Foreword

As the first Americans wandered into North America from Siberia, across frozen wastes that are now severed by the Bering Strait, they sought guidance about the spirit world from their shamans.

But what is an historical atlas of religion? Most historical atlases, including those in the Routledge series, examine phenomena of a physical character: the construction of railroads, canals, factories; the voluntary or forced migration of peoples—immigrants, Native Americans, slaves; the advance of explorers or the collision of armies. Such activities were geographical in character: for instance moving foodstuffs from the farms of the Midwest to the urban markets in the East; shifting slaves from the exhausted soils of Virginia to the new cotton fields in Mississippi; finding a northwest passage to the Pacific or cutting the Confederacy in two. And because these activities have an explicit geographical dimension, they are easily mapped.

But how does one map ideas about God?

Most atlases avoid this perplexity by equating religion with the institutions of religion.

But historian Bret E. Carroll is interested in religion as religion—ideas about God and the nature of belief. He makes use of information on religious institutions in order to illuminate patterns of thought and behavior. He seeks to map the pathways of belief in the American past.

Because new religious ideas were often spawned by solitary religious visionaries or preachers, Carroll at times focuses on such individuals. He thus maps the efforts of Indian prophets of revitalization, ranging from the prophet Pope, who inspired the Pueblo revolt against the Spanish in 1680, to the Paiute visionary, Wovoka, whose transformation of the “Ghost Dance” alarmed whites and resulted in the massacre of Indians at Wounded Knee in 1890. Carroll shows the routes of celebrated preachers such as George Whitefield during the First Great Awakening of the 1730s and 1740s and of Charles Grandison Finney during the Second Great Awakening a century later. He also depicts activities as varied as the founding of Indian villages by the Puritan missionary John Eliot, the establishment of the Oneidan communes by John Humphrey Noyes, and the blending of eastern and western thought in the Theosophy of the Russian emigrant, Helena Blavatsky.

Carroll understands, further, that religious ideas were spread by groups of people as well as individual preachers or prophets. He locates the multiple origins of American Lutheranism in Sweden, the German Palatinate, and the Netherlands, and tracks its passage, respectively, to the Delaware Valley, the Carolinas, and New York.

Carroll devotes considerable attention to missions, which were often central to the transmission of religious ideas. In addition to the usual accounts of Spanish missionaries in the South and French Jesuits along the upper Mississippi and Great Lakes, Carroll describes the diffusion of Russian Orthodox missions in Alaska and the Northwest, Protestant missionary activities in India and China throughout the 19th century, and even the AME Zion (African-American Protestant) missions to Africa during the last third of the 19th century.

Historical atlases that concentrate on religious institutions contain a built-in bias in favor of the major denominations, which, by virtue of their size and continuity, have generated and preserved the information on which such atlases depend. By treating such matters succinctly, Carroll has reserved far more space to consider the full diversity of religious belief and practice in America. Thus his atlas alone includes maps of such extraordinary range as Eskimo bear rites of neolithic times, the 18th-century migration of the Jews from 17th-century Holland and Brazil, the evolution of the Disciples of Christ in the trans-Appalachian West, the origin and spread of Christian Science, the rise of Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam, and the development of a host of 20th-century faiths ranging from Zen Buddhism, Protestant fundamentalism, Pentecostalism, the Unification Church of Sun Myung Moon, the Scientology of science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard, and the syncretic Baha’i.

Tocqueville was struck by the dull pragmatism of the American people, whose contributions to philosophy, literature, and the arts were, he maintained, modest indeed. But he was impressed that so materialistic a people could succumb to such extravagant religious views and passions. Carroll makes a strong case that religion is the field in which American thought has attained its greatest creativity. He has managed to capture the eye-popping splendor of this imaginative profusion. We must stare hard at it all, for if we cannot understand its religious beliefs, we cannot understand the American nation.

Mark C. Carnes Barnard College, Columbia University