ONE NATION, UNDER GODS

Smithsonian fellow Manseau (Rag and Bone: A Journey Among the World's Holy Dead, 2009, etc.) unspools a web of gods who have had an impact on the development of the United States.

The dominant Christian narrative that runs through the history of the United States was written by Christians. What the author endeavors to do here—and does so with deep-running stories told with verve and dash—is to square that narrative with a religious syncretism that provides a more colorful, distinct, eccentric, not to mention truthful, historical record. In each chapter, Manseau addresses a single topic, though they gradually spread a maze of intersections and dynamics. “[T]he repeated collision of conflicting systems of belief, followed frequently by ugly and violent conflict,” writes the author, “has somehow arrived, again and again, not merely at peaceful coexistence but striking moments of inter-influence.” Manseau takes on a great company of iconoclasts, from Eric the Red to North African Muslims and Chinese from the Middle Kingdom, all of who arrived in American before Christopher Columbus sailed the ocean blue. From the undaunted Anne Hutchinson’s antinomianism, the author pivots to the healers from Africa who faced smallpox with their history of inoculation. Early on, Thomas Jefferson knew that religious systems interacted, intimately and transformatively. Eventually, there would come Shakers and Mormons, Hindus and Buddhists, Sikhs and Scientologists. Manseau does not paint a peaceable kingdom; it has always been riven by exclusion leagues, immigration acts, dreadful violence and banishments. His point is that there has always existed an undeniable “inter-influence,” that the atmosphere of the country couldn’t help but be shaped and reshaped by its disorderly moments with those who found themselves here for religious reasons.

An eye-opener. After reading Manseau, readers will see the influences he writes about not only dot, but shape, the landscape.