Straight White American Jesus - The Myth of Religious Freedom w/ Reza Aslan and Peter Manseau
Aired: 2026-05-12
Duration: 39:12


=== Real History of American Religion (05:49) ===

[00:00:07]  Axis Mundi.
[00:00:14]  What's up, everyone?
[00:00:15]  Brad Onishi here with the one and only Reza Aslan, and we've got something you do not want to miss.
[00:00:21]  That's right, Brad.
[00:00:22]  The brand new season of Our Seven Neighbors from the Interreligious Institute at Chicago Theological Seminary is live right now.
[00:00:30]  And this year, the United States marks its 250th anniversary.
[00:00:34]  We're stepping back to ask a big question What is the real story of religion in America?
[00:00:41]  This season, we're lifting up the deep history of spiritual diversity in the United States and revisiting the founders' very different visions.
[00:00:48]  For the role of religion in public life.
[00:00:50]  The truth is, there's never been just one religious story in this country.
[00:00:53]  There have always been many.
[00:00:54]  Exactly.
[00:00:55]  From the earliest days of the Republic, debates about faith, freedom, pluralism, and power shaped the nation.
[00:01:01]  Some founders imagined a country with strong protections for religious liberty, others had narrower visions.
[00:01:08]  And alongside them were native traditions, enslaved African spiritual practices, immigrant faith communities, all shaping America in ways that often go untold.
[00:01:18]  Instead of repeating a tidy myth.
[00:01:20]  Narrative, this season tells a braver, more accurate story, one that honors the breathtaking diversity that's always been here.
[00:01:26]  If you care about how religion has shaped American democracy, if you want to understand how spiritual communities have fueled movements for justice, if you're ready for a fuller account of our shared history, this season is for you.
[00:01:39]  From the Axis Munby Podcast Network and Chicago Theological Seminary.
[00:01:44]  The new season of Our Seven Neighbors is streaming now wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:01:50]  What's up, y'all?
[00:01:51]  Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
[00:01:53]  I'm Brad Onishi, author of American Caesar and founder of Axis Mundi Media.
[00:01:59]  Today, I am so pleased to bring you something that we've been waiting for for several months and now can share with you.
[00:02:06]  It's the first episode of Our Seven Neighbors, a new Axis Mundi series in partnership with producer Kim Schultz, who's the director of interreligious engagements and public projects there.
[00:02:18]  This is a series about the history of Religion in the United States.
[00:02:23]  And as we approach our CEQA centennial, our 250th anniversary as a country, and as we see the Trump administration do everything possible to try to convince you that there is only one story of religion in the United States a myopic, narrow story of white Christians who founded this country and who deserve to inherit every aspect of it.
[00:02:44]  This season is about telling the real history of religion in the United States.
[00:02:48]  And it begins with host Reza Aslan.
[00:02:52]  A person I know many of you are familiar with through his writings, through his CNN show, through his just work on the leftovers.
[00:03:00]  One of the scholars of religion who's done the most in terms of public scholarship over the last couple decades, interviewing Peter Mansell, who's a curator at the Smithsonian Museum.
[00:03:09]  And Peter, some of you know, is a prolific author, somebody who started Killing the Buddha back in the day, and has written just several seminal texts about American religion.
[00:03:19]  Well, that's where this season begins.
[00:03:21]  And it just goes from there in terms of telling a nuanced, complex, Unflinching story of how faith in the United States has developed from the colonial period until now.
[00:03:33]  This series is right in line with everything we try to do at Axis Mundi, bringing public scholarship to your ears and eyes, making scholarly analysis accessible to everybody.
[00:03:44]  So, without further ado, I'm excited to share with you episode one of Our Seven Neighbors with Reza Aslan as host and his guest, Peter Manso.
[00:03:55]  You'll see in the show notes a link to subscribe.
[00:03:58]  Go there.
[00:03:59]  Listen, follow, and as the 250th anniversary approaches, use this series and the understanding it provides to counter any narrative you hear that tries to reduce this country to one story, one people, one God, one idea of what is right and wrong.
[00:04:17]  I'm Brad Onishi.
[00:04:17]  I'll see you on the other side.
[00:04:33]  Welcome to Our Seven Neighbors, Season 5.
