THOMAS TWEED’s Religion in Lands that Became America is not an exercise in “big history”, the multidisciplinary academic enterprise that examines the history of the entire earth from the Big Bang to the present and future. But, spanning the period from the age of hunter-gatherers, c.9200 to 1100 BC, his study is ambitious.
At the outset, Tweed announces the motifs of displacement and emplacement (or “crossing” and “dwelling”) of his account. Religion, he holds, is about “crossing”, about moving when an “ecocultural” niche is disrupted by climate change, migration, technological development, or other conditions that make cultural arrangements unsustainable, and about the establishment of new arrangements. It is also about dwelling or “place-making”, he writes, “using figurative tools . . . and sacred structures like churches to transform local ecology and construct a symbolic world”. I guess this means making oneself comfortable in a place or circumstance.
Weighing in at 620 pages, the book is big in bulk as well as scope. But the reader will be relieved to learn that almost half of the 620 pages are devoted to footnotes and index. That is to say, while there appears to have been some attempt to market it as a trade book for the general reader, it is an academic book. After declaring his methodology and announcing the motifs that structure his account, Tweed sets out to chronicle everything that happened.
Viewing the sweep of history, Tweed concludes that the three great “crossings” in the lands that became America were: the Cornfield Crisis (1140-1350), a result of reduced agricultural capacity in a maize-dependent society; the Colonial Crisis (1565-1776), involving the import of African slaves and displacement of indigenous peoples; and the Industrial Crisis, resulting in rising immigration, income inequality, and urban crowding.
This invites the question what makes these three “crossings” uniquely significant. The “crossings-and-dwellings” thesis does not seem to say any more than “things fall apart and then come together again.” That does happen: every age is, after all, an “age of transition”. This hypothesis is broad enough to explain more or less every social phenomenon, and so does not provide an informative explanation of any.
This poses the question why Tweed, given the wealth of crossings and dwellings that are always with us, focuses on the three crises that he selects to structure his account. Why not the awakenings and revivals of the 19th century which formed American-style Evangelicalism and, pushing back against the higher biblical criticism of the period, gave rise to the fundamentalist response to modernity which crystalised in the iconic Scopes monkey trial (Comment, 24 October)?
Tweed devotes barely a paragraph to the trial, which, set up to test a Tennessee law prohibiting the teaching of evolution in the state’s public schools, became a significant public event during the 1920s and was, arguably, the first shot of the culture war that reignited later in the century. The Scopes trial showcased the distinctive socially stratified and regionally concentrated character of American religion as a class marker strongly correlated with rurality and working-class status and, later in the century, with political affiliation.
A further concern is about Tweed’s claim that “religion is about crossing . . . [and] dwelling”. This may very well be true, but it is true also of a variety of other institutions, including schools, labour unions, fraternal organisations, places of employment, the military, and a variety of non-profits, including the “settlement houses” that facilitated the “Americanisation” of immigrants who had crossed the Atlantic to dwell in north-eastern port cities. Tweed eschews any essentialist characterisation of religion, preferring to view what religion is as what it does, namely facilitating crossing and dwelling. But that does not distinguish it from a range of other institutions and practices.
After explaining his organizing motifs in his brief introduction, Tweed sets out to chronicle events from 9200 BC to the near-present. But the wealth of detail, the episodic structure, and the absence of any focused narratives make it difficult for the general reader to see how the events that he describes plug into the theses that he initially articulates.
Dr Harriet Baber is Professor of Philosophy at the University of San Diego, California, in the United States
Religion in the Lands that Became America: A new history
Thomas A. Tweed
Yale £18
(978-0-300-22148-0)
Church Times Bookshop £16.20
