America's Religions: From Their Origins to the Twenty-first Century / Edition 4

by Peter W. Williams

Overview

America's Religions is one of the most comprehensive single-volume histories available on the length and breadth of the religious traditions that have taken root in the United States. From Catholics to Calvinists, Methodists to Pentecostals, Jehovah's Witnesses to Seventh-day Adventists, and Buddhists to Scientologists, Peter W. Williams covers the gamut of America's religions in this accessible, well-organized survey.

Within a sweeping overview, Williams offers concise descriptions of the background, beliefs, practices, and leaders of America's most influential and distinctive religious movements and denominations, including Judaism, the principal branches of historical Christianity, and important non-Western religious traditions. This thoroughly revised edition of America's Religions is sixty percent larger than the original version, with new chapters on Hispanic and Islamic religions and comprehensive updating throughout.

This eminently practical volume allows the reader to approach America's religious history from two directions: as a chronological narrative that entwines the development of religious movements with the economic, political, legal, and social currents of American history, or as a series of discrete topics. Williams provides an extensive bibliography arranged by topic, also updated.

Williams shows how individual religious traditions have developed in the context of one another and how each group has come to terms with formative American experiences such as cultural pluralism, independence, war, slavery, the frontier, and urbanization. Maintaining a focus on the process of Americanization, he explores how religion has helped to shape and sustain many distinctive cultures, or subcultures, within the broader American society.

Informative and clear, America's Religions is an essential volume for anyone interested in religion in America.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780252081125
Publisher:	University of Illinois Press
Publication date:	10/30/2015
Edition description:	4th Edition
Pages:	632
Product dimensions:	7.00(w) x 9.90(h) x 1.50(d)

About the Author

Peter W. Williams is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Religion and American Studies at Miami University, Oxford, Ohio. He is the author of Popular Religion in America and Houses of God.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

The Varieties of Native American Religious Life

    Beginning a survey of the religions of what is now the United States with the American Indian, or Native American, peoples has a number of advantages. In the first place, it helps to overcome a historic blindness induced by a preoccupation with America's European cultural heritage, to the detriment of religious impulses that do not fit readily into European American categories. Secondly, it raises a number of issues about the basic character of religion which are not as readily apparent in the exclusive study of the traditions of the modern West. Thirdly, it obeys strictly the logic of history—a "chrono-logic"—in beginning at the beginning, with the aboriginal inhabitants of a very old continent. Fourthly, it opens up an array of highly diverse yet in some ways curiously similar religious experience and expression which is easily written off by most contemporary Americans as exotically "other" or becomes so romantically idealized that it bears little resemblance to reality.

    The notions of "Americanness" and "Indianness" in themselves have always been problematic. The American "Indians," of course, were not what Columbus thought them to be, that is, residents of southern Asia. On the other hand, as Sam Gill has pointed out, the term Indios in Columbus's day referred generically to any of the inhabitants of the part of the world that lay east of the Indus River. Since many, if not all, of the ancestors of the American Indians hadmost probably originated in Siberia and crossed what was then a land bridge across the Bering Strait to Alaska at some remote time in prehistory, Columbus may have not been so far off in his identifying these "new" people as Asians. The notion of "America," as distinct from the sought-after Asia, came hard and slowly to the cognitively bewildered European newcomers. The subsequent development of the "United States" out of a contiguous collection of European colonies and areas inhabited by aboriginal peoples was also a process that took time and required active feats of imagination to rationalize. Two recent works of scholarship, Edmundo O'Gorman's The Invention of America and Garry Wills's Inventing America, indicate in their convergent titles the intellectual difficulties involved in making sense first out of an entire hemisphere and, much later, of the new political creation of a group of transplanted English colonists wanting to become an independent nation.