[00:04:36]  We are so excited you are here with us.
[00:04:38]  My name is Kim Schultz, and I'm the Director of Interreligious Engagement at Chicago Theological Seminary and producer of this podcast.
[00:04:46]  Season 5 is titled Religion and Resistance in America, and we are hosted this season by Reza Aslan.
[00:04:54]  Now, if you don't know, and how can you not, Reza is a renowned writer, commentator, professor, Emmy, and Peabody nominated producer and scholar of religions.
[00:05:04]  In addition, and more specifically, he is the recipient of the prestigious James Joyce Award, author of three internationally bestselling books, including the number one New York Times bestseller, Zealot The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth.
[00:05:18]  His newest book is titled A Kid's Book About Israel and Palestine.
[00:05:23]  He is also a former trustee on the board of directors at Chicago Theological Seminary, and he is here with me now.
[00:05:29]  Reza, welcome.
[00:05:31]  What a thrill to have you host this season of Our Seven Neighbors.
[00:05:34]  Thank you for joining us in these important and Timely conversations this season.
[00:05:39]  Thank you, Kim.
[00:05:40]  It's such a delight to be hosting this season, and what a joy it is to be back in the CTS fold.
[00:05:48]  We are so happy to have you here.
[00:05:50]  So, with season five, Religion and Resistance in America, tell us what you hope for this season.

=== Complicated Religious Environment Emerged (15:49) ===

[00:05:56]  Well, the issue of America's great religious diversity and our history of the freedom of religion is something that many Americans just take for granted as foundational to what it even means to be.
[00:06:10]  A citizen of the United States.
[00:06:11]  But of course, like with most things, the issue is much more complex, much more fraught than most people realize.
[00:06:20]  And we're going to explore the ways in which religious minorities in the United States have, rather than simply being handed the freedom to worship as they please, had to often fight for it and to struggle for it.
[00:06:36]  Why does this topic interest you, Reza?
[00:06:38]  What is it about this season that?
[00:06:40]  Gets you excited and that you're most curious about?
[00:06:42]  Well, growing up as a Muslim immigrant in the United States, this is an experience that I have shared pretty profoundly myself, not just in the 80s during the Iran hostage crisis, but certainly in the post 9 11 period.
[00:06:59]  As a religious minority, I know how difficult it has been for me to demand the rights and privileges that the Constitution affords me.
[00:07:10]  I can only imagine the same experience that Jews or Catholics or Mormons and indeed even atheists have had to have those same exact freedoms that they were promised actually played out.
[00:07:27]  And so I think that this is a conversation that needs to be had just to understand America and American history, but certainly now more than ever as we are being inundated by this.
[00:07:41]  Muscular form of Christian nationalism that is rewriting the very foundations of American history, redefining what it even means to be American in the 21st century, this conversation is probably more important than ever.
[00:07:57]  Fantastic.
[00:07:58]  So excited, Reza.
[00:07:59]  Thank you.
[00:08:00]  So let's talk about today in our episode with Peter Mansoe.
[00:08:03]  Peter Mansoe is a novelist, historian, and museum curator.
[00:08:07]  He is the founding director of the Center for Understanding Religion in American History at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History.
[00:08:16]  And he has a lot to say, as you might imagine, around the subject of religion and its roots here in this country.
[00:08:21]  In fact, one of the stories he tells in his book, Under Gods, is about the concept of a city on a hill.
[00:08:28]  Talk to us about that.
[00:08:29]  Yes, people love the city on the hill story.
[00:08:32]  The idea that this is a nation founded with a single moral purpose, protected by freedom of conscience, gradually becoming more inclusive.
[00:08:40]  But Mansell tells a messier, more honest story.
[00:08:45]  America was never religiously unified, and pluralism didn't emerge through harmony.
[00:08:51]  It actually emerged through conflict.
[00:08:52]  So, today with Peter, I want to ask about the promise and the reality, and what that history says about who we are and what we're at risk of forgetting.
[00:09:02]  America's religious freedom story is usually told from the center, as if it begins with a unified Christian project and then steadily widens into tolerance and then pluralism.
[00:09:13]  But Mansell's work insists the opposite.
