“There were no Puritans on my street in Philadelphia.”

That’s the opening line of Thomas Tweed’s encyclopedic new book Religion in the Lands That Became America: From the Ice Age to the Information Age (Yale Univ., May 2025). It also describes his reaction, as an undergraduate, to reading Sydney Ahlstrom’s 1973 book, A Religious History of the American People, which has long been used as an introductory religious studies textbook.

“I still think it is a compelling, encyclopedic account,” Tweed, a professor of American studies and history at the University of Notre Dame, tells PW, but decades after he began studying the history of religion, migration, and culture in America, his own book seeks to tell a different story.

Tweed was raised in a Catholic home and had formative teen experiences at Jewish classmates’ bar and bat mitzvahs. The prevailing historical understanding of American religion didn’t fit his experience. “People thought that religion in America was about a center and a periphery,” he says. At the center, he says, were “white, male Protestants and their texts in the northern United States. Some of my best friends are some of those things, but I just thought, there’s a richer story here.”

Religion in the Lands That Became America explores what Tweed calls an “ecosystem” of people in natural and built environments. He begins with ancient peoples in the year 9200 BCE and ends in 2020, an unusually recent stopping point for a historian.

“The real way to change the story is to change the starting point,” Tweed says, explaining why the book uses land as a frame rather than historical periods, groups of people, or the political entity that is the United States of America. “I want to find ways to talk about the land,” he says, “without centering the nation.”

In 2013, two years before he served a term as president of the American Academy of Religion, Tweed reached out to Jennifer Banks, senior executive editor at Yale University Press, with some questions about Ahlstrom’s book, also published by Yale. Those conversations led to Religion in the Lands That Became America, which, Banks says, “radically reorients our narratives about the religious history of the United States, allowing many populations to finally see their traditions at the center of the larger story.”

“Just about everything is new here,” says Banks, including “the vastly expanded timeframe, the archaeological material that Tweed begins the book with, the ecological focus of his analysis, and the way Indigenous populations, women, African Americans, transnational migrants, and people of many faiths are central to his narrative. The book should set the agenda for scholarship going forward.”

Tweed hopes it will encourage readers to see themselves as connected to the long fullness of human ancestry, and to a land that is, he says, “really a kind of patchwork quilt, sewn together by a narrative thread about flourishing.”

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The land is really a kind of patchwork quilt, sewn together by a narrative thread about flourishing.
”

“Let’s just tell the truth,” he says, including hard truths about environmental destruction, slavery, Indigenous erasure, misogyny, and other bigotries.

Yet Religion in the Lands is also rich with what Tweed calls “historical sources of hope,” such as when Frederick Douglass and Mark Twain spoke out for protections for mistreated Chinese American workers. History reveals “all kinds of people stepping forward for no obvious reason of self-interest, to think about the common good and other folks,” Tweed says, “so there’s lots of hope.”