America's Religions

From Their Origins to the Twenty-first Century

Peter W. Williams

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780252097706
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

A classroom perennial and comprehensive guide, America's Religions lays out the background, beliefs, practices, and leaders of the nation's religious movements and denominations. The fourth edition, thoroughly revised and updated by Peter W. Williams, draws on the latest scholarship. In addition to reconsidering the history of America's mainline faiths, it delves into contemporary issues like religion's impact on politics and commerce; the increasingly high profile of Buddhism, Hinduism, and Islam; Mormonism's entry into the mainstream; and battles over gay marriage and ordination.

PART I

THE TRADITIONS

A. Oral Traditions

According to conservative estimates by archaeologists, writing on tablets dates back to roughly the middle of the fourth millennium B.C. (3500–3300), whereas the earliest alphabets used in the ancient Near East appeared less than four thousand years ago. The use of writing to record religious lore became important in the Western world quite early in the human experience, but even the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) began as a collection of oral traditions. For centuries after scripture began to be codified in written form, the vast majority of people even in the West were unable to read, and its preservation and interpretation was entrusted to a small elite of rabbis or priests. It was not until the Reformation era that literacy, abetted by the invention of printing with movable type, began to spread widely. The radical notion that all people should be able to read and write did not gain great currency until the settlement of North America by English-speaking Protestants in the seventeenth century.

In the areas of the world that remained isolated from the forces of modernization, oral culture predominated until recent times. This was very much the case among Native American, African, and African American cultures until at least the nineteenth century. The transmission of religious traditions through memory and word of mouth—often in astounding quantity and complexity—has certain features that differentiate it from the written lore to which most Americans are accustomed. Changes and borrowings occur frequently but with little notice, so that the process is more fluid, more protean than that which takes place with a set of fixed sacred texts. The role of the few “religious specialists”—priests, shamans, medicine men—who constitute a people's collective memory also takes on a very special character. They determine what is to be remembered and what discarded.

This is not to say that oral traditions have disappeared in our own day. Folk preachers, both black and white, continue to cultivate their art, which is ostensibly based on written scripture but often takes on a life of its own. Radio and television have also opened up whole new avenues for oral religious expression. Some very ancient motifs of traditional religion, such as healing and the warding off of evil, manifest themselves throughout the spectrum of traditional, folk, and popular cultures. The texture of the religious life of a people who have lived for centuries without contact with the technology and values of modernity, though, differs substantially from the world of Joel Osteen and Creflo Dollar. The first two chapters of this survey of the American religious experience are an exploration of the religious cultures of the aboriginal inhabitants of North America and Africa in order to evoke this texture. This can only be done in a very general way, given both the multiplicity and complexity of these traditions. Also, as soon as these traditions began to come into the consciousness of Europeans and European Americans, they immediately began to change through the inevitable cultural contacts—many of them forced—that occurred. In later chapters, the metamorphoses of these traditions—as they encountered, embraced, adapted, or resisted the Christianity of European America—will unfold in all of their own complexity.

CHAPTER 1

The Varieties of Native American Religious Life

Beginning a survey of the religions of what is now the United States with the American Indian, or Native American, peoples has a number of advantages. In the first place, it helps to overcome a historic blindness induced by a preoccupation with America's European cultural heritage, to the detriment of religious impulses that do not fit readily into European American categories. Secondly, it raises a number of issues about the basic character of religion that are not as readily apparent in the exclusive study of the traditions of the modern West. Thirdly, it obeys strictly the logic of history—a “chrono-logic”—in beginning at the beginning, with the aboriginal inhabitants of a very old continent. Fourthly, it opens up an array of highly diverse yet in some ways curiously similar religious experience and expression that most contemporary Americans have easily written off as exotically “other” or have so romantically idealized that it bears little resemblance to reality.