[00:09:16]  The margins were always here, they always mattered.
[00:09:20]  And the widening came through exclusion, resistance, and repeated moral struggle, not a clean national consensus.
[00:09:28]  Mansell posits that the United States was never a monolithically Christian nation the way so many people think it was.
[00:09:35]  Rather, it is a landscape where diverse beliefs, including those of Muslims, Jews, Native Americans, and so called heathens, have constantly interacted, fought, and shaped one another.
[00:09:47]  He views American religious history not as a steady march toward toleration, but as a series of conflicts where pluralism was forged through exclusion, resistance, and struggle.
[00:09:58]  So, without further ado, let's get to my conversation with Peter.
[00:10:08]  Welcome to our seven neighbors, Peter.
[00:10:11]  Peter, you know this already.
[00:10:13]  I love this book.
[00:10:13]  It's been a decade, but it was such an earth shattering re examination of American history and this kind of story that we love to tell ourselves about religious freedom in America.
[00:10:31]  And I think what I love most about the book is the way that it just kind of shatters that myth a little bit.
[00:10:39]  Tell us a little bit about.
[00:10:41]  Why is it that this sort of traditional simplistic story that we tell kids in schools all around this country about how this country was built on religious freedom maybe isn't the full story?
[00:10:54]  Yeah, thanks, Reza.
[00:10:55]  It's great to be here with you.
[00:10:57]  And I'm so grateful to you for breathing some life back into this book.
[00:11:00]  You're permanently a part of this book's life because your name is on the cover and the very right in the front, right there.
[00:11:05]  I love it.
[00:11:06]  That's great.
[00:11:07]  Above mine, your top line.
[00:11:09]  So I so appreciate it.
[00:11:11]  But this book.
[00:11:12]  Came at a time when I think that American culture, broadly speaking, was taking for granted that pluralism had arrived.
[00:11:22]  I think it's compelling because it is something we want to believe about ourselves.
[00:11:27]  We want to believe that America, the United States, is this place where so many beliefs can interact and thrive.
[00:11:35]  But if you do even the barest looking back into American history, the early history of the United States, colonial history, the histories of First contact, you find how far from reality the idea that we're founded as a nation of religious freedom really is.
[00:11:52]  And I think that we are still grappling with really a concerted effort of myth making.
[00:11:58]  There were points in the history of the United States when it was advantageous to certain groups of Americans to put forward this idea that we were founded on this ideal of religious freedom.
[00:12:10]  And usually it meant particular types of religious freedom.
[00:12:13]  Religious freedom for me.
[00:12:14]  But not necessarily for everyone else.
[00:12:16]  And that's, of course, what you discover when you go back and interrogate the myths of the pilgrims, of the Puritans, this idea that these people came to the new land to live the ideal of religious freedom.
[00:12:29]  You discover very quickly that it was only religious freedom for themselves.
[00:12:34]  I was just thinking about one of the founding images of this myth of religious freedom.
[00:12:38]  And I start the book off discussing it, and I also come back around to revisit it at the end of the book and its closing pages this idea of a city on the hill.
[00:12:48]  That America was going to be founded as a city on a hill, this Christian notion, the model civilization.
[00:12:54]  And I was thinking, well, what did Mary Dwyer think of this idea of the city on the hill?
[00:12:59]  Mary Dwyer, hanged as a Quaker in Boston, what did she think as she ascended the scaffold and put her noose in the neck?
[00:13:05]  What was her view of the city on the hill?
[00:13:07]  And I think that's a question that we need to ask about America's religious history.
[00:13:12]  What was the other view throughout all these moments when we are told that religious freedom has been championed in American history?
[00:13:20]  What was the other view?
[00:13:21]  Whose freedoms were being diminished while others were being protected?
[00:13:25]  So, those are the types of stories I wanted to tell in the book.
[00:13:28]  Because we are dealing with myths and foundational myths, I wanted to stretch back as far as I could conceivably tell these stories or to retell these stories.
[00:13:38]  And so, it tries to be a 500 year history from those moments of first encounter up until the time that I wrote it in 2015.
[00:13:45]  And it felt to me that that was the right scope for encountering and trying to dismantle some of these myths.
[00:13:52]  Yeah.
