Where is the Pacific in American Religious History?

Charles McCrary

Note: This post is the first in a series on the Pacific Ocean. I didn’t really plan a series, but the introduction to this post quickly became too long. So, this post serves just as an introduction to the series. Please ask questions and make suggestions in the comments section, and I’ll try to address them in future posts.

American religious history is going global. As many historians move away from the nation-state as a way to organize their objects of study and instead trace other themes—capitalism or environmental change, for example—they are taken beyond the geographic bounds of the United States. The upcoming Biennial Conference on Religion and American Culture will feature sessions on “American Religion and Global Flows” and “‘Religion in the Americas’ as an Organization Program.” At the 2013 AAR meeting in Baltimore, a panel considered the theme “Placing the Subfield: North American Religions, Religion in the Americas and Beyond.” Those of us paying attention to the job market likely have noticed an increase in the number of calls focusing on Latin America, the Caribbean, and/or “the Americas.” Not all of this interest has to do with the decline of the nation-state. In fact, studies of religion and government are on the upswing, with “empire,” “American in/and the world,” and “foreign relations” all providing valuable frames for the study of religion. Even in cases where confining studies to the United States might make sense, there are ways that a global approach might be beneficial. Studies of American religious freedom, for example, often center on historical interpretations of the U.S. Constitution. But these stories are bolstered by discussions of global secularity, constitutionalism around the world, and the role of religion and secularism in international relations. In short, we do need to ask important questions about what exactly our subfield is about, and in what ways geography should define “American religious history” (or “American religions” or “religion in the Americas”.) In what networks do we plot “religion”? I do wonder about graduate programs changing to “the Americas”—why not “the world”? Or “global flows”? Should Brazil be more a part of our subfield than Canton? Or Tahiti?

So, after that introduction full of things everyone knows already, I’ll get to my real question: Where is the Pacific in American religious history?

The Pacific Ocean may be the “tide-beating heart of the earth,” but in American religious history it’s usually a footnote at best. Whereas the Caribbean and South and Latin America are slowly making their way into our surveys, narratives, and programs, the Pacific is still mostly left out. One reason is that the now-standard “Atlantic World” model(s) works in a way that has, for the most part, not been attempted (and, I think, is not really possible) with the Pacific. Another reason for this absence is the narrative of American history as westward movement. Almost twenty years ago Laurie Maffly-Kipp challenged this orientation with her essay “Eastward Ho! American Religion from the Perspective of the Pacific Rim” in the edited collection Retelling U.S. Religious History. The main point of the essay is to change the perspective of our narration, i.e., to “look east,” not unlike Daniel Richter’s orientation in Facing East from Indian Country. So, this narrative still might end up a national story (perhaps “U.S.” in the book’s title already gave the game away), but one very differently told. Maffly-Kipp argued,

In the long run, integrating the history of religion on the Pacific Rim into our larger narratives will entail a series of (admittedly enormous) steps. First, we must learn about the Pacific Rim and its people ourselves, and then synthesize the religious stories of Alaskan Aleuts, Nootkas, Tlingits, Pacific Coast Indians of all sorts, indigenous Hawaiians, fur traders and whalers (Spanish, French, Russian, British, and American), missionaries (Spanish, French, Russian, British, American Protestant, Mormon, and Japanese), and migrants (European, American, and Asian). If this were not a tall enough order, we must then weave all of these actors and events into a larger narrative of American religion that relates them to an Atlantic world and an emerging hemispheric community. We will have, in short, a world history of American religion (130).

There are some problems with the approach, including the limitations of the “Rim” motif. This has to do with a land-based historical orientation that does not adequately consider water as space. David Igler, in his excellent 2013 book The Great Ocean (if you’re going to read only one book as an introduction to Pacific history, this is a very good candidate), addresses this issue: “Oceans, it would seem, hardly register on historians’ ‘mental maps’ of places that truly matter because we so often imagine the sea as a flight from history and humanity. By contrast, the ocean figured prominently on the mental maps of the earliest indigenous travelers as well as the European and American mariners who arrived in large numbers during the early modern period” (8). Maffly-Kipp was still more concerned with the history of the North American continent, which is fine, but can cause historians to miss the boat(s). There are also the theoretical problems in identifying the “religious stories” of such vastly different people—and, of course, the historical problem of what a “religious story,” as opposed to a cultural or economic or ethnic story, might be. Despite these issues, Maffly-Kipp’s call still feels fresh and could serve as an agenda-setting charge for future scholarship. Aside from a few exceptions, American religious studies has left this call largely unanswered.

In my next post, I will provide an overview of Pacific studies and Pacific history, which have been written for decades but seldom intersect with American histories. In future posts in the series, I plan to offer suggestions for themes and topics that might bring them together, particularly for historians of religion. A Pacific-focused history of American religion could open up new topics for exploration, as well as illuminate topics already being discussed. I’ll leave off with one brief example. On this blog we have been discussing Kevin Kruse’s One Nation Under God (here and here) and the way corporate, political, and religious interests overlap. Other recent and forthcoming work also has focused on these intersections. The study of Americans and Europeans in the Pacific could add important missing pieces to these conversations. Missionaries from the London Missionary Society and American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions often used their Pacific locales as nodes in a network of Christian outreach as well as capitalist expansion. The Dole family—missionaries, political leaders, and capitalists—are an excellent example of how these interests were understood as part of the same project, in this case, united by an imperialist project.

What else might the study of the Pacific yield for historians of American religion? Should we be interested in the first place? Is an emphasis “global flows” too decentering, rendering our subfield too diffuse to hold together? How might graduate programs, societies, and professional groups incorporate the spaces, materials, and people of the Pacific? What models, topics, and themes might we use? …etc.?