Theology in the Raw - The Religious History of the Land Now Called "America": Dr. Thomas Tweed

Episode Date: July 3, 2025

Dr. Thomas A. Tweed, who did his graduate study at Harvard and Stanford, is the Harold and Martha Welch Professor of American Studies and Professor of History at Notre Dame University. Dr. Tweed served as president of the American Academy of Religion in 2015, the largest learned society for the study of religion. He is the author of many books, including his more recent: Religion in the Lands That Became America: A New History (Yale University Press) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey friends, welcome back to another episode of Theology and Royal. My guest today is Dr. Thomas Tweed, who did his graduate study at Harvard and Stanford. And he is the Harold and Martha Welch Professor of American Studies and Professor of History at Notre Dame University. Dr. Tweed served as the president of the American Academy of Religion in 2015, which is the largest