It was not uncommon to see among the crowds “in carriages, in wagons, on horses, on burros, or on foot” entire families in the company of “some little one deformed from birth or injured by accident, whose case is beyond the curative power of the most skilful physician.” When they arrived, these families would approach a small hole cut in the church floor—el pocito, the “little well,” as it is called—and scoop out “a small amount of the sacred earth and make a kind of tea or drink of it.… Those who come long distances usually take back with them a small quantity of the earth as a safeguard for the future.” In cases of illness so severe that the infirm could not be brought to Chimayo, Chimayo could be brought home a handful at a time.
Those who made use of the powers of el pocito did not concern themselves with how the miracles began (“How and when the healing virtues of the sacred earth of this favored spot were first manifested, not even tradition tells us,” the 1915 account reports), but it is generally accepted that the local Tewa people visited this site for much the same purpose long before the first Spanish missionaries arrived. The church was built here, in other words, because the ground itself was already regarded as holy.
Founded by Christians on land sacred to people who had lived there for millennia, El Santuario de Chimayo might be seen as a reply to the long-ago challenge put before Native Americans to abandon their cultures or die. The answer given, centuries in the making, was that if they must be changed by the faith brought across the ocean, then that faith itself would be transformed as well.
From the intersection of these two conflicting traditions, which first squared off during that meeting of the gods on the island of San Salvador more than five hundred years ago, there arose a religious site of interest to pilgrims who might consider themselves Roman Catholic, Native American, both, or neither. As the shrine’s own welcoming materials state, “Visitors to El Santuario come from all over the world and represent many diverse religious and cultural beliefs. Many are pilgrims who walk long distances, sometimes barefoot, sometimes carrying large wooden crosses. Some visitors are Jews, Hindus, Muslims or Buddhists who come initially out of simple curiosity. Some are blessed with the belief that they are at a place of God that transcends those things which tend to separate us.”
It is likely only a coincidence that the shrine’s description of the visitors to its crater in the sacred soil echoes precisely the same diverse people of faith President Obama had in mind when he wrote, “Whatever we once were, we are no longer just a Christian nation.” Yet coincidence though it may be, it is not a meaningless one. After all, the history told by this “little well” in New Mexico belongs equally to all Americans. There is no sign here of a city upon a hill that must be breached or defended, only the very stuff of which the country is made.
This goes beyond the physical; it is not just a matter of the chunk of earth that we call the United States. The hole at the back of the church is a product of the same process of conflict, negotiation, and compromise that can be seen in the lives described and the stories told throughout the American story. Though the epic of belief and unbelief in America seems from the start to be one of weaker faiths and unpopular ideas vanquished by those strong enough to impose creeds and consequences as they see fit, the more enduring theme in this saga is resistance.
Though the particulars of their beliefs were informed and limited by the times in which they lived, a line of spiritual descent can nevertheless be traced from the Indian chief Hatuey insisting he would prefer hell to a Christian heaven, to the Muslim Zemmouri escaping Christian slavery for an uncertain future. One can see the same kind of defiance at work when Jacob Lumbrozo plainly doubted the dominant faith, when Anne Hutchinson refused to silence her “strange opinions,” and when Tituba used the very fears that had condemned her to save her own life. Were these stories merely of individual actions, these moments of personal rebellion might have had no further significance. Yet they are also stories of people forced to live in community with those who have startlingly different ideas. We cannot help but learn and change through exposure to religious difference, as did Cotton Mather, William Livingston, Conrad Weiser, Thomas Jefferson, Handsome Lake, Joseph Smith, Mary Moody Emerson, and her nephew Waldo. Collectively, they remind us that religious outliers are usually not outliers for long—as the Spanish feared about the interaction of Indians and Muslim slaves, ideas are contagious. Their stories also tell us something about those who seem very much to be religious insiders, whose families are well-churched enough to imagine that they live in an exclusively Christian nation. Like New England missionaries whose great-grandson became a wizard in California, they are never more than an experience, a marriage, or a generation away from becoming as spiritually eclectic as the people of this land have always been. They are as open to new influences and interpretations as a hole that, depending on what you are looking for, contains nothing or the world itself.