[00:13:53]  You brought up Winthrop's famous city on a hill quote, which has become such an inspiration for so many Americans.
[00:14:02]  I mean, it was very famously re quoted by Ronald Reagan.
[00:14:08]  But you also point out that underneath that statement, there's a real anxiety that is being expressed from the Puritan perspective.
[00:14:17]  Talk about that anxiety a little bit.
[00:14:19]  What were the Puritans actually trying to do?
[00:14:23]  To protect when they spoke in these lofty terms about the sort of pluralistic religiosity of this new land, this new Jerusalem?
[00:14:34]  Well, they were fleeing some realities and encountering new realities.
[00:14:38]  So, the reality they were fleeing and what they were hoping to create was a place in which they could practice their understanding of Christianity as they saw fit and only allow that understanding of Christianity.
[00:14:51]  But what I think about a lot in terms of what they actually encountered when they got here.
[00:14:56]  And what their rhetoric, what their anxiety may have been about, was just a terror of being in this new place, so far from everything they had known, surrounded by people with whom they could not communicate, understanding that there are other European powers that were also trying to get a foothold in this new land, contesting this new Jerusalem.
[00:15:18]  So, from the very moment that they arrived, there are these conflicting forces, and recognizing that that's where they're standing, and that's where they're supposing they will be a city on a hill.
[00:15:28]  And it's interesting the way that the phrase, Gets used throughout American and particularly presidential politics.
[00:15:35]  Reagan, most famously, but John F. Kennedy before him, Obama liked to talk about the city on the hill.
[00:15:41]  And they talk about it being an exemplar.
[00:15:43]  But the Puritans and John Winthrop also spoke about it as being acknowledging the fact that anything that goes wrong, everyone's going to see it.
[00:15:52]  You can't hide if you're a city on a hill.
[00:15:54]  So they were engaged in a very high stakes endeavor.
[00:15:58]  And so, in some ways, it's no surprise that they, Though in arriving in the name of their own religious freedom, they immediately establish a theocracy, and which they enforce with banishment, with imprisonment, and occasionally with fatal force.
[00:16:13]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:16:15]  I think this notion that pluralism that we think was there from the beginning was forged not necessarily through consensus, but through conflict, that it was this kind of clash between ideals and sort of the practicality that ultimately is what gets institutionalized in the Constitution.
[00:16:39]  You talk a little bit about that process.
[00:16:42]  You know, we're talking about this early experience, this Puritan experience that was.
[00:16:47]  Perhaps a little bit less about freedom of worship and more about the freedom to control worship.
[00:16:54]  But now we get to the moments of the early republic and concretizing this idea of religious freedom.
[00:17:03]  But even then, there's this tension behind it, isn't there?
[00:17:07]  Can you express that a little bit for us?
[00:17:10]  In some ways, the circumstance that we see 250 years ago now, at the start of the revolution and in the early republic, Some ways, the religious circumstance or religious milieu that was created is the direct result of what was happening with the Puritans and with this ripple effect of schism and heresy.
[00:17:30]  And there's ever more almost immediately, there's ever more religious groups.
[00:17:34]  And so, I mentioned Mary Dwyer, who was hanged as a Quaker in Boston.
[00:17:38]  She first leaves to go to Rhode Island, was part of the crowd that went with Anne Hutchinson and Roger Williams.
[00:17:44]  And then she goes back to England and then she comes back as a Quaker.
[00:17:47]  And so, suddenly, there are these proliferations of different.
[00:17:51]  What the Puritans would call heretical sects or schismatic sects.
[00:17:54]  And it keeps flowering, it keeps flowering.
[00:17:56]  And that's the circumstance that's happening in the 1770s.
[00:18:00]  There are all these different Protestant Christian groups that, to us, from the distance of 250 years, we'd think, oh, this is just a Protestant majority.
[00:18:08]  But at the time, the differences, what we would consider to be these small differences between these groups, were a matter of life and death.
[00:18:16]  They were a matter of fights in the streets.
[00:18:18]  They were a matter of taxing one group to pay for another group, in the specific instance of the Baptists being taxed in Virginia.
[00:18:25]  To pay for the training of Anglican clergy.
[00:18:28]  And this was something that would not stand.
