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In the years before the land of Indiana became the state of Indiana, it was home to a wide variety of Native American tribes, including the Miami and Shawnee who were, by historic standards “recent” arrivals in the 1700s. These tribes were pushed into the area by the expansion of European settlers on the Atlantic coast. The tribes had their own religious beliefs, but those customs and traditions were pressured by their encounter with Europeans, largely beginning with French exploration of the area in the 1670s. First contact was between Catholic Christians and Natives, and it wouldn’t be until the American Revolution that Natives had much contact with Protestant Christians, ranging from Moravian missionaries to settlers of a wide variety of denominations.

Wars, treaties, and the eventual displacement of the Natives often carried religious overtones but also led to conversion—some tribes embraced Catholicism, others Protestantism. The Second Great Awakening along the frontier, which is often remembered for its influence on the pioneers of the late 1700s and early 1800s, also gave rise to revivalism within some of the Native population, most notably in those who flocked to the anti-expansionist tribal confederacy led by Tecumseh and his brother, Tenskwatawa, also known as the Prophet.

This history carries with it many of the reactions and tensions that will be better recognized after Indiana achieved statehood. Catholicism and Protestantism were both foundational components of Indiana’s religious history. For instance, the first Catholic church in Indiana was built in Vincennes in 1732. Yet, Indiana’s settlement was largely influenced by a wide variety of Protestants, not all of whom spoke English.

Perhaps the largest ethnic group, nearly from the start, was German immigrants (or their descendants). Even as immigrants spoke the same language when they assimilated, they did not always worship in the same churches. German immigrants could be found in Catholic parishes as well as Lutheran or Evangelical churches across the state, in both rural and urban environments. In places like Fort Wayne or Seymour, the presence of German immigrants meant that both Catholic and Protestant Germans were settling in large numbers.

Because the majority of Hoosiers were Protestant, Protestant immigrants tended, throughout the nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries, to have an easier time acclimating to the Hoosier State. The Reformation divide was quite real, but it was not absolute. Protestants usually enjoyed good relations, regardless of ethnicity, with their Catholic neighbors and vice-versa. This was especially true in rural communities, where denominational hierarchies were not as entrenched, even if denominational differences mattered.

While there was a good deal of anti-Catholicism in Hoosier Protestant churches, there was also a good deal of anti-Protestantism in Catholic parishes. While often carrying theological overtones, the “walls” around Catholic neighborhoods were constructed not just by Protestants keeping Catholics “out,” but also by priests (and parishioners) intent on preserving both their faith and ethnic uniqueness in a Hoosier environment that was awash in Protestant Americanism. In places like Indianapolis, you could find parishes that, while united in their allegiance to Rome, were also concerned with preserving their own ethnic traditions from Americanization. Hence, there were English, German, Irish, Italian, and Slovenian Catholic parishes that, at times, were just as worried about having members intermarry with their fellow Catholics of different ethnicity as they were about dealing with Protestants.

These tensions did boil over at times. The most obvious example came with the rise of the Second Ku Klux Klan in Indiana during the 1920s. Rebirthed in an age of fraternal organizations and “Lost Cause” nostalgia, the hooded order found a home in Indiana not primarily because of its openly racist past or present antipathy towards African Americans but because the Hoosier State’s chapter leader, D.C. Stephenson, perfectly blended and twisted popular sentiments about patriotism, Protestantism, and the defense of Prohibition. Borrowing phrases generated during World War I (such as “100 percent Americanism”), the Klan vowed to defend native born Americans and “their” values. Furthermore, utilizing latent and overt anti-Catholicism, it promised to defend Protestant America from the clutches of a Papal conspiracy of domination—a counter to the Knights of Columbus. The organization also promised to enforce dry laws when local law enforcement failed to act, as the prohibition of alcohol was a widely endorsed reform among nearly all Protestant denominations. The chief target of the Klan in Indiana was not the state’s relatively small African American population but rather its immigrant Catholics.

With the demise of the Klan and the traumatic and unifying experiences of the Great Depression and World War II, the Catholic-Protestant tensions that in many ways had defined the state’s history with immigration and religion began to recede somewhat. On the Christian side of the ledger, there were also numbers of Eastern Orthodox churches that appeared in certain parts of the state, particularly in northwestern Indiana and Indianapolis, where ethnicity and immigrant status were equally important to both the communities of faith and to their larger neighborhoods. Indiana also saw a small, but important, number of Jewish immigrants during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as well, with most settling in urban areas, particularly Indianapolis. Here the same patterns can be seen of the largely secularized pressure for assimilation often running up against the desire to retain cultural and ethnic uniqueness.

While the state’s Judeo-Christians found common ground on things like anti-Communism, the historic trends regarding immigration were still very much at work in the latter half of the twentieth and into the early twenty-first centuries. Immigrant workers spoke new languages and sometimes brought with them new faiths. Hoosiers now included Middle Easterners and East Asians, and with them new houses of worship in the Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, and Islamic traditions. But Indiana also saw immigrants who were Christian, both Catholic and Protestant. Here, too, there was diversity. Immigrants from Central and South America, while largely Catholic, also had a large number of Protestants (especially from Pentecostal denominations) among them—even before their arrival in Indiana. Not unlike earlier German immigration, native Spanish speakers were soon at home in both rural and urban Indiana. Likewise, Hoosier Koreans, Chinese, and Burmese might be found worshiping in Methodist, Baptist, or Presbyterian churches. These new arrivals often found support not just from within their ethnic or immigrant communities, but also from established denominational and para-church organizations staffed by native born Hoosiers. They also, at times, found opposition from their neighbors, with acceptance coming over time and only after some initial concerns.

The faith traditions of immigrant Hoosiers might be more diverse in the twenty-first century, but their experiences among themselves, their communities, and their fellow Hoosiers follow similar patterns that can be seen not just in the state’s history but in the nation as a whole.