The best part of teaching a graduate course is the excuse to read books you should have already read but never got around to. When Sylvester Johnson’s African American Religions, 1500-2000: Colonialism, Democracy, and Freedom (Cambridge UP, 2015) appeared last year I remember leafing through it, engaging the sections I needed for a chapter I was working on that dealt with colonization efforts during the early republic, and then putting it on my shelf for later perusal. (There’s a number of books on my shelves like that.) But I was impressed with it enough to add it to the syllabus for my master’s level seminar on American cultural and religious history.

I was surprised, however, when I finally sat down and read the book this week, in at least two ways. First I was surprised in how long it was going to take to read the text; I underestimated my ability to skim such a dense book. Johnson cunningly structures his project in a way where merely reading the introduction and conclusion of each chapter will not provide a quick roadmap for everything in-between. This is a book that you have to spend time digesting every paragraph and work for his insights. (It made me wish I had started the book earlier, because I ended up having to devote most of my free time mid-week to reading when I’m way behind on other projects.) And second, I was surprised at just how expansive the book is. You would think that a book that claims to cover African American religions over five centuries was broad enough, but that’s just cracking the surface: what he’s really after is a revisionist narrative of inter-empire contact, efforts of colonization, and democratic rule in the modern age.

From the very start Johnson insists that to understand African American religions you must place the tradition in both a transatlantic context as well as with an African diasporic perspective. Everything in the history flowed from the inter-colonial contact between the Portuguese, British, French, and Spanish empires and the West African coast, so he spends a couple chapters on how the birth of this commercial exchange fundamentally altered how people in the Atlantic world encountered not only trade but governance. He naturally has detailed (and innovative) discussion of fetish and its relationship to evolving European conceptions of materiality, but also–almost off-hand–offers brilliant observations of corporate bodies and their role in establishing new models of autonomous rule. His section on the American Revolution and early colonization efforts, predicated on the conscious construction of white freedom (which is as much an institution as the institution of slavery), made me revise my undergraduate lecture on slavery and the American founding. Of course, his most direct and provocative thesis, about how African Americans who led their own colonization efforts often replicated the patterns of imperialism from which they were fleeing, was persistent and convincing. But I especially loved his comparisons between people who both embraced and rejected colonization ideologies, whether Frederick Douglass and Martin Delaney during the nineteenth century, or Marcus Garvey and Martin Luther King Jr. in the twentieth. I don’t think I’ve read a book in recent years so packed full of fresh insights, deep analysis, and moving (if often disturbing) implications.

One thing that struck both me and my students was the, at times, lack of direct engagement with religion, at least as typically conceived. Johnson’s interests are wide and intertwined, so he moves from discussing commerce to governance, and from migration to surveillance, often without taking a breath to specifically connect it to, well, African American religions. Part of this is due to the nature of the book’s scope (five hundred years, many empires, and thousands of characters!), part is due to the implied audience of religious studies scholars assuming many of the religious insights (which draws on a background history grad students often lack), and part is due to the very expansive definition Johnson employs for “religion” itself. More than a set of beliefs, rituals, or practices, Johnson is more interested in societal interplay and the structure of power. That is, he is using religion to understand the process of colonization, and not the other way around. Once we discussed this in the seminar a lot of confused faces transformed into understanding.

Now, as phenomenal as the book was, I’m not sure I’ll assign it in the future. Very few of my graduate students are interested in a life in academia–most are going into teaching, museum preservation, or public service of some kind, or they’re a non-traditional student coming back to school after a long career in an unrelated field–so they’re typically not as interested with the deeply theoretical or intricately historiographical questions Johnson poses. (I assign a couple books that represent religious studies methodologies during the semester, but I have to be aware of my students’ backgrounds and limits.) The book is also exceptionally dense, which can make it difficult to make it through in a week. Most of the students arrived at the seminar frankly befuddled with a lot of Johnson’s more complex arguments, and it was only through discussion that the meaning became clear.

But even if I won’t assign it in the future, this was a book that will stick with me. (And I think, based on the conversation, it will stick with my students as well.) If you are teaching a graduate survey, and this text’s aims would fit your circumstances, I recommend considering it. And if you are a scholar of American religious, political, racial, or cultural history, don’t let this one just sit on your shelf.

[To whet your whistle, here’s an excellent Q&A with Johnson in Marginalia.]