[00:18:31]  And set against the backdrop of the revolution, which it isn't often expressed as a war about religion, but it is about creating a break from the full entwining of religious authority and the authority of the state, because of course the King of England is the head of the Church of England.
[00:18:49]  And that is part of the break that needs to happen at the time of the revolution.
[00:18:53]  So just the practical matter of these constantly squabbling.
[00:18:58]  Protestant sects, as well as a few Catholics and a couple small Jewish communities.
[00:19:04]  This leads to the conversation around what would it look like to have a republic without, or rather, what is the need to have a republic without an official church.
[00:19:15]  But I think that one important thing also to point out is that even that view of religious diversity in early America, which does take into account that religious diversity, as we consider it now, didn't exist in the same way, but the religious diversity then.
[00:19:33]  Was equally challenging in its own way.
[00:19:36]  But even that doesn't take into account that talking about only those early Americans really gets to the issue of who was counted and why, whose religious perspective is counted or is considered to be genuine and worth taking into account.
[00:19:49]  And generally, when you think about, and this has changed, but a generation back when people were talking about the religious makeup of early America, and there was important work done to quantify and show that.
[00:20:04]  Early America was much less church than is often popularly assumed.
[00:20:07]  The numbers are like 10 or 20% of people actually belong to a church.
[00:20:11]  But even that low number doesn't take into account these vast populations that were uncountable through religious affiliation, namely the enslaved, who made up at the time 20% of the population of the young United States, Native Americans, who are also part of the social milieu of the young United States and have their own religious perspectives, which are informed by more than two centuries of interacting with all those different Christian groups on the North American continent.
[00:20:41]  I'm going on and on and a bit, and I've forgotten your question, but just to say that it is a vastly more complicated religious environment at the beginning of the United States than is generally thought.
[00:20:53]  This idea that we've kind of retconned this idea that we are, oh, we are one nation under God, as we, an escapable phrase.
[00:21:02]  But always, my argument in the book is that we were always one nation under God.
[00:21:05]  Just that very simple adding of the plural really challenges that understanding of what were the ingredients that made the United States.
[00:21:14]  What it was at the founding and set the course for how it would develop.
[00:21:18]  I think that even some very well informed listeners would be surprised to hear what you were saying before about the enormous presence of Muslims and Jews in the pre Republic United States.
[00:21:35]  Obviously, as you mentioned, you know, that there was the enslaved African Muslims who were brought here and who became, you know, foundational to the American.

=== Early Jewish and Muslim Presence (04:52) ===

[00:21:46]  Religious landscape, but also the Jewish presence.
[00:21:49]  Would you mind just kind of quickly talking about those two religious communities and not just their presence early in the formation of this country, but their influence when it came to how we thought about religion and the possibility of religious pluralism?
[00:22:07]  Jews have been part of the American experience throughout the colonial period.
[00:22:10]  I'd have to go back and check my dates to offer a date of when the first Jews arrived in the New World, or rather, I should say, the first confirmed.
[00:22:19]  Oh, they were colonists, right?
[00:22:20]  Well, that's what I was going to say is that there are stories of secret Jews, the term is escaping me, aboard Columbus' ship, as well as secret Muslims because of the history of Spain at the time and who was more likely to get on a ship and leave Spain at the time.
[00:22:35]  But moving past that early Spanish colonial time, the Jewish communities that began to take hold in early America were in places like Savannah and then in Rhode Island, which, as a result of some of those early experiences of Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson, became a safe haven for religious difference.
[00:22:55]  But interestingly, other supposed safe havens for religious difference in English North America were not hospitable to Jews.
[00:23:02]  So, for example, Maryland, which was very famously the first Catholic colony, it had an act concerning religion in the 1640s, which sounded great because it tolerated both Catholics and Protestants.
[00:23:15]  It sounded like everything was going to be fine, but it did punish blasphemy with death.
[00:23:20]  So, if you blaspheme the name of Jesus, then you were left out of the law of toleration for religion.
[00:23:28]  Jews had a very precarious place in America, but in the pre US colonial America and then in the early US.
[00:23:36]  Though eventually, when the freedom of religion is codified in the Constitution, Bill of Rights, on the federal level, it's left out of all the states, it's not applicable to the states.
