Imagination! who can sing thy force?
Or who describe the swiftness of thy course?
Soaring through air to find the bright abode,
Th’ empyreal palace of the thund’ring God.
Phillis Wheatley, “On Imagination” (1773).
In 1773, American poet Phillis Wheatley reflected “on imagination,” whose mystery and power she found in the divine. She wrote of imagination, birdlike, ascending to its heavenly home, “The empyreal palace of the thund’ring God.” Imagination was a lifeline for Wheatley, an enslaved woman who took her faith very seriously, and her expression of its majesty flowed naturally through heaven and back again. She wrote where “in one view we grasp the mighty whole / or with new worlds amaze th’ unbounded soul.” Wheatley found meaning in her religion. So too did millions of Americans who came before and after her. If we want to understand them—the worlds they made, the lives they lived—we must understand the history of American religion, in all its many forms.
Wheatley knew firsthand that American religion could inspire horrific oppressions and exhilarating liberations. The history of religion in the United States includes stories of imagination and cataclysm. Religion has shaped the nation’s triumphs and its travesties. To reckon with the American past, it is necessarily to reckon with the history of American religion. But American religion has never been singular. Far from static or stable, it exists in a state of unending transformation, perpetually being made and remade across the centuries. Nor is it monolithic. Various forms of Christianity loom large, but Christianity was not the first nor the only religion to shape the United States.
Because religion is far more than formal practice, we therefore seek the history of American religion not just in churches and mosques and synagogues, but in Indigenous towns, plantation arbors, political campaigns, home kitchens, football fields, and board rooms. And we aim not only to capture the diversity of American religious history, but to capture it as a historical phenomenon. Here is a story of conflict and change, of conformity and creativity, of adaptation and innovation. And it is a history with stakes. Far from a collection of static creeds, American religion has been a historical force. We therefore capture that vast diversity of American religiosity—and irreligiosity—without losing sight of power and conflict.
This book begins millennia ago and tracks the spiritual worlds of Indigenous people before examining the transformations in Europe and Africa that led to the exploration, encounter, and invasion of the land that came to be called the Americas. We track the institutions, ideas, and conflicts that made American religions and account for how those religions made and remade the American nation, repeatedly. Our narrative includes prophets and skeptics, saints and heretics, missionaries and mystics, radicals and reactionaries, enslaved preachers and religious innovators. Immigrants forged new traditions and made new homes, while the continent’s first inhabitants, preserved and adapted the continent’s Indigenous spiritualities across the centuries.
While recognizing the power of theology, American religious history is more than a chronicle of disembodied spiritual ideas. Religion is believed, but it is also lived. Major theologians and denominational developments matter to the history of American religion, and they are reflected here, but an added emphasis on lived religion also reveals how ordinary people understood and experienced the sacred and how those experiences changed across the centuries. We therefore spend as much time in living rooms and campfires as we do in church. And our cast of characters includes far more than just famous ministers.
Across American history, religion has inspired love and promoted peace. And yet, often as an engine of violence, it has also drenched the American past in blood. American religious history is a chronicle of war and dispossessions, of slavery and terror, no less than a history of emancipation and moral imagination. Our task as historians is neither to celebrate nor to condemn. We seek to understand religious traditions historically and to approach historical actors with empathy. Recognizing the diversity of beliefs that have made American religious history, we let historical actors convey their own religious worlds whenever possible.
The history of American religion is dynamic and expansive. American religion moves. It travels on foot, on horseback with circuit riders, on trains, steamboats, airplanes, telegraphs, radio waves, telephone lines, and digital networks. Religion has been printed, podcasted, posted, projected, and produced in every form of media. We track these movements and these distributions, ever mindful of how technology has made and remade American religion.
Faith appeals to timeless truths, but religion evolves and adapts. This is, above all else, a history, an inquiry into religious change over time. Every generation inherits a religious world, but no generation bequeaths that world unchanged. Traditions rise and fall. Americans of all stripes have invented new spiritualities just as they have forgotten old ones. They have evangelized for long-defunct beliefs and battled for long-forgotten spiritual causes.
Phillis Wheatley believed “the palace of the thundering god” evoked awe, fear, and mystery. But above all, it inspired imagination. To understand American religious history is not to embark upon an empty recitation of dead facts, but is, instead, to view the world from the wider vistas of historical imagination. “From star to star the mental optics rove, / Measure the skies, and range the realms above,” Wheatley wrote. American religious history can be both beautiful and terrible, revolting and transcendent. But, above all, it is essential.
The Palace of Thundering Gods is an open-source resource that has been created through the collaboration of over 100 scholars. Believing that historical knowledge should be free, we have brought together specialists in the history of American religion to create an accessible yet rigorous history of religion in the United States. We are excited to share it with you.
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