American Religious History

Late last year Pennsylvania’s Governor Josh Shapiro interjected himself forcefully into the uproar over former University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill’s Congressional testimony (in which she failed to say that calling for “the genocide of Jews” would necessarily violate the school’s code of conduct) and the events on the Penn campus that would soon culminate in her resignation. The governor came out strongly against antisemitism in all its forms – never bad in itself. But Shapiro’s widely reported speech on Sunday, December 10, 2023, at Philadelphia’s Rodeph Shalom synagogue, in which he proclaimed, “Hate has no place here,” misnamed the chief problem that had plagued Penn and a number of other universities this past fall.

In 1897 the German-American philosopher and editor, Paul Carus, was searching for an American painter to present Americans with a visual image of Buddha, “not according to Japanese and Chinese style, but according to more modern American notions’” (p. 111). Through such means, Carus hoped to attract more of his countrymen to the Asian faith. Carus’s quest, which proved unsuccessful, may be taken as a symbol of the predicament facing the two to three thousand European-descended American Buddhists of his day: they were drawn to Buddhism as a radical alternative to the Judeo-Christian religions of their upbringing, but they were unwilling to break with some of the basic assumptions of those traditions.

During the last three decades of the nineteenth century a fascinating debate took place inside the Masonic Fraternity of northern California. This debate centered on the question: Is Freemasonry a religion? It is relevant today for two reasons. For one, this debate was not an isolated phenomenon. There is evidence the same controversy was occurring at this time not only in northern California but across many jurisdictions of the Fraternity in the United States.

This video presentation is part of the Worldwide Exemplification of Freemasonry, a Masonic lecture series produced by the Grand Lodge of Indiana. It was first shown on December 24, 2011.

The historical study of American fraternal organizations can yield surprising insights into the complex social processes associated with the term assimilation. A look at the Masonic fraternity in Gilded Age San Francisco provides a case in point. There the Freemasons brought together foreign-born and native-born Protestants and Jews to form a distinct subset within the broad middle class of the city. By examining in detail the extent of Jewish integration within the fraternity, it is possible to show some of the accomplishments and limitations in this process of Masonic identity formation.

Evangelical Protestantism occupies an established place of prominence in the history of the American West. Successive outbursts of revivalism, which enlivened rural areas and cities alike during the nineteenth century, and the great interdenominational associations to promote Bible-reading, Sabbath-keeping and temperance which followed in their wake did much to bring social order and civilization to the vast regions of new settlement. Symbolically capping this united spiritual effort during the post-Civil War decades stood the Evangelical Alliance, a national body of Protestant leaders in roughly forty cities formed to coordinate the multi-faceted evangelical crusade.

On June 7, 2021, the NPR show, “Here and Now,” aired a segment on the 400th birthday of Rebecca Nurse, broadcast from the Rebecca Nurse Homestead in Danvers (formerly Salem Village), Massachusetts. Readers of Witches of Massachusetts Bay will doubtless recognize Nurse as one of the most well-known of the 20 individuals executed at Salem for alleged…

After publishing “Traditional Understanding Overshadows Academic Explanations at Rebecca Nurse Commemoration” by Tony Fels, a fascinating discussion ensued in the Comments section between Tony Fels and Margo Burns. Since readers often skip the Comments section, I wanted to share this important conversation about the meaning of the Salem confessions. As Tony put it, “The Salem witch hunt is one of those subjects that simply crosses the boundaries between what interests academics and what interests the general public. We’re all involved in its meaning simply as people, as evidenced again and again by events like the 400th anniversary of Rebecca Nurse’s birthday.”

A moral and religious fraternal practice within the Judeo-Christian family, Freemasonry (or Masonry) arose in Britain early in the 18th century and quickly spread to the European continent and American colonies. The movement derives its name from the work of the masons of King Solomon’s temple, whose physical labor in constructing this biblical house of worship is taken as a model for the task of building one’s character in the modern world.

Historians of American religion have recently turned their attention to the subject of regional variations in the expressions of faith. Not surprisingly, New England and the South have led the way among regions in offering material for hypotheses about geographic religious distinctiveness. But California, a state large and populous enough perhaps to be considered a region of its own, may now also claim a bold interpretation to account for its religious character in the nineteenth century.

In 1871 San Francisco’s Masonic Mirror reprinted a story that had first appeared a decade earlier and served throughout the Gilded Age as a favorite among fraternalists. Written by James Linen, a local Mason, the account was entitled, “The First Masonic Funeral in San Francisco.” It told of how on an August day in 1849, very early in the morning, a corpse was found washed ashore on a beach at the edge of the gold rush city. Upon examination, the body presented a startling sight: