Conclusion

Summary

America is a strange place to do religion. It was ever so. From the multifarious mix of dissenting and establishment Protestants – the flotsam and jetsam of the warring Reformations – who came to settle European colonies on the stolen lands of native peoples to the multitudes of Central and Eastern European Jews and Irish-Italian-Polish Catholics who came yearning to breathe free, escaping famine and persecution from the Old World; from the Black churches that managed to forge, out of the slavers’ religion, a tradition of empowerment, hope, and liberation, to the various Black Muslims who have reconstituted and reinhabited pre-slavery Islamic identities; from the legions of immigrant communities who have brought and adapted their religions on American shores to the countless spiritual innovators who have alloyed and invented new American styles of religious belonging: Mormons, Christian Scientists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Scientologists, Seventh-day Adventists, New Agers, Nation of Islam adherents, Theosophists, and Pentecostals – if you can say nothing else about American religion, it’s energetic, entrepreneurial, and eclectic.