EXCERPT FROM THE PREFACE TO EDWIN SCOTT GAUSTAD AND PHILIP L. BARLOW, NEW HISTORICAL ATLAS OF RELIGION IN AMERICA

by Philip L. Barlow

"Another place! It's enough to grieve me-that old dream of going, of becoming a better man just by getting up and going to a better place." -Wendell Berry

"Tell me the landscape in which you live and I will tell you who you are." -Ortega y Gasset

"Space has a spiritual equivalent and can heal what is divided and burdensome in us." -Gretel Ehrlich

The prospect of a conversation about "geography" is sure to prompt a yawn in many American citizens, especially during the 365 days of each year that harbor an important sporting event, or the new release of Hollywood's latest, or a terrific sale at the mall. And should some hapless geographer press the issue in the wrong company, the glaze he might inspire in his auditors' eyes is apt to harden to cataract caliber.

Anyone hoping to comprehend religion in its historical context, however, ignores geography at severe peril. Among the many useful ways to read the Hebrew Bible, for instance, is to imagine it as a vast tract arguing and probing the thesis, "This land is mine; God gave this land to me." And if the Promised Land was core to the ancient Abrahamic covenant, geographic zones conceived as holy in Israel's subsequent history are not difficult to trace-whether the nation as a whole, or Galilee, Judea, Jerusalem, the Temple, or the Holy of Holies. And what defined ancient Israel conditioned Christianity, whose place of origin is claimed by adherents of both religions (and, of course, of Islam) as "Holy Land." The Crusades remind us that conceptions of space can matter to the point of bloodshed to those who hold them inviolable. Indeed, the entire history of Christianity is incomprehensible apart from a geographic sensibility. The Pope emerged as supreme in the early Christian centuries-the sixteenth chapter of St. Matthew notwithstanding-in part because the cultural-political preeminence of Rome held sway among its metropolitan rivals, such as Antioch or Jerusalem itself. And centuries before the Protestant Reformation fractured western Christendom, the widening tensions between the eastern and western halves of the old Empire sundered the Church into Eastern Orthodoxy (to whose theology and history Americans remain more or less oblivious, largely because of language and geography) and Western (or Roman) Catholicism. Analogous geographic concerns affect the daily lives and religious sensibilities of people throughout the world, as when, five times each day, Muslims utter prayers while facing holy Mecca, or become pilgrims (perhaps at great sacrifice) to Mecca, while Hindus journey toward Benares. Quite beyond "objective" demographics, chosen people, promised lands, sanctified cities, sacred rivers, taboo forests, holy mountains, hallowed directions-all suggest an intricate mesh of religion and "interpreted space." Yawns imply less about "geography" than about those who yawn.

The United States, having evolved into the most religiously complex nation in the world's history, teases or wrenches the issues into special form. In the mid-eighteenth century, the Reverend Thomas Bacon wrote from Maryland to his sponsoring mission society in England: "Religion among us seems to wear the face of the country; part moderately cultivated, the greater part, wild and savage." Bacon's suggestion that piety may be related to geography is more than metaphorically true. It is not the purpose of this work to create a "geotheology"-either like the original one by a sixth-century monk who, unfortunately, attacked the heresy of a spherical world, or (more recently, locally, and successfully) such as Kathleen Norris accomplished in 1993 in her personal and beautifully written Dakota: A Spiritual Geography. Anyone attempting such tasks, however, especially on a national level, would do well to be informed by the religious dimensions of the historical geography and the geographical history of the American people. The New Historical Atlas of Religion in America insists and assumes that environment has palpably influenced the nature and the progress of those religions that either withered or flourished on the American vine.

This is true of America's earliest natives, whose religion was the environment-the land, the land's derivative harvests or herds, and the nature, spirits, peoples, and cosmos that all interacted with it. Shifts in this worldview were profound precisely as Native Americans surrendered terrain to the European invaders. The assertion about the religious significance of the physical environment holds too for those early Africans-made-Americans against their will, imported and bound to one region more than to another-slaves whose minds and circumstance and religion were shaped so utterly by a land that grew cotton. And the assertion is also true for that largest of all religions that came to dominate America in recent centuries.

For the first time in its hoary history, Christianity entered a fresh and seemingly empty continent to explore, to settle, to redeem. No central authority directed the effort; no master plan supplied the details. Parish lines and political boundaries were yet to be hacked through the forests, flung across the mountains, pushed into the plains. Political princes and ecclesiastical overlords were a vast, watery, and treacherous 3,000 miles away in space, further yet in time. Here, in what settlers experienced as a boundless new world, one could improvise or experiment; one could grow fearful or brave. The form of modification or of revolution was often fixed by the contours of the land, a land that "was ours before we were the land's." To this daunting though beckoning wilderness, immigrants came on a grand errand and on a stupendous scale. And while many chafed or scoffed, betrayed or fled, enslaved or failed or died, most found a continent worthy of their sacrifice and of their seed. They gave themselves to the land "and forthwith found salvation in surrender." In the process, whether Christian or non-Christian, diverse groups in diverse locales and in diverse ways shaped and were shaped by their surroundings. Baptists built churches by rivers, convenient for immersion; Puritans erected chapels in the literal and symbolic centers of their respective towns; Lakotas aligned their teepees to sacred points on the horizon; Mormons staked their claim to successive new Zions and fled the wrath of the earlier inhabitants of their several promised lands. New York accepted Russia's Jews and Minnesota accepted Sweden's Lutherans, whose faith-or whose children's faith-was altered by the change in venue. The growth or shrinkage of diverse religious groups, their motion in space and time, their surroundings and encounters with other people and other (regional) cultures-all intersect in sometimes obscure but often important ways with their own and others' interpretations of their theology, their worldview, and sense of purpose.