“As Ms. Wilensky-Lanford notes, at the time of the nation’s founding, Baptist firebrands and Deist skeptics worked together in the cause of liberty. Her call for Americans of all backgrounds to protect public religiosity “in all its specificity and messiness” reflects our best traditions.” --The Wall Street Journal

"Despite [its task’s] magnitude, A God-Shaped Nation renders America’s religious odyssey with dazzling, kaleidoscopic breadth: a half-millennium of prophecy, heresy, hierarchs, shamans, demons, holy men, idolaters, preachers, revelators, and much, much bloodshed. It’s a convulsive history in which each generation believed they were the ones who finally saw the light."--Souli Boutis, Kismet Magazine

"[A God-Shaped Nation] soars, thriving on multiple accounts of imported and native-grown religions that have flourished in America’s spiritual hothouse and tackling, with relish and insight, the nation’s twentieth- and twenty-first-century religious, cultural, and political engagements." —Jon Butler, ARC Magazine

"Wilensky-Lanford shows a tremendous understanding of what makes history exciting without sacrificing contextual details...Besides being wildly entertaining and well-written, its goals are significant, even vital, to the present moment." Ben Woollard, The Revealer

"A fluent, always engaging study of America's religious traditions." —Kirkus Reviews

"A key work for readers who want to learn how religion developed in America." —Library Journal

"Explains America at its best and worst...a full and magisterial accounting of church and state." —Booklist

"The author ably and engag­ing­ly traces how com­pet­ing reli­gious visions became insep­a­ra­ble from the Amer­i­can exper­i­ment itself." —The Jewish Book Council

Ever since conquistadores claimed Taino land in the name of their Catholic God and New England Puritans formed their strictly Protestant “city on a hill,” religion has been central to American life. Even as some found religious freedom—Rhode Island welcomed the Quakers, Jews, and Baptists that Massachusetts expelled as dissenters—indigenous people and Africans forced into slavery struggled to protect their religious practices. With the constitutional separation of church and state, it fell to the American people to decide: would they sharpen religion’s formidable powers of division, or reimagine its creative possibilities?

In A God-Shaped Nation, Brook Wilensky-Lanford follows this essential American tension from first contact through the 2024 election. This is an expansive history of extraordinary religious questions, told through the ordinary people who grappled with them. It is a story of defiance: Anne Hutchinson, preaching against Puritan clergy; Reform rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise serving soft-shell crab to his kosher guests at an 1883 banquet; and Wovoka, a Paiute man who envisioned the Ghost Dance movement, which persisted in the face of violent government repression at Wounded Knee. It is also a story of community: Millerites waiting together in vain for Jesus’s return on a rainy October night in 1844; Chinese immigrants bringing Daoist and Buddhist gods to their California temples; Mormons pushing westward to build their “new  Zion” in Utah. And in the last fifty years, it has been a story of muscular political power, as the religious right has sought to shape the present and paint the past in its own image.

At a moment when religion penetrates even the most secular aspects of American life, understanding its history is more essential than ever before. “It is in history that the very human work of religion happens,” Wilensky-Lanford shows us, “and in ordinary time that even the most carved-in stone tenets can and do change.”

Advance Praise for A God-Shaped Nation: 

“To write an overarching history of religion in America is an ambitious undertaking—to grapple with the dissonance, diversity, power, and publicness of religion across a continent and a half millennium. Brook Wilensky-Lanford meets that challenge with unusual grace and clarity in A God-Shaped Nation. Her lustrous narrative is at once sweeping in breadth and absorbing in detail, a skilled feat of historical synthesis and artful storytelling.”

—Leigh Eric Schmidt, author of  Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality

“The madness and the beauty, the inspiration and the frustration, the violent outbreaks and reformist impulses, the superficiality and profundity of American religious history—it’s all here in Wilensky-Lanford’s engrossing book. Alert to the extraordinary diversity and the constantly evolving nature of the subject, and vital for anyone who wants to understand our present political moment, this is the history of American religion as it should be done.”

—Katherine Stewart, New York Times bestselling author of Money, Lies, and God

“Serious histories of American faith for a general readership come around only once every decade. Wilensky-Lanford’s is ours, and has immediately become my favorite. It encompasses the entire historical scope, with generous coverage of important groups either ignored or given just-sufficient recognition in previous surveys. A prodigy of organization with no visible seams, and written in a conversational but elegant style, it will leave you understanding both the nation and its everexpanding, ever-changing religious partners far better than when you came in. A necessary and important book.”

—David Van Biema, former religion writer, Time, and coauthor of The Prayer Wheel