A Documentary History of Religion in America

Edwin S. Gaustad, Mark A. Noll, Heath W. Carter, Edwin S. Gaustad, Mark A. Noll, Heath W. Carter

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781467450485
• Edition: 4
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: History of Religion

Up-to-date one-volume edition of a standard text

For decades students and scholars have turned to the two-volume Documentary History of Religion in America for access to the most significant primary sources relating to American religious history from the sixteenth century to the present. This fourth edition—published in a single volume for the first time—has been updated and condensed, allowing instructors to more easily cover the material in a single semester.

With more than a hundred illustrations and a rich array of primary documents ranging from the letters and accounts of early colonists to tweets and transcripts from the 2016 presidential election, this volume remains an essential text for readers who want to encounter firsthand the astonishing scope of religious belief and practice in American history.

Chapter 1

The Old World and the New

The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw the transplanting of both European nationalism and European religion into the Western Hemisphere. Colonists and soldiers from any nation were pawns in an intricate game of international chess; or, to change the figure, territorial claims made on behalf of either church or state (or both) were often only bold bluffs in a game of considerable chance. Whatever the game, the New World saw many winners and losers, high rollers and quitters, the quick and the dead. And along with the Europeans seeking to make their mark were an increasing number of Africans, unwilling participants in the entire venture, and a diminishing number of Native Americans, the continent’s first and longtime inhabitants.

In the Age of Exploration, western Europe’s imperialism was theological no less than political. As Europeans would export to the New World their government, soldiers, traders, settlers, and modes of civilization, they would also dispatch their religion. Never mind that the New World already possessed armies and economies, cities and cultures; those of Europe were “higher” and therefore endowed with a preemptive right to prevail.

And prevail of course they did. So effectively indeed have they prevailed that the very memory of an earlier, pre-European age is virtually obliterated. When scholars write of “American religion,” therefore, they most often write of European religion transplanted to America. None would deny that this is a very large part of the story; upon reflection, few would argue that it is the whole story. In the absence of abundant literary remains, artifacts, landscapes, and European accounts—when read carefully against the grain—offer passage into a long-buried past.

Mississippian Culture and Society

Our history thus begins with an attempt to document some Native American “religions.” The quotation marks are intended to remind that, while the category of religion is never without its problems, this particular deployment is especially problematic. After all, the concept of “religion” was entirely alien to America’s native peoples and, as scholars have decisively shown, bound up in European imperial designs. Similarly, we must resist indulging in the imaginary construct called “the American Indian” or “the religion of the Indian.” The vast geographical and chronological spread of those peoples who first inhabited North America allows for no such single entity as “the American Indian.” Enormous variety characterizes the native populations of the Western Hemisphere. And much lies beyond our present power to recover. The modern American can look, for example, at Ohio’s great Serpent Mound built thousands of years ago or at Georgia’s Rock Eagle Effigy Mound erected hundreds of years ago only to wonder at the achievements of those cultures and the probable complexities of their religions. Even in more modern times one hesitates to generalize about cultural similarities among the desert-dwelling Zuni, the forest-roaming Iroquois, the Sioux of the open plains, and the Salishan of the Pacific Northwest. “The religion” of the Native Americans turns out to be the multi-colored, many-layered religious patterns of hundreds of discrete tribes and villages.

A proper study of these patterns might consume a whole book, and so we will focus on one small corner of the larger quilt, namely, Mississippian culture and society. Near the dawn of the second millennium of the Common Era, the indigenous worlds surrounding the lower half of the Mississippi River and extending south and east all the way to the Atlantic Ocean underwent a remarkable transformation. Long organized as small bands of highly mobile hunters and gatherers, they turned suddenly to agriculture and in particular to corn. With this momentous shift in food production came a corresponding revolution in political organization. Large and powerful chiefdoms sprang up across the land, and none more significant than what we now call Cahokia. In the three centuries spanning roughly 950 to 1250 CE, this city of 15,000, located near what is now St. Louis, was comparable in size to London. Its remarkable mounds, some of which remain visible today, were part of a sacred landscape, which present-day archaeologists—excavating these majestic sites and the remnants of material culture to be found within them—continue to work on reconstructing. Cahokia had been abandoned by the time Europeans arrived on the continent, but other Mississippian communities persisted, and so we find in the annals of colonization remarkable accounts, such as the one excerpted below, of the riches of these indigenous societies.

New Spain

Spain’s storied conquests are more often told of Central and South America than of that disappointing continent farther north. In the former, civilizations were higher (Aztec, Inca, Maya), the riches far greater, and the victories for church and state more enduring. But “conquistadores” entered North America too, even if their ultimate fates can scarcely be labeled as “conquests.”