[00:23:47]  And so many state laws continue to discriminate against Jews.
[00:23:52]  State constitutions include religious tests for holding office, which denied Jews the right to hold public office.
[00:23:59]  Here, where I'm talking, you To you from in Maryland, there was a law, there was not a law until 1820, which was the so called Jew Bill, which gave Jews the same rights as Christians.
[00:24:09]  So, it takes a full generation and then some from the birth of the United States for some of the state level religious tests and laws discriminating specifically against Jews start to be repealed.
[00:24:21]  Yeah.
[00:24:22]  You kind of alluded to the Maryland Toleration Act.
[00:24:27]  And it's funny, too, because there's something so insightful about the name of that act, because a lot of what we confuse for pluralism was.
[00:24:40]  Actually, toleration wasn't.
[00:24:43]  And even as you rightly say, even the toleration wasn't all that tolerant.
[00:24:47]  But I'm curious when a society says we tolerate you, who is still holding the power there?
[00:24:55]  What does that do psychologically to the minority communities who are trying to build a life?
[00:25:01]  You're reminding me of the key term, which is toleration, of course.
[00:25:05]  And that is the term that George Washington uses when he addresses the Jewish community in Newport who have written to him.
[00:25:13]  Not long after he becomes first president of the United States, they write to him and say, Well, what is going to be the place of Jews in this new country?
[00:25:20]  Can you please offer some words of assurance?
[00:25:23]  And they may even ask him, Will there continue to be this toleration?
[00:25:26]  And he responds that in this new nation, it will not be mere toleration, but it will be full representation, that the United States gives bigotry no sanction, and that Jews should count on being at home and welcome as full citizens in the United States.
[00:25:43]  That was a bit optimistic in terms of the constantly recurring anti Semitism that Jewish communities face throughout the 19th century and then into the 20th and 21st.
[00:25:53]  But that sentiment was there, at least at the founding, that this was a nation that should go beyond toleration.
[00:25:59]  Because as you say, toleration does suggest that someone is holding the stick above you and they're just waiting for a reason to bring it down on you.
[00:26:08]  Yeah.
[00:26:08]  One of the things I love about the book is you contrast the metaphor of city on a hill with something.
[00:26:17]  A little bit different, which is this little hole in the dirt at Chamayo.
[00:26:21]  Is that right?
[00:26:21]  Am I saying it right?
[00:26:22]  Chamayo?
[00:26:23]  Tell us a little bit about that metaphor and why that image, in your mind, captures the truth of American religious diversity better than what we've been kind of dismantling all this time.

=== Beyond Toleration Metaphor Explained (11:30) ===

[00:26:38]  Though this book is a work of history, I said it was a 500 year history.
[00:26:41]  It really began with travels I took around the U.S. looking at religious life now in 2005.
[00:26:47]  Before I published a book with my friend Jeff Charlotte called Killing the Buddha, in which we traveled around the US looking for interesting stories of contemporary religious life, particularly places of intersection, religious communities having this mutual impact on each other and changing in creative and surprising ways.
[00:27:05]  And one of the places that was most meaningful to me on this number of trips that I took around the US doing this kind of story gathering was in Chimeo, New Mexico, at a place called El Sanctuario del Chimeo.
[00:27:17]  And it is a Catholic church that stood there for upwards of 300 years.
[00:27:22]  Older than the United States, but it stands on a place that previously was sacred to the Native American community that was there.
[00:27:30]  And over the course of this long interaction, the Catholic Church, many of its practices incorporated some of the practices that were there beforehand, and it has become popular well beyond its core Catholic constituency.
[00:27:44]  It's a really historic tourist site as much as it is anything else.
[00:27:48]  And what happens in this church is that the way the church is arranged is you walk in and there's The sanctuary that you'd expect with the altar up front, where people sit in the pews and then line up to take communion during the Mass.
[00:28:01]  But in the back of the church, in a little side chapel, there is a hole in the ground of the church, in the cement floor of the church.
[00:28:09]  And in this hole is earth, the earth of that part of the United States that was sacred to the Tehuah people, who believed that it had miraculous qualities such that if you needed healing, you might bathe with it or you might eat it.
