{"id":11860,"date":"2025-10-14T14:52:36","date_gmt":"2025-10-14T14:52:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/farefwd.com\/?p=11860"},"modified":"2025-10-14T14:59:50","modified_gmt":"2025-10-14T14:59:50","slug":"religion-in-the-lands-that-became-america","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/farefwd.com\/index.php\/2025\/10\/14\/religion-in-the-lands-that-became-america\/","title":{"rendered":"Religion in the Lands that Became America"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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Shout to the Lord All You Lands!<\/h2>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t
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Thomas Tweed\u2019s Religion in the Lands that Became America<\/em> skillfully traces the imprints of ecological circumstances on American religious life but undersells the influence of religious thinking itself.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Review by Will Bryant<\/em><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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“Historical enquiry discloses\u2026 the situatedness of all enquiry.\u201d – Alasdair McIntyre<\/em><\/p>

\u201cIn our history, across our great divide \/ There is a glorious sunrise \/ Dappled with the flickers of light.\u201d – Taylor Swift<\/em><\/p>

Conventional histories of religion in America rest on what could be called \u201chistorical theology,\u201d a method that focuses first on intellectual innovation within religious communities, then traces their effects outward to social and ecological life. Think John Winthrop\u2019s \u201ccity on a hill,\u201d or Ben Franklin\u2019s wisecracking post-puritan deism.<\/p>

In Religion in the Lands that Became America<\/em>, historian Thomas Tweed takes a different tack. His title belies his method. Land, Tweed thinks, shapes religious belief. The physical nature of the land in North America, and the ecological and economic relationships it produces, set the boundaries of his narrative. Such a rejection of \u201chistorical theology\u201d could swing the pendulum too far in the other direction, where religion becomes nothing more than a nice story we tell ourselves to cope with stressful changes in our social environment. But Tweed navigates this strait of Messina with skill for most of the book, letting changes in \u201cspiritual ecology\u201d drive the narrative while leaving space for genuine theological innovation.<\/p>

His approach shines when external changes like colonial encounters, warfare, or industrialization prompt real religious rethinking. The ecological framework allows Tweed to identify patterns across space and time despite theological or traditional differences, such as the common impetus to political revolution among indigenous people and colonists alike at the end of the 18th century. He shows the ways European and indigenous religions responded to the colonial encounter, and the ways in which new American identities caused rifts from religions\u2019 pre-Columbian pasts. Tweed pays attention to what social features religious traditions shed as they undergo these changes\u2014a part of the story that \u201chistorical theologians\u201d can easily leave unwritten.<\/p>

After pacing about in pre-modern North America for a few hundred pages, Tweed finds his rhythm in the 18th and 19th centuries, when religion in North America faced for the first time a common ecology: industrialization. He describes the religious dimensions of industrial ideology: Francis Lowell\u2019s Fourier-inspired utopianism, Henry Ford\u2019s interest in New Thought, John Rockefeller\u2019s evangelical mission. A strong point of this analysis is Tweed\u2019s ability to identify common changes in American religious life driven by new industrial technology. First, the water and steam powered factories that begat urbanization, then the automobile and the various technologies of war that reshaped American religious organization and moral thinking in the early 20th century, and finally the successive revolutions in information technology (the radio, the TV, the internet) that created new media for religious exchange. The landscape of American religion today is defined by these tectonic shifts.<\/p><\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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Religious innovations always emerge from contentious internal debate on theological tradition and received wisdom.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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For all its benefits, however, Tweed\u2019s approach may be less appealing to readers who wish to inhabit the lives and communities of the religionists who experienced the changes he describes. Because nonreligious factors drive the narrative, the internal response from a religious community or tradition can sometimes appear as a fait accompli<\/em>. \u201cOf course the heirs of the Puritans came to support abolition,\u201d a reader might think, \u201ctheir social context and institutional structure wouldn\u2019t have had it any other way!\u201d In reality, religious innovations always emerge from contentious internal debate on theological tradition and received wisdom. The diverse inheritors of puritan theology held every possible view on slavery, from William Lloyd Garrison\u2019s radical abolitionism to Lyman Beecher\u2019s colonizationism and Nathan Lord\u2019s reactionary anti-abolitionism. Theological tradition rarely prescribes a single answer to a new social circumstance. Tweed\u2019s narrative at times clouds the stakes of theological debate as it occurred and obfuscates the desires and intentions of the people who participated.<\/p>