    Although the idea of "America" today carries with it the features and values of a modernized, technologically sophisticated society very remote from the life of the continent's aboriginal peoples, there are some intriguing ways to argue that these people were archetypically American. In the first place, like all subsequent inhabitants of North America, the Indians were immigrants. As we have already noted, their ancestors most probably arrived from Siberia in pursuit of big game. Secondly, like later immigrants and more settled Americans as well, they were a mobile people, ultimately fanning out from the Bering Strait through two continents all the way south to Tierra del Fuego. For some, mobility was more or less continuous as they adopted nomadic patterns in pursuit of game. Others, such as the agriculturists of the south, became more settled, but never escaped from the periodic need to readjust to new circumstances often engendered by intercultural encounters or changes in the natural environment. Thirdly, as Americans of today are proud to claim for themselves, these Native Americans were an infinitely adaptable people. Even though they lacked sophisticated technology, they adjusted their life-patterns to environmental circumstances ranging from the Arctic to the tropical, and learned to extract a living from the most varied of circumstances. The ultimate encounter with Europeans was no exception: the animals and firearms of the Spanish were rapidly adopted by the Plains Indians, for example, and the latter's myths began to incorporate the previously unknown horse as an archetypal symbol.

    Finally, like Americans of later times, the earliest Americans were extraordinarily varied in the cultures they developed. Just as the diet, the language, the religions, and the other components of the American culture of our own day have been enriched from the endless rubbing of shoulders of almost infinitely varied national stocks living together, so did the aboriginal peoples continually diversify, lend, and borrow in response to changing circumstances. This diversity was maintained over the years through the lack of continual interaction made possible by today's means of cultural homogenization—widespread literacy, mass media, centralized educational and political institutions. However, Native American cultures were by no means static. Ecological changes or social dynamics continually prompted these peoples to migrate and come into contact with others, whether peaceably or otherwise, and cultural borrowing and assimilation were ongoing factors in the evolution of Native American culture. The Aztec civilization that Cortés and his followers beheld on their arrival in Mexico was an imperial creation, and many peoples had been forced by the powerful Aztecs to submit to a not always very welcome yoke. Myth and ritual changed their contents to embrace new circumstances, a process that continued through the fusions of Indian and Christian themes of the Peyote religion of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

    Because of this remarkable cultural and religious diversity stretched over both space and time, it is difficult to be both general and meaningful in the discussion of Native American religions. One runs the risks in doing so of generating a series of abstractions in need of endless qualification and counterexamples, or else an equally endless chain of anecdotes and descriptions having little to do with one another. Still, there are some ways of approaching the topic that illuminate the general patterns of Native American religious expression and its underlying characteristics, especially insofar as it differs significantly from the characteristics of religion in the modernized society to which most of us have become accustomed.

    First, there are a number of ways of perceiving the world that are characteristic of traditional cultures in general and Native American peoples in particular. Religion itself, for example, is a concept for which most such cultures lack specific words. In contemporary American society, religious activity tends to become compartmentalized and relegated to a specific time and place, for example, Sunday morning at church. In traditional cultures the religious or symbolic life of a people is instead frequently integrated into the fabric of daily activity, so that any act connected with what the culture identifies as significant takes on a religious meaning. For premodern cultures especially, the production or acquisition of food is of central importance—in contrast with most of contemporary American society, in which only a small percentage of the population is directly engaged in agricultural work. Therefore, the killing of an animal or the harvest of the year's supply of maize (corn) is not just a routine, "secular" event but rather one surrounded with ritual or ceremonial developed as a constant reminder of the cosmic significance of the particular act. Perhaps the saying of grace before meals, now largely abandoned in homes where parents and children keep wildly different schedules and communicate through notes on the refrigerator door, is an example of the way in which such practices linger and eventually dissolve in the solvent of modernity.

    Another aspect of Native American religious life that differentiates it from much of contemporary American experience is its relationship to the social order. In the pluralistic America of today, religion is seen, and regarded by law, as a matter of individual choice among any number of conceivable alternatives. In fact, our choice may be more constrained by our own situation in society than may be readily apparent, but the theoretical range of options remains open. In traditional societies, however, the religious life of a people is coextensive with the people itself, and seldom extends beyond a coherent social group. It would be as unlikely, for example, for a Navajo to adopt the religion of the Apache as it would be to begin speaking the Apache language, even though cross-fertilizations may occur among religions or languages.