According to legend, one of the miraculous aspects of el pocito is that no matter how many come to fill their mouths, plastic bags, or coffee cans, the hole will never be empty. The Catholic priests in charge of the shrine smile at this suggestion, and then point discreetly behind the church, where a huge pile of freshly delivered soil awaits blessing with holy water before it is transported by shovel, sweat, and wheelbarrow inside the church. Often the priests are too busy to fill the hole themselves, and so they have been known to provide a bucket to the willing and ask volunteers to lend a hand.
If the shrine is too crowded for these deputized hole-fillers to make their way to the front of the assembled faithful, the bucket will pass from hand to hand through a room decorated with cast-off crutches and photographs of those in need of healing. When the hole is finally refilled, it is the work of many, working in concert despite all differences, for the benefit of those they may never know. It is a process few would call sacred, but it may indeed make the little well, like the vast nation of which it is both a symbol and a part, a miracle of the most unlikely kind.
Acknowledgments
One Nation, Under Gods could not have been written without the support of several institutions and many friends. Most significantly, I was fortunate to spend a year working on the book at Washington College, in Chestertown, Maryland, as a Patrick Henry Fellow at the C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience. The Starr Center’s staff welcomed me into a wonderfully collegial home away from home, and I could not have asked for an environment more conducive to historical research than its eighteenth-century Custom House. During the project’s earliest stages, I was simultaneously completing my dissertation at Georgetown University, where conversations with faculty members and my fellow graduate students in the doctoral program in religious pluralism helped me find many of the stories told here. I am also grateful to the National Endowment for the Arts, the Social Science Research Council, and the Smithsonian Institution, each of which provided funding that allowed me to focus on research and writing at crucial times. My sincere gratitude, too, to my agent Kathleen Anderson, who encouraged this project from the beginning, and to my editors at Little, Brown—John Parsley, Junie Dahn, Janet Byrne, Ben Allen, and Deborah Jacobs—who helped see it through to the end. The friends and family members I should thank are too many to name; the one I must thank—my best friend, my first reader—is my wife, Gwenann Seznec Manseau. The book is dedicated to our daughters, Annick and Jeannette, who will live the next chapters of this history.
Notes
To complete this work of both synthesis and original research, I have relied on the work of dozens of historians of various periods of American history, as well as primary source materials drawn mainly from two digital archives: for periodicals produced from the seventeenth through the mid-nineteenth century, I used Readex’s America’s Historical Newspapers database, and for publications produced during the last 160 years or so I frequently turned to the California Digital Newspaper Collection of the University of California, Riverside. While the book itself took fou
r years to write, I have also drawn on more than a decade of traveling through, and reporting on, religious America in its many manifestations. The people of all faiths and no faith whom I met during those travels have served as the inspiration for this book; they are the spiritual descendants of the figures described throughout, as are we all.
Over the next few pages, I will highlight the most significant scholarship and other materials I read while writing One Nation, Under Gods. Specific sources follow this brief overview. Indebted as I am to the work of several generations of historians, any errors in the preceding chapters are of course my own.
Introduction: I first visited El Santuario de Chimayo in the spring of 2002, and since then have remained drawn to it as a vivid example of American syncretic religion in action. As noted in the conclusion, the faithful of Chimayo seem to remake the notion of what constitutes a “miracle” through their eclectic and occasionally chaotic approach to ritual observance. This is an idea I first explored in a commentary for National Public Radio’s All Things Considered in 2004. A decade later, the dirt of Chimayo still strikes me as a fitting lens—albeit a dusty one—through which to view the great collaborative history of religion in America.
