergraduate religious studies and history students A History of Religion in America provides a substantive and comprehensive introduction to the complexity of religion in American history.

Chapter 1
Native American religion and its European encounter

The importance and challenges of studying Native American religion

For most Americans, their history begins with the English settlement of North America. Barely a thought is given to Spanish and French efforts, and not much more attention is paid to those who occupied the land before any Europeans arrived. This foreshortened history has largely been abandoned, for good reason. For one thing, not to tell the full story is to perpetuate a short-sightedness induced by a preoccupation with America’s European cultural heritage. Second, it limits our understanding of the complex character of religion that is not as readily apparent in the exclusive study of the West.¹

“Savages we call them,” wrote Benjamin Franklin of Native Americans, “because their manners differ from ours, which we think the perfection of civility.”² Much the same can be said of many Americans’ attitudes toward Indian religion. Religion, however, has always been central to the Native American experience, to its identity, and to its vitality. Some continue to describe it as primitive, but in that the word primitive implies a belief system devoid of deep feelings and subtle thought it is inappropriate. Historically, Native American religion has been marked by rich symbolism and profound thought concerning the most basic concerns of man: the creation of the world, the origin of human life, and the nature of the supernatural and of the afterlife.³

The study of Native American religion poses three problems. First, there is the problem of sources. Whereas most of the major world religions have literary traditions, Native American religion has been handed down as oral tradition. Such oral accounts have little sense of linear time. And though quite lovely in their telling, metaphorical and symbolic language abounds and past and present are collapsed into a single continuum. Similarly dangerous is the use of the records of the first European and American observers of Indian culture. Explorers, traders, and missionaries witnessed firsthand many aspects of Indian life, but their accounts are framed by their cultural biases.⁴

Second, the title “Native American religion” is actually a misnomer and perhaps might better have been put: “Native American religions.” Native American religion was, and still is, as diverse as the Euro American religions with which it came into contact. In brief, there were as many Indian religions as there were Indian tribes.⁵ The phrase Native American religion, then, is a fiction, but it is a convenient fiction, which will be employed, at least in part. What follows is a discussion of both the diversity that separates and the commonalities that unite Native American religions.

Third, there is the challenge of describing a phenomenon that is ever changing. Like subsequent inhabitants of North America, Indians were immigrants, and like those who followed, they were forced to adapt – to adjust their life patterns – to their new environment, the other tribes they encountered, and in time, and most challenging, to European culture and Christianity. What is often described as traditional behavior is really the product of extensive alteration over many centuries in response to all of those encounters. This was true for Native Americans in the Pre-Contact Period, between the migration of their northeast Asiatic ancestors beginning perhaps 30,000 years ago to 1492, during which hundreds of distinct Native American cultures emerged. And it was true in the period after 1492, when Indian tribes were forced into foreign environments to which they had to adapt, encountered hitherto unknown tribes with different religious beliefs that influenced their own, and faced the oftentimes forced acculturation that followed confrontations with European and American agents of culture and religion⁶

Common characteristics of Native American religion(s)

As Peter Williams has argued, among Native Americas, as with many traditional societies,

the religious life of a people is coextensive with the people itself, and seldom extends beyond a coherent social group…. Society, culture, religion, and cosmos are coincident, and together constitute the sum of reality for a particular people as long as they manage to cohere as a self-sufficient group.⁷

Thus, it is not surprising that anthropologists have identified at least 500 different Native American cultures in the area that would become the United States on the eve of European contact. Euro Americans may have insisted that the truths of their religion were universal, that Christianity transcended culture, but Native Americans believed that each society or group of people had its own sacred stories and rituals.⁸ Nevertheless, it is possible to identify many common characteristics among Native American religions.

Four prominent features linked the diverse expressions of North American Indian religion: a similar world-view, a shared notion of cosmic harmony, emphasis on directly experiencing powers and visions, and a common view of the cycle of life and death. Native Americans generally believed that human existence was designed by the creator divinities – in some cases holding a single, particularly powerful, creator god primarily responsible – at the time of the “first beginnings.” They agreed that, in those days, all beings were more or less human but that a change took place that turned many primeval beings into animals and birds. Thus the close affinity that remains between people and animals, as well as the animistic concept of spirits as animals and animals as spiritual.⁹

Although clearly not monotheistic, as were principal Western religions, the Native American notion of cosmic harmony emphasized the unitary system of the universe made up of humans, animals, trees, and plants – nature as a whole – and the supernatural. The roots of this idea may be traced to Indian hunting origins, thereby explaining its continued prominence in later hunter-gatherer tribes, but it was equally at home among agricultural Indians. Simply put, all living beings had their supernatural guardians. Each animal had its guardian, usually a mysterious spirit larger than ordinary members of the species. In the case of humans, a Supreme Being played a superior but not exclusive role.¹⁰

