Writing a monograph that spans thousands of years of history and seeks to be both inclusive and original is an audacious undertaking. Few scholars attempt it, and fewer succeed. Yet such works are essential. Students and general readers benefit from sweeping narratives that illuminate enduring themes and situate them within broader historical processes. In Religion in the Lands That Became America, Notre Dame historian Thomas A. Tweed offers the latest comprehensive account of religion’s role in North American life. The result is a book that is brilliant in conception and rich in detail.

Tweed’s goals are clear: “In this book I want to tell a new story that includes more characters and more places” (p. xiii). He promises to “change the plot,” recovering what has been obscured and altering the tale’s social effects in the present (pp. 3–4). To achieve this, Tweed adopts a long chronology and a global perspective, ensuring that readers never lose sight of how events beyond North America shaped its religious landscape. This is not a conventional narrative. Instead, Tweed foregrounds processes—migration, adaptation, and displacement—that transcend political boundaries and temporal markers.

The book’s most original section is its opening. He devotes nearly 100 pages (2 of his 10 chapters) to Indigenous peoples before European colonization. He begins by reminding readers how brief human existence has been in the cosmic timeline, then turns to the earliest signs of life in the Americas, decentering Homo sapiens. Next, he traces the arrival of the first humans to the region and then tracks the development of their societies. This emphasis on precontact societies is a welcome corrective to older narratives that treat Native traditions as mere preludes to European Christianity. By highlighting continuity as well as change, Tweed underscores what endured despite conquest and conversion. His discussion of Indigenous religious practices—rituals tied to land, kinship, and cosmology—offers a nuanced portrait that resists romanticization while affirming complexity.

The final chapter is equally innovative. Tweed opens with technology, exploring how Silicon Valley entrepreneurs have reshaped religious experience. From iPhones to online worship to algorithm-driven spirituality, he demonstrates that digital platforms are not peripheral but central to contemporary religious life. This attention to the present, framed within a deep historical arc, is one of the book’s great strengths.

Tweed’s interpretive framework privileges diversity over questions of power. Like many scholars trained in religious studies, he resists narratives dominated by elites and institutions. Instead, he emphasizes “private spaces” alongside synagogues and legislatures, giving voice to lesser-known individuals whose practices too often escape archival capture. His paired themes of “displacement” and “emplacement” (or crossing and dwelling), combined with a concern for “sustainability” (p. 9), structure the narrative and invite readers to consider religion as dynamic, adaptive, and embedded in material environments. This approach yields a story that is more comprehensive than many traditional accounts.

Yet it also entails trade-offs. Tweed claims that “for the religious history of the lands that became America…long-term processes and short-term events had as much influence” as “presidents and wars” (p. xiii). By focusing on long-term processes, Tweed minimizes the role of some pivotal events in US history. The Civil War receives three pages and World War II only one. For Tweed, these conflicts were not decisive in shaping American religion. While his argument has merit—wars are not the sole engines of religious change—it risks underestimating how national crises catalyze spiritual innovation. Revivals, reform movements, and theological shifts often emerge in response to trauma.

When Tweed addresses politics directly, he most often does so through the lens of civil religion. He traces its origins to the Revolutionary era and the First Amendment, defining it as “a piety found outside the churches and associated with the civil realm” (p. 161). Americans, he argues, sacralized founding documents—the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution—as “American Scripture” (p. 181). They fused Enlightenment notions of a creator deity with a conviction that the United States was a new Israel. Civil religion, functioning as an alternative to an established church, became “the first language of American nationalism,” enabling patriots to frame political projects in general rather than specifically Christian terms (p. 198).

This analysis is persuasive and elegant. Yet Tweed’s treatment of Protestant power invites debate. He contends that Protestant claims on national identity “remained assertions in the subjunctive mood: they expressed a wish more than a stated fact” (p. 198). Perhaps. But recent scholarship has documented the extent to which Protestants shaped law, education, and foreign policy. To his credit, Tweed acknowledges that unofficial Protestant establishments emerged in certain times and places, complicating any simple narrative of pluralism. Still, readers may wish for a more sustained engagement with these tensions. As Tweed knows as well as any historian, no matter how hard Catholics, for example, tried to embrace American civil religion, for much of their history they remained political and social outsiders.

No book of this scale can cover everything, and it does not take much expertise to complain about what an author did not include. Yet despite Tweed’s promise to move beyond Puritan and Atlantic Coast frameworks, the West occupies a marginal place between the Revolutionary era and the rise of Silicon Valley. Figures central to Western and Pentecostal traditions—Junípero Serra, William Seymour, and Aimee Semple McPherson—are absent. Nor does Tweed devote much space to defining key terms, leaving readers to distinguish on their own Pentecostals from Presbyterians, for example. These gaps do not negate the book’s achievements, but they underscore the difficulty of writing a truly national history that will both satisfy scholars and inform undergraduates.

What Tweed does include is impressive. His narrative incorporates overlooked individuals and communities, enriching our understanding of American religion’s diversity. His engagement with material culture, migration, and ecology reflects cutting-edge scholarship. And his 200-plus pages of endnotes testify to extraordinary rigor. The notes function not merely as citations but as an ongoing dialogue with other scholars, offering readers a roadmap through contested interpretations.

Religion in the Lands That Became America is sweeping, ambitious, and original. It reframes familiar stories, foregrounds neglected actors, and situates North American religion within global and ecological contexts. Its interpretive choices—emphasizing diversity over power, processes over events—will provoke debate, as will its omissions. But that is precisely the point. Tweed has written a book that invites conversation rather than forecloses it. For students, it offers a panoramic introduction; for scholars, a stimulus to rethink categories and chronologies. In an era when religion remains central to public life, Tweed’s work reminds us that understanding its past is indispensable to navigating its future.