INTRODUCTION

Most seventeenth-century European thinkers who showed a strong interest in non-European philosophy believed in the universal basis of knowledge. The truths that they discovered did not, in their view, end at the borders of Europe. Consequently, when these Europeans encountered other philosophies, they tried to understand the differences in terms of an absolute conception of truth and falsehood rather than regard these other philosophies as merely different or alternative paths to truth.

The European discovery voyages that began in the fifteenth century gradually served as a medium for learning about other cultures, although it took some time for Europeans to learn about the higher forms of knowledge of these regions. This was particularly true with regard to their philosophies. The explorers themselves provided little of this knowledge. Rather, it was missionaries who provided most of it. Because of the religious zeal of the explorer-nations, such as Portugal and Spain, passage was regularly provided on their ships for Catholic missionaries of diverse European nationalities. These missionaries sought contact with peoples in Asia and the Americas and began to learn their languages and study their cultures.

Clearly, these missionaries did not come to this task with detached, impartial attitudes. Even missionaries who admired China, such as the Spanish Dominican D. Navarrete, were too prone to see superstition and idolatry where it did not always exist. Nevertheless, some of these missionaries recognised the importance of learning about the philosophy and religion of these lands.

On 15 August 1790, American history was made in an unlikely corner of southern England, at an estate owned by a prominent family of Catholic dissenters. Though old British penal laws still officially prohibited public celebrations of the Mass, a crowd packed the Chapel of St. Mary's at Lulworth Castle to receive the sacrament and witness the consecration of John Carroll as the first Catholic bishop to the United States. Born into Maryland's landed gentry and schooled among English refugees in France, Carroll became the superior of Rome's missions in the infant American nation in 1784 and quickly distinguished himself as an energetic administrator. In his new role as bishop of Baltimore, a diocese effectively coterminous with the thirteen original United States, he was in charge of perhaps thirty-five priests in widely scattered parishes, many of them in locales formerly hostile to “papists.” Such hostility had once been evident in Boston, for example, where a small Catholic congregation by 1790 was gaining Irish parishioners. In 1732, when the rumor spread that a Catholic cleric was in town to celebrate a St. Patrick's Day mass, Governor Jonathan Belcher invoked the local antipriest law in dispatching the Suffolk County sheriff on a futile house-to-house search. Decades later in New York, the old canard of a Romanist fifth column found new life in anti-Catholic attacks by the Federalist newspaper Gazette of the United States (1789), prompting Carroll to rebut that Catholics were not enemies of religious liberty.

Religion is woven into the fabric of the American political experiment. Since the first permanent settlements in British North America, religion has been integral to the identity and mission of the American people and their political pursuits. The New England Puritans especially endeavored, in the words of Matthew 5:14, to build a “city set upon a Hill.” Their polis, they believed, would remake political society and be a model for future commonwealths. Familiar features of colonial founding documents and other expressions of the colonists' political pursuits included invocations of divine blessing and acknowledgments of a sacred mission. Many early colonial charters and codes derived their ideas and provisions from the Bible. Most of the colonies eventually adopted a model of religious establishment they had known in the Old World. Local Puritan congregations enjoyed legal favor in much of New England – Rhode Island being the notable exception – and the Church of England was established throughout the South. Religious dissenters were afforded a measure of toleration in most colonies, although they were often burdened in the exercise of their religion and subjected to civil disabilities because of their religious beliefs and affiliations.

As European settlements grew in number and size up and down the Atlantic seaboard, there was a corresponding increase in the diversity of religious sects. The extraordinary religious diversity in the colonies was a potential source of rivalry and conflict among the sects competing for adherents and, sometimes, the legal and financial favor of the civil state.

The history of British North America from 1759 to 1815 set Canada on a religious course that would differ significantly from what transpired in the United States. To be sure, much in early Canadian religious history is familiar to Americans because of circumstances, heritages, and events shared by all North Americans. These common experiences included historic tensions between Roman Catholics and Protestants, a large measure of Protestant pluralism, the presence of evangelical revival, consistent disregard of native religion, internal conflict over the wisdom of revolution, strong commitment to liberty, full exposure to Enlightenment thinking, and deep divisions created by ethnicity or race. Yet because of the distinctive unfolding of Canadian history, religion in Canada has never simply replicated American experience.

