Tisa Wenger is Professor of American Religious History at Yale Divinity School, with appointments in American Studies, History, and Religious Studies. Her first book, We Have a Religion: The 1920s Pueblo Indian Dance Controversy and American Religious Freedom (University of North Carolina Press, 2009), looked at how the category of “religion” was used to counter efforts to suppress Indian dances. Following that, she expanded on this study with Religious Freedom: The Contested History of an American Ideal (University of North Carolina Press, 2020), and co-edited Religion and U.S. Empire: Critical New Histories (NYU Press, 2022). Her latest work, Spirits of Empire: How Settler Colonialism Made American Religion,was just published by the University of North Carolina Press, and it builds on her earlier studies of race and religion in the context of U.S. empire by examining how a series of compelling figures in both the white settler and Native American communities reconceived religion in the context of early nineteenth-century settler-colonialism.
Samuel Hayim Brody: Let’s start with a basic question on the geographical and temporal scope of the book. Your story is focused on the early nineteenth century, and largely though not exclusively on the Great Lakes region. Can you talk about how and why you narrowed this huge story down to this particular scope?
Tisa Wenger: My second book, Religious Freedom,initially was going to cover the whole scope of U.S. history. There were so many stories that didn’t make it into that book, and this book actually started with a few of the scraps of that one, even though I don’t foreground the theme of religious freedom this time around. For example, the story of the encounter between “the Shawnee prophet,” Tenskwatawa (1775-1836), and William Henry Harrison (1773-1841) was something that I started writing about in the early stages of the religious freedom book. I was thinking all along about this question of how U.S. Empire makes American religion, and that story about Tenskwatawa and Harrison seemed like a good starting point. I concluded that this time and place, this geography, was a productive way to think about that question, because it’s a formative period in U.S. history. It’s a region that was one of the main growing edges of U.S. empire in that period. And it’s a region that hasn’t gotten as much attention as it deserves from historians of American religion. And then, because I have family ties to the Midwest, it was also significant at a personal level for me.
Brody: One of your big concepts, which you return to frequently throughout the book, is the idea of “settler secularism.” I think it is not a concept that many readers will be familiar with. Could you talk about some of the work that it does in the book, and what brought you to this concept as a useful frame for your topic?
Wenger: Yeah, absolutely. That’s a phrase that I’ve coined, so it’s unlikely anyone will be familiar with it! One of the aims of the book is to put settler colonial studies in conversation with what I think of as critical secularism studies. And, of course, with American religious history.
Again, I had been working on the racial and imperial politics of religious freedom. To me, religious freedom is a key pillar for secularism, particularly in the United States. At the same time, I was co-editing a book with Sylvester Johnson on religion and U.S. empire. So I was thinking about the intersections between U.S. empire and American religion, and in all my work, I’ve been concerned with the question of how religion takes shape, how religion is formed, not just the traditions that get described as religion, but the category of religion itself.
Over the years, that question has led me to the scholarship in secularism studies, which sees secularism not just as an absence of religion, or opposition to religion, although it gets caricatured that way in popular discourse. But in critical secularism studies, secularism is understood at two different levels (at least). One would be structures of governance, and the secular state. The secular state, in attempting to provide freedom of religion (not that every secular state has that aim), also seeks to protect the state from religious modes of governance, from religious authority, from being governed by religion. In adjudicating those aims, the secular state necessarily has to define and govern religion, so secularism studies is concerned with thinking about how religion takes shape under this kind of regime.
So, to get back to your question, the term settler secularism itself developed out of this question: how does religion take shape under U.S. empire? And if I think of U.S. empire as a mode of secular governance, an empire that has prided itself on not having an established religion, on granting religious freedom to its subjects, how is religion configured under that regime? And what happens when I put secularism studies in conversation with settler colonial studies, when we recognize that U.S. empire was, in its origins, a settler colonial empire? U.S. empire was initially concerned with expanding westward, and there’s this triumphalist narrative of American history in which the nation just sort of naturally expanded west across the continent. But that narrative conceals the violent process of settler colonial conquest, in which Indigenous nations and Indigenous people were being pushed out and displaced. So, settler colonialism and secularism, to me, are defining features of U.S. empire, and I think these two frameworks together offer a fuller and more accurate understanding of the context in which American religion took shape. So that’s the starting gambit and primary theoretical stakes of the book.
