The persistence of racial inequality and cultural derision toward black religion within white denominations, whether based in the North or South, convinced African Americans to maintain and establish their own separate and autonomous religious communities. Whether these entities existed outside of white religious structures or within white majority organizations, African Americans declared their right to govern their own institutional affairs and to define the content of black belief, ritual, and practice. Though these activities mainly occurred in innumerable Afro-Christian communities, significant segments of the black population developed faith identities through Judaism, Islam, and African religious retentions. Within these black religious bodies, gender, class, and culture played major roles in shaping their institutional identities. Moreover, there was vigorous discourse among religious leaders and grassroots constituencies about their relationship to Africa, initiatives for overcoming racial barriers, and whether belief and practice should emphasize interracial interactions and black nationalist objectives. Major developments in the American and African American experience between 1865 and 1945 – namely, legalized segregation, urbanization, industrialization, migration, depression, two world wars, and the flowering of the arts and music – were reflected and debated in black religious communities. Hence, African religious history became a microcosm of the black experience and an arena in which broad currents in American history were confronted and challenged.

The early colonial period of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was a time of trauma and devastation for Iroquoian peoples and territories. The historical record of that period is as dramatic and stunning as it is flawed. From the time of first direct contact with Europeans in the 1530s, Iroquoians have been subjects of interest to European writers, largely for reasons of power. In the early seventeenth century a large body of writing about the Iroquoians began developing under the pens of French Jesuit missionaries, whose aims were to destroy Iroquoian and other indigenous religions. Known collectively as the Jesuit Relations, in subsequent centuries these writings became the primary source documents for knowing and understanding Iroquoian life in the seventeenth century. Important English and Dutch sources exist as well, but they are far smaller in size and scope. The Jesuit Relations were compiled and translated in the early twentieth century into seventy-three volumes. Other important sources for Iroquoian religion during the seventeenth century include indigenous oral traditions, archaeology, linguistics, and later ethnographic research from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The famous “League of the Iroquois” included five different indigenous nations that were united into a permanent league or confederation, arranged through an Iroquoian set of principles known as Gayanashagowa, the “great law of peace.” The names of these nations are usually given as the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and the Seneca. In the early eighteenth century, a sixth nation was added, the Tuscarora.

More than a generation ago Carl Bridenbaugh, summing up the religious experience of the colonists on the Hudson and the Delaware, wrote, “In a region of so many nationalities – Dutch, Swedes, Finns, French, Germans, English – toleration was vital.” In contrast to the colonies to the north and south, which were largely ethnically homogeneous before 1730, with powerful established churches, Congregationalism in New England and Anglicanism in the South, the Middle Colonies – for the purposes of this essay New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware – presented a diverse array of faiths and peoples. All of the following found homes there: Dutch and German Reformed; French Huguenots; Swedish and German Lutherans; Scottish, Irish, and English Presbyterians; Welsh and English Baptists; English Congregationalists; and German, English, and Welsh Quakers, not to mention a variety of other sects. Roman Catholics also achieved grudging toleration there, and by 1730 most of North America's tiny Jewish population lived in New York. Living near them, of course, were Native Americans whose religious relationship with Europeans was often uneasy. And arriving involuntarily were growing numbers of enslaved Africans, who would be a source of both missionary labor and uneasy conscience for some of their European neighbors.

This essay presents an overview of the diversity of the religious experience of the inhabitants of the Middle Colonies between 1680 and 1730, largely in terms of denominations broadly defined. It examines not only “high” matters of theology and leadership, but also elements of faith closer to the experience of the masses of worshippers. In a world in which political leadership was firmly in male hands, it looks at how these religious groups incorporated women into their communities.

Praise poetry is central to any delineation of southern African literature since praising is an important part of the peoples’ political and literary expression. The genre of praise poetry called izibongo in Zulu (used in its plural form) is a political art form found in southern African societies like the Nguni- and Sotho-Tswana-speaking peoples. The term refers to the form of poetic expression that defines and names an individual, and is characterized by bold imagery expressed in carefully selected language. This type of poetry applies to the personal set of praise names of individuals, comprising cumulative series of praises and epithets bestowed on them by their associates, from childhood onwards, interspersed with narrative passages or comments. These praises, composed and recited by professional bards, often embody concise allusions to historical incidents and memorable achievements or characteristics connected with each family, and may amount to verses of considerable length and excellence. Among the Nguni linguistic groups, the characteristically colorful heroic praise poetry has a rich body of collected literature dating back four hundred years, and such poetry is treasured by people in this subregion as their highest form of literary expression. The major function of praise poetry is to conserve and transmit social consciousness, while simultaneously entertaining the audience. Because it deals with happenings in and around the individual being praised, informing the audience of his/her political and social views, praise poetry is documentary, and speakers of many (and similar) southern African languages have retained this cultural expression to aid them in remembering their past.