Florida—the very name of course is Spanish—early felt the European boot wedged into its sandy soil. That peninsula stretched out into the Caribbean so far that the first Spanish explorers understandably took it for another large island—comparable, for example, to Cuba. Before abandoning its Florida efforts, however, Spain discovered that Florida was a mere vestibule to another great mass of land. Soldiers and missionaries ventured as far north as the Chesapeake Bay before retreat beckoned as the only sensible course. The unplanned trek of Cabeza de Vaca from Florida to Texas and Mexico as well as the more or less planned expedition of Hernando de Soto in the southeastern corner of the continent stumbled upon no treasures of gold, no fabled capital cities. Undismayed, other Spanish explorers pursued their dreams, now farther west, and specifically into what was later to be called New Mexico.

In all of this marching, searching, and wandering, agents of Spain’s church accompanied agents of the state. The Dominicans (or Order of Preachers) arrived in the New World in direct response to the appeal of one of their number, Bartolomé de Las Casas, that native peoples be converted rather than slaughtered, that they be regarded as human beings rather than animals. The Franciscans (or Order of Friars Minor) also waded onto Florida’s beaches but labored with more lasting effect west of the Mississippi and Pecos Rivers.

New France

Decades before France established permanent settlements in North America, fishermen from that nation had plumbed the riches off Newfoundland’s bountiful banks. But if fish constituted France’s initial commercial interest across the Atlantic, fur led French explorers far beyond those coastal shores. French penetration of the continent proceeded initially via the great St. Lawrence River, the modern cities of Montreal and Quebec being monuments to that seventeenth-century effort. On the secular side, the name of Samuel de Champlain (c. 1567–1635) is inseparable from France’s forts (Quebec in 1608), trading posts, villages, and enduring influence. On the religious side, the Society of Jesus above all other names is marked from the mouth of the St. Lawrence to and throughout the Great Lakes, then south along the Mississippi all the way to that river’s broad basin at New Orleans.

While other Catholic orders do appear in New France, the Jesuits emerge as the spiritual right arm of the national conquest. The seventy-three volumes of Jesuit reports or relationes stand, moreover, as the indispensable source for all of New France’s history. Since French population did not swiftly follow upon the heels of French exploration, Jesuit missionaries worked chiefly with the native tribes of interior America. And the clash of cultures and of wills has rarely—if ever—been more fully documented, more poignantly revealed. Converts came slowly, sometimes not at all. Alongside the Jesuits, the Ursulines, led by the mystical nun Marie de l’Incarnation, spearheaded missionary efforts to native women, all the while tending to more than just their spiritual needs.

England Anew

For all of North America, England more than Europe’s other powers came to stay. Though by no means among the first to cross that treacherous “ocean sea,” England did plant colonies in sufficient numbers and win land with sufficient force to endure. Not that its “planting” resulted from some smoothly functioning, centrally synchronized English colonial office. Quite the contrary: in this instance as in many others, England muddled through. In richly varied ways—joint stock companies, adventurers, proprietors, royal advisors, and governors—English men and women did come, did cultivate, did marry and multiply. Others came from Scotland and Germany in significant numbers, and still others from Africa directly or by way of islands in the Caribbean.

In Virginia, and by extension throughout the South, the Church of England saw itself as entitled to all of the official recognition and support there that this national church enjoyed at home. Many steps were taken in an effort to see that this would be so. Parish boundaries were legally fixed, taxes for the support of the clergy were duly levied, generous acreage (glebe land) was faithfully set aside, and parish vestries were granted broad privileges and powers. But nothing seemed to go according to plan. And English clergy found little in the New World that bore a comforting resemblance to the Old. The re-creation of English village life in seventeenth-century Virginia defied the best efforts. Geography dictated much of the irreconcilable divergence, while economic necessities (and failures), political wrangles (and weaknesses), and population patterns (and diversity) dictated the rest. Virginia might name its rivers and towns after English kings, might furnish its houses with English linen and glass, and might demand that England’s Book of Common Prayer be faithfully followed in all respects; yet no Englishman, searching in vain for that quiet village green, would mistake Virginia for home.

In Massachusetts, and by extension throughout New England, a different drummer marched. There the religious priorities outranked the economic ones, and there religion was less an attempted transplant of the National Church than a careful cultivation of a church newly formed and reformed. Pilgrims and Puritans alike brought with them a vision of what Christ’s true church should be, of how society should be ordered and a biblical commonwealth constructed. Their errand into the wilderness was above all else a religious errand, and all institutions—town meeting, school, church, family, law—must faithfully reflect that central fact. Here geography permitted towns and parishes to be laid out in a manner closer to the patterns left behind. Here farmers and merchants could assume roles not sharply different from those known before. And here a new college could actually aspire to follow in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the pattern set by the university long established in Cambridge, England.