    A system of religious practices therefore develops within the context of the experience of a particular people, remains confined among that people, and is virtually the only option open to any of the members of the people, although change is always possible through commonly accepted visionary experience. This relationship of religion to society is reflected in tribal naming, where the word a people uses to describe themselves frequently means "the people" or "human beings." For an individual group, their own experience of the world is normative and exclusive, and is regarded as universal only in the sense that the religions of other peoples are irrelevant to their own situation. Other peoples, and their religions with them, are basically not "really real." Society, culture, religion, and cosmos are coincident, and together constitute the sum of reality for a particular people as long as they manage to cohere as a self-sufficient group.

    Two other basic cultural categories that have direct implications for religion are the ways in which a given people perceive and experience time and space. For contemporary Americans, both time and space are usually experienced as linear and divisible, and subject to precise measurement and manipulation. The theory of relativity may have modified these notions at a high level of scientific abstraction, but the logic of modern life dictates otherwise in our everyday round. Clocks and watches are everywhere, on our walls and desks and wrists. Complex organizations such as businesses, hospitals and universities depend on a precise synchronization of activity, and woe to those who are habitually late. Space is similarly compartmentalized: parking spaces, apartments, house lots, and offices all represent the division and privatization of the space in which we daily live and work.

    Among traditional peoples, however, time and space are generally experienced in other ways. Verb tenses in Native American languages frequently lack the clear-cut distinction of past, present, and future characteristic of the linear interpretation of time implicit in English and other Indo-European tongues. In the modern West, time progresses in a straight line, from an origin through the present into a future that will be distinct, and hopefully better, than what has preceded it. Implicit in this schematization of time is the notion of progress, which reached its apogee in the optimism of the Victorian era when technology and democracy promised to bring about a secular millennium of peace and prosperity here on earth.

    This sense of time is by no means universal, and in fact is quite recent in the course of human history. Far more typical of the world's peoples is an experience of time as an endless repetition of the same events, with humans striving eternally to emulate the patterns handed down by the gods or other superhuman beings in the mythical time of beginnings. Left to themselves, humans tend to muddy the proverbial waters and are in need at regular intervals of returning to this "strong time" of origins—illud tempus, in Mircea Eliade's phrase—in order to bring the course of the world back into line with the original divinely given paradigms for human action. Instead of inevitable progress, regress is the normal course of things, and must be regularly compensated for if life is to continue.

    Similarly, space in the sense of clearly delineated land belonging to a particular person is alien to the sensibilities of most traditional peoples. For nomadic hunting peoples especially, the notion of fixed space as in any way significant is virtually nonsensical. Land is provided in the order of things for human habitation and use, but it can be said to "belong" to an individual or group only insofar as they are actually inhabiting or otherwise utilizing it. On the other hand, almost all peoples engage in making certain aspects of space symbolically significant, thus creating order, or cosmos, out of what is otherwise undifferentiated chaos unfit for human habitation. For the Navajo, for example, the world (in the sense of cosmos) is delineated by four sacred mountains at its corners. Whether these are actual, physical mountains is of secondary importance. What is ultimately important, rather, is the sense of orientation, of living in a space that is organized spiritually for human existence.

    In some cases, actual topographic features, especially mountains, take on this orienting function. For nomadic hunters, such as the Sioux of the Great Plains in the nineteenth century, their renowned Sun Dance ceremony could be performed anywhere. The coming together of scattered people for the ceremony was a symbolic affirmation of their unity, which was not always visually apparent. In the Sun Dance, as in the rituals of many other peoples, a tree was set into the ground to constitute a pole representing the center of the cosmos—an axis mundi, or world axis, in the phrase of Eliade. This center was none the less real because its location was arbitrary—in the Indian worldview, it was more real than any naturally rooted tree since its ultimate reality was bestowed by the ceremonies performed around it.

