When Time magazine asked in a cover story on April 8, 1966, “Is God Dead?” they received 3,500 angry letters in response. It does not matter, writes Brook Wilensky-Lanford, “that the nuanced theological discussion inside the magazine answered the cover’s question with a tentative no.” Americans, after all, have long been passionate about spiritual matters. Wilensky-Landford’s A God-Shaped Nation: Five Hundred Years of Religion in America traces countless debates and controversies, valiant victories, and violent incidents relating to Americans’ faith over its nearly six hundred pages.
Starting with Spanish Catholic oppression of Native peoples and ending in the current Trump presidency, the author ably and engagingly tells the book traces how competing religious visions became inseparable from the American experiment itself. Puritan Protestants, Indigenous people, and enslaved Africans contributed and preserved sacred practices, and waves of Jews, Buddhist, Daoist, Muslim, Sikh and other minorities have contributed to a constantly evolving religious landscape. America has even produced its own religious brands, including Mormonism, Scientology, and Christian Science.
Wilensky-Lanford highlights often-overlooked events, including Anne Hutchinson’s defiance of Puritan authority, Paiute prophet Wovoka’s Ghost Dance movement, Chinese immigrants building temples in California, and the Millerites awaiting Christ’s return in 1844. Jewish history also occupies an important place in the narrative, particularly through Reform rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise, whose controversial 1883 “treyfa banquet” symbolized both the adaptability and internal tensions of American Judaism. By centering such moments, the author demonstrates how minority faith communities repeatedly challenged the boundaries of religious belonging in the United States. As Wilensky-Landford details at length, the constitutional separation of church and state created unprecedented opportunities for religious expression, but it also intensified competition among groups seeking cultural influence and political authority.
In the epilogue, the author describes her own upbringing as the daughter of a Jewish mother and Christian father, and spends two pages wrestling with the connection between Israel and Judaism. Ultimately, as she concludes, “the American religious story is not fixed; it relies at every junction on human actions and judgements.”
Dr. Stu Halpern is Senior Advisor to the Provost of Yeshiva University. He has edited or coedited 17 books, including Torah and Western Thought: Intellectual Portraits of Orthodoxy and Modernity and Books of the People: Revisiting Classic Works of Jewish Thought, and has lectured in synagogues, Hillels and adult Jewish educational settings across the U.S.
