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The United States as a country was religiously formed by Reformed Protestants, who were later joined by substantial numbers of immigrant Lutherans, Roman Catholics, and Jews. The role of Martin Luther in this religiously varied and pluralistic society has often changed over time, and has depended greatly on the context of those who have written about him. In some periods of time, especially the 18th century, Luther was little noticed or commented about, generally a figure solely in the distant past. In the 19th century, many American writers and scholars took notice of Luther, but often as a past symbol of some reality the author wished to address. Thus, Luther was seen essentially as one of the first modern individuals in the West, standing for religious and personal liberty against the reactionary forces of church and state. Some Protestants noted him for his stance against the medieval Western church and the papacy, which mirrored their own anti–Roman Catholic positions; American Roman Catholics saw him as the cause of the splintering of the true church and the author of all that was religiously problematic. After the Civil War, scholars began to access modern German scholarship about Luther, and the Luther birth anniversary of 1883 was perhaps the high point of his reputation in America. In the 20th century, there were positive and negative developments. On the negative side, two world wars soured Americans on things German, and some saw Luther as contributing to the rise of the Nazis and of the Holocaust. On the positive side, many of Luther’s works were translated into English, and many new historical and theological studies of the reformer were produced in English, along with translations of European works. American Lutherans began to produce substantial contributions to Luther studies, and newer works, even among Roman Catholics, sought to put Luther into his historical and theological contexts.

Pioneers bring new, distinctive, and transformative elements to the cultural matrix, building upon trends, perceptions, and situations. The concept of a pioneer as it has developed is itself problematic, since it presupposes a fixed cultural phenomenon applicable in a variety of instances and without attention to pre-existing groups, institutions, or cultural expressions that may have played a role in the “new” formation. Unfortunately, much of the treatment usually found under the term “pioneer” assumes a tabula rasa environment, but this is not the case in North America, as Dunbar-Ortiz eloquently indicates. Those pertinent to being designated “pioneers” focus attention on individuals and movements that established identifiable Islamic organized entities in North America. They built upon Islamic linguistic, cultural, and social orientations they either brought with them as immigrants or were present on the North American continent. “Pioneer,” thus, is understood to be flexible with regard to time frames, as well as the designation of “new.” Furthermore, since the geographic region of North America is itself diverse, separate analyses of the United States, Canada, Mexico, and the Caribbean are made here. This, despite arguments by some scholars on the vagaries of such hermetically defined entities, appears to be the most adequate format for this summary review. Indeed, there is ample evidence of crossovers between these countries. Because of Islam’s long interaction with Christianity, and European countries that crossed the Atlantic, it follows, then, that perspectives and biases from European Christianity would affect the religion’s growth in North America. In fact, Islamic influences, and Christian antagonism to them, were known in North America’s early European expansion on the continent; indeed, some played a role in North American cultural development. All the so-called world religions have adopted incorporative and encompassing strategies vis-à-vis older, traditional religious patterns; some have been aggressively missionary-oriented, while others have generally expanded by a process of osmosis. Apart from its early years, Islam has tended toward the latter pattern. It should not surprise us, then, that conflicts between Christianity and Islam should have been a subtext of Islamic growth throughout the world. With the widespread influence of Christianity in the conquests of the Americas and their subsequent occupation, it is reasonable to look for competitive factors of cultural influence as they interacted. Interreligious conflict played a role in the migrations of groups such as the pilgrims to the United States. Undoubtedly, the mixed relationship between European Christendom and the Muslim world played a role in early attitudes within the North American context, with Europe welcoming and expanding on Islamic scholarship in many areas of knowledge, while the Church was vigorously opposing Islam as a religion. Among other features of this history, there were, then, pre-existing conceptual understandings and trends open to pioneers for their usage and reaction. A cultural attitude of positive reinforcement of Muslim presence has been operational within Muslims themselves toward settling in new environments. It derives from Muslim cultural contexts and predisposes them to work positively within any new situation. Consider the concept of rihla, an old Arab literary trope often associated with Ibn Battuta (d. 1369) and religious journeys such as the hajj, a motif fully embraced by Islam from its early days. Believers espoused it as a way of relating to new realities—viewing their role as one of appropriating God’s world regardless of where they traveled. In effect, the whole world was God’s, and Muslims were welcome in it. Hence Islam also had the potential to be in North American because they to feel at home wherever God would lead. In contrast, Western scholarship has tended to emphasize the philosophical, legal and theological constructions of Islam in comparing it with Christian or secular realities; this may have skewed studies away from other realities in the development of this religion outside its original home. In this regard, most Muslim believers find solace in sociocultural dimensions, such as eid celebrations, Islamic rituals, food protocols, Qur’anic recitations, and popular religious symbols. The interaction of Islam in North America requires examining wider focus in determining its successes. From that perspective, the examination of Islam on the continent is in its beginnings. It should also be noted that those foundational to building new American institutions utilized various models of Islam available in different countries of the Islamic world. This has resulted in a multidimensional religious reality on the continent. Finally, various changing social attitudes are evident in North America’s history in relation to Islam and these have played a role in the religion’s ongoing development, such as the attractiveness of Sufism’s apparent passivism and, perhaps more, the role of conversion and antipathies like Islamophobia. These elements are all ongoing in the understanding of the way in which pioneer activities have taken place on the continent.