As a historical survey, Religion in the Lands that Became America <\/em>suffers the conceits of the genre. Tweed has little space to account for millenia of religious history, so illustrative corner cases often get left behind, especially when the corner case does not fit the socioecological picture Tweed is intending to paint. The Religious Right, for example, emerges on the scene in the 1970s with little discussion of the decades of conservative theological tradition and countercultural social life that produced the movement, because the movement\u2019s pre-millennial eschatology and strict biblicism led it to avoid the socioeconomic environment faced by the religious mainline in America for much of the 20th century. Readers wishing to understand where the movement came from may have to look elsewhere for more detail.<\/p>

Tweed also sometimes rests on the crutch of his ecological method when he lets religion play second fiddle to wider political and technological changes. At moments when theology seems to have played an important ideological role in shaping these changes\u2014for example, when Robert Oppenheimer quotes from the Bhagavad Gita<\/em>, \u201cI have become death, destroyer of worlds\u201d before the first test of the atomic bomb\u2014Tweed only marks it as a curiosity and moves on. Though the historical theologians of a past generation may have unfairly omitted the ecological conditions of theological reasoning, today\u2019s social historians should not omit genuine intellectual innovation when it emerges from those very ecological conditions. Tweed rightly avoids the causal claim\u2014\u201cOppenheimer built the bomb because he read the Bhagavad Gita<\/em>\u201d\u2014but he wrongly understates the possible effect of Oppenheimer\u2019s reading of the Bhagavad Gita<\/em>, and other theological influences, on his imagination and implementation of the Manhattan Project. Though the bomb may have been mainly caused by the material forces of technology, economy, and warfare, its construction and cultural reception were shaped by the contingencies of history, including Oppenheimer\u2019s interest in esoteric Hinduism. Historical agents rarely understand themselves as acting purely in the service of material causes, and it is the duty of the religious historian to consider nonmaterial causes when they emerge from the material procession of history.<\/p><\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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Supernatural insight, for Tweed, is relegated to some other place, far from the domain of the religious historian.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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The historical dilemma between ecology and theology may seem like nothing more than an academic quibble, but I\u2019ll suggest that it is a dilemma we all face. As we narrate our own lives, we often seek to explain our present experience by way of past circumstances. As songwriter Noah Kahan puts it, \u201cI\u2019m mean because I grew up in New England.\u201d Taylor Swift, on her biblical \u201cAll Too Well (Ten Minute Version),\u201d wrestles with the loss of a relationship defined by a particular place: \u201cI know it’s long gone and \/ that magic\u2019s not here no more.\u201d Both of these lyrics take an ecological approach to history. They reduce personalities and relationships to the physical facts of the situation.<\/p>

Kahan and Swift recognize that there is more to life than our ecological circumstances. Kahan is Job-like in his assessment of New England\u2019s prospects. He\u2019s \u201cgot dreams,\u201d but he \u201ccan\u2019t make [himself] believe them,\u201d because he is stuck in such a hellhole as Hanover, New Hampshire. There is no possibility of theological inbreaking or superstructural grace\u2014Kahan is damned by his circumstances. Swift\u2019s historical meditation is similarly pessimistic. Her refrain \u201cI remember it all too well\u201d suggests that her past romance is dead and gone. But there are slivers of hope. In the outro to \u201cAll Too Well,\u201d Swift wonders, \u201cJust between us, did the love affair maim you all too well? \/ Just between us, do you remember it all too well?\u201d The implication of open wounds, even open questions, between Swift and her erstwhile lover suggests the possibility that their relationship may yet be more than a memory. On \u201cHappiness\u201d we see Swift\u2019s clearest statement of historical optimism. She sings, \u201cIn our history, across our great divide \/ there is a glorious sunrise \/ dappled with the flickers of light.\u201d Swift knows that epiphany\u2014a \u201cglorious sunrise\u201d\u2014appears not despite the division of her history, but through it<\/em>.\u00a0<\/p>

It is this historical optimism that I wish Tweed possessed in greater measure in Religion in the Lands that Became America<\/em>. Like Swift and Kahan, he maintains a cold dedication to the ecological circumstances of history. But on the question of theology, Tweed sides with Kahan. Supernatural insight, for Tweed, is relegated to some other place, far from the domain of the religious historian. Unlike Swift, he does not see that theology is properly the domain of history.<\/p><\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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Will Bryant<\/strong> lives in Washington, DC, and works in clean energy policy. He graduated from Dartmouth College, where he studied Religion and Quantitative Social Science, in 2024.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Religion in the Lands that Became America: A New History<\/strong> was published by Yale University Press in 2025. Fare Forward <\/em>appreciates their provision of a review copy. You can purchase your own copy here<\/a>.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Thomas Tweed\u2019s Religion in the Lands that Became America skillfully traces the imprints of ecological circumstances on American religious life but undersells the influence of religious thinking itself. 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