The kind of national comparison offered by Seymour Martin Lipset describes much that has been distinctive in religion as in other spheres. In Lipset's account, Canadian society “has been and is a more class-aware, elitist, law-abiding, statist, collectivity-oriented, and particularistic (group-oriented) society than the United States.” The antistatism, individualism, populism, violence, and egalitarianism that have often characterized American history have been decidedly less prominent in Canada. Some explanations for these systematic differences are geographical. Canada's vast space and sparse population have required a more active government and have placed a premium on cooperation in the churches. But an even broader explanation is historical.

In the sixth century ce, Christian theology matured both in the eastern and western parts of the Empire. In the East, the works of the unknown and pseudonymously named Dionysius the Areopagite aimed to transpose into a Christian theological context the systematic version of Platonism found in Proclus. In the West, the three hypostases of Platonism are transformed into the persons of the Trinity, gods become angels, and salvation becomes resurrection rather than permanent separation from a body. Boethius undertook a re-evaluation of the ancient Greek philosophical tradition from a refined Christian theological perspective. Boethius seems to have a clearly articulated vision of what can and cannot be accepted from Platonic, Aristotelian, Stoic and Academic sources. His most influential work, The Consolation of Philosophy, acknowledges the feasibility and even perhaps the inevitability of a Christian philosophy. Writing in Latin, Boethius provided a bridge for the renaissance of Christian thought in the West in the ninth century. Maximus the Confessor refined further the Christianized Platonism of Pseudo-Dionysius. He wrote not only on narrowly theological problems, but on the full panoply of ecclesiastical and spiritual issues. The idea of Christian philosophy as a way of life explicitly in opposition to the ways of life recommended within the ancient Greek philosophical tradition comes to the fore in Maximus. The last philosopher treated in this section, John Scotus Eriugena, brings us to the Carolingian Renaissance.

This chapter looks at the development of Hausa written literature from the formative stages to its modern status, beginning with a critical analysis of the dynamism and fluidity of the very identity of “Hausaness” it seeks to represent, as well as the sociohistorical and political conditions that have influenced its evolution over time, which demonstrate an important interplay between history, literature, language, and society. In mainstream Hausa scholarship, Hausaland has traditionally been seen to include northern Nigeria and, on rare occasions, Niger. This relatively narrow focus on the West African region populated by the Hausa people will be maintained in this chapter. But this demographic space will also be interrogated as a way of opening up new possibilities in the study of literary activities in the Hausa language in the Hausa diaspora, in places like the Sudan, Northern Ghana, and the Middle East, and of comparative literary experiences between the Hausa “motherland” and the Hausa diaspora.

Hausaness: language, culture, and identity

Hausaness as an identity does not encompass a monolithic unit. It is a convergence that reflects Ali Mazrui’s notion of a triple heritage of indigenous African, Islamic, and European elements, and which extends, historically, from pre-Islamic, precolonial time to the present era. Demographically, it incorporates descendants of the original Hausa seven states, the descendants of other ethnic groups such as the Fulani, Arab, Tamajaq, and Nupe who have been linguistically and culturally assimilated as a result of sociohistorical contact, political affiliations, intermarriages, and other more recent “converts” in the region arising from both colonial and postcolonial dynamics.

A new chapter in the history of American religions was inaugurated with the formation of the United States following the War for Independence. The century and a half after 1790 witnessed astonishing changes in the circumstances of the North American continent and in the religious traditions and institutions located on it. The United States evolved into a world power, and the religious institutions that were part of American society and culture came to occupy signifi cant positions of cultural influence. Confl ict and controversy were also part of the record as the religious traditions interacted variously with one another and with the social and political developments in the nation and the world. This Introduction to the second volume of The Cambridge History of Religions in America looks briefl y at some of the judgments rendered by the authors of the essays that follow dealing with this period of American religious history.

In 1787 after the end of the Revolutionary War, representatives from the thirteen English colonies gathered for a convention in Philadelphia, a meeting that extended from late May until mid-September, in which they drafted the U.S. Constitution. The Preamble of that document affirms a set of high social ideals. “We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution of the United States of America.” More than one year had passed after that convention before a suffi cient number of colonies ratifi ed the Constitution; then on 4 February 1789, presidential electors named George Washington the fi rst president of the United States . Two states, however, did not approve the Constitution until additional rights were guaranteed, including one that addressed religion, a process that took until December of 1791 to complete. The First Amendment to the Constitution in the Bill of Rights addressed directly the issue of religion in the new nation.