The notions of “Americanness” and “Indianness” in themselves have always been problematic. The American “Indians,” of course, were not what Columbus thought them to be, that is, residents of southern Asia. On the other hand, as Sam Gill has pointed out, the term Indios in Columbus's day referred generically to any of the inhabitants of the part of the world that lay east of the Indus River. Since many, if not all, of the ancestors of the American Indians had most probably originated in Siberia and crossed what was then a land bridge across the Bering Strait to Alaska at some remote time in prehistory, Columbus may have not been so far off in his identifying these “new” people as Asians. The notion of “America,” as distinct from the sought-after Asia, came hard and slowly to the cognitively bewildered European newcomers. The subsequent development of the “United States” out of a contiguous collection of European colonies and areas inhabited by aboriginal peoples was also a process that took time and required active feats of imagination to rationalize. Two recent works of scholarship, Edmundo O'Gorman's The Invention of America and Garry Wills's Inventing America, indicate in their convergent titles the intellectual difficulties involved in making sense first out of an entire hemisphere and, much later, of the new political creation of a group of transplanted English colonists wanting to become an independent nation.

Although the idea of “America” today carries with it the features and values of a modernized, technologically sophisticated society very remote from the life of the continent's aboriginal peoples, there are some intriguing ways to argue that these people were archetypically American. In the first place, like all subsequent inhabitants of North America, the Indians were immigrants. As we have already noted, their ancestors probably arrived from Siberia in pursuit of big game. Secondly, like later immigrants and more settled Americans as well, they were a mobile people, ultimately fanning out from the Bering Strait through two continents, all the way south to Tierra del Fuego. For some, mobility was more or less continuous as they adopted nomadic patterns in pursuit of game. Others, such as the agriculturists of the south, became more settled, but never escaped from the periodic need to readjust to new circumstances often engendered by intercultural encounters or changes in the natural environment. Thirdly, as Americans of today are proud to claim for themselves, these Native Americans were an infinitely adaptable people. Even though they lacked sophisticated technology, they adjusted their life-patterns to environmental circumstances ranging from the Arctic to the tropics, and learned to extract a living from the most varied of circumstances. The ultimate encounter with Europeans was no exception: the animals and firearms of the Spanish were rapidly adopted by the Plains Indians, for example, and the latter's myths began to incorporate the previously unknown horse as an archetypal symbol.

Finally, like Americans of later times, the earliest Americans were extraordinarily varied in the cultures they developed. Just as the diet, the language, the religions, and the other components of the American culture of our own day have been enriched from the endless rubbing of shoulders of almost infinitely varied national stocks living together, so did the aboriginal peoples continually diversify, lend, and borrow in response to changing circumstances. This diversity was maintained over the years through the lack of continual interaction made possible by today's means of cultural homogenization—widespread literacy, mass media, centralized educational and political institutions. However, Native American cultures were by no means static. Ecological changes or social dynamics continually prompted these peoples to migrate and come into contact with others, whether peaceably or otherwise, and cultural borrowing and assimilation were ongoing factors in the evolution of Native American culture. The Aztec civilization that Cortés and his followers beheld on their arrival in Mexico was an imperial creation, and many peoples had been forced by the powerful Aztecs to submit to a not always very welcome yoke. Myth and ritual changed their contents to embrace new circumstances, a process that continued through the fusions of Indian and Christian themes in the Peyote religion of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Because of this remarkable cultural and religious diversity stretched over both space and time, it is difficult to be both general and meaningful in the discussion of Native American religions. One runs the risks in doing so of generating a series of abstractions in need of endless qualification and counterexamples, or else an equally endless chain of anecdotes and descriptions having little to do with one another. Still, there are some ways of approaching the topic that illuminate the general patterns of Native American religious expression and its underlying characteristics, especially insofar as it differs significantly from the characteristics of religion in the modernized society to which most of us have become accustomed.

