Peter Manseau - One Nation, Under Gods: A New American History

But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no god.

It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.

Thomas Jefferson

the forest is unconverted.

Derek Walcott

In the dry red soil of Chimayo, New Mexico, there is a hole in the ground that some call holy. They intend no pun, no play on words. The hole is a serious matter; the locals who tend to it would no more joke about their humble opening in the earth than they would a hole in the head, or the heart.

An arms length in diameter and just deep enough that the temperature seems to drop when you lean in for a closer look, the hole has been here for centuries. The dirt in this valley has been regarded as sacred since before the birth of the Republic of which it is now a part; it has been revered as the physical nature of the spirit world since before the Spanish missionaries arrived with their own notions of embodied divinity; it was holy even before the first Europeans looked on the people of an unmapped continent and declared that they must know nothing of God.

Though it has a long and eclectic spiritual history, the hole sits today in the back corner of a Roman Catholic Church, El Santuario de Chimayo, which is among the most frequently visited religious pilgrimage sites in America. Hundreds of thousands of true believers and curious souls visit every year to line up in a small side chapel strewn with pictures of loved ones lost. They crowd into a closet-sized space around the hole, bend at the knees, dip their hands into the cool of the gap below, and pull up big handfuls of dirt. Some of it ends up in Ziploc bags, some in Tupperware tubs to be taken home on airplanes to every corner of this improbable nation. Much of it ends up in the mouths of the faithful. Visitors to Chimayo believe that eating the dirt brings miracles; as evidence they point to the crutches hanging from the walls.

Some would call this practice folk religionnot the real or legitimate orthopraxy of a Christian church but an indigenous corruption of the sanctioned sacrament of Communion. Others might suggest it is in fact something more complicated: a distinctly American form of religious syncretism, a blending of faith traditions so complete that it is difficult to separate one from the other. Implicit in each of these explanations is a more obvious physical truth. The church at Chimayo was built over a hole in the ground that has history both connected to and independent of the structure around it.

To extend the metaphor: In thinking about religion in American history, we have too often focused only on the church standing above the hole and not on the hole itself, nor on the people lining up to make the soil within a part of their blood, their bones. The United States is a land shaped and informed by internal religious diversitysome of it obvious, some of it hiddenand yet the history we have all been taught has mostly failed to convey this. We have learned history from the middle rather than the margins, though it is the latter from which so much of our culture has been formed.

We need only look to the point often seen as the beginning to know this is true. It is the story we memorized in school: In fourteen hundred and ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue and he did so, we all have been taught, on orders and at the expense of Ferdinand and Isabella, the Catholic monarchs of Spain. The largest of his ships was named for the mother of the Christian savior (its full name was Santa Mara de la Inmaculada Concepcin, Holy Mary of the Immaculate Conception). In his journal, which begins in the form of a prayer, In the Name of Our Lord Jesus Christ, Columbus writes of standards bearing the cross brought onto the lands he was soon to conquer.

Less well known are the men who sailed with Columbus who did not call this symbol their own. No less than America would be, Europe at the time was a place endlessly conflicted over its multi-religious past. Having shaped so much of Iberian culture, practitioners of Judaism and Islam provided Spains Catholics with a daily reminder that their world was not made by the church alone. Whether this reminder was mere embarrassment or existential threat, it was reason enough to force them out. Columbus devotes the first words of his diary to praising Spain for evicting its religious minorities in the same year he began his voyage, and yet his own adventure could not have been accomplished without men drawn from the very peoples he was so pleased to see driven from their homes. It was precisely their connections to exiled faiths that led several of his crewmen to join a mission that was less likely to end in riches than a watery grave.

Even less well known are the spiritual practices of the Taino Indians who paddled their boats out to greet the newly arrived ships. Columbus declared that the people he encountered could easily be converted to the faith of Christendom because they obviously had none of their own. In fact, they merely had no faith he recognized, and so he was as blind to it as history books have often been.

The dominance of the Christian narrative of Columbus over the more complicated quilt of beliefs present at the earliest encounter between the places called the Old World and the New illustrates a neglected aspect of the American story. At every major turning point in the nations narrative of encounter and expansion, an alternate spiritual history can be told. From a distance it is easy to see only the Christian elements of much of American history. The church stands aboveas unavoidable as any twice-told taleobscuring the more beguiling story within.