Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Thomas A. Tweed is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He is the author of The American Encounter with Buddhism, 1844-1912: Victorian Culture and the Limits of Dissent (1992).

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Retelling U.S. Religious History

University of California Press

During the early decades of the seventeenth century, Anglican Thomas Morton and his friends, British and Native American, erected a huge maypole at Ma-re Mount, in the Massachusetts Bay colony, around which they danced, drank, and otherwise "Revelled." A few decades later, masked Pueblo Indians performed the traditional kachina dances with the permission of a Spanish governor, Bernardo López de Mendizábal, who reportedly said that he too would have danced "if it were not for the necessity of upholding his dignity as governor." In both instances, opponents associated the dances with "paganism" and with sex. In the words of William Bradford, governor of Plymouth colony, Morton and his friends danced around the maypole "many days together, inviting the Indian women for their consorts, dancing and frisking together like so many fairies, or furies, rather; and worse practices."1 "During the kachina dance, the Franciscan inquisition records report that the Indians appeared naked, wearing only "a kind of hood, or mask, having a small hole through which they can see a little." Afterward, again according to the Franciscans, the Indians "sometimes . . .enter whatever house they wish and have carnal intercourse with the woman whom they desire."2 Attempts were made to suppress both dances, the former successful, the latter not,

While the two stories unfold rather differently, we have similar characters—Indians, Christians, and government officials—in each. In the first, Morton, an Anglican layperson, is depicted as the "Lord of Misrule" by the Puritan governor, William Bradford, while in the second, Mendizábal, the Jesuit-educated governor of the colony of New Mexico, is the villain in the eyes of his Franciscan inquisitors. Both Morton and Mendizábal were removed from their respective situations as a result of their flagrant violation of Puritan and Franciscan sensibilities. Nonetheless, the outcome for the respective native peoples was vastly different. In New England, the native peoples were largely exterminated by a combination of displacement, disease, and war at the hands of the Europeans. In New Mexico, however, the Pueblo successfully revolted against Spanish colonial and missionary rule in 1780 and remained independent for many years thereafter. They retained much of their traditional land (the right to which was protected by the Crown and defended by the friars) and religion (although attacked by the friars), and effected a vigorous synthesis between the Pueblo and Catholic traditions which has lasted down to the present.3

Juxtaposing these two stories about the body reveals themes we might not see otherwise. In the story about New England, Indians for the most part die or retreat with the frontier, renegades are "tamed" or expelled with the coming of "civilization," and New Englanders of British Protestant descent maintain a sense of their genetic and religious "purity." In the story about New Mexico, the Indians and their culture survive in place, and the mixing of peoples and religions occurs and is acknowledged, if not applauded, from the start. In time, Euro-American Protestants conquer New Mexico, but the voices of the colonize—Indian and Mexican—do not disappear. When we begin with the body as the site for our story, and specifically with sexuality (biological and symbolic), several themes are highlighted—contact and boundary, "purity" and "mixing."

In the Protestant-dominated histories of American religion, British Protestant attitudes toward sexuality are largely taken for granted and their use of sexual imagery is for the most part ignored. Martin Marty and Robert Handy focus explicit attention on Protestant attempts to forge a Christian America, but do not highlight the role that the regulation of sexuality played in that process. The most recent textbooks of American religion tend to discuss sexuality explicitly only when it "deviates" from the norm. For example, Sydney E. Ahlstrom, Mark Noll, Winthrop Hudson, and John Corrigan all discuss the unusual sexual practices of the Shakers, the Oneida Community, and the Mormons. Ahlstrom alone alludes to the sexual imagery common in nativist writings about Roman Catholics, Mormons, and Masons. In contrast, Catherine L. Albanese's shift to an emphasis on spirituality allows matters of sexuality to surface at regular intervals throughout her narrative.4 In most recent accounts, however, sexuality remains as a persistent but mostly hidden subtext. References to Protestant morality and moral reform encode tacit assumptions about normative sexual practices, while non-normative sexuality surfaces, most often through allusion and association, on the margins of the narrative, as a characteristic attribute of nondominant groups.

To take sexuality as a starting point for rethinking American religious history is to place discourse about the body, and more specifically the sexual body (here defined in terms of the biological capacity for arousal), at the center of the narrative.5 As religious history, the narrative is thus centered at a point where religious traditions engage with human biological capacities. As American history, the narrative is centered on the engagement among traditions within the legally defined boundaries of what now constitutes the United States. Within these parameters, I have structured the narrative around questions of legitimacy. First, what is legitimate (or illegitimate) sex? Second, since legitimate sex is so frequently limited to marriage, what counts as legitimate marriage? And third, to focus on the more symbolic dimensions, who exemplifies or is associated with legitimacy or illegitimacy and on what basis?

I have taken as my task to sketch the outlines of a story that illumines the interconnections between religion and sexuality within a frame-work of state formation. Although such a framework runs the risk of reproducing a traditional narrative structure, I do not see how we can escape at least an implicit linkage between questions of state formation and the task of American religious history in its synoptic mode, since without state formation we have no Americans. What makes the traditional Puritanism-to-pluralism narrative traditional is not its emphasis on state formation, but the way it depicts that process. By beginning the narrative with native peoples and Europeans in New Mexico as well as New England, I try to avoid reading later British-American dominance back into my account of the colonial era. Additionally, focusing on state formation illumines relationships of power in the resolution of questions of legitimacy. Such a framework highlights the law as a quintessential market not only of the "state," but of that which is constructed as normatively "American." Given this task, I argue that although various cultures with diverse laws and customs regarding sexuality came together in what is now the United States, that which has been normatively American until the 1960s has been rooted, though not exclusively, in a heritage of medieval canon law and later attempts on the part of Euro-American Protestantism to maintain its purity and power in the face of pluralism.

The narrative is divided into three sections. The first explores issues of sexuality in the seventeenth-century encounter between Europeans and Native Americans, with a specific focus on New...