First, there are a number of ways of perceiving the world that are characteristic of traditional cultures in general and Native American peoples in particular. Religion itself, for example, is a concept for which most such cultures lack specific words. In contemporary American society, religious activity tends to become compartmentalized and relegated to a specific time and place, for example, Sunday morning at church. In traditional cultures, the religious or symbolic life of a people is instead frequently integrated into the fabric of daily activity, so that any act connected with what the culture identifies as significant takes on a religious meaning. For premodern cultures especially, the production or acquisition of food is of central importance—in contrast with most of contemporary American society, in which only a small percentage of the population is directly engaged in agricultural work. Therefore, the killing of an animal or the harvest of the year's supply of maize (corn) is not just a routine, “secular” event but rather one surrounded with ritual or ceremonially developed as a constant reminder of the cosmic significance of the particular act. Perhaps the saying of grace before meals, now largely abandoned in homes where parents and children keep wildly different schedules and communicate through notes on the refrigerator door, is an example of the way in which such practices linger and eventually dissolve in the solvent of modernity.

Another aspect of Native American religious life that differentiates it from much of contemporary American experience is its relationship to the social order. In the pluralistic America of today, religion is seen, and regarded by law, as a matter of individual choice among any number of conceivable alternatives. In fact, our choice may be more constrained by our own situation in society than may be readily apparent, but the theoretical range of options remains open. In traditional societies, however, the religious life of a people is coextensive with the people itself, and seldom extends beyond a coherent social group. It would be as unlikely, for example, for a Navajo to adopt the religion of the Apache as it would be to begin speaking the Apache language, even though cross-fertilizations may occur among religions or languages.

A system of religious practices therefore develops within the context of the experience of a particular people, remains confined among that people, and is virtually the only option open to any of the members of the people, although change is always possible through commonly accepted visionary experience. This relationship of religion to society is reflected in tribal naming, where the word a people uses to describe themselves frequently means “the people” or “human beings.” For an individual group, their own experience of the world is normative and exclusive, and is regarded as universal only in the sense that the religions of other peoples are irrelevant to their own situation. Other peoples, and their religions with them, are not “really real.” 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.

Two other basic cultural categories that have direct implications for religion are the ways in which a given people perceive and experience time and space. For contemporary Americans, both time and space are usually experienced as linear and divisible, and subject to precise measurement and manipulation. The theory of relativity may have modified these notions at a high level of scientific abstraction, but the logic of modern life dictates otherwise in our everyday round. Clocks and watches are everywhere: on our walls and desks and wrists. Complex organizations such as businesses, hospitals, and universities depend on a precise synchronization of activity, and woe to those who are habitually late. Space is similarly compartmentalized: parking spaces, apartments, house lots, and offices all represent the division and privatization of the space in which we daily live and work.

Among traditional peoples, however, time and space are generally experienced in other ways. Verb tenses in Native American languages frequently lack the clear-cut distinction of past, present, and future characteristic of the linear interpretation of time implicit in English and other Indo-European tongues. In the modern West, time progresses in a straight line, from an origin through the present into a future that will be distinct, and hopefully better, than what has preceded it. Implicit in this schematization of time is the notion of progress, which reached its apogee in the optimism of the Victorian era when technology and democracy promised to bring about a secular millennium of peace and prosperity here on Earth.

This sense of time is by no means universal, and in fact is quite recent in the course of human history. Far more typical of the world's peoples is an experience of time as an endless repetition of the same events, with humans striving eternally to emulate the patterns handed down by the gods or other superhuman beings in the mythical time of beginnings. Left to themselves, humans tend to muddy the proverbial waters and are in need at regular intervals of returning to this “strong time” of origins—illud tempus, in Mircea Eliade's phrase—to bring the course of the world back into line with the original, divinely given paradigms for human action. Instead of inevitable progress, regress is the normal course of things, and must be regularly compensated for if life is to continue.