It is not insignificant that Chinua Achebe, recognized as one of the world’s best contemporary novelists, gestures towards a Modernist sensibility in the title to his first novel, Things Fall Apart (1958). This refers to a line from W. B. Yeats’s “The Second Coming” (1922), in which, writing via an apocalyptic lens, the Irish poet describes the historical disruptions that occur in the encounter between epochs:

Achebe’s novel also reflects upon this theme but from a thoroughly African and Igbo perspective in which all levels of the narrative discourse, from language use to characterization and the sense of spatiality, help establish the terrible effects of the colonial encounter. Another of his novels, No Longer at Ease (1961), also refers to a Modernist poem, this time T. S. Eliot’s “Journey of the Magi” (1927). Eliot’s idea of being neither within nor outside the possibility of salvation, of being both of the old order and of the new, and the nagging sense of loss and alienation that this produces is translated by Achebe into a representation of the predicament of Obi Okonkwo, an educated African in early post-independence Nigeria caught between the mores and expectations of his traditional upbringing and the western forms of self-actualization sharpened by his travels in the west and by his sojourn in Lagos as a senior civil servant.

Virtually anything human beings use to live their lives must be manufactured or harvested, wrought from raw materials by skill and labor. This may seem obvious, but consider the rows of hand-crafted thimbles, needles, hand tools, footwear, images, and amulets displayed in museums. The ingenuity and careful fabrication they exhibit demonstrate in the most material way the fact that human beings build their worlds and expend incessant effort to keep them in good working order. The plentiful availability of goods to which members of modern, industrialized societies are accustomed is easily taken for granted.

Things matter precisely because of the work they do. This essay will survey the visual and material cultures of religions in America with an eye to understanding how religious peoples of many different kinds have relied on things. “Material culture” refers not only to objects and images, but also to what they do and the power they have in performing the cultural work of organizing the world, cultivating and maintaining relations with sacred realities, and imagining the communities, places, pasts, and futures that compose one's sense of reality. By producing, collecting, revering, and exchanging their sacred objects, people are able to secure vital relationships among themselves, their ancestors, and the divine. It will become evident that this applies to modern as well as ancient peoples. Moderns cling to photographs, monuments, plastic statuary, and mass-produced lithographs no less emotionally than ancient peoples gripped stone effigies or medicine bags.

Christianity is a religion rooted in historical claims and historical narratives, as is the Judaism from which it emerged and whose scriptures it shares. On the one hand, their linear narratives of salvation history locate cosmic and essential significance in particular highly specific events, people, places, and times. Yet on the other hand, Christianity has been from its earliest centuries a highly philosophical system. Great weight has been attached to metaphysical propositions about the relationship of the divine and the human that are claimed to be absolute and timeless. The history of religion, therefore, embraces both the history of peoples and the history of beliefs and teachings – teachings that, to some extent, claim to defy the flow of historical change. The business of doing religious history intrinsically threatens some aspects of traditional belief. It challenges the claim of certain doctrines to be timeless, or to be rooted in the universal consent of the faithful. It illuminates the context-driven character of so many of the church's decisions and pronouncements. Finally, it analyzes the often highly mixed and often discreditable motives and behaviors of key players in the messy business of religious politics.

Like its subject matter, religious history has evolved considerably across two millennia. In part, the evolution simply reflects the changing intellectual cultures of different epochs, the constant and inevitable dialogue between a world faith and the particular cultural matrices in which it grows and finds expression.

One infamous 300-year battle over slavery was waged in Britain and the Americas, a period that is culturally rich with texts written by first-, second-, and sometimes third-generation Africans (in Britain and the Americas), including the United States and the Caribbean. Geography as an organizing principle helps to illuminate the similarities and differences within that literature of slavery and abolition.

African writers in Britain

From the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, slaves and ex-slaves in the African diaspora, kidnapped in West Africa, shipped across the notorious Middle Passage, and sold into slavery, wrote unflinchingly about their brutal life experiences. In petitions, poems, fictions, and autobiographies, also known as slave narratives, they recreated their environment and their mature selves as human beings enduring grievous lives, in Britain, the Americas and the Caribbean. They wrote in conscious opposition to proslavery stereotypes.