    Just as Native Americans experienced time and space in ways significantly different from members of modernized societies, so was their interpretation of and relationship with the complex of forces and entities we call "nature." Just as modernized peoples distinguish sharply between past, present, and future, so do we experience nature as sharply different from ourselves. Human beings hold a special place in the universe, a distinctiveness supported by the early chapters of Genesis. Domestic animals occupy an intermediate role, but the rest of nature, the realm of plant and animal life, is frequently perceived as so different from our own realm that it is subject to dominance and manipulation for our own purposes with impunity.

    It is interesting that one of the ways in which the traditional cosmos of the Native American peoples has reentered our own worldviews has been through the ecological crisis that was first perceived by Rachel Carson and other environmentalists in the 1960s. Although much sentimentalization and distortion of American Indian modes of perception has occurred in the process, the essential insight which has been recently appropriated by many contemporary Americans is valid—namely, the idea that the American Indians regarded humans as one among a number of animate forces in the world that had to live in harmony with one another if life was to continue in a tolerable fashion.

    A good example of this relationship is the practice of some peoples, such as the northern Saulteaux, of addressing and propitiating a bear before killing it at the end of a hunt. The Indians were not vegetarians who shuddered at the idea of taking life. Rather, they recognized the claims of all life to a place in the cosmos and the proper respect that different life-forms owed one another in the divine ecology. The logic of that ecology dictated that humans were to use bears as a source of nutrition, but that did not reduce the bear to the status of the object of sport or casual violence. Human and bear each had a proper role to play in the cosmic round, but the significance of that round had to be repeatedly and carefully reasserted each time an act of potential disruptiveness was anticipated.

    The same sense of participating in a cosmos in which all beings formed an interrelated continuum also shaped Native American conceptions of the supernatural realm. In the Christian worldview, God and humanity are radically distinct from one another, even though the latter may have been made in the image of the former. Calvinistic Protestantism, which helped to shape the modern world-picture even more than other varieties of Christianity, carried this contrast to an extreme, and insisted that the Divine Word was the only possible point of contact between the two realms.

    For American Indians, however, the monotheism characteristic of the principal Western religions—Judaism, Christianity, Islam—is simply absent. In some cases a particularly powerful creator god may be ultimately responsible for the world's coming into existence, but such a god usually then takes on the characteristics of what Eliade calls a deus otiosus—an "otiose" or inactive god who takes little interest in the subsequent fate of that creation. More usually, Native American creation stories, which vary greatly in their precise content, are narratives of the activities of different kinds of supernatural beings who help humanity emerge from nothingness or some primordial condition of existence into the mundane world. For both the Navajo and the Zuni, for example, the original inhabitants of the world emerged from underground. In other versions, the Earth Diver—a diving bird or animal—brings soil up from beneath the primordial water that had covered the world and sets the process of creation in motion. This latter motif, incidentally, was widespread among peoples of eastern Asia, the probable ancestral home of the natives of the New World.

    Many other sorts of supernatural beings inhabit the Native American cosmos. In the Seneca creation account, which is shared by many other peoples as well, a good twin brother brings a perfect world into being, after which his bad twin proceeds to foul it up. Supernatural forces in animal or bird form, as in the case of Earth Diver, also can play roles in world-creation. Another sort of figure related to the Seneca creator-twins is generically known as the Culture Hero. This being plays a role in many myths, such as those of the Algonkians, as the source of human life-patterns. The Culture Hero is not really a god but nevertheless lives in a realm of mythic beginnings rather than in the here-and-now of the everyday world.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from AMERICA'S RELIGIONS by Peter W. Williams. Copyright © 2002 by Peter W. Williams. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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Table of Contents