Sam Brody: Thank you. And, I want to say, I think one of the strengths of the book is that even though it does have this very large framework, you really zoom in on specific individuals such as, for example, the Catholic priest Gabriel Richard. I’m inclined to pronounce his name in a French way, is that accurate?
Wenger: As far as I know, yes.
Brody: Yeah, and then there’s the Baptist missionary, Isaac McCoy, and then you also have a really intriguing section on Joseph Smith, the founder of the Latter-Day Saints. When I read a book like this, I sometimes put myself in the place of a student, and in this case, when we talk about how religion is formed, I can imagine a student having a little bit of a short circuit, because they’ll think: Well, Catholicism, isn’t that 2,000 years old? What do you mean it was formed in the 1820s in the United States, right?
But you talk about these very specific experiences that people like Richard encountered, which I find very resonant to the present in ways that can help us explain certain things. So, for example, recently there has been an interesting discourse about converts to Catholicism who appear to be doing it for what they perceive as a political identity that they associate with a kind of traditional Catholicism. And one of the responses to that that you sometimes see is: “Why would anyone convert to Catholicism and then not listen to the Magisterium?” Right? I mean, what’s the point of becoming a Catholic if you’re just gonna Protestantly go and do whatever you want? But in your chapter, you start out with Richard confronting all these people who have gotten married a la façon du pays, without caring that they weren’t in the church, and so on, and this is the congregation that he has to deal with. So you really are discussing, especially with respect to the question of settler secularism, the issue of real estate, which is so important in Catholic history, but also specifically in the history of an expanding settler empire. So, I think this idea that the form or shape of a particular tradition, like Catholicism, in the American context is thoroughly conditioned by this settler imperative, is really one of the facts you allow your reader to sort of see over and over and over with the different figures you look at, no matter how different their religious or theological claims might be.
Wenger: Yes. Well, thank you for stating that aim and structure of the book so clearly, and I’m glad that you found it helpful that I organized the book around these individual stories, because I actually had some anxiety about that along the way. I wasn’t always sure that this very granular approach to the history was the best way to do it. But I like narrative history, and I like featuring the stories of individual people. I think it makes a book more readable and compelling, and more complex, right? Because each individual story has twists and turns, and in fact there are so many more pieces of all of these stories that got left on the cutting room floor.
But the argument is layered through the chapters that you referenced. You can see through these various chapters how different religious traditions are being shaped and reshaped by this settler colonial context, through these individual stories. That’s exactly my aim. And I had some readers along the way of early drafts who said, “All of the chapters seem to have the same argument, even though they’re about totally different people.” I thought, “Yes, that is kind of the point.” But I also wanted there to be a sense that each chapter is adding something new, a new layer, and so with the chapter on Richard and Catholicism, I increasingly foregrounded the theme of land. And it’s not that land isn’t relevant to the other stories. Obviously it is, but this just felt like a story where I could foreground and center that part of it, because Richard himself is investing in land purchases in Illinois. And just coincidentally, to my amazement, I found these letters between him and William McIntosh, who is named in the case Johnson v. McIntosh that establishes the doctrine of discovery in U.S. law! This very famous Supreme Court case, and I found in the Richard papers these letters from William McIntosh, and I was shocked to discover that this was actually the same William McIntosh. It was one of those big archival finds. As far as I know, nobody else has noticed this connection in any of the published work about Gabriel Richard.
So, obviously Catholicism existed long before the founding of the United States. But when I talk about how religion is made by settler colonialism, it’s not intended to be a story of pure, exclusive origins. I think a quest for origins is always futile. So, of course, there’s a Catholicism there, prior to this, but here, a specifically American flavor of Catholicism is taking shape through this history. And some of the traditions that I discuss in the book actually are being newly created at this time in history, like the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or Mormonism. Mormonism isn’t only about settler colonialism, of course, but there’s a settler colonial context in which it’s formed from the very start.