The literatures of the three hispanophone islands of the Caribbean – Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico – are the oldest in the region. Their origins can be traced back to an Arawak oral tradition rich in myth and legend – gathered in all its vividness by Spanish Friar Ramon Pané in his Relación acerca de las antigüedades des los indios, las cuales, con diligencia, como hombre que sabe su idioma, recogió por mandato del Almirante (1571) (An Account of the Antiquities of the Indians, Gathered Diligently by a Man Who Knows Their Language; Chronicles of the New World Encounters, 1999) – that speaks of a worldview centered on a harmonious relationship between religion, culture, politics, and patterns of work and exchange. Pané, who lived in Hispaniola from 1494 to 1499, gathered a rich trove of myths, beliefs, and aboriginal religious practices that constitute most of what we know of the Amerindian lore of the Caribbean. Together with the many descriptions found in Spanish chronicles of the dancing and singing rituals known as areitos, through which the Taínos recorded their history and reconstructed through drama salient episodes of everyday life, they offer glimpses of rich cultural traditions lost through the impact of warfare and the virgin soil epidemics that decimated the aboriginal population of the Caribbean. The picture they convey, of a society dependent on a simple economy of subsistence agriculture and fishing, survived the devastation and environmental assault of European conquest and colonization to make an important contribution to Puerto Rican, Dominican and, to a lesser extent, Cuban rural cultures, laying the foundation for traditions of resistance that would later serve as a counter world to the economy of the plantation.

Historical discussion of method in the seventeenth century has long focused on the supposed development of ‘modern scientific method’, attempting thereby to explain the Scientific Revolution. However, doubt is now frequently expressed, on both philosophical and historical grounds, about the legitimacy of such an approach. Even leaving aside those arguments denying the very possibility, let alone existence, of a determinate and efficacious ‘scientific method’, the search for historical understanding through the location of its first appearance increasingly seems quixotic. As a consequence, it can now be asserted that an examination of seventeenth-century ‘method’ in the investigation of nature will have historical validity only if it respects and interprets the intellectual categories of the time — that is, if it focuses on ‘method’, not ‘methodology’. This essay, therefore, concerns ‘method’ as a logical and philosophical category; it does not purport to examine or reconstruct the procedures used by philosophers in producing new knowledge, except to the extent that these involved explicit appeal to ‘method’.

Those who talked of a ‘method’ or ‘methods’ capable of generating and organising natural knowledge usually rendered this concept plausible in the context of essentialism. Hence the world was seen as being composed of essences, or natural kinds (rather than of individuals classifiable only on conventional grounds). The essences of things, furthermore, were discoverable by rational or empirical means, and the resultant knowledge was certain rather than probable. The discoverability of such knowledge was in turn sustained by talk of effective ‘methods’. Throughout the century, therefore, debates about method formed part of broader contentions about the nature of knowledge itself.

INTRODUCTION

The philosophy of the seventeenth century has often been seen as connected with a gradual march from religious orthodoxy and oppression towards pre-Enlightenment deism, agnosticism, atheism, and toleration. In reality, though, the world of seventeenth-century religious thought is much more complicated than this simple schema would suggest. To be sure, there is a strain of religious thought that appears to lead directly to the Enlightenment. However, there is a great deal more: widespread religious movements that are quite different in character, an undercurrent of interconnected religious ideas and developments which may now look strange and distant from philosophy but were familiar to, and were taken seriously by, all the major philosophers of the period. These philosophers lived in societies dominated by religious institutions and lived through tremendous upheavals that were fundamentally generated out of religious concerns – the Reformation, the Counter-Reformation, the Thirty Years' War, the Puritan Revolution, the pogroms in Poland, the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. The point is not simply that religious ideas and events had an important influence on the philosophical thought of the period. Rather, these religious issues were deeply intertwined with philosophical conceptions of knowledge, revelation, the importance of scientific inquiry, human nature, and what it is to be reasonable. This meant, among other things, that philosophical positions had serious consequences that went far beyond the classroom, academy, or salon, as the cases of Galileo, Bruno, and Vanini show in different ways.

There are no “red,” “white,” or “black” people as such. The specific ways in which we understand these terms have some roots in antiquity, but as full-blown categories they are relatively recent inventions. Once the categories emerged, however, they took on lives of their own, so much so that “race” became deeply inscribed in Western thought, permeating its religious beliefs, fables, and mythologies. Historically, Christianity in England, Europe, and America mythically grounded, and later frequently regrounded and revised, modern notions of race. This essay explores the lengthy history of how religion helped to create and later to deconstruct race through the colonial, antebellum, post–Civil War, and civil rights eras. In addition, the essay suggests how groups who were seen as ethnic rather than racial groupings – especially Jews – or who came late to the history of American religio-racial history – namely, Asians and Asian Americans – encountered ideas and practices of race that were foreign to their own histories. Some of these groups were thought of in racial categories because of their presumed religions, namely, Asians; others, namely Jews, usually were not. Finally, the essay examines how a more contemporary project of pluralism claims to efface this historic confluence of religion and race, even as race still fundamentally informs how religious groupings conceptualize and organize themselves.

