What Counts as American Religion?

A new history reconsiders who belongs in American religious history and what should count as religion

Thomas Tweed’s transformative new history, Religion in the Lands That Became America: A New History (Yale University Press), begins and ends in the same place: a farm outside of Waco, Texas, where in 1970 excavators discovered the remains of an 11,100-year-old adult male and young girl at a site called Horn Shelter No. 2, named for the Baptist couple who owned the land. The site represents, for Tweed, the first conclusive evidence of religion in the Americas: the bodies are aligned in a westward direction, with an assortment of beads and coyote teeth placed carefully around the burial. These and other material remnants demonstrate the existence of metaphysical anguish, spatial thinking and analogical reasoning—all of which, according to Tweed, are required for the development of religion.

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