3 Hypotheses About "American Religions" and "American Religious History" That I Can't Get Out of My Head

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Lately I’ve been thinking about the fields of “American religions” and “American religious history.” I did some of that thinking on Twitter and Facebook. 

I got some pushback, some encouragement, and some bemusement. I was also accused of navel gazing. So, at the risk of yet more navel gazing, I want to use this post to put forward three hypothesis that I’ve been mulling over. I’ve yet to really dig into these hypothesis. Right now they are research problems. They are rabbit trails. I see them leading off into the woods and I’m curious to know where go. I’m also curious to get more pushback, encouragement, and bemusement from the RiAH community, so feel free to congratulate me or thoroughly denounce me in the comments. 

1. “American Religions” is a nationalist discourse.

I’m beginning to think of “American religions” or “Religion(s) in America” as its own discourse. In some ways it’s analogous to the “World Religions discourse” identified by Tomoko Masuzawa. Here I’m thinking of discourse in the sense it’s used by Michel Foucault. (Stay with me. I know you don’t want to hear any Foucault stuff. But just trust me for a minute.) “American religions” is not simply the description of some things called religions in some space called America. Rather, it’s a way of speaking about, describing, categorizing, and inventing things labeled as both “religions” and “American.” “American religions,” then, is a phrase with two unstable signifiers and their meaning is worked out through the discourse about American religions.

Thinking about the American religions discourse in this light, here’s the question I’m kicking around: Whence the American religions discourse? Why do we talk about “American religions” or “religion in America,” not just a subfield or an AAR section (though they add “North” in there) or a job listing category, but as a general object of inquiry? I think the American religions discourse predates the subfield, the AAR, and the job listings. I think it goes back at least as far as Robert Baird’s Religion in America: Or an Account of the Origin, Relation to the State, and Present Condition of the Evangelical Churches in the United States: with Notices of the Unevangelical Denominations. It might even go back as far as Cotton Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana: Or the Ecclesiastical History of New England from 1620-1698. But, for now, let’s say it starts with or at least around Baird.  Glancing through the contents of Baird’s work, a few themes emerge: the importance of voluntarism as the exceptional aspect of American religions; the relationship between the churches and the state; the religion of immigrants; an account of the various churches, denominations, and religions in the country; and missionary movements within America and abroad. In Baird’s work we find the categories through which knowledge of “American religions” is produced. The horizons of the discourse are set in 1830. So, when attempts have been made to retell the story of American religions they have done so according to these discursive structures: add more immigrants, add more “religions,” take a supply-side approach to voluntarism, etc. All of this is to show that American religions discourse isn’t what we say about religions in America, but how we are able to say anything about religions in America at all. That is, it’s not what we put (or don’t put) on our “Religion in America” syllabi, but the reasons why we think there should be such a class in the first place.

So, whence the American religions discourse? As David Chidester has recently argued:

As we review the history of the study of religion, it is necessary but not sufficient to assert that the general idea of religion is a constructed category and that all kinds of ideas about specific religions have been invented…Therefore we have to ask: Under what material conditions were these crucial terms in secular modernity produced, authenticated, and circulated?

My hypothesis is that it has something to do with American nationalism. I think it also has something to do with American exceptionalism. For the most part, those of us working within the American religions discourse are Americans, or at least living or teaching in America. So even when we are critical of the United States, both now or in the past, it is always with the caveat that it could do better. We are all insiders and the American religions discourse is, at least in part, an act of identity formation and maintenance. It’s why Americanists make such great media interviews. A wise American historian once told me that “you can’t outrun your people.” I think he meant your denomination/culture/upbringing/background. But I think there’s more to it than that. We study ourselves, even if we don’t often admit it. We are all nationalists. Even Baird first published his book in Europe as a representation of American religious vitality and only later published it at home.

If Baird is an early example for the formation of the American religions discourse then he is also an example of how what we call “American religious history” or “religion in American history” (as this blog is so named) has yet to move past the church history of folks like Baird. Here, I think I should isolate American religious history from other parts of the American religions discourse, such as sociology. Baird includes Jews, Catholics, and atheists in his “unevangelical denominations” section of the book. With a few exceptions, today’s American religious history continues to add categories to the list of folks under study but has yet to evidence major methodological changes in its approach. The assumption shared by Baird and many historians today is that religion is a thing out there in the world that is empirically observable in the archive. History that describes and narrates religion is “religious history” and if it happens on this continent it’s “American religious history.” Innovation comes in finding religion in unexpected or understudied parts of the archive. Even the title of this blog, “Religion in American History,” is ambiguous. On the one hand it could also assume there is a thing called religion that is accessible in the archive. But on the other hand, the hand I would like us to use more often, it could mean that “religion” is a category invented over the course of American history. In this reading, in this new non-Baird, non-Church History reading, the object of study would not be some stable “religion” but the various ways “religion” is produced, constructed, and imagined in American history. Taken this way, the American religions discourse would itself be understood as one way “religion” is produced in America.  

Circling back to Masuzawa and the world religions discourse, I’m wondering if the American religions discourse and the world religions discourse share a common genealogical root. This is the hypothesis I have the least to go on so far. Yet, if you follow me through my first hypothesis and we locate the American religions discourse in the 19th century, then, it coincides nicely with the rise of the world religions discourse during that same period. Ten years after Baird’s book, Lydia Maria Child published The Progress of Religious Ideas Through Successive Ages, an early attempt at an accounting of the world’s religions. To what extent is Baird’s account of American religions a species within the larger taxonomies of religion around the world? If world religions discourse was produced through encounters with racial and cultural others, the rise of empires, and the birth of nation-states, then is American religions discourse also implicated in these things? While liberals compiled accounts of the world’s religions in search of universal truth did conservatives fashion an account of American religious exceptionalism? I honestly don’t know. Yet.