by John-Charles Duffy
I’m in the process of reframing my “intro to American
religions” course for this coming fall. I teach this course as a historical
survey. For the past couple of years, the course’s organizing narrative has had
two strands, intertwined like DNA: one story about the consolidation and
erosion of Protestant dominance in American society, and another story about
the expansion of religious diversity in the U.S. through immigration.
This fall, I’ll be attempting a single organizing narrative,
unified by the theme “religion and empire.” By “empire” I have in mind American
territorial expansion and the United States’ rise to political and economic
superpower status. This experiment grows out of a conversation I had at the AAR
this past November with Brandi Denison. By reframing American history as a
history of empire—from the Mississippians and the Aztecs to U.S. neocolonialism
and globalization—I hope to give the course a stronger transnational orientation,
with attention not only to the flow of religions into U.S. borders but also to the flow of American religions and
their influence out across the globe.
One side effect of this focus on empire is a shifting of the
story’s center of gravity westward, away from the eastern seaboard. I already
make a point, as I suspect all of us do by now, of starting the story of
European contact with the Spanish and the French rather than the English. The
theme of empire reinforces that move, plus now I’ll be including Russian colonization in Alaska and
California. Manifest Destiny will loom large in the new course, which will ensure
that Native Americans recur in the historical narrative rather than fading into
obscurity after the initial European contacts. Manifest Destiny will also bring
Hispanic Americans into the course earlier—in the course as I’ve been teaching it
up to now, they don’t appear until the unit on post-1960s pluralism. Mormons
will figure in the new course as an obstacle to American empire in the
trans-Mississippi west; Confucians, Buddhists, and Sikhs help build that
empire’s infrastructure and economy. I’ll be adding to the course a focus on
Christian civilization-building in the United States’ Pacific possessions. Our
readings will likely include McKinley’s account of how God inspired him to take
charge of the Philippines.
Some topics that are typical fare in “intro to American
religions” courses will probably drop out of my new course because they don’t
tie in well to the theme of empire. The First Great Awakening will definitely
go. The Second Great Awakening might survive the cut because of its connection
to American expansion west across the Appalachians, but at that point in the historical
narrative I’ll be more interested in Native American revitalization movements. The
fundamentalist-modernist controversy is out, though we’ll discuss the
conservative-liberal split within Protestantism in connection with colonialism,
missions, and interreligious dialogue. The day I currently spend on JFK’s
speech in Houston will need to go—the speech is an important turning point in a
story about eroding Protestant dominance, but it isn’t pertinent to a story
about imperialism. (If JFK gets mentioned in the new narrative, it will be for
his contributions to the Cold War.) The black civil rights movement will still
appear in the new syllabus, to follow up on the legal and social status of America’s
former slaves. I currently do a day on American Muslims negotiating life in the
U.S.; in the new course, I need to do more on Islamism as a reaction to
American neocolonialism.
Again, in choosing “religion and empire” as the course’s
guiding theme, my pedagogical aims are broader than highlighting religion in
the American west—but I’m pleased that the theme facilitates that focus as
well.
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