So in the 1620s the Pilgrims and in the 1630s the Puritans brought into being, respectively, the Plymouth Colony and the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the latter being much the larger of the two. Though initially differing on their relationship with England’s mother church, the two colonies soon merged ecclesiastically into “the way Congregational” as opposed to “the way National.” And before the century was over, the two colonies had merged politically as well. The “New England Way” came to stand as a model that, it was fervently hoped, Old England would behold in admiration and respond to with imitation. During the first half of the seventeenth century, Massachusetts and Connecticut kept one eye over their shoulders to see how the church at home responded to the effort abroad to bring Christ’s pure church into being. When England under Oliver Cromwell underwent its own Puritan revolution, the delicate experiment being conducted three thousand miles away lost some of its relevance and some of its intensity.

Three of the thirteen colonies followed such distinctive religious paths as to require separate treatment as “special cases”: Maryland, Rhode Island, and Pennsylvania. Initially, Maryland cannot be included in the generalizations above concerning an Anglican South—though Anglican it eventually became. In its early years, however, it stood apart from England’s other colonies, north or south, as having been launched under the auspices of a Roman Catholic proprietor, Lord Baltimore. One of the few sentiments binding the British colonies together was their profound anti-Catholicism, an inevitable part of their intellectual baggage brought over from bloodied England. Yet in 1634 the Crown encouraged and made possible the Catholic colony of Maryland—clearly a “special case.”

Rhode Island, as noted above, had its special character thrust upon it: as a dumping ground, as the latrine of New England (at least as contemporaries were fond of saying). The reason for such undisguised contempt was simple to see: Rhode Island imposed no religious requirements, made no religious demands, enforced no religious uniformity. And in the early seventeenth century, such libertine behavior on the part of a government was as unthinkable as it was intolerable. Not that Rhode Islanders were indifferent to religion; most were not. But in that small space south of Massachusetts and east of Connecticut, men and women were free to be as religious, or as irreligious, as they pleased.

Between the microcosms of Maryland and Rhode Island, the macrocosm of Pennsylvania came into being a half-century later. The grant of land given to William Penn was huge, and there on a vast scale experiments of several sorts were tried—none more notable than Penn’s explicit dedication to liberty of conscience. Because so many took Penn so literally, Pennsylvania presents a picture of greatest diversity: ethnic, linguistic, religious. Indeed, Maryland, Rhode Island, and Pennsylvania shared two common features: they all experimented with religious liberty, and the initial experimenters all were overwhelmed by it.

1. MISSISSIPPIAN CULTURE AND SOCIETY

Cahokia

As mentioned above, Cahokia was the largest of the Mississippian chiefdoms. (1) A photograph of Monks Mound as it appears today (with a reconstructed set of stairs), more than a millennium after its construction. (2) This modern representation of what it might have looked like in its heyday captures the grandeur of Monks Mound, the largest and most ambitious work of human construction in pre-Columbian North America. On the far left is visible a representation of “Woodhenge,” a circle of large wooden posts that archaeologists presume the city’s inhabitants used as a sun calendar and that was part of the city’s sacred landscape. Mississippians believed their chiefs to be descendants of the sun. (3) The famous Birdman tablet, discovered on the site of Monks Mound, depicts a man in a mask that recalls the falcon, which was associated with warrior status in Mississippian traditions, as well as with a prominent deity. (4) Discovered in 1979, the Birger figurine—with its depiction of a woman hoeing the back of a serpent, whose tail in turn splits into vines with gourds that grow up the woman’s back—offers tantalizing evidence that Cahokia was perhaps home to an organized cult of the Earth Mother, a female goddess common to many different Native American societies and strongly associated with fertility (both agricultural and human). (5) This Exchange Avenue figurine, discovered in 2009, depicts a female holding a lightning whelk cup, which was commonly used in Cahokia’s sacred ceremonies. The shell’s rare clockwise spirals were associated with the movement of the sun and therefore also the passage from birth (in the east, just as the sun rises) to death (in the west, as the sun sets).

A contemporary photo of Monks Mound, the largest human-made earthen mound in North America (The Cahokia Mounds Museum Society)

This contemporary painting by Lloyd K. Townsend imagines what Cahokia’s central district may have looked like at its peak (The C...