Similarly, space in the sense of clearly delineated land belonging to a particular person is alien to the sensibilities of most traditional peoples. For nomadic hunting peoples especially, the notion of fixed space as in any way significant is virtually nonsensical. Land is provided in the order of things for human habitation and use, but it can be said to “belong” to an individual or group only insofar as they are actually inhabiting or otherwise utilizing it. On the other hand, almost all peoples engage in making certain aspects of space symbolically significant, thus creating order, or cosmos, out of what is otherwise undifferentiated chaos unfit for human habitation. For the Navajo, for example, the world (in the sense of cosmos) is delineated by four sacred mountains at its corners. Whether these are actual, physical mountains is of secondary importance. What is ultimately important, rather, is the sense of orientation, of living in a space that is organized spiritually for human existence.

In some cases, actual topographic features, especially mountains, take on this orienting function. For nomadic hunters, such as the Sioux of the Great Plains in the nineteenth century, their renowned Sun Dance ceremony could be performed anywhere. The coming together of scattered people for the ceremony was a symbolic affirmation of their unity, which was not always visually apparent. In the Sun Dance, as in the rituals of many other peoples, a tree was set into the ground to constitute a pole representing the center of the cosmos—an axis mundi, or world axis, in the phrase of Eliade. This center was none the less real because its location was arbitrary—in the Indian worldview, it was more real than any naturally rooted tree since its ultimate reality was bestowed by the ceremonies performed around it.

Just as Native Americans experienced time and space in ways significantly different from members of modernized societies, so was their interpretation of and relationship with the complex of forces and entities we call “nature.” Just as modernized peoples distinguish sharply between past, present, and future, so do we experience nature as sharply different from ourselves. Human beings hold a special place in the universe, a distinctiveness supported by the early chapters of Genesis. Domestic animals occupy an intermediate role, but the rest of nature, the realm of plant and animal life, is frequently perceived as so different from our own realm that it is subject to dominance and manipulation for our own purposes with impunity.

It is interesting that one of the ways in which the traditional cosmos of the Native American peoples has reentered our own worldviews has been through the ecological crisis that was first perceived by Rachel Carson and other environmentalists in the 1960s. Although much sentimentalization and distortion of American Indian modes of perception has occurred in the process, the essential insight that has been recently appropriated by many contemporary Americans is valid—namely, the idea that the American Indians regarded humans as one among a number of animate forces in the world that had to live in harmony with one another if life was to continue in a tolerable fashion.

A good example of this relationship is the practice of some peoples, such as the northern Saulteaux, of addressing and propitiating a bear before killing it at the end of a hunt. The Indians were not vegetarians who shuddered at the idea of taking life. Rather, they recognized the claims of all life to a place in the cosmos and the proper respect that different life-forms owed one another in the divine ecology. The logic of that ecology dictated that humans were to use bears as a source of nutrition, but that did not reduce the bear to the status of the object of sport or casual violence. Human and bear each had a proper role to play in the cosmic round, but the significance of that round had to be repeatedly and carefully reasserted each time an act of potential disruptiveness was anticipated.

The same sense of participating in a cosmos in which all beings formed an interrelated continuum also shaped Native American conceptions of the supernatural realm. In the Christian worldview, God and humanity are radically distinct from one another, even though the latter may have been made in the image of the former. Calvinistic Protestantism, which helped to shape the modern world-picture even more than other varieties of Christianity, carried this contrast to an extreme, and insisted that the Divine Word was the only possible point of contact between the two realms.

For American Indians, however, the monotheism characteristic of the principal Western religions—Judaism, Christianity, Islam—is simply absent. In some cases a particularly powerful creator god may be ultimately responsible for the world's coming into existence, but such a god usually then takes on the characteristics of what Eliade calls a deus otiosus—an “otiose” or inactive god who takes little interest in the subsequent fate of that creation. More usually, Native American creation stories, which vary greatly in their precise content, are narratives of the activities of different kinds of supernatural beings who help humanity emerge from nothingness or some primordial condition of existence into the mundane world. For both the Navajo and the Zuni, for example, the original inhabitants of the world emerged from underground. In other versions, the Earth Diver—a diving bird or animal—brings soil up from beneath the primordial water that had covered the world and sets the process of creation in motion. This latter motif, incidentally, was widespread among peop...