This past Sunday, as members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints gathered for the final day of the 186th Semiannual General Conference, news spread of controversial leaked videos. Ryan McKnight, who claims to have received the videos from an unnamed source, uploaded more than a dozen recordings to youtube, which quickly received thousands of views. These videos are from standard briefings church authorities receive from invited guests, and are supposedly recorded for leaders unable to attend. Now there are plenty of things to discuss concerning the ethics of the leaks, the tensions within the videos, and the nature of these types of meetings, but what I’m interested in is the historical genealogy and cultural potency of one brief phrase: Ralph Hardy, an area authority of the Church who introduced former Senator Gordon Smith, joked about Smith’s staff as “church broke.” The statement implies that these individuals, though non-Mormon, were “broke” in the sense that they were willing to follow the orders of LDS leaders, just as one would “break” a horse to follow your commands. “Not many months ago,” Hardy riffed, “[Smith’s] legislative director called me on the phone and said, ‘Ralph, you haven’t called us in six weeks, what are we supposed to be doing?'”

Now, I actually don’t think Hardy meant the phrase as earnestly as some have believed. The nature of the meeting, and the tone of his remarks, seem predisposed for humorous exaggeration of that sort. And even Senator Smith’s comment that he treasured his temple recommend over his constituency’s approval, which might raise some eyebrows concerning his primary point of allegiance (and may cause him some trouble back home), was probably more a reflection of the meeting’s context than his actual belief. He seems like a smart guy, all things considered, and I assume that he embraces modern suspicions of ecclesiastical influence in political governance. I don’t believe either Hardy or Smith believe that LDS senators should take their orders from Salt Lake City, nor do I think Mormon leaders expect them to. (Though perhaps there is a spectrum, and they are likely a lot further to one end of the spectrum than I’d feel comfortable.) But whatever their sincerity, their remarks hint to a long history of clashes between the Mormon Church and the American federal body over one’s political fidelity.

Fears of Mormon leaders’ manipulation of American voting patterns were present from Joseph Smith’s era, and for good reason. Smith often endorsed political candidates, both at the state and national level, and boasted of the Church’s ability to vote in bloc. This understandably raised the ire of his neighbors. One observer argued that while the Mormons “have the same rights as other religious bodies,” as soon as their prophet dictated political participation they “step[ped] beyond the proper sphere of [a] religious denomination, and become a political body.” The basic principles of disestablishment, which separated ecclesiastical authority from forms of governance, dictated that religious authorities should not direct their followers’ electoral actions. Such corruption had to be opposed, and the conflict was at the forefront of Smith’s leadership until his death. Things did not quiet down after Smith’s death and Brigham Young led the Church to Utah. The first territorial elections featured Young being appointed governor and other church leaders filling nearly every other post. (Though, to be fair, there wasn’t much competition.) One of the key conflicts between the federal government and the people of Deseret was the issue over how much control Mormon leaders wielded in the political sphere. It wasn’t until the Church dropped their individual political organization, the “People’s Party,” and accepted America’s two-party system that tensions began to cool.

But the big transition moment, and the period in which all these debates splashed all over the national press, was when Reed Smoot, a Mormon apostle, was elected a United States Senator. As Kathleen Flake outlined in her wonderful book, Smoot was accused of being a plant on behalf of the LDS Church to manipulate activities in Washington. How could someone sworn to follow the will of a heretical prophet actually place the interests of the nation above those of his faith? A several-year trial ensued that covered issues like prophetic counsel (then-prophet Joseph F. Smith memorably dodged questions regarding his revelatory authority), the continued and illegal perpetuation of plural marriage (which led to the “second manifesto” and the release of two apostles who continued to countenance the practice), and the secret temple oaths that allegedly bound endowed Mormons (like Smoot) to seek revenge upon the American nation. Basically, the trial was to find out whether Smoot was “church broke.”

The result of the trial is a familiar tale. Smoot and his fellow Church leaders made the concessions needed to (mostly) acquiesce senators of their fears, and the American political body (mostly) decided that Mormonism’s controversial beliefs and practices weren’t enough to bar its members from elected office. Yet the dynamic dance between the Mormon Church and the American government over the primacy of allegiance continued in uneven ways throughout the twentieth century. In the 1950s and 1960s, an ecumenical moment that witnessed John F. Kennedy assuring voters that his Catholicism would not dictate his presidential actions, membership in the LDS faith was seen as a virtue for elected candidates. Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson or Governor George Romney were praised for their balance of Mormon virtues and civic duty. And though Mitt Romney faced some suspicions during his presidential runs, they never equaled the deep vitriol found in the accusations the century before.

The general narrative of this story reflected one of the general tenets of a secular and pluralist society: even though religious belief could still serve as powerful instigators in the political realm, Americans (both Mormon and non-) eschewed the influence of religious leaders upon their congregants’ political participation. Freedom of conscience was to be untrammeled. That is, people can look inward to their spiritual convictions, but not outward to their ecclesiastical authorities, when entering the voting booth. This had been a sticking point for Mormons (as well as other groups like the Catholics) during the nineteenth century, but had largely been fully adopted in the twentieth. The thing so striking about the “church broke” statement, then, was how out of line it feels within contemporary Mormon political discourse.