Emotion is an important part of religions in America. There is great diversity among emotional styles. Some groups are highly emotional, others relatively low in emotional expression, and some occupy a middle ground. Religious life is characterized by cultivation and expression of many emotions. Four that are of particular importance for Americans are wonder, empathy, anticipation, and the feeling of emptiness. Some emotions are treated as commodities. The study of emotion in religion enables fresh perspectives on the interwovenness of emotion, religion, and culture. The investigation of the emotional lives of religious persons in America can be advanced through study of persons’ reporting of their experiences alongside research bearing on cultural expectations for emotional life.

Buddhism has been a missionary religion from its beginning. Japan was among the countries where this “foreign” religion arrived and was assimilated, adapted, and reshaped into new forms specifically connected to the new geographical and cultural environment. Buddhism traveled long distances from India through China and Korea, bringing with it flows of people, ideas, technologies, material cultures, and economies. More than ten centuries after its arrival in Japan, the first phase of propagation of Japanese Buddhism started and was linked to the history of Japanese migrants to Hawaii, North America, and Brazil since the 19th century. This was a history of diaspora, a term that implies not only the physical—and often traumatic—dispersion of people who left their homes for unknown places, but also a reconfiguration of their identities through the adaptation to these new places and their cultures. The main role of Buddhist priests sent from Japan was to assist and provide comfort to the newly formed communities of migrant laborers, who very often experienced racial discrimination and lived under harsh conditions. Temples became important loci of Japanese community life, as well as centers for the preservation of Japanese culture. Diasporic communities felt the urge to keep a bond with the homeland and a reconnection with some past traditions, while, at the same time, striving toward integration in the new society. Japanese Buddhist denominations in diasporic communities had therefore to accommodate different needs and adjust their teachings and practices to better suit their host cultures. Some of them underwent substantial changes, while others placed more emphasis on some practices instead of others. Moreover, Japanese Buddhist schools had to find a way to balance between their traditional role in Japan, which was—and still is—closely related to funerary rituals and memorials, and the new stimuli and requests coming from the new generations of Japanese migrants (nisei and sansei) and the non-Japanese spiritual seekers, the latter mostly interested in meditative practices and not in funeral Buddhism. In short, what needed to be done was to overcome a status of “ethnic” religion without, however, losing its own identity.

Religious moderation is hardly the first thing that comes to mind when considering the history of the United States. Would one have spoken of the Puritans as moderates? Could one characterize the many great revivals and awakenings that coursed through colonial and early republican American in such terms? And what about the impertinence of Anne Hutchison, the audacity of Jarena Lee, the bold experiment of Prohibition, or the modern political fervor that accompanied the rise of the religious right? When compared to England and many other nominally Christian European nations, the United States generally figures as an example of religious zeal. Yet moderation holds a special place in American religious thought, and not just recently. Since the Protestant Reformation, at least, the concept of religious moderation has been inescapably entangled with concerns about the form and shape of government. Just how much religious “enthusiasm” is safe for a monarchy, a democracy, or a republic? wondered English political theorists in the 1600s and 1700s. Their concerns unavoidably carried to the “New World,” contributing to the persecution or marginalization of Quakers, Shakers, and other religious practitioners deemed too immoderate in their passions and, not infrequently, their gendered practices and sexualities. With the birth of the new republic, Americans also raised questions about the political valences of religious moderation when debating which residents of the nation could fully enjoy the rights of citizenship. Appeals to moderation were used for centuries to exclude not only religious minorities but also racial and ethnic minorities and women. And yet the contours of moderation were continually contested by both those who wielded power and those subject to it. Since the late 1800s, questions of religious moderation have also been intertwined with questions of modernity and the reconfiguration of public and private spaces. This was especially true with the rise of the fundamentalist movement in the early 1900s, a movement that opposed some of the modernist interpretive measures gaining currency among many American Christians, as well as the idea (increasingly popular over the course of the 20th century—particularly after the failure of Prohibition) that most forms of religion properly belong to the private realm. While fundamentalists were no less technologically savvy or educated than their theological opponents, their positions were nevertheless cast as anti-modern and immoderate, in that fundamentalists ostensibly held more closely to revelation than to modern science. This notion of fundamentalism as the incursion of immoderate anti-modernism, traditionalism, or enthusiasm into politics and public life has continued into the 21st century. While 21st-century arguments for religious moderation are most often directed at Muslims (who, in addition to conservative Christians, are frequently depicted as prone to trampling on the rights of those with whom they disagree), American history has no shortage of incidents involving pressures, often violent, on racial and religious minorities to moderate or privatize their ostensibly uncivilized behavior for the sake of the nation or even for humanity.

Music in American public life is best understood not simply as the formal arrangement of religious texts in sound but as a fluid arena of exchange between performers, participants, and audiences. In these exchanges we note the transformation of religious traditions themselves, as they navigate contact with their others and the challenges of public life or secularism; we also see the emergence of American religious musics as alternate publics themselves, in which new understandings of authority, tradition, and identity are negotiated. What is more, in recent decades American genre music—from jazz to hip-hop—has become a steady arena in which new forms of religiosity are proposed and debated.