Reconfiguring the Boundaries of American Religious Studies

Abstract

American Religion 2, no. 1 (Fall 2020), pp. 10–13 Copyright © 2020, The Trustees of Indiana University • doi: 10.2979/amerreli.2.1.03 Reconfiguring the Boundaries of American Religious Studies Abtsam Saleh Harvard University, Cambridge, USA Why is American Islam is so Rarely Framed as an “American Religion” in the Field of Religious Studies? Despite existing in America long before the establishment of the United States, Muslims have been largely left out of discussions on American religion within the field of religious studies. In order to answer the question of why, one has to ask what scholars of religious studies have understood “American religion” to be. According to most surveys of American religious history, the term has been used to denote the history of Christianity in America, white Protestantism more specifically, some dating the origins of American religion back to the Protestant Reformation.1 Narratives surrounding American religion were constructed to center Protestantism and the ways it has dominated public religious life in the United States, reified by legal and political actors.2 Considerations of what fell under the category of American religion were largely based on proximity to mainline Protestant churches, casting all other denominations and/or religions outside of the category. Over time, however, 1 For more recent work on this topic see John Modern, “Marshall McLuhan, Playful Prophet” in “Forum: The Religious Situation, 1968 (Part 2),” Religion and American Culture 29, no. 2 (2019): 153–162. 2 See Marie A. Failinger, “Islam in the Mind of American Courts: 1800 to 1960,” Boston College Journal of Law and Social Justice 32, no.1 (2012): 1–29. Abtsam Saleh 11 historians of American religion have begun to expand on this narrow definition. R. Laurence Moore’s Religious Outsiders and the Making of Americans,3 although working with this mainline definition of American religion, expands on the category by examining its relationship with denominations and/or religions deemed as religious outsiders on the basis of dissenting from mainline Protestantism. Moore concludes that this categorization based on consensus-dissent is inadequate in expressing the plurality of American religious life in-so-much as it continues to center mainline Christianity as the religion of the US as a nation. In the more recent “The Study of American Religions: Critical Reflections on a Specialization,” Finbarr Curtis critically examines the category of American religion as a specialization within the discipline of religious studies, including its history of Protestant bias. Curtis highlights how despite attempts at expanding American religion to include narratives of underrepresented religious groups, these inclusions remain peripheral despite being recognized.4 This precise centering of Protestantism as the American religion and the locating of those not in proximity to it in its periphery is a reason why American Islam is so rarely framed as an “American religion” in the field of religious studies. Narratives of American religious history place American Islam in the periphery, dismissing its influence on American culture and American culture ’s influence on it. American religionists reify this categorization both in their scholarship and institutionally when American Islam is positioned as peripheral to the construction of the American nation and religion. Can Islam be “American religion”? If we move away from an understanding of American religion that centers white Protestantism and expand the category to mean religions who have both shaped and been shaped by this nation, whose understandings are put in conversation with the legal, social, political, economic, and cultural life of the United States, then Islam is certainly an American religion. American Muslims are part of the patchwork of American social-religious life, preceding the formation of the United States. Enslaved African Muslims were brought to the Americas centuries prior to the American Revolution, bringing with them their religious traditions, many maintaining them in conversation with their new surroundings, and some preserving them over generations.5 Over centuries, Islam lived and grew within 3 R. Laurence Moore, Religious Outsiders and the Making of Americans (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). 4 Finbarr Curtis, “The Study of American Religions: Critical Reflections on a Specialization ,” Religion 42, no. 3 (2012): 365. 5 See Sylviane A. Diouf, Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas, (New York: New...