Recently, I had a short blog post about a new book I’ve read, One Nation, Under Gods.   I love the book, and thought I might write a longer post about it now. And I need to since I’m going to be lending it to my parents to read tomorrow.

One Nation, Under God is a new book by Peter Manseau, a writer who has his doctorate in religion from Georgetown University. This is a book that is definitely needed considering that many Christians in the US are doing their best to rewrite history to fit their fantasy that the US was founded as a “Christian Nation”, though of course they don’t agree on what a “Christian Nation” actually would be. The book presents the facts very well and is not favorable to any particular side.

The book’s strength is that it relates the changing religions in the US, and to a lesser degree, the whole of North America, to the politics and culture of the times. It starts us in 1492, bringing in the state of European religions to how it affected the urge to colonize the New World. From the likely hidden Jews on Columbus’ ships, forced into a masquerade by the murderous Roman Catholics in Spain, to the Muslim slaves of the conquistadors, and the native Americans, we have how religion mix, mesh and change, showing that no religion has some inviolate “truth”.

Next is the immigration of the various northern sects of Christianity coming in from Europe, those who were sure that their versions of Christianity were the only “pure” ones. They, of course, promptly decided that anyone who disagreed with them once they crossed the Atlantic needed to be killed or to be banished from the colonies that they established.   Their quest for a free place to worship was an entirely selfish desire that they would do anything to forbid anyone else access to. Their various “shining cities on the hill” were bastions of fear of the “other”.   We do have the surprising story that Cotton Mather, famous from his sermons often included in Early American Literature classes, trying to encourage the use of a native African superstition which was essentially vaccination to stop smallpox, an awful disease that killed Mather’s family. Mather’s slave, renamed Onesimus after the slave that Paul returned to his master, told him of this practice. Mather did his best to encourage his society to do this but felt the sting of rejection for his new ideas because any attempt at relieving disease was considered going against the will of his god and his god’s divine judgment.

We also had Jews migrating in this period since they were persecuted by most other contries that had some form of Christianity as the state religion. For example, Jews were forbidden in England for 300 years. In the book, it describes the plight of Jews that had to leave a South American colony that had changed hands between the Netherlands and Portugal. With Portugal came the Inquisition, so they begged passage to New Amsterdam aka New York City. They were nearly kept from there too, until the Jewish backers of the Dutch traders threatened to pull their backing.

Continue reading “Not So Polite Dinner Conversation – a review of “One Nation, Under Gods”” →