Perhaps the fact that Ralph Hardy felt comfortable enough to joke about a Mormon senator’s staff being “church broke,” not to mention the fact that there hasn’t been an outcry in response to the leaked dialogue, demonstrates how far we have come since the era of Reed Smoot. (Though imagine if that came out during Romney’s 2012 campaign!) Yet the remark hearkens back to the tumultuous relationship between the LDS Church and the nation in which it was birthed, the tricky questions of religious disestablishment, and the continued entanglements between religion and politics in America’s democratic experiment.

[The featured image is “Hiding Behind the Temple, Reed Smoot Draws the Fire of the Protestants,” Salt Lake Tribune, December 22, 1904, which was an attempt to highlight Smoot’s secretive temple oaths.]

A few weeks ago I wrote about how I spend the first couple weeks of my survey class emphasizing the diverse origins of North America. The Native, Spanish, French, and Dutch populations, I argued, left and indelible impact on the continent that is often overlooked when we focus on Angl0-American settlement. Now I want to briefly describe how I do the same thing in my American Religious History course, which I’m teaching concurrently.

On one of the first days we address this issue head on: why is it that the Puritans are the first group we think of when we imagine the origins of American religious history? Students provide the obvious answers: they’re British, they’re simultaneously vilified for hypocricy and deified for seeking “religious liberty,” they’re devout and faithful, and, I quickly add, they’re Protestant. In many ways, the Puritans provide many of the paradoxes and tensions that the class will focus on for the semester: competing beliefs of America as a chosen (and Protestant!) land, a collusion of religious belief and political action, mixed conceptions of religious liberty, and an emphasis on religiosity as central to social life. But in many ways the Puritan way of viewing these was the exception during the first century of British settlement, not to mention a late-comer to the colonization scene. So we put a placeholder in our Puritan discussion and look elsewhere for the foundations of American’s religious heritage.

In many ways, the strategy is the same as in the survey class: I spend quite a bit of time on the wide variety of Native religions as well as Spanish, French, and Dutch settlements. But in each region we also talk about what role religion played in their conceptions of power, society, and inter-cultural contact. We give particular attention to Catholic settlements, not just the Spanish and French, but also in Maryland, for one central reason: everywhere Anglo-Protestants looked in colonial America, they were never far from a Catholic presence. Even in the Northeast, where indigenous tribes were more of a worry, captivity narratives often spoke about the Catholic control (phantom or not) of the indian raids. And as they marched both westward and southward, they were going to encounter even more Catholic cultures that tested not only their notions of religious truth–though it certainly tested that–but also their notions of liberty and freedom, ideas that were constantly in flux. Framing early America colonization as a move toward Protestant dominance overlooks just how outnumbered they were during the seventeenth century.

One of the concluding lessons during one class is simple: America had more religious diversity prior to British contact than after. At least for a while.

We don’t even get to the Puritans until after we’ve spent several classes on indigenous, Catholic, Dutch, and even Anglican (in the Chesapeake) traditions. And even once we talk about Winthrop and his “City on a Hill,” we note that within a few years we have strong dissenting events with Anne Hutchinson and Roger Williams. The “holy commonwealth” was never as homogenous or orderly as let on. We talk about the incidental religious diversity experienced in New York, New Jersey, and the Carolinas, where the Anglican establishment was never able to gain a strong enough footing. And then we talk about the deliberate diversity in Rhode Island and Pennsylvania, where they consciously bucked the notion that societies had to be united around one shared belief. From the very beginning of even British colonization, we argue, there is already stiff competition.

In one way, despite my desire to follow current trends in colonial America, the class is oriented around a trajectory toward the formation of the United States. But only in a subversive way: by the time we get to the “Was America founded as a Christian nation?” question, about which we will have organized group projects (more on that later), students clearly see that the answer is more complex. What did it mean to be “Christian”? What did it mean to be a “nation”? All of these different colonial societies provided different answers, even before the Revolutionary period and the advent of a Whiggish separation theory.

I strongly feel this story of diversity is crucial for today, the Age of Obama. We need to learn that, on the one hand, our present generation didn’t invent the idea of a diverse society. That’s been there all along. And second, for those who fear “diversity” and long for a period when America was “great” and unified under a homogenous Anglo-Protestant order, it is important to see that such an era never existed. America has always been a competition between beliefs, a hodgepodge of divergent practices and ideas forced to interact with each other. How we’ve dealt with that diversity is the true story, and its lessons have never been more relevant than today.