What Counts as American Religion?

Whether or not one agrees with Tweed’s definition of religion, his choice to begin his story in ancient Texas toward the end of the last Ice Age in North America, rather than New England or Jamestown in the 1600s, is the first of many refreshing narrative twists about who belongs in American religious history and what should count as religion.

Religion in the Lands That Became America is the culmination of decades of research. Tweed has been thinking about how to retell American religious history since he read Syndey Ahlstrom’s magisterial survey, A Religious History of the American People (1973), a now-canonical text that saw Protestantism, Puritan theology and New England as the touchstones of American religious identity. Tweed felt that Ahlstrom’s story “didn’t have much to do” with the religion he encountered growing up in his Catholic parish or his friends’ synagogues in Philadelphia, and he wondered whether a more inclusive religious history could offer “a fuller account of how more people confronted more problems.” Religion in the Lands That Became America is his answer to that challenge.

Tweed’s expansive new history begins with the “Foraging Religion” of Horn Shelter Man and ends in Clifton, Texas, just a few miles from Horn Shelter Man’s burial place. The town—in a state that leads the country in greenhouse gas emissions and also has a booming solar industry—now hosts fiber-optic cables that allow residents to attend church services online and participate in what Tweed calls “digital religion.” Religion in the Lands That Became America thus moves from foraging to fiber optics to offer an expansive American religious history that focuses on “eco-cultural niches” and human flourishing. The result is a firm rejection of nationalist narratives of religion that is at once profound and thought-provoking.

Tweed, a professor of history and American Studies at the University of Notre Dame and former president of the American Academy of Religion, has read widely in numerous fields, and his footnotes span over 200 pages with very little repetition of sources. While critics will undoubtedly quibble with certain omissions or narrative decisions, this is a major achievement of synthesis, narrative and creativity.

Tweed’s approach self-consciously centers on language and narrative. His fascination with the relationship between history and the art of the story has been a theme of his field-defining scholarship, from his edited volume, Retelling U.S. Religious History (1997), to his oft-cited theory of religion, Crossing and Dwelling (2006).

For Tweed, history is not merely “objective,” but is a narrative with a beginning, middle and end. As a result, it is worth dwelling on the structure of his latest book. His story is split into four sections that span over 11,000 years: (1) Foraging, which covers American religious history before humans established long-term agricultural settlements; (2) Farming, which begins in 11,000 BCE and ends with the Industrial Revolution of the mid-19th century; (3) Factories, which begins in 1848 and ends in the 1970s; and (4) Fiber Optics, which spans from 1975 until 2020.

Each epoch is accompanied by a “sustainability crisis,” most of which remain unresolved. The cornfield crisis of the 12th century, for example, led to the abandonment of Cahokia, one of the largest and most influential capitals of indigenous Mississippian society. The colonial crisis, which included the “Columbian exchange” of plants, animals, pathogens and people—including massive displacement of Native people and the transatlantic slave trade—and its consequences reverberate into the present. Similarly, the industrial crisis of the late 19th and early 20th centuries has led to urbanization, inequality and a reliance on extractive industries that remain unaddressed.

As Tweed’s structure indicates, the pivot points diverge from the canon: the Pilgrims and the Puritans are tucked into a chapter on “Plantation Religion.” The American Revolution occurs about halfway through the book, and Tweed places the political philosophy of the American founders in conversation with Anishinaabe conceptions of bimaadiziwin, or “the good life.”

What makes the plot progress are technologies and ecologies, rather than politics. The Civil War is covered in a chapter on “Industrial Religion” that begins not with Fort Sumter, but with the Lowell mills—the 19th century textile factories in Lowell, Massachusetts, whose system of mass production, wage labor and union organizing were harbingers of the changing ecological and economic landscape that would mark the 20th century.

This is not to say that Tweed skirts major issues like war, rebellion and politics. His coverage of these topics is impressive. Tweed synthesizes major fields of research within a few sentences. His narrative choices reveal a larger argument: that a more representative story about American religion highlights the dynamic of migration/displacement and place-making/home-making (i.e. “crossing and dwelling,” a reference to Tweed’s 2006 theory of religion). These motifs narrate the religious histories of indigenous people and immigrants of all kinds, from English Puritans to African Muslims and Asian Buddhists.

Tweed’s emphasis on Native religion is especially striking and significant. The first two chapters of his book, “Foraging Religion” and “Farming Religion,” focus almost exclusively on indigenous religions before Columbus’s arrival in 1492. Tweed is careful not to recreate the narrative of the “vanishing Indian,” or the trope, whether explicit or subconscious, that white civilization—through American territorial expansion—was preordained by God or would inevitably supersede Native American culture and life. Instead, Native religions are woven into nearly every chapter, from Neolin, an Ohio Valley Lenape prophet in the 18th century whose religious vision spread from current-day New York to Minnesota and inspired Pontiac’s Rebellion, to the American Indian Movement in the 20th century.

The role of metaphor is another recurring theme in the “lands that became America.” European settlers “planted” their religion in the Americas and used figurative metaphors that reiterated their economic reliance on agriculture. They self-consciously aimed to “seed” the gospel in new lands and spoke of their “inner plantations.” With the rise of industry, new metaphors and figurative tools came to emphasize machines and, eventually, telephones. In the digital age, the internet became a “new metaphor for God,” and individuals could be “programed” or “deprogramed” within religious traditions.

Like all innovative stories, Tweed’s book provokes questions. This structure, which moves from “Foraging” to “Farming” to “Factories” to “Fiber Optics,” resembles an evolutionary narrative of increasing human complexity. This vision of American religious history, while more inclusive of more people, creates new questions about religion: If the development of religion requires figurative tools like the “capacity for analogical reasoning,” when can a human child be considered religious? Can one be a member of a religion without the capacity for analogical reasoning? Moreover, what does it mean to structure a story about religion around resources?

His use of ecological and technological motifs to organize his narrative left me wondering about the relationship between religious change and social structure. Is religion a reactive response to the ecological and social pressures that each generation inherits? To what extent do ecological or mechanical metaphors structure religious experience?

Such questions are especially incumbent in our current moment. With the 250th anniversary of the United States on the horizon amid the rising influence of Christian Nationalism and its theocratic claim that America was founded as a “Christian nation,” Tweed’s history offers a corrective to narrow visions of American religion that begin with Plymouth Rock. His chapter on “Rebellious Religion,” which includes the drafting of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, is especially instructive in this regard. As Tweed writes, the “founders and framers wouldn’t establish a Protestant, or even a Christian, state.” Instead, they aimed to improve upon the “eco-cultural niche” that they inherited by allowing free exercise of religion and disallowing the establishment of religion. Today, as we face renewed challenges, Tweed ends with a final question to his readers: is it possible to “repurpose ancient figurative tools and craft new ones to rectify long-standing injustices, restore degraded niches, and build a sustainable world?”

These are generative, essential and energizing questions, and Tweed is to be credited for creating a grand narrative that is at once erudite, self-reflective and intellectually stimulating. Religion in the Lands That Became America is a major achievement and should rightly take its place alongside Ahlstrom and other major narratives about religion in America.

Katharine GerbnerMore by this author →

Katharine Gerbner is Associate Professor of History at the University of Minnesota, where she also serves as Director of the Religious Studies program. She is the author of Christian Slavery: Conversion and Race in the Protestant Atlantic World (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018) and Archival Irruptions: Constructing Religion and Criminalizing Obeah in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica (Duke University Press, 2025).