This course has two tasks. The first task is to orient students to the broad and complex topic of religion in the Americas. The second is to understand concepts of religion that scholars, practitioners, and states have used to interpret their own contexts.

We approach the topic of religion in the Americas as an invitation to a thought experiment: How does it change when we center different standpoints? There are three units in the class. The first unit thinks about the history of religion in the Americas through the lens of settler-colonial conquest; the second unit does so through the lens of slavery and its afterlives; the third unit centers themes of migration, citizenship, and the U.S. nation-state. These units chronologically overlap. We move forward in time and then backtrack to move forward again with our attentions attuned to new dynamics of power and meaning. We do not “leave behind” any unit when we transition out of it. Rather, we begin to notice how the different parts interweave, how histories of black religion interweave with histories of indigenous practice, how immigrant narratives take up and modify histories of conquest and slavery, and how ideas of what is and is not “religious” freedom emerge in and through formations of race, sexuality, gender, and nation.

It is impossible to be exhaustive when approaching such a broad topic as “religion in the Americas”—there are any number of themes around which we might center our forays, and one could spend a lifetime covering one religious tradition in one region within this vast geography—so our primary goal is to develop a set interpretive skills that can apply across a liberal arts education. The assignments in this course are designed to build your skills as critical readers and interpreters, as well as to create frameworks for you to explore themes that follow from and surpass this class.

This syllabus was created for the Young Scholars in American Religion program.