There’s something similar happening with the Indigenous religious movements that I describe in the book. Indigenous ancestral traditions were around for much longer than the history here, obviously, but they were changing, taking new shape at this time. Every tradition gets formed and reformed in historical context. I have a chapter on Kenekuk, who was known as the Kickapoo Prophet, and his visions and prophecies were clearly speaking to the crises that his people faced at that time. I once had an editor at a university press, years ago, suggest to me, after my first book came out, that I might write a book about how Native American religion was invented. I did not like that idea, and I still don’t, because it seemed like a harmful distortion. But I think in this book, I’m able to show how the context of settler colonialism led Native people to reinvent their traditions. Just as at the same time, even though they were in a very different position, white settlers were doing the same thing. Everybody in the United States was reinventing their traditions. I think that editor’s suggestion was always in the back of my mind, but I wanted to show that this kind of reinvention is not unique to Native Americans. Settler colonialism reshaped all of American religion.
Brody: You just needed that framework that would be able to put it in the general context alongside the settlers’ own religion. So it didn’t seem like some sort of exposé, or something.
Wenger: Right, exactly, or as if Native American traditions are newly invented and others are not.
Brody: Okay, that’s actually a great segue for my next question. You discuss the responses of Shawnee, Anishinaabe (Odawa, Ojibwe, and Potawatomi) and Kickapoo leaders to the ever-increasing and constant encroachment of U.S. empire. I think of it as a kind of spectrum of responses. (Although you could really question this, and I question this myself: why does this appear as a spectrum?). But on one end is violent resistance, armed resistance, to U.S. empire. And at the other end is a kind of creative appropriation or adaptation of the settler categories, their ways of thinking, including the category of religion. And an attempt to deploy those categories in ways that resist white colonialist understandings, and that includes conversion to Christianity, which you discuss in a number of places.
I noticed, when I was reading, that I had a certain affective response that I suspect that I won’t be the only one to have, and I wonder if you anticipate it, or if you are thinking about this type of reader. I have a certain attraction or pull towards one end of the spectrum. I’m going to quote you here toward the end of the book. You describe people that you don’t talk about because they’re so far outside colonial control that they’re beyond the purview of this book: “those who resisted the category of religion entirely and, as kin with the land and its spirits, maintained entirely Indigenous ways of organizing social worlds.” What I noticed was, on the one hand, I feel a certain pull toward the authenticity that I impute to those who remain untouched by the colonial mindset. And yet, on the other hand, I think one of the effects of your book is also to show the dignity and creativity involved in this effort to adapt, take control of, appropriate, and redeploy things like religion in general—the category itself—or Christianity in particular. That effort can be seen as, and here you quote the Ojibwe intellectual Gerald Vizenor, “emerging technologies of survivance.” Or maybe “emerging technologies” might be you, and “survivance” is Vizenor?
Wenger: Correct.
Brody: So, if you could talk about how you approached those different responses, and also if you were really thinking about that affective possibility for your readers who might be thinking “oh, here come the bad guys, they’re bringing their bad guy religion, and oh no, you converted to it, what are you doing,” right? But you want to show something more complicated to be going on there.
Wenger: Absolutely. I think there is a temptation for many people to romanticize the more overt forms of Indigenous resistance, and that’s understandable. I feel that myself sometimes, but I do want to kind of push back against that.
You quoted my line there about those beyond the purview of this book, and yes, I wanted to acknowledge that I’m not describing everybody. I would be hard-pressed to say that there are any Indigenous people in North America now who are not touched by or reacting to empire. Indigenous people are all in the modern world, right? But there’s also a lot beyond my knowledge, and I want to acknowledge that. Indigenous peoples have had a remarkable ability to persist and resist, and to maintain traditions that are outside of the view of settlers, which is part of that resistance. And I’m one of those settlers. So, I just want to leave space for that possibility.
I find useful Audra Simpson’s concept of the politics of refusal alongside the politics of recognition. I discuss this at the beginning of the chapter on Kenekuk. And I see those—building on Simpson, who also says this—I see those two Indigenous strategies as not necessarily in opposition to each other, or in conflict, but oftentimes necessarily complementary or layered. Some Native people and Native communities are probably going to be more on one side than on the other, but also many toggle back and forth, and that’s the way that I started thinking about Kenekuk. The politics of refusal is precisely about rejecting settler categories and structures and systems, and saying we’re just going to maintain Indigenous ways. But that kind of refusal is also always in dialogue with those imperial forms. It’s very similar to the way that scholars of Christian fundamentalism would say that fundamentalism takes shape in response to modernism, right? So, it’s not that it’s invented completely whole cloth, but it’s emphasizing certain things in response to new situations. And I think Indigenous politics of refusal work in a parallel way in some respects. The politics of recognition, on the other hand, is about saying: in the world in which we live, we can gain real benefits for our people by gaining recognition and legibility under these imperial forms. And again, the same community can do both. And probably needs to do both at different times, in different respects.
