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PREAMBLE
When not cataloging inalienable rights or grievances against the crown, that great enumerator Thomas Jefferson noted that religious views deserving the new nation’s protection belonged to “the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan, the Hindoo, and infidel of every denomination.”
A list, he knew, can be more persuasive than any argument. While a polemic may rest on a single opinion, an inventory insists that there is always more than one.
Perhaps for this reason, he and other early framers of religious liberty in the United States often took the simple act of counting as their starting point.
James Madison for his part maintained not just that the need for freedom of religion arose from the “multiplicity of sects which pervades America,” but that it was this very multiplicity that was “the best and only security for religious liberty in any society.”
Though Madison here referred mainly to various Christian dominations—who, despite their differences, believed in the same one God—elsewhere he made clear where he thought limiting any ledger of American faiths would lead. “Who does not see,” he asked, “that the same authority which can establish Christianity in exclusion of all other religions, may establish with the same ease any particular sect of Christians in exclusion of all other sects?”
Jefferson went further still in his accounting. “It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no god,” he famously quipped. “It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”
Whether it was Jefferson’s “gods” or Madison’s “sects,” so much depends on that final “s.” A single letter can radically alter a word’s meaning—in this case by asserting that the American ideal of freedom must be for religions, plural, or it is not free at all.
Under Gods is a narrative examination of the place of the plural in the history of the United States. Leading up to the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, we asked writers, scholars, and artists to tell stories of religious people, communities, and events throughout those two and half centuries. Each of the resulting twenty-five essays gathered here corresponds to a single decade; together they explore spiritual diversity as foundational and essential to American religious life from 1776 to today. Highlighting moments well-known or obscure, beliefs and practices held by multitudes or relatively few, this portrait is necessarily partial, but it provides a better understanding of the whole.
Rather than being constrained by the historical eras that anchor them, the stories told here often reach across time. The writings of an enslaved Senegalese Muslim find unexpected resonance with a twentieth-century Sufi community in South Carolina. A Catholic priest killed during the Mexican Cristero War becomes the patron saint of undocumented immigrants generations later. The objects through which these histories emerge—Shaker boxes, Chinese restaurant altars, a book of Harlem Renaissance spirituals, Amish solar panels, and Dallas Cowboys merchandise featuring a Sikh call to sovereignty—all twist our lenses of the past to create a kaleidoscopic view of the nation’s present.
True to their pluralistic subject, the essays differ markedly in genre and tone. Some unfold as tragedies, others as mysteries or tales of invention. Episodic and idiosyncratic rather than comprehensive, they are intended as a catalyst to further conversations.
We have chosen as an avatar for this project the Statue of Liberty. Like much of American culture, the statue is not explicitly religious, but it carries, along with its flaming torch and July IV tablet, a complex religious inheritance.
The French sculptor who designed it, Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, drew inspiration from Greek gods as well as robed Arab women he saw during travels in Egypt. In 1880, a Catholic journal declared it “an idol of a heathen goddess.” But a more lasting interpretation was provided three years later by the American poet Emma Lazarus, who was moved to write the words inscribed on a plaque inside the statue’s pedestal—“Give me your tired, your poor…”—by the Eastern European Jews then fleeing persecution to stream, one million strong, into the United States.
Though the monument is formally known as “Liberty Enlightening the World,” Lazarus gave the 151-foot-tall figure another title, the name by which the poem suggests she knows herself: the Mother of Exiles. Her “huddled masses yearning to breathe free” were seeking not just physical but spiritual freedom.
Seen in this light, the torch she lifts is a beacon similar to the “s” wielded by Jefferson and Madison: an affirmation that liberty and multiplicity create and sustain each other, promising mutual protection.
Long before the phrase “under God” was added to the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954, there were many Americans who held that the United States ought to be a nation shaped by a single dominant religious perspective. They have always been free to believe so, enjoying a freedom that exists and endures only because it is part of a larger story.
The larger story is that we are a nation under many gods, informed by a vast array of personal beliefs, communities of faith, and spiritual traditions. No individual identifies with every one of them—indeed many reject them entirely—but we all live with their collective influence, as surely as they have shaped our shared history.
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