The earliest recorded English slave trader was John Hawkins, who, in 1562, on behalf of the English government, traded Africans to the Portuguese African and Spanish planters. By 1618, the English government held monopolies to slave trading-companies. The Royal African Company was founded in 1672 and was granted exclusive rights of trade between the west coast of Africa and the British colonies in the Americas. In the next five years, the company had shipped 100,000 African slaves to the West Indies and 5,000 to the North American colonies. After the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, England assumed imperial dominance in the slave trade by acquiring the right – the Asiento – to deliver 144,000 slaves to the Spanish colonies.

After the French Revolution, optimistic radical reformers expected a new society to emerge, one in which the conflicts between different religious denominations, which provoked the intolerant policy of the Old Regime, would be overcome. Most philosophers demanding the separation of religion and society identified the moral beliefs on which the new society would be built with the rational core of true Christianity, pessimistic conservatives, however, suggested that the Revolution was the result of the decidedly anti-Christian tendencies of the Enlightenment. These conflicting notions of the relationship between the Enlightenment and the Christian religion represent two tendencies of eighteenth-century philosophy, which among other things directed attempts to re-define the role of religion in society. On the one hand, most philosophers were convinced that the order of human society was based on a belief in God as provider of moral law and thus they tried to harmonise the tensions between the other-worldly oriented Christian religion and secular society. On the other hand, philosophers attacked the Christian religion, since they perceived institutionalised Christianity as a form of intolerant superstition or fanaticism. Two wholly different ways of harmonising the tensions between religion and society are depicted in Sections 1 and 4. The first can generally be characterised by the tendency to separate religious issues from social or political ones. Eighteenth-century concepts of toleration proceeded on the assumption that the care of religion did not belong among the duties of the state because religious faith was the purely personal concern of the individual. Among the main arguments used to reject the pretensions of church and state to control religious belief was the assertion of a right to private judgment in religious matters.

Religious organizations made innovative and often aggressive use of media and communications technology during the long nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, shaping those technologies and their cultural impacts in complex ways. Earlier the invention of printing in Europe had unintended consequences for established churches by fostering religious dissent. As print replaced face-to-face human exchanges as the primary medium of social communication and cultural currency, Protestants mastered the printed word as a tool of religious purification. In early America, the adoption of Protestant culture by Native Americans and African slaves included adopting literacy – or at least the recognition of literacy as a central power in Anglo-American society.

However, early Americans got their religious reading from Europe, and domestic markets for religious media took time to develop. By 1790 some parts of the United States had very high literacy rates; in rural New England, for example, few people could not sign their own name to a legal document. Over time a mass reading public emerged both for “high culture” reading such as books and sermons, and “low culture” – broadsides, ballads, newspapers, and tracts. While the centers of production for this mass print culture were urban areas (particularly Philadelphia, Boston, and New York), the distribution and – more importantly – the consumption of print media were decentralized, and the inherent authority of clergy was challenged by an explosion of religious printed matter from nearly none in 1800 to, by midcentury, what Nathan Hatch has called the “grand engine of a burgeoning religious culture.”

One of the earliest examples of the rise of religious publishing and of the development of a richly contested culture of religious reading was the career of Philadelphia printer Mathew Carey. Carey was among the first American publishers to exploit a national market and to compete successfully with books from England, creating a massive distribution system comprising book agents, the most famous and tireless of whom was Episcopal parson Mason Locke Weems, author of a pithy fi ctionalized biography of George Washington.

The historical half century in Spanish America (1750–99) that overlapped the War of Independence by the English colonies of North America can be characterized as a period of gestation. Beginning with the implementation in 1750 of the first in a series of rigorous reforms in the spirit of the Enlightenment and ending in 1799 with the ascension to power of Napoleon in France, this period marked the development of a new and revolutionary religious, cultural, and political awareness that would create independent Latin American republics.

Religion played an important role during this process in Spain's colonies. America's Christianity had been planted by the Spanish as early as 1493 and had set down firm roots for a flowering of Spanish American Catholic identity during the seventeenth-century baroque era. And although the cold rationalism of the Enlightenment pruned back religious growth during a winter of repression that began in 1750, it left behind “seeds of nationalism” that would begin to gestate the new national identities that appeared at the dawn of the nineteenth century with complete political independence for Spanish America.

GEOPOLITICAL BACKGROUND

Religion does not operate in a vacuum but responds to political and social forces that shape particular historical circumstances. The context of Spanish American societies differed notably from the North American experience. For instance, the English colonies' population was crowded along the Atlantic coast, and – except for Pennsylvania's German population and the South's many plantation slaves – was relatively homogeneous.