I see this spectrum that you were referring to in that way. Take Tenskwatawa, the Shawnee prophet who very famously, with his brother, Tecumseh, took the lead in this Indigenous movement to resist U.S. western expansion at the very beginning of the 19th century. It’s such an interesting story, and it’s also so interesting to me when I learned that early in his visionary career, he was seen by some white Christians who were in Ohio and Indiana at the time, the Shakers in particular, as a real prophet who was receiving revelations from God. He had really interesting exchanges with them and others along the way, so that he was not always seen oppositionally by all white people. And yet, he became this sort of figure of the dangerous Indian prophet in the eyes of the state and in the eyes of Governor William Henry Harrison.
Brody: You raised something interesting for me when you mentioned the scholarship on fundamentalism. My area is modern Jewish thought. One of the consistent themes in the literature is always this question of “assimilation,” and the dynamic is quite similar, in the sense that there is this whole range of imaginary possibilities, and they’re all imagined in response to the same circumstances. People who end up being considered the authentic continuation of pre-modern Judaism are also always innovating their responses. There’s a classic instance: one of the founders of what we today call ultra-Orthodoxy, the Hungarian rabbi Moses Sofer, is known for his quote, “Everything new is forbidden by the Torah.” And what’s so funny about this quote is that it’s a citation from a passage of the Mishnah that’s about tithing, and it’s talking about a new sheaf of grain after a certain deadline has passed. It’s a new grain, and therefore that’s forbidden to tithe at a certain point. So he is doing an inventive interpretation! At the very moment of his founding of fundamentalist ultra-orthodoxy, he’s doing a creative interpretation of an ancient text in order to say that everything new is forbidden. So, this irony is just embedded right there. And this idea that Moses Mendelssohn is over here with his enlightenment, and then you have Moses Sofer over there with his fundamentalism, it’s a very similar spectrum of contradictions, and it seems to really just come down to the contradictions being arranged differently.
Wenger: Yes, that’s really insightful. I do think it’s a similar spectrum of contradictions, as you put it. My approach here to the Native people who became Christians, like the many Odawa who became Catholic for example, is informed by recent scholarship on Indigenous Christianity that emphasizes the agency and creativity of Native Christians themselves. They cannot simply be seen as sort of dupes of the colonial system, or merely as sellouts, or whatever critical frame a certain generation of scholars might have put upon them, or even what their critics at the time within their own communities might have said. They found ways to remake and reformulate Indigenous cultural values through Christianity, and they found ways to remake Christianity in ways that were compatible with Indigenous values and Indigenous interests and in a way that was legible to the state. That made it possible for them to survive as communities.
I teach a class on Native Americans and Christianity that I’m offering this semester. We just went on a field trip to visit the Mohegan Tribal Museum, the Tantaquidgeon Museum, which is in Uncasville, about an hour from here in New Haven. It’s, incidentally, the oldest Native-run and managed museum in the country. It was founded by a Mohegan woman, Gladys Tantaquidgeon, in 1931. There’s also an old church there, the Mohegan Church. There are no worship services currently being held there, but it’s an old, New England-style Congregational church right up the hill from the museum. That church was built in 1831, and the museum staff explained to us that the Mohegans chose to build that church at least in part to avoid removal. They established it right after the Removal Act was passed in 1830.
So Christianity was very helpful to many Native people. Long before that there were many Native Christians in the Northeast, in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, and Samson Occom [Mohegan, 1723-1792] was one of the leading figures in that earlier movement. Over time, that church helped the Mohegan Tribe hold on to some of its land. Whether or not they would have actually been removed without it, who knows, but it certainly helped them build alliances with their white neighbors in the 19th century. When it became possible to gain federal recognition as a tribe, in the 1990s, that church building and the land on which it stood was the only land that had been tribally held in perpetuity. They probably wouldn’t have gained federal recognition as a tribe without that church.