[00:28:26]  And this became part of the ritual practices of this church in Chimayo, New Mexico.
[00:28:32]  So, This was meaningful to me for a couple of reasons.
[00:28:36]  One is that it is just the age of the place itself and of the story that it represents.
[00:28:43]  When we're talking about religion in America, it's much older than 250 years.
[00:28:48]  It's much older than whatever other founding moment you'd like to think about or that we've been shown or suggested that this is where religion in America starts.
[00:28:58]  And it is a story, it is a history that is millennia old.
[00:29:02]  And we are one part of it.
[00:29:04]  The United States is one part of it as a place in which many different religious communities come together and have this mutual influence.
[00:29:11]  So, I like the contrast of the city on the hill to the hole in the dirt.
[00:29:16]  That the city on a hill is something imposed upon something else that is there.
[00:29:21]  The hole in the earth is something that is already there and learning from all these constituent elements coming together.
[00:29:27]  So, that to me was the two of the founding or the guiding metaphors of the book to think about that contrast between those two images and just.
[00:29:37]  To try to suggest that this is a much bigger story than it is usually reduced to.
[00:29:43]  I think that's probably what I would like to be the takeaway for most of my work, which is very basic sounding, but it has broad implications that the story is always bigger.
[00:29:55]  So we're constantly encountering these efforts to reduce the story of religion in America to this one thing, and you're either inside or you're outside.
[00:30:03]  But the story is always bigger.
[00:30:05]  And what's interesting to me is that those efforts to reduce the story.
[00:30:10]  Are also part of the big story.
[00:30:11]  And so it's, you don't have to argue against it because it is part of this larger argument that we are all part of this, these contrasting elements that I don't think there'll be ever any resolution because the very basic idea of what we're trying to do here is to make a place where all these conflicting ideas can interact and influence each other and continue to do so.
[00:30:35]  Yeah, the story is bigger, it's messier, it's porous, it's constantly contested.
[00:30:43]  I think that's.
[00:30:44]  Very important, but it's also deeply meaningful.
[00:30:48]  And I think that's the thing is that a decade after this book, when we're in a situation right now where the idea of religious diversity, very concept of diversity, of religious freedoms are being challenged in ways we haven't seen meaningfully, institutionally, in quite some time.
[00:31:12]  What would you say?
[00:31:14]  Is the thing that most people misunderstand the most about religious freedom in our history that makes us most vulnerable to the possibility of repeating those old patterns of conflict and even the tolerance, if you will?
[00:31:37]  I suspect that many Americans believe that religious freedom is something that the founders decided was a good idea.
[00:31:46]  And they did it, and it was great.
[00:31:49]  And it was a good idea.
[00:31:51]  And in some ways, they tried to do it, but it's always been evolving.
[00:31:55]  It's always been, as you say, contested, specifically because the idea of religious freedom includes conflict within it.
[00:32:03]  Because my religious freedom may limit your religious freedom and vice versa.
[00:32:09]  And when you multiply that by the countless communities that all have their own notions of what it means to be religiously free, there is bound to be contested ground about where do your beliefs begin to impact my ability to live my life and where do mine do the same to you.
[00:32:27]  So, an understanding of the ways that religious freedom has been denied to many Americans throughout American history since the founding, since the framing, since this was supposedly codified as law,
[00:32:41]  understanding this pendulum swings, those moments when, yes, it does seem like pluralism is ascendant, and those when it draws back and it feels like there is a religious majority trying to hinder the efforts of the minority to be seen and just to be able to live their lives.
[00:32:59]  So, I think that we are experiencing in our lives times, we've experienced the swing in both directions.
[00:33:07]  When this book came out in 2015, and I was making the media rounds trying to talk about it or trying to get people interested, I would sometimes hear people say that, oh, you know, this is settled.
[00:33:18]  You know, it's a we have a black president, everything's fine.
[00:33:22]  Yeah.
[00:33:22]  And as I write about in the closing chapter of the book, not only the first black president, but the first president to acknowledge America as a vastly diverse religious nation.
[00:33:32]  In his inaugural address, the first time ever, and who knows when we'll see the like again.
