Introduction

American religious life, like American culture more generally, is nothing if not colorful. From the outset, it has been multiform, diverse, protean, and dynamic. This is what makes its study so interesting.

But this atlas is predicated on the belief that there is a story—or, perhaps more accurately, many stories, many small patterns rather than one large one—that can be conveyed through maps. Such central themes as migration, immigration, geographic expansion, regional concentration, and the formation of institutions and communities are amenable to cartographic expression. Using these overarching themes, this atlas attempts to provide an introductory overview of American religious history, highlighting the rich and colorful diversity that has characterized it since the first peopling of what is now the United States some tens of thousands of years ago. To grasp this diversity is to grasp one of the basic—some would say defining—features of American life. Indeed, because the United States is a land of immigrants and has thereby become home to most of the world’s religions, an appreciation of American diversity may lead to an appreciation of the nation’s cultural sources in and interrelationships with other regions of the globe.

Diversity has become an important organizing—and disorganizing—principle in studies of American religion, past and present. Not long ago, the nation’s religious history was understood in terms of white Protestant domination and development: beginning with English Puritans, white Protestants of European background moved westward starting in the 17th century, first across the Atlantic and then across the North American continent, creating and defining a religious “mainstream.” But scholars have increasingly sought in recent years a new historical understanding, a “decentered” approach that removes white Protestants from the heart of the story and challenges the very idea of a “mainstream” to represent more completely and accurately the complexity of America’s religious past. Geographically, this new approach has involved a recognition that the conventionally emphasized east-to-west developmental trajectory of white Euro-American Protestantism has coexisted with equally significant west-to-east and south-to-north movements, usually by nonwhite and/or non-Protestant peoples and religions from places other than Europe, across the Pacific Ocean and Bering Sea as well as the Atlantic, and in many cases long before the arrival of the Puritans. This atlas is intended to reflect this “state of the art.” It presents a textual and cartographic portrait of the nation’s religious diversity and multidirectionality, devoting space to groups and geographic movements traditionally slighted and first bringing Protestantism into view only in the third part.

While this atlas is devoted above all to conveying the diversity of American religious experience, its size does not permit the inclusion or full coverage of all of the thousands of groups and movements that populate U.S. religious history. Its method is to divide that history into six chronologically and topically defined periods, successive but overlapping, and to examine and map the major new developments in each.

Native American religions are treated in the first part, for the history of religion in America begins with them. The second and third parts examine European colonization and settlement in North America, first by non-English Europeans from the 16th through the 19th centuries and then by the English in the 17th and 18th centuries. With these groups came the many Judeo-Christian traditions, and particularly the Protestant ones, that gradually and sometimes coercively came to dominate, if never entirely to define, American religious culture. Part four explores the Protestant expansion, innovation, and experimentation, among both white and black Americans, that framed 19th-century American religious life. The fifth part, covering the period from about 1850 to the present, examines the immigration of peoples and religions from Eastern Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America. Arriving especially from 1880 to 1920 and again after World War II, they transformed America’s Protestant diversity into a diversity far more inclusive. Part six focuses on the 20th century, when the forces shaping modern American life—urbanization, industrialization, technology, continuing immigration, and internationalism—elicited religious responses and produced new movements that expanded American religion in all of its dimensions. An epilogue examining American religious regions—geographic areas defined by the particular religious characteristics of their residents—is intended to summarize the whole and to examine what is perhaps the most important concept used by geographers and historians to map American religious diversity and discern some order in its apparent chaos.

While this atlas cannot completely span the breadth and plumb the depth of American religious history, it can introduce the rich tapestry of religious impulses and expressions so central to the American and human experiences. The reader is welcomed to a fascinating world.