A NATION WRESTLES WITH GOD

Divine democracy.

From John Winthrop’s “city upon a hill” and Martin Luther King Jr.’s mountaintop to Navajo chants and Joy Harjo’s poetry, Restless Books publisher and Amherst College scholar Stavans here assembles a history of North America through its inhabitants’ ideas of the divine. “I myself have wrestled with God since, well, forever,” he writes in the book’s introduction. “Some days I am an inveterate skeptic, others a devout believer. A Jew from Mexico, I come on my mother’s side from a religious milieu. But she, a rebel, instilled revolt in me as a spiritual stance.” The theme of the chronological collection is the unique way in which North Americans—Indigenous and immigrants—conceived of God’s power over landscape. The American sublime—great mountains, rivers, valleys, and swaths of cultivated countryside—has always provoked us to ask if there is an intelligence behind it. In his eloquent introduction, Stavans makes the point that religion is largely a matter of language. The diction of the King James Bible shaped the political vision of Abraham Lincoln. The call-and-response of the Black church echoes in King’s addresses. This is an anthology about how America became a nation “under God” and whether we still have that god in our lives. “I am not, personally, a believer or a religious man in any sense of institutional commitment or practice,” writes the late scientist Stephen Jay Gould. “But I have enormous respect for religion, and the subject has always fascinated me, beyond almost all others.…Much of this fascination lies in the stunning historical paradox that organized religion has fostered, throughout Western history, both the most unspeakable horrors and the most heartrending examples of human goodness in the face of personal danger.”

A wonderfully capacious anthology of writings about America’s unique relationship to religion.