Chapter 1: For this group portrait of the religious motivations of those involved in the earliest encounter between the Old World and the New, I consulted popular histories of different eras, scholarship in a variety of fields, and primary sources concerning the conquest of the Caribbean. In the first category, popular accounts, works consulted include James Reston Jr.’s Dogs of God: Columbus, the Inquisition, and the Defeat of the Moors (2005), Robert Irwin’s The Alhambra (2004), Laurence Bergreen’s Christopher Columbus: The Four Voyages, 1492–1504 (2011), and Samuel Eliot Morison’s Admiral of the Ocean Sea: A Life of Christopher Columbus (1942). Older popular works include Out of the Sunset Sea, by Albion Tourgee (1893), With the Admiral of the Ocean Sea: A Narrative of the First Voyage, by Charles Paul MacKie (1891), and Washington Irving’s 1828 biography, The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus. While these nineteenth-century works are responsible for most of the widespread misconceptions about Columbus that exist today, they remain of interest as a window into the changing cultural attitudes about what his journeys accomplished. Among the misconceptions for which these older works are not responsible is the Jewish Columbus thesis mentioned in this chapter. The notion that Columbus was a “secret Jew” using the voyage as an escape from anti-Jewish Europe is mainly the legacy of Simon Wiesenthal’s provocative Sails of Hope: The Secret Mission of Christopher Columbus (1973). A good debunking of this and various other claims about Columbus’s birth, religious affiliation, and nationality can be found in Fred Bronner’s “Portugal and Columbus: Old Drives in New Discoveries” in the academic journal Mediterranean Studies 6 (1996). Works of recent scholarship consulted in this chapter include Viking America: The First Millennium (2001), by Geraldine Barnes; Jews and Muslims in British Colonial America: A Genealogical History (2012), by Elizabeth Caldwell Hirschman and Donald Neal Yates; the multi-authored volume The World of Columbus (1993), edited by James R. McGovern; and the independent scholar Lynne Guitar’s work on the Taino and their myths. Primary sources consulted include The Saga of the Greenlanders, De Orbe Novo: The Eight Decades of Peter Martyr D’Anghera, The relación of Fray Ramón Pane, A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies, by Bartolomé de las Casas, and Columbus’s own Book of Prophecies, as well as his journal, published in an edition summarized by las Casas.
Chapter 2: The two most important texts for telling the tale of Mustafa Zemmouri and the failed Narváez Expedition are the Narrative of Cabeza de Vaca (also known as Castaways and The Shipwrecked Men), and Ralph Emerson Twitchell’s The Leading Facts of New Mexican History, Volume 1 (1917), which not only narrates the events of the expedition in harrowing detail but places them in the context of existing scholarship at the time it was written, which was already extensive in the early twentieth century. Following in the footsteps of these two classic sources, several works have marked the last decade as a time of increased interest in the man more often called Esteban de Dorantes. Recent popular accounts of his life, and of the exploits of other members of the Narváez Expedition, include Brutal Journey: The Epic Story of the First Crossing of North America (2006), by Paul Schneider; A Land So Strange: The Epic Journey of Cabeza de Vaca (2007), by Andrés Reséndez; and Crossing the Continent: 1527–1540 (2008), by Robert Goodwin. For pointing me toward considering the conquest of the Americas in light of struggles between Christians and Muslims in Spain, I am grateful to Ana Marcos Maíllo’s article, “Los Arabismos Más Utilizados por los Conquistadores de Nueve España en el Sigle XVI.”
Chapter 3: Despite its unambiguous place in American mythology, John Winthrop’s sermon “A Model of Christian Charity” continues to puzzle scholars. To begin with, there is some question whether Winthrop delivered this sermon aboard the Arabella, or before its departure, in the port of Southampton, England. Others question whether it was delivered at all, but merely written as Winthrop crossed the Atlantic. See Francis J. Bremer’s John Winthrop: America’s Forgotten Founding Father (2003), p. 174, for more on this question, and on Winthrop’s life and times generally. Similarly, Richard Gamble’s In Search of the City on a Hill: The Making and Unmaking of an American Myth (2012) explores the afterlife of Winthrop’s words, revealing how their current significance is a product more of twentieth-century politics than of centuries of American self-understanding. Recent reevaluations of religious dissent in early New England include The Times and Trials of Anne Hutchinson, by Michael Paul Winship (2005), and Eve LaPlante’s American Jezebel: The Uncommon Life of Anne Hutchinson, the Woman Who Defied the Puritans (2004). The trial transcripts from which dialogue between Hutchinson and Winthrop were drawn can be found through a number of online sources as well as in David Hall’s The Antinomian Controversy, 1636–1638: A Documentary History (1990).
Chapter 4: The primary sources for this chapter are the documents related to Jacob Lumbrozo in the Maryland State Historical archives (MSA SC 3520-14037). Particularly useful is the information collected by Lois Green Carr, of the St. Mary’s City Commission, MSA SC (2221-3-4-1). Lumbrozo-related documents also appear in The Jew in the American World: A Source Book, edited by Jacob Rader Marcus (1996), pp. 40–42, and in J. H. Hollander, “Some Unpublished Material Relating to Dr. Jacob Lumbrozo, of Maryland,” American Jewish Historical Quarterly 1 (1905), 25–39, American Jewish Historical Society. Documents related to Peter Stuyvesant and the Jews of New Amsterdam can be found in The Jew in the Modern World: A Documentary History, edited by Paul R. Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz. For background on the colony that hosted Lumbrozo’s trial, I relied on Matthew Page Andrews, History of Maryland: Province and State (1929) and Harry Wright Newman’s The Flowering of the Maryland Palatinate (1961).