Brody: Thank you. So that leads me to my next question. I’m thinking now about the flip side of this spectrum, which is on the settler side. You really do a lot to illuminate the conflict on the settler side about religious missions. That was so interesting to me, because I had this idea in my mind of the mission as one of the quintessential colonial tools, and of course it’s a big part of the colonial apparatus to have missions. But I didn’t think about the people on the settler side who just thought, Oh, this is in my way. If these people convert, and they become Christian, then they’re gonna tell me I can’t take their land, you know? And so, Actually, I don’t want them to convert to Christianity. I just want to be a genocidal racist.
Wenger: Yes.
Brody: So I had not really thought of that complexity before. The idea of the missionary as the sort of liberal bleeding heart in the situation, even though they’re still part of the colonial apparatus. And honestly, it put me in mind of much, much later theory, like in Albert Memmi’s Colonizer and the Colonized [1957], he talks about these two categories, “the colonizer who refuses” and “the colonizer who accepts.” In his context, which is mid-twentieth-century colonial North Africa, “the colonizer who refuses” is a sort of left-wing Algerian or Tunisian Frenchman who wants to be on the side of the colonized, but it doesn’t really work, and he can’t resolve his contradictions. Whereas “the colonizer who accepts” is the one who just says: Yes, we’re superior, we’re here to take over everything and subordinate or destroy your culture. And I would never really have thought to project any version of that backward, but it seemed like something like that did, in fact, exist, and I thought it was so interesting. If you wouldn’t mind just saying a little bit about how those dynamics of conversion, and how the fact that Native people could become Christian actually posed a potential threat to white settler designs in some instances.
Wenger: Yeah, absolutely. It’s interesting you put it that way. I probably could have made that kind of comparison overt. This point comes out most strongly in the chapter on Isaac McCoy, who was such a sincere guy who saw himself as working in the interests of the Indians. He saw himself as a benevolent and true “friend of the Indians,” you know? Even as he was advocating for removal, which he conceptualized as colonization. He wanted to see the eastern Indians colonize the West, and bring Christianity to the West, and by doing so, he thought they were going to gain clear title to the land that they settled there, which was such a strange formulation. But he really believed this was in the best interest of all the Native people.
Certainly, not all missionaries agreed with that idea, but in the larger political discourse, they were seen as the white people who were on the Indians’ side, and they understood themselves that way. Native people often appealed to them as potential allies, and some missionaries did serve as allies against Indian removal. Not McCoy, but some others did. When I was reading in McCoy’s voluminous papers, all throughout you can see these critiques of McCoy, from these “frontier” settlers—and I’m using the word “frontier” advisedly as their word—who hated the missionaries for precisely this reason, because they saw them as people who stood in their way. Because if the justification for removal was that the Indians were uncivilized, and if Christianity brings civilization, then, can you still justify removal if they’re Christian? I think here of the Five Civilized Tribes in the South, such as the Cherokee—they were called the Five Civilized Tribes because many of them were Christian; the Cherokee also had a tribal government with a constitution, their own written language, and rates of literacy were higher in the Cherokee Nation than they were among the white population in surrounding states. But they were still forcibly removed because their land was simply too desirable for the slave economy. So, becoming Christian didn’t necessarily prevent that from happening. But some white settlers feared that it would be harder to justify.
Brody: This reminds me, actually, of another connection. It’s almost as if this debate on the white Christian side is between people whom you could describe, perhaps, as people who really believe in this new idea of religion that is purely inward, cognitive, or theological, and all that. And then these other people who are sort of like, “No you fools, it’s religio-racial! You dupes!” And the connection that it draws for me is actually to a lot of the scholarship on race that goes back to the 15th century Spanish context, where you have almost this same issue with conversion. First, you have these mass forced conversions, and then suddenly there’s this suspicion that these “Marranos” and “Moriscos” are not really true Christians, and then you get the division between “Old Christians” and “New Christians,” and you get the Inquisition. And it feels very similar: “Oh, you thought that baptism was it? No, you fools. It’s been race this whole time. Religion is about peoplehood. And not just about, we poured some water on your head and you said some things.” And so… it feels like this dialectic is very generative for drawing connections between the U.S. settler context and these other moments, both past and future.
