This chapter explores an often-overlooked religious group in the United States: those who are not affiliated with religion. The chapter discusses the quantitative and qualitative challenges in measuring religious “nones” and considers historical patterns of stigma and prejudice against the religiously unaffiliated. The number of secular Americans is growing and they need a seat at the table of civil religion.

The book’s introduction outlines its ambition to read literature as a variety of cartography, and presents a technical vocabulary for grasping literature’s role in the changing geo-epistemology of the twentieth century. It begins by exploring Langston Hughes’s creation of literary maps, and introduces the concept of "counter-mapping," a practice of producing knowledge that challenges official geographies. It then sets out to reexamine modernism’s connection to technology by arguing that the spatial ramifications of media and transit technologies imbued early twentieth-century writing with a unique geotechnical aesthetic. Drawing from postcolonial theory, the book aims to map this geotechnical aesthetic across a range of authors from across the dominion of the United States.

Chapter 3 reads two maritime fictions against the cartographic and photographic records of US War Department’s Bureau of Insular Affairs. I argue that the camera’s unpredictable mode of development heightened colonial anxieties about the assimilation of the Philippines into the United States. For a literary counterpoint to the Bureau’s colonizing project, I read back and forth between the island-hopping narratives of Ernest Hemingway and Ramon Muzones, a Hiligaynon language novelist from the Visayas. Their shipboard fictions set adrift the repressive and racializing logics of US military technics. But the novelists move in different directions. Disillusioned, the late Hemingway gets lost at sea, uninterested in a return to national homeland. Muzones complies a pre-Hispanic nautical map, a regional Visayan space within the newly independent Philippine republic.

The coda to the book reads the contemporary author Craig Santos Perez to reflect on the violence of US territory making and the role of literary language in reorganizing its effects. I provide a close reading of Perez’s from unincorporated territory and its orientation toward the modernism of Claude McKay. By reworking McKay, Perez makes a contribution to cartographic literature that helps to see the US map as a dialectical image, provisional and contingent as opposed to authoritative and final.

The chapter demonstrates how religious freedom and robust pluralism can be catalysts for social healing – benefiting individuals and communities, building social capital, and encouraging solidarity. The chapter concludes with four case studies of bridging religious divides to achieve positive change, address injustice, reach compromise, and overcome adversity.

Chapter 4 provides a demographic and historical overview of Protestantism in the United States, describing how it has shaped civil religion and examining the political and cultural influence of Mainline Protestantism, Evangelical Protestantism, and the historic Black church.

Chapter 4 explores how the literary collection adapted to audio recording to form a species of sonic cartography. I argue that Zora Neale Hurston’s fieldwork in Jamaica and Haiti presented US borders in stereo, both offset from Caribbean islands and overlapping with them. Hurston’s notion of a sonic boundary is distinct from that heard by Jean Toomer, for whom folksong is a spiritual rejoinder to the violence of agricultural labor. Toomer’s swansong to Georgia’s small-town sugarcane harvest is echoed and distorted by Cuban soundscapes. Poems about cane harvest by Agustin Acosta and Nicolás Guillén document of Cuba’s rather different agricultural identity and pose toward US imperium. In these cartographies, I argue, the line demarcating continental nation from island colony is not just aquatic, but also sonic: heard in stereo, and often out of phase.

Chapter 2 turns to loco-descriptive lyric poetry, read in the context of expanding highway infrastructure. It opens with a consideration of oil maps deposited in Ezra Pound’s Cantos, some of which critique the expropriation of former Ottoman territories by Anglo-American cartels. At that very locus, the Iraqi modernist poet Nazik al-Malā’ikah envisioned a very different kind of energy poetics, where the dividing line between oil’s extractive and consumptive spheres is decidedly smudged. In postcolonial counterpoint, the chapter closes by reading the automotive aesthetics in Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, and Wallace Stevens. The US highway system provides them with a conflicted linguistic resource, where the trace of oil’s violent extraction is smeared by the exhilarations of their lyrics.

This chapter traces the influence of Christianity on politics and society in the first two centuries of the American experiment. It offers an overview of the religion in the original colonies, the religious revivals associated with the First Great Awakening, the role of Christianity shaping the United States Constitution, the Second Great Awakening in an era of westward expansion, religious diversity, and the theological debates surrounding slavery and the Civil War.

Chapter 1 takes Gertrude Stein’s visit to the recently incorporated “Indian Territory” of Oklahoma as an opportunity to reread her geographical histories of the United States from a point in Native space. It contrasts Stein’s love for state lines with the writings of Yankton Dakota writer Zitkála-Šá. Her autobiographical essays of the early twentieth century contain shadow maps of Očhéthi Šakówin, or The Great Sioux Nation. They complicate Stein’s excitement over how the airplane makes patchwork earth look like an official US map. By reading contrapuntally between Stein and Zitkála-Šá, this chapter considers autobiography as a contested genre of cartographic literature. In response to technics of automated transport, the form was retooled by Stein and Zitkála-Šá in ways that make the overlap of US geography and Native space visible as a differential space.

Chapter 5 begins by reading Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House as an experiment in cinematic projection, a phantasmagoric erasure of the means of projection. I compare Cather’s cartographic romance to that of Robert and Frances Flaherty’s Moana of the South Seas, the first film to be called “documentary.” Both the Flahertys and Cather mark US national space against the anachronism of the remote island. Spinning this view around, I tell the story of Fialelei, who served as producer and translator for the Flahertys in Sāmoa. She also accompanied them to the United States, and her voyage embodies the Samoan principle of the Vā, or “space-between.” This Oceanian counterpoint provides a new position for studying the role of cinematic fantasy in isolating the “primitive” from “civilized,” and projecting the former onto the “insular.”

This chapter traces the history of Roman Catholicism in American politics and society, beginning with an overview of the tenets of the Catholic faith. The chapter then discusses historic tensions and division between Protestants and Catholics, tracing patterns of assimilation and eventual acceptance of Catholicism into American civil religion.