Ethiopian literature falls into three broad categories: classical literature, including historical narratives, heroic poetry, and works of philosophical reflection cast in an imaginative mode; romantic and political literature in Amharic, and, since the Second World War, the new literature in English. The classical literature is expressed in Ge’ez, a Semitic language that is also the oldest written language in Africa, with its unique orthography going back nearly two thousand years. The Holy Bible and all other Christian texts have been translated into Ge’ez, which survives today as the language of the Ethiopian clergy; in this respect, it has a status similar to Latin in the western world. Ordinary Ethiopians neither spoke nor wrote in Ge’ez. Therefore, the texts written in that language did not seep into the soul of the people, and did not produce a national literary culture. The classical literary texts, hymns, and songs circulate today only among the priestly class and highly specialized students and teachers of Ge’ez. This is part of the reason that the modern Ethiopian state which emerged in the late nineteenth century had to forge a new language aimed at producing a popular national culture through the medium of Amharic.

Classical literature

This category comprises a substantial number of devotional books, many of them works translated from foreign sources. They include biblical scriptures, exegesis, service books of the Coptic church, texts detailing the lives of saints of the Universal Church who flourished before the schism at the Council of Chalcedon in 451 ce and of saints of the Coptic church, especially the Desert Fathers, and homilies by the early Church Fathers, such as John Chrysostom, Athanasius of Alexandria, Severus of Antioch, and Cyril of Alexandria (Haile 1995:40).

During the War of Independence the American clergy fervently solicited divine support for their cause. Yet none was so bold to assert outright that God was on the side of the rebels. Although preachers discerned positive omens in such rare early triumphs as the battles of Trenton and Princeton, any claim to certain knowledge of God's will would have been condemned as blasphemous. Indeed, military setbacks, of which there were many during the early war years, were often perceived as heaven's retribution for the inhabitants' sins of arrogance, avarice, unchaste behavior, and similar vices. And so, in accordance with the understanding of that time, although pulpits throughout the land resounded with pleas for God's favor, the language was always cautiously supplicatory and conditional.

Both preachers and ordinary Americans shaped their case as an “appeal to heaven,” imploring God to recognize the righteousness of their cause. The battle flag of the Third Connecticut Regiment bore the motto, “AN APPEAL TO HEAVEN.” General George Washington, when awaiting the British attack at New York in 1776, had ordered a day of fasting and prayer by the troops to “incline the Lord, and Giver of Victory, to prosper our arms.” The next year he informed soldiers who had emerged victorious from a firefight at the battle of Brandywine that “another Appeal to Heaven with the blessing of providence, which it becomes every officer and soldier to supplicate,” might bring further success.

As war between Britain and France raged around the world in the 1750s, religious writers in colonial British America described the conflict as nothing short of the apocalypse foretold in the Book of Revelation. The battle between Protestant Britain and Catholic France, as they saw it, represented the death struggle between Christ and the Antichrist, and Britain's triumph would deal a mortal blow to the “beast” of Rome. With British victory in the Seven Years' War assured, sealing the ouster of France from North America in 1763, millennialist prophets anticipated Christ's imminent return and the onset of a thousand-year reign of peace. In the short term, however, Britain was suddenly faced with the practical problem of what to do with the Catholic population it inherited in Canada. Should these French and Indian faithful, some seventy thousand of them, be absorbed into the empire, forced to convert to Protestantism, or banished altogether? In the end, the British adopted a relatively lenient policy of religious toleration and recognition of rights for Catholics. The policy was met with anger in the British colonies, especially in New England, where traditional anti-Catholicism ran deep, and the controversy exacerbated the deteriorating relationship between the colonies and Britain in the early 1770s.

The policy dilemma, and Britain's resolution of it, illustrates two dominant, if countervailing, themes in the relationship between religion and empire in America during the eighteenth century.

The economic crisis of the Great Depression spurred religiously informed political and social activism in the United States. Many Roman Catholic labor union and social activists in the 1930s drew inspiration from the papal encyclicals of Popes Leo XIII and Pius XI. Among some African American Protestants in the South and North there was also a desire to champion civil rights. American Jews, often sharing the same socially marginal, immigrant backgrounds as Catholics, filled the ranks of social reformers. In contrast to African American Protestants and Catholics, however, religious faith per se played a less explicit role in shaping Jewish activism.

At the same time, many Protestants, whether from mainline or Fundamentalist denominations, loomed large in the ranks of those opposed to organized labor and the expanding role of the federal government in the American economy. Even among Catholics and African American Protestants, there were prominent individuals who condemned progressive social reforms.

This essay will explore the contours of religiously based social activism in the 1930s as well as devote attention to the foes of reform. Many historical accounts of the Great Depression in the United States have slighted the significant role of religious reformers in promoting the fortunes of organized labor and building the New Deal Democratic electoral coalition. If economics cannot be separated from politics, then neither should be examined without accounting for religious belief. In religious faith there is a philosophical framework that individuals use to understand their economic and political systems.