Spirits of Empire: How Settler Colonialism Made American Religion

Wenger (We Have a Religion), a history professor at Yale Divinity School, unpacks in this comprehensive account the complex relationship between Indigenous resistance, secular governance, and American Christianity in the 18th and 19th centuries. She explains that the U.S. government used religion as a tool to secure power, by morally justifying its conquest of Indigenous lands and setting up networks of churches to support settlers. Yet she overturns ideas of Indigenous peoples as passive subjects, explaining how Native leaders “actively reshaped both Christianity and their own Indigenous traditions” within the “imperial frame” by, for example, reciting Catholic chants in tribal anguages and forming relationships with missionaries. Such activities helped Indigenous peoples cultivate a “respectable” image in the eyes of political elites, benefit from bonds with missionaries, and sometimes actively resist colonial power (some tribal leaders “educat[ed] missionaries in the realities of settler colonial violence and the values of Indigenous life”). Drawing on extensive research, the author convincingly overturns the fiction of American religion as divorced from secular governance, framing it instead as a central part of the country’s structural and moral foundations and a site where power and resistance were negotiated. The result is a scrupulous look at the entanglement of empire, sovereignty, and belief in early America. (Mar.)