For several decades, the teaching of American history paid insufficient attention to the role of religion in shaping the nation. Some public schools were so afraid of offending anyone that they ordered teachers to avoid the topic altogether, which annoyed and bowdlerized nearly everyone. Albert Shankar, president of the American Federation of Teachers, found textbooks that—and I am not making this up—defined the Pilgrims as “people who made long trips” and Christmas as a “warm time for special foods.”
Challenging the myth of religious consensus
As the pendulum swings to the opposite extreme, some schools are now presenting the false view that Americans have always shared common Christian beliefs. Ilan Stavans’ new anthology, A Nation Wrestles with God: American Prophets, Philosophers, and Firebrands (Restless Books, 2026), can disabuse readers of any such illusion.
Stavans has assembled more than a hundred brief excerpts to survey the sweep of religious experience and opinion in the United States. He reminds us that this nation has always had diverse traditions, theologies, and practices—and plenty of people who dissented from the prevailing orthodoxy of the day. From the Navajo chants to New Yorker cartoons, Stavans shows us how many voices of faith and doubt are contained in the American story.
A few of Stavans’ selections seem odd—The Wonderful Wizard of Oz?—but many are inspired.
He gives us a wonderful courtroom exchange between Massachusetts Bay Colony governor John Winthrop and Anne Hutchinson, whom the Puritans banished for her dissenting beliefs. We read science fiction by Isaac Asimov and Frank Herbert, and song lyrics from Bruce Springsteen and Lana Del Rey. We hear both prophetic voices that launched important movements and those who swam against the tide of their time.
An outsider’s eye on American faith
As a Jewish American from Mexico, Stavans knows something about being overlooked and marginalized. Now teaching at Amherst, he brings fresh perspectives on the faith, culture, and history of Americans and includes in this volume some voices that are seldom heard, such as Rabbi Sabato Morais and the Theosophist Madame Blavatsky. Our religious history, he quietly insists, includes not only major Christian denominations but also many other traditions: indigenous, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, and many others.
It is extraordinarily difficult to cover the history of religion in America without making a few goofs. The ones I noticed are found in the timeline, rather than in the notes introducing each selection. What does Stavans mean when he says the American Catholic Church was declared to be part of the Roman Catholic Church in 1908? Catholics here have been in communion with Rome since Spanish colonists founded San Juan, Puerto Rico, in 1521. There is a tiny denomination called “the American Catholic Church,” but this is an Old Catholic group that has no relationship with the Pope.
Nor was the first mosque in the US founded in Massachusetts in 1915: There was one in Fargo, North Dakota, two decades earlier. On one page, Stavans incorrectly states that the Mormon church banned black priests in 1969, and on the next page correctly dates this discrimination to the earliest days, when Brigham Young ordered them barred from this office, which is bestowed on most boys. And we really should call them by the name they prefer, Latter-day Saints.
Scientists, mainline Protestants, and Darwin’s theory
Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution was not initially opposed primarily by Evangelicals but rather by mainline Protestants—and by scientists who thought, correctly, that it had not yet been fully developed. Objections from critics such as Louis Agassiz led to the theory’s improvement, as is supposed to happen in science. Fundamentalists mostly ignored evolution until pseudo-scientific “Social Darwinism” embraced eugenics and claimed the poor were less genetically fit than the rich to have children. Many prominent critics of evolution, such as William Jennings Bryant, were not conservatives but anti-imperialists aligned with the leftist People’s Party.
Most Christians today agree with something the evolutionary theorist (and lover of sacred music) Stephen Jay Gould suggested, excerpted in this book, that religion and science each have something to tell us and need not be locked in irreconcilable conflict. Perhaps A Nation Wrestles with God can give us hope that Americans, both believers and skeptics, both the devout and those who dissent, likewise, can share the same land.
A Nation Wrestles with God: American Prophets, Philosophers, and Firebrands, new anthology by Ilan Stavans, 512 pages, published by Restless Books. Paperback: $21.92 buy on Amazon
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