A God-Shaped Nation: Five Hundred Years of Religion in America

A kaleidoscopic history that shows how the quest to worship freely became one of the nation’s most vexing tensions, shaping life for believers and nonbelievers alike.

It seemed a vast, bountiful continent appeared to Europeans just as religious turmoil was reaching a fever pitch in their own. Spanish Catholics, British Protestants, and French Jesuits all set their hopes on this “new world.” Yet it was a land already settled by indigenous people with their own religious life. Soon it teemed not just with rival Christian sects but with immigrants and enslaved people who brought a global array of beliefs with them. It didn’t take long for Americans to begin spinning out faiths all their Mormonism, Christian Science, Spiritualism, and the apocalyptic Millerism that had followers waiting in vain for Jesus’s return on a rainy October night in 1844.

In A God-Shaped Nation, Brook Wilensky-Lanford reveals how religion in all its manifestations has been at the heart of the nation’s deepest divides and its moments of transcendent unity. The history she unfurls is not bound by the walls of temples, synagogues, mosques, and churches. There is Anne Hutchinson, preaching in her parlor in defiance of colonial Puritan clergy; Reform rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise shocking his kosher guests at an 1883 banquet by serving soft-shell crab; Wovoka, the Paiute man from whose prophecy emerges the Ghost Dance movement; and the Chinese immigrants whose pantheon of Daoist gods offered protection over their backbreaking work constructing the transcontinental railroad.

Following both the leaders of religious movements and the everyday people who brought them alive, Wilensky-Lanford shows that no area of American life—not even the most secular—has been untouched by the push-and-pull of religious freedom. View Less