Chapter 5: Documents related to the events in Salem in 1692 are widely available and make riveting reading on their own. The University of Virginia’s Salem Witch Trials Documentary Archive and Transcription Project (http://salem.lib.virginia.edu/home.html) is a particularly user-friendly resource. Elaine Breslaw’s Tituba: Reluctant Witch of Salem (1997) is the most recent and most compelling treatment of the various personalities and contexts that must be taken into account when considering the events in Salem in 1692. Other background and general sources consulted include Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England (1987), by Carol Karlsen, Conjure in African American Society (2005), by Jeffrey E. Anderson, and Zora Neale Hurston’s Mules and Men (1935) for examples of practices with roots that can be traced back to colonial-era religious experience. Similarly, the works of Harry Middleton Hyatt (Folk-lore from Adams County, Illinois; Hoodoo, Conjuration, Witchcraft, Rootwork: Beliefs Accepted by Many Negros and White People) provide a fascinating window into eccentric American beliefs that have always existed alongside more normative traditions. Details of the fires that afflicted Boston in the seventeenth century are taken f
rom Russell Herman Conwell’s History of the Great Fire in Boston, November 9 and 10, 1872, Arthur Wellington Brayley, A Complete History of the Boston Fire Department… from 1630 to 1888, and Annie Haven Thwing’s The crooked & narrow streets of the town of Boston 1630–1822.
Chapter 6: As the most famous Puritan in American history, Cotton Mather is often remembered as either a witch-hunter or a scold. To consider his openness to new religious and cultural influences, I consulted texts including The Life and Times of Cotton Mather, by Abijah Perkins Marvin (1892), and Kenneth Silverman’s biography of the same name, published ninety-two years later. Except where noted, the Cotton Mather quotations used throughout are from his journals (The Diary of Cotton Mather 1681–1724), which he kept obsessively throughout his life, even during smallpox epidemics.
Chapter 7: To set the scene of this summit between British colonists and the Iroquois, I relied largely on Witham Marshe, who provided a play-by-play of the Lancaster Treaty as it unfolded in his Journal of the Treaty at Lancaster in 1744, with the Six Nations. Also useful, though it was written more than a century after the fact, is the 1876 biography of the translator Conrad Weiser, The life of (John) Conrad Weiser, the German pioneer, patriot, and patron of two races, by Clement Zwingli Weiser. For overviews of Native American religious ideas and their influence on the Six Nations Confederacy and governance, I turned to older sources including Cadwallader Colden’s The History of the Five Indian Nations of Canada (1727), Elias Johnson’s Legends, Traditions and Laws, of the Iroquois, Or Six Nations, and History of the Tuscarora Indians (1881), and David Cusick’s Sketches of Ancient History of the Six Nations Comprising First a Tale of the Foundation of the Great Island (now North America), the Two Infants Born and the Creation of the Universe (1848), as well as more recent scholarship including The History and Culture of Iroquois Diplomacy: An Interdisciplinary Guide to the Treaties of the Six Nations and Their League, edited by Francis Jennings et al. (1985), and William Fenton’s The Great Law and the Longhouse: A Political History of the Iroquois Confederacy (1998). While the scholars behind the “Iroquois influence theory” make a case for a more direct connection between the governance of the Six Nations and the early American republic than I claim here, I am nonetheless indebted to their work for pointing me in the direction of primary sources, including Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography, the Lancaster Treaty, and the writings of Conrad Weiser. Bruce E. Johansen’s Forgotten Founders: How the American Indian Helped Shape Democracy (1982) was a particularly useful resource, as were two attempts to challenge “Iroquois influence” claims, Philip Levy’s “Exemplars of Taking Liberties: The Iroquois Influence Thesis and the Problem of Evidence,” The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Ser., Volume 53, Number 3 (July 1996), 588–604; and Elisabeth Tooker’s “The United States Constitution and the Iroquois League,” in The Invented Indian: Cultural Fictions and Government Policies (1990), edited by James A. Clifton, 107–128.
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