by Paul Elie
from Georgetown University

In Jefferson’s Longhouse, Many Mansions

It has been a good month for the sophisticated discussion of religion in Washington. A couple of Mondays back Marilynne Robinson and James Carroll (current book: Christ Actually) were in conversation at Sixth & I. And on Wednesday evening, while Christian Wiman, our guest in Georgetown’s Faith & Culture series, read his poetry and spoke about his remarkable excursions into poetry and Christian belief – more on this soon – Peter Manseau was at Sixth & I speaking about his new book, One Nation, Under Gods. The idea of the book – developed when Peter was a doctoral student at Georgetown – is that the United States has been a multi-religious nation more or less from the beginning and that this can be seen especially well if the national story is told with Christianity largely left out.

Bookforum’s new issue carries a rave (and a times a raving) review:

With a novelist’s verve and a historian’s precision, Manseau deftly guides us through a cacophonous religious landscape, studded with encounters so unexpected and bizarre that they could be the stuff of speculative fiction. Rather than beginning with a city on a hill built by hardy Puritans in search of religious freedom, Manseau reminds us that we are a country of longhouses and pueblos, visionaries and iconoclasts …
Much more than a simple catalogue of diversity, One Nation, Under Gods is a stunning history of religious cross-pollination. Religions “exist only in relation to each other,” Manseau writes. “They change and grow, live and die, through adaptation, competition, imitation, and assimilation.” And that process, in a sense, is the hidden American gospel …

I am eager to read the book – eager to see whether Peter presses the evolutionary metaphor as insistently as the Bookforum reviewer, Tanya Erzen, suggests. Because if followed through to its logical conclusion, this metaphor (a common motif in trade history just now) would suggest – wouldn’t it? – that the history of religion in America is a matter of the survival of the fittest, and that the fairly traditional Christian strains of religion have been the most robustly populated because they are, well, the fittest … which seems to run precisely counter to the argument for a splendid and equable religious diversity that I have understood Peter to be making with the book.

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