Native Americans emphasized the direct experience of powers and visions. Among the Great Plains Indians, this was commonly represented in the vision quest, one of the most powerful rituals in Native American religions. The vision quest may have originated as a puberty rite, where young men were required to seek the assistance of a guardian spirit to withstand the trials of existence and luck in hunting, warfare, and love. Parents or elders sent young men into the forest or wilderness to fast, suffer from the cold, and be subject to the attacks of wild animals, from which might result a vision of the spirit that henceforth would become a guardian spirit. The vision quest was transformed, however, on the Plains into a ritual for grown men, wherein hunters or warriors repeatedly withdrew into the wilderness to seek guardian spirits, each serving a different purpose.¹¹

Native Americans, in contrast to those living in Western culture, conceived of time as cyclical, rather than linear. Rather than seeing time as a straight line, from an origin through the present into the future, implicit in which is the notion of progress, American Indians understood time to be an eternally recurring cycle of years and events. So too each person made a cycle of time from birth to death, death marking both the end of the old and the beginning of a new life, either on this earth, reincarnated into another human or some animal form, or in a transcendent hereafter.¹²

Native Americans possessed a strong sense of continuity between the self and outside realities and between themselves and the things they held sacred. They saw reality as more mysterious and symbolistic and what they saw as more holy and mysterious as closely related to, if not inseparable from, their daily existence. Whereas Euro Americans conceived of a three-level universe of God, human beings, and nature, each inhabiting different realms, Native Americans envisioned a world to which all were bound by ties of kinship. There were grandfathers who were Thunder Beings, there was Grandmother Spider, and there was the Corn Mother. Animals took on human form, like Coyote the Trickster, and shamans – holy people – who were said to fly like birds and talk to animals.¹³

In the Western world-view, the natural world was a resource for man; as noted in Genesis 1:28, man was “to have dominion over … every living thing that moves on earth.” The secular and the sacred were distinct, and the human relationship to the natural environment fell into the secular sphere. Native Americans made no such distinction. For them, land belonged, for lack of a better word, to the tribe only insofar as they were inhabiting it and making use of it. While occupying that land, however, they made certain aspects of that space symbolically important. Mountains, for example, could be associated with a particular god or gods or with a unique story of creation. But Indians also conceived of animal and plant guardians as sacred beings, who, at some point in the distant past, had pledged the bodies of their species as food for man. This led Native Americans to create elaborate rituals for hunting and planting, offering gifts to the spirits of the life they took and being careful not to waste any portion of that which they killed or harvested.¹⁴

For the agricultural-based tribes of the Southwest, harmony with nature was paramount, and that was expressed in their rituals that marked the changing of the seasons and that honored the Father Sun, Mother Earth, and the gods that brought precious rain. Prime among the last group were the kachinas, who visited villages during the first half of the year, bringing rain from their homes in the nearby mountains. Kachinas (see Figure 1.1) were not so much worshipped, as they were considered friends. They were represented by male dancers, who danced themselves into a state in which their spirits were joined with the kachinas they impersonated. As part of the rituals, the dancers gave carved dolls to the children, which were not intended as toys but rather as sacred objects for the home.¹⁵

Native Americans held sacred the inner world as well. Dreams revealed holy, hidden things that often could not be known in other ways. Tribes had rituals wherein individuals brought their dreams to tribal councils or holy men so that their meaning could be discerned. Especially on the Plains, leaders of the hunt were chosen from among those who had dreams deemed relevant to the hunt, while many tribes believed that, in dreams, the soul was free to travel to distant places to learn and to return with information, or visions, from guardian spirits.¹⁶

Figure 1.1 Kachina dancers

Source: Granger Historical Picture Archive/Alamy Stock Photo

The inner world that dreams disclosed was intimately related to the outer world, and in order to bridge the gap between the two, people were given a name that indicated their kinship with nature and that told something of their inner essence. Those names could, and often were, changed as significant deeds or events occurred. Black Hawk, for example, might become Afraid of Horses, White Rabbit, or Moves from Your Sight Little Red Star. And the colors were significant, in that each of the four directions had its color, and each color its quality: the red of the north might signify wisdom; the white of the south, innocence; the black of the west, deep thought or introspection; and the yellow of the east, inner light.¹⁷

Belief in shape-shifting was common. Trickster figures such as the Coyote could assume any form they chose, even in the very midst of their adventures. Thus, they were seen as beings of creative power, who had helped put the present world in order, as well as disorder, and who often disturbed the regular working of society. Shape-shifting tricksters could shift from sly cunning creatures, who could outwit their opponents, to the fool, who, according to one tale, fought himself because his right arm and left arm did not know that they belonged to each other. They were without boundaries, able to become whatever inspiration and circumstance decreed, and belief in such transformations reminded Native Americans that the world was, after all, one substance.¹⁸

Native Americans lived their lives in accordance not only with the four directions, as noted above, but also with sacred numbers – four, for the directions of the compass, for example,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Native American religion and its European encounter
• 2 British colonization and the origins of American religion
• 3 Religion and the American Revolution
• 4 Religion and the Early Republic
• 5 Religion and the age of reform
• 6 A people apart
• 7 Civil war and the churches
• Index