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Five Hundred Years of Religion in America
by Brook Wilensky-Lanford
A kaleidoscopic American history of extraordinary religious transformations, told through the ordinary people who made them happen.
Ever since conquistadores claimed Taino land in the name of their Catholic God and New England Puritans formed their strictly Protestant "city on a hill," religion has been central to American life. Even as some found religious freedom—Rhode Island welcomed the Quakers, Jews, and Baptists that Massachusetts expelled as dissenters—indigenous people and Africans forced into slavery struggled to protect their religious practices. With the constitutional separation of church and state, it fell to the American people to decide: would they sharpen religion's formidable powers of division, or reimagine its creative possibilities?
In A God-Shaped Nation, Brook Wilensky-Lanford follows this essential American tension from first contact through the 2024 election. This is an expansive history of extraordinary religious questions, told through the ordinary people who grappled with them. It is a story of defiance: Anne Hutchinson, preaching against Puritan clergy; Reform rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise serving soft-shell crab to his kosher guests at an 1883 banquet; and Wovoka, a Paiute man who envisioned the Ghost Dance movement, which persisted in the face of violent government repression at Wounded Knee. It is also a story of community: Millerites waiting together in vain for Jesus's return on a rainy October night in 1844; Chinese immigrants bringing Daoist and Buddhist gods to their California temples; Mormons pushing westward to build their "new Zion" in Utah. And in the last fifty years, it has been a story of muscular political power, as the religious right has sought to shape the present and paint the past in its own image.
At a moment when religion penetrates even the most secular aspects of American life, understanding its history is more essential than ever before. "It is in history that the very human work of religion happens," Wilensky-Lanford shows us, "and in ordinary time that even the most carved-in-stone tenets can and do change."
"A fluent, always engaging study of America's religious traditions." —Kirkus Reviews
"This book clearly and effectively explains America at its best and worst, providing a full and magisterial accounting of church and state." —Booklist
"The breadth of ideas and people featured is impressive. A key work for readers who want to learn how religion developed in America." —Library Journal
"The madness and the beauty, the inspiration and the frustration, the violent outbreaks and reformist impulses, the superficiality and profundity of American religious history—it's all here in Wilensky-Lanford's engrossing book. Alert to the extraordinary diversity and the constantly evolving nature of the subject, and vital for anyone who wants to understand our present political moment, this is the history of American religion as it should be done." —Katherine Stewart, New York Times-bestselling author of Money, Lies, and God
To write an overarching history of religion in America is an ambitious undertaking—to grapple with the dissonance, diversity, power, and publicness of religion across a continent and a half millennium. Brook Wilensky-Lanford meets that challenge with unusual grace and clarity in A God-Shaped Nation. Her lustrous narrative is at once sweeping in breadth and absorbing in detail, a skilled feat of historical synthesis and artful storytelling." —Leigh Eric Schmidt, author of Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality
This information about A God-Shaped Nation was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Brook Wilensky-Lanford is a religion writer, editor, and teacher. The author of Paradise Lust: Searching for the Garden of Eden, a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice, and former managing editor of Killing the Buddha, her work has been published in The New York Times, The Guardian, The New Republic, and elsewhere. Currently the Associate Director of Sacred Writes Public Scholarship, she holds an MFA in Nonfiction Writing from Columbia University and a PhD in Religion in the Americas from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she lives.
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