[00:33:39]  And so it's, I think, having a sense of how religious freedom has been fought for and accomplished by different communities at different points in American history, and also a sense of what forces have been involved in it being limited for others.
[00:33:57]  I think those are important lessons for anyone to learn and just to be made aware that, in some ways, it's the question of whether or not we have religious freedom, it's the whole ball of wax.
[00:34:06]  You know, I mean, you.
[00:34:07]  It really gets to the heart of what it means to try to be a multicultural, diverse democracy.
[00:34:13]  Can we be that?
[00:34:14]  We can only be it if there's room for everyone to believe and act upon their beliefs in the way that their conscience dictates.
[00:34:22]  If you don't have that, you don't have the same thing that we all think we are living in and working towards.
[00:34:28]  Yeah.
[00:34:30]  If you could leave our listeners with one reframe, like one sentence that replaces.
[00:34:39]  America was founded as a Christian nation with religious freedom for all, right?
[00:34:45]  What would you say instead?
[00:34:47]  You're a Bruce Springsteen fan?
[00:34:49]  Oh, yeah.
[00:34:51]  I was just thinking right before the interview, for some reason, I was trying to think of a line of his, and it's talk about a dream, try to make it real.
[00:34:58]  And that's what I feel like is the American enterprise.
[00:35:02]  It's this dream that we all awoke within, and we try to contribute to, and we try to make it real.
[00:35:10]  The idea that it's a constant trying, that dream requires constant effort, constant struggle, that it's not a thing that is just handed to us, but a thing that we need to fight for is kind of the entire point of what we're doing with this podcast.
[00:35:29]  And so, the last question I guess I have for you is when you're looking at the religio political landscape of America right now, which is not great, and understanding that particularly the freedom of religion that we sort of take for granted and we assume is our God given birthright,
[00:35:51]  but which in reality is something that has constantly had to be negotiated and fought for and re engaged, do you?
[00:36:02]  Feel a sense of hope?
[00:36:04]  Do you see examples of communities, particularly minority religious communities, that are trying to, in a sense, widen the circle of what it means to be American and a person of faith and an American of faith in ways that could actually serve as models, can last, can give us a sense of what the future could look like?
[00:36:28]  I do feel hopeful.
[00:36:29]  I go back and forth, I have my own pendulum swings.
[00:36:32]  But I feel hopeful because there is more active religious freedom for more communities now than there has been in American history.
[00:36:40]  And there will continue to be.
[00:36:42]  There are more signs of communities that previously might want to keep quiet, refusing to do so.
[00:36:50]  And I don't mean just in any kind of political speech way, but in terms of their presence on the national cultural stage, we see more and more of diverse religious America all around us, no matter where we live in the country.
[00:37:04]  So, I do feel hopeful.
[00:37:06]  I've been thinking as an interesting metaphor for religion in America lately.
[00:37:11]  I've been thinking about the ring shout tradition in the African American, Low Country ring shout tradition that it's born of this bringing together religious elements from enslaved people brought from Africa with European religious influences, even Native American religious influences in the 18th and 19th century.
[00:37:31]  They are all given expression in this new religious ritual, which involves.
[00:37:36]  The movement and rhythms of enslaved communities melded with Christian cultural heritage, biblical stories, and shared in this really joyous, freedom seeking way.
[00:37:49]  And it is seeming to me that if we think about American religion generally, that there is those kind of bringing together of elements that ultimately I think are hopeful and creative and are constantly generating new moments which lead us to whatever the future may be for us.

=== Joyous Freedom Seeking Communities (01:03) ===

[00:38:08]  Peter Mann, so thank you for your work and for your thoughts, and thank you for joining us on Our Seven Neighbors.
[00:38:14]  We're absolutely grateful.
[00:38:16]  My real pleasure.
[00:38:17]  Thanks so much, Evan.
[00:38:26]  Just a fantastic conversation with Reza Aslan and Peter Manso from the Smithsonian.
[00:38:32]  We are so grateful for you for joining us for this conversation.
[00:38:35]  We hope you will join us again in our next episode of Our Seven Neighbors Religion and Resistance in America.
[00:38:43]  Thanks for being here.
[00:39:03]  Axis Mundi.
[00:39:09]  This podcast was edited by Resonate Recordings.