Who is America? Exploring Religion, Identity, and Belonging

Who is America?

The title of a mockumentary created by Sacha Baron Cohen as a form of political satire, the question rests on the elusive nature of “America” itself.

Asking “who is America?” is the equivalent of asking what “America” stands for, where it is, and who counts as part of it.

These are some of the questions my students will ask in an upcoming course on “American religion” I am offering at a German university. As part of the course, participants will explore what is “American” about “religion” and which religions have shaped the United States in the past and present.

The seminar also offers students the opportunity to examine and grapple with key concepts themselves, asking what “religion” is and what constitutes “America,” alongside the intersectionality of such categorizations and identifications with race, gender, and sexuality.

These questions are more than course fodder. They are highly relevant and important as the U.S. approaches a momentous election in November, one which will impact the lives of billions the world over (Germany included). Below, I share a bit of what course participants will be considering when it comes to defining “America” and discussing “American religion.”

The unraveling of the American project?

I am coming to this course after having spent four months in the United States — in Pennsylvania, Florida, Michigan, Arizona, and California. The diverse experiences I had, covering religion and immigration, offering seminars on topics like climate change, polarization, and AI, as well as covering Muslims’ mixed feelings ahead of the 2024 elections, reminded me once more of the U.S.’s dizzying complexity and diverse constituencies.

America — as some limit it to describe solely the U.S. — is an ongoing conversation. And to some, it is an unraveling project, trapped in its own neoliberal mise-en-scène, tumbling into a potentially post-American century and post-democratic apocalypse.

While students will contemplate such prophecies and potential futures, I will also invite them to consider how the U.S. got here. The story of the U.S. is more complicated than people's relentless pursuit of more land, money, and power. It is one of asking what counts as good governance, who “We the People” are, and how we incorporate more (or fewer) people into the vision of an emerging democratic society and world power. These questions have ignited a number of social and political passions in the U.S. over the years, with many competing visions for what counts — and who counts — as most important.

At times, this has meant more opportunity for more people. At the same time, it has meant limiting life for others based on race, class, gender, sexuality, or religious persuasion.

The “Americas” — a broader view

As students look back on the American past, they will also be challenged to expand their vision of what counts as “America” in the first place.

In 1883, Walt Whitman ruminated on how certain stories about the U.S. were forgotten or sidelined by dominant European frames of “American” history. He wrote, “We Americans are yet to really learn our own antecedents. . . . Thus far, impress’d by New England writers and schoolmasters, we tacitly abandon ourselves to the notion that our United States have been fashion’d from the British Islands only . . . which is a very great mistake.”

Today, Whitman’s points hold firm. “America” is not limited to the U.S. alone, nor were the Americas made of purely European stuff.

When European colonizers stumbled upon the Americas — including both North and South America along with the Caribbean — they were inhabited by numerous complex and sophisticated Indigenous societies, upon which colonizers relied for knowledge, labor, and resources. Despite being dominated by European colonial powers — not to mention their populations and societies irreparably decimated by disease, war, and enslavement — Indigenous peoples left an indelible imprint on the Americas. The populations that survived continue to speak to their ongoing influence in language, culture, environment, and society.

This is not to mention the numerous other peoples, from across the Atlantic and Pacific worlds, who were brought to the Americas as enslaved persons, indentured servants, or otherwise, and who likewise left their own indelible marks on what became the American hemisphere.

Thus, this course takes a decidedly more hemispheric approach to understanding “American” religion, politics, economics, and culture. To view the Americas more hemispherically not only means seeing the ways in which the U.S. is inherently intertwined with the stories of Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean, and South America, but also to view the hemisphere more transregionally.

This also means not limiting the Americas to the group of nation-states and territories traditionally included in North America, Latin America (those areas where Spanish, French, or Portuguese predominate), and the Caribbean. Instead, it means taking a broader view of these states, cultures, people, and geographic areas to see them as entangled with numerous other stories beyond the hemisphere.

This requires keeping in mind how this region is part of the Atlantic world (including Africa and Europe) and other regions of the globe via historical and modern communications, trade, and travel.

More specifically, taking an “Americas” approach also means paying attention to certain themes, such as hemispheric continuities and connections, contested borders, and tense boundaries, which have transformed over time and exist across the Americas as they are conceived and constructed, lived in and between, by a multitude of people.

Who is American religion?

It also requires a fresh take on what counts as “American religion.” Religion, as I often tell students in my introductory course, has always been a part of the “American” story.

But the accepted Euro-American liturgical history that posits the “New World” as a place of overwhelmingly European and Christian influence, whether of the Protestant or Catholic varieties, is little more than myth.

The truth is that there were many more influences, individuals, and imaginations at play in the development of the Americas that emerged from the age of European encounter. European civilization was far from homogenous (it included its own religious diversity from the get-go), nor was it the only cultural, political, social, architectural, or religious influence on the hemisphere. Various cultures—both Indigenous and imported from across the Atlantic world—came to shape what we now know as “American culture.”

This course will introduce students to the Americas’ stunning religious diversity: the enduring legacy of Black religious traditions through the Middle Passage, enslavement, emancipation, and ongoing discrimination; the hybrid creativity and resilience of Indigenous thought, practice, and material culture; or the introduction of ever more diversity through the ongoing movement of people, ideas, and technology.

Whether through the embedding of traditions from elsewhere in American soil or the crafting of new religious movements within its environs, the Americas are a seedbed for a range of spiritualities, which has created space for both conflict and collaboration.

Conclusion

Each aspect of this course and its questions invites students to deconstruct and re-examine what counts as “America” or “American religion.” And, as we all approach the elections next month, it is important — if not vital — we do the same.

As we imagine what our American future(s) might be — which is the question we ask every time an election rolls around — we might ask: what vision do we have for America? How far does it reach? Who does it include? Who does it exclude? Or, as my colleague and editor Betsy Shirley asked in her introductory letter as Sojourner magazine’s new Editor-in-Chief: Who is included when you say “we”?