Wenger: Add in another point of comparison, too, to debates in the British colonies, particularly in the South, around enslaved people, and whether one could enslave Christians. Rebecca Goetz wrote a really good book some time ago called The Baptism of Early Virginia: How Christianity Created Race that talks about this. And also Katharine Gerbner’s book, Christian Slavery: Conversion and Race in the Protestant Atlantic World. They are talking about how these debates among white Christians in the slaveholding class are building on a European Christian tradition in which part of the justification for slavery is heathenism. And baptism bestows upon you standing in civil society. So enslaved people in the colonies actually made the case for themselves: When they converted to Christianity, they should therefore be freed. So there were laws passed in Virginia, etc., specifically rejecting that, specifically saying that conversion to Christianity does not change the civil status of an enslaved person. So it’s very similar to these other contexts.
Kathryn Gin Lum’s book Heathen: Religion and Race in American History is also helpful to think about these longer connections and the way that heathenism is conceptualized. You mentioned this sort of interiority aspect of religion, but I think it’s also the revivalist Christianity that is all about conversion and evangelism, and that, too, is happening in the early 19th century, and McCoy and these Baptist missionaries are part of that. They’re driven to convert the heathen, and of course they’ve got these racial hierarchies as well. It’s not that they’re immune to that. But I think there is an alternative potential in Christianity that suggests that Jesus’ message is for everybody, and there’s a kind of potential there that is one of the reasons that some enslaved people and some Native people embrace it and claim it and then use that as a resource to push back against the religio-racial hierarchies that the missionaries continue to work within. So there’s tension within the Christian tradition, and then alongside that you have plenty of White settlers, whether they saw themselves as Christian or not, who just said, “No way!”
Brody: That’s right. I have one question left. The subtitle of the book is How Settler Colonialism Made American Religion. You focus on various types of white settler Christians including Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians, and also people outside the Protestant mainstream including Catholics and Mormons. And you also talk about the different Native peoples that we discussed earlier. But I’m interested now, if you don’t mind, in going a little bit beyond the scope of your book, since I think you persuasively argue that this is all laying a groundwork that is going to shape American religion, inescapably.
In the introduction, you have a very brief reference to your own ancestors, Amish and Mennonite people, and I’m wondering how you might see your thesis as applying to, for example, groups that mainly arrived after the Civil War. How should American Jews or Hindus or Buddhists or Sikhs think of themselves as being heirs to this legacy? Are there parallels in the discussions about reparations, for example? [Some] argue that someone who immigrated here in 1905, if they are classified as white, they may never have owned slaves or benefited from slave wealth—they still benefit from the aftereffects of the structure. So in this case, it might not be a question of “benefit” purely, it might be a much more complicated issue. If you don’t mind, just a little speculation about, well, let’s say somebody’s family came here from Pakistan in the 1980s, and they’re going to a mosque in Paterson, New Jersey, how might they think about themselves in relation to the story that you tell?
Wenger: Yeah, I’m not sure I do have a good answer to that question. First of all, as I suggest in the book, there’s so much that could be, and I hope will be, filled in. I’m sure people will argue back against me in lots of ways, but I do suggest that there’s a kind of structure here for what religion looks like that is taking shape through this history, that then affects later generations, and others who then come into that system as immigrants. In an early draft of the introduction, I had so many qualifiers because, of course, I’m not trying to say this is the only thing that affects American religion. There’s lots of other things that happen, lots of other stories to be told. But my editor made me take that out, because he said it sounded too weak: “You don’t need all these qualifiers!”
But I do think the story of immigration to America, the story of coming to America for freedom, for prosperity, for all of these things is actually a product of the 19th century, right? That is when the familiar immigrant narrative took shape. This part may not have as much to do with religion specifically, but I think it’s all in there together—because of the availability of cheap land to immigrants. And the reason that land is available is that Native people are being kicked out, and that’s the fundamental economic engine of the United States in the nineteenth century. So that’s the immigrant story that takes shape. Of course, immigrants coming in the twentieth century are not benefiting directly from that anymore. But I do think that they’re coming into a cultural landscape in which the shape of religion, the expected legal and cultural molds for religion, and the script for what an immigrant experience is supposed to be, has all been conditioned by these nineteenth-century stories.
Brody: Thank you so much. I really appreciate your taking the time to talk with me, and I’m sure the readers of the Political Theology Network will as well.
