A GOD-SHAPED NATION

Comprehensive history of religion and its indelible role in American society.

“Religion is a permanent and important part of our lives—all our lives—whether we want it to be or not,” writes independent scholar Wilensky-Lanford, author of Paradise Lust: Searching for the Garden of Eden (2011). In the modern U.S., the religion that is most evident in the public sphere is evangelical Protestantism, “the water that Americans swim in.” This influence, she observes, has its pernicious aspects: its demand, surrounded by an entire political movement, that life begins at conception, and its refusal to render unto Caesar and not get entangled in secular politics. Yet, as it has always been, America is also a land of tremendous religious diversity, albeit diversity that evangelicals have regularly tried to quash. Wilensky-Lanford takes a leisurely tour of the currents of American religious history, from the efforts by the first Spanish conquistadors to impose Catholicism on Indigenous peoples to the establishment of Pilgrim communities in New England (its principals, she writes, rejected the label “Puritan” as pejorative). She also explores the extraordinary splintering of established churches in the “Second Great Awakening” of the early-19th century (“If there was no national religion, that meant there was room for many religions to flourish side by side”), and she chronicles, in more recent times, the importation or creation of outliers, like Krishna Consciousness and Scientology. Interestingly, women, with a few exceptions, were sidelined from all this until the early 1970s, when, for the first time in its history, Harvard “invited a woman to say the Sunday service” and female rabbis were ordained for the first time. The narrative flows smoothly, often returning to the interaction of religion and politics (with those evangelicals, she notes, replacing the cause of segregation with that of abortion—“a stunningly successful move”). What remains, Wilensky-Lanford concludes, is to preserve religious freedom: “Variety, not conformity, is what religion is made of.”

A fluent, always engaging study of America’s religious traditions.