Western Catholicism from the Time of

Preface	xi
Topical Guide to Chapters	xv
Introduction: Telling Stories	1
PART 1: THE TRADITIONS
A. Oral Traditions	11
Introduction	11
CHAPTER 1	The Varieties of Native American
Religious Life	12
CHAPTER 2	The African Background of New World
Religions	23
B. The Mediterranean Matrix	28
Introduction	28
1. Judaism and the Emergence of Historical Religion	29
CHAPTER 3. The Jewish Tradition	29
CHAPTER 4	From the Religion of the Hebrews to the
Restoration of Israel	36
2. Christianity East and West	47
CHAPTER 5. The Eastern Orthodox Tradition	47
CHAPTER 6. The Roman Catholic Tradition	55
CHAPTER 7
Constantine	64
C	The Reformation Era: The Sundering of Western
Christendom and the Emergence of the Protestant Traditions	76
Introduction	76
CHAPTER 8. The Lutheran Tradition	77
CHAPTER 9. The Anglican Tradition	86
CHAPTER 10. Calvinism and the Reformed Tradition	94
CHAPTER 11	The Radical Reformation and the
Anabaptist Tradition	100
PART 2: EARLY AMERICA: EUROPEANS, COLONIALS, AND
TRADITIONAL PEOPLES BEFORE THE REVOLUTION
Introduction	103
CHAPTER 12. Colonial Anglicans	105
CHAPTER 13. New England Puritans	107
CHAPTER 14. Presbyterians and Other Reformed Churches	119
CHAPTER 15. The Society of Friends (Quakers)	128
CHAPTER 16. John Wesley and the Rise of Methodism	135
CHAPTER 17	The Great Awakening and the Baptist
Tradition	139
CHAPTER 18	The Origins of Modern Religious
Liberalism	148
CHAPTER 19. Anabaptists and Pietists in Pennsylvania	153
CHAPTER 20. Jews and Catholics in Early America	158
CHAPTER 21	Christian Missions to the North American
Indians	163
PART 3: RELIGIOUS COMMUNITY FORMATION IN THE NEW REPUBLIC
Introduction	175
A. Toward Independence	177
CHAPTER 22. The Revolution and the Constitution	177
B. White Evangelicalism	181
CHAPTER 23. The Second Great Awakening(s)	181
CHAPTER 24. Moral Reform, Antislavery, and Civil War	190
CHAPTER 25. The Culture of Antebellum Evangelicalism	199
C. Alternative Protestant Patterns	208
CHAPTER 26	Liturgical Protestantism: Lutherans and
Episcopalians in Changing Worlds	208
CHAPTER 27. Religion in the Slave Community	216
D. "Freedom's Ferment": New Religious Movements	220
CHAPTER 28	Unitarianism, Transcendentalism, and
Universalism	220
CHAPTER 29	New World Space and Time: Restorationist,
Millennial, and Communitarian Movements	226
CHAPTER 30	New World Revelation: Joseph Smith and
the Rise of the Mormons	235
PART 4: THE END OF THE FRONTIER AND THE RISE OF THE CITY
Introduction	243
A. The Adjustments of Protestantism	245
CHAPTER 31. Victorian Evangelicals	245
CHAPTER 32	Protestant Liberalism and the Social
Gospel	255
CHAPTER 33. Anglican Renaissance	264
CHAPTER 34	Reactions to Modernity: Fundamentalism,
Holiness, Pentecostalism	269
CHAPTER 35. Religion in the South	282
B. Traditions in Transition: European Immigrants	292
CHAPTER 36	American Catholicism: From Ethnic
Pluralism to Institutional Unity	292
CHAPTER 37. Eastern Christianity in America	302
CHAPTER 38	Ethnic Diversity and Denominationalism
in American Judiasm	308
C. Old and New Frontiers	315
CHAPTER 39. Native American New Religions	315
CHAPTER 40. Black Nationalism and New Urban Religions	322
CHAPTER 41. Health, Wealth, and Metaphysics	328
PART 5: THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: FURTHER ENCOUNTERS
WITH MODERNITY AND PLURALISM
Introduction	343
CHAPTER 42	Neo-Orthodoxy and Ecumenism: The
Foundations of "Mainline" Protestantism	345
CHAPTER 43	"Mainline" Protestantism in
the Later Twentieth Century	355
CHAPTER 44	Conservative Protestantism: Culture and
Politics	375
CHAPTER 45. Mormons and the "Mainstream"	389
CHAPTER 46	Traditions and Structures in the
American Jewish Community	398
CHAPTER 47	Jewish Identity and Jewish Culture in
Twentieth-Century America	403
CHAPTER 48	Vatican II and the End of the Catholic
"Ghetto"	414
CHAPTER 49	Roman Catholic Education, Thought, and
Culture	421
CHAPTER 50. The Religions of Spanish-Speaking Peoples	431
CHAPTER 51	African American Christianity:
"Eyes on the Prize"	440
CHAPTER 52. Islam in the United States	448
CHAPTER 53	Asian Traditions and American
Transformations	457
CHAPTER 54. Liberalism, Radicalism, and Secularism	477
CHAPTER 55. Popular Religion in New Keys	487
Conclusion: Has American Religion Changed during the Past
Century?	503
Bibliography	513
Index	571

Editorial Reviews

Over the past decade, scholars of American religion have undergone a crisis of narrative. Recognizing that earlier generations of historians have focused their work too narrowly on the experiences of white, male, middle-class Protestants, they have struggled to find a means of representing the incredible variety of spiritual expression that has always existed throughout an ever-diverse population. The solution offered here by Williams, a professor at Miami University (Ohio) and the editor of The Encyclopedia of the American Religious Experience, is to abandon narrative altogether. The result, regrettably, is not altogether satisfactory. This volume is astounding in its breadth; 11 of its 55 chapters offer cursory surveys of the major religious traditions. The remaining chapters digest the progress, since 1492, of dozens of spiritual movements and hundreds of religious leaders across a wide spectrum of ethnic and regional identity. However, Williams's resolute dedication to pluralism comes at the expense of both coherence and balance he devotes almost as much space to Victorian Anglicanism as he does to the Second Great Awakening. Although Williams intends this as a college textbook, he takes pains to italicize and define even such familiar terms as "pope," and offers too many simplistic generalizations. His methodological framework, built on the assumption that each group has its own distinct tradition, prevents him from examining crucial processes of cultural contact and exchange. The final product resembles more a collection of brief, loosely related essays than a mature work of synthetic analysis. (Dec.) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

Intended as a textbook for beginning students interested in religion in the United States, this volume reads like a catalog lacking thematic or interpretive unity. Williams (religion and American studies, Miami Univ., Ohio), whose book was originally published by Macmillan in 1989 and republished by the University of Illinois in 1998 as America's Religions: Traditions and Cultures, offers a newly revised edition that adds some 60 pages, owing largely to an expanded and comprehensive bibliography of 56 pages. As the bibliography demonstrates, the revisions are intended to increase coverage of African American, Native American, Jewish, Islamic, and Asian traditions. Nevertheless, Williams, who studied under the late Sydney E. Ahlstrom at Yale University and wrote the highly respected A Religious History of the American People, makes no effort to hide his preference for the Lutheran tradition and hence greatly reduces the value of his book for readers with other religious convictions. As with other books of this ilk, the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant tradition receives the bulk of his attention; the Library of Congress correctly catalogs this book under religious thought rather than American religious history. The book ends with the curious statement that although the content of religion in the United States changes, the process of religion doesn't. Those who feel that we are currently in the midst of a religious cultural war might disagree. Recommended for large academic libraries. James A. Overbeck, Atlanta-Fulton P.L., GA Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

"A towering achievement. Peter Williams has provided a magisterial study that does justice to the rich pastiche of religious life in America. The bibliography alone makes this an invaluable resource." —Randall Balmer, author of Religion in Twentieth-Century America


"For coverage and liveliness of style, America's Religions is encyclopedic in the best sense of the word."—Kathleen Flake, author of The Politics of American Religious Identity: The Seating of Senator Reed Smoot, Mormon Apostle


"America's Religions provides an outstanding account of the religious worlds Americans have created and continue to inhabit. This volume is a rich resource for historians who take the long view, for religionists who focus on specific traditions, and for Americanists who examine distinctive cultures. Each will find Williams's new edition packed with insight and highly adaptable to diverse course uses."—Stephen J. Stein, author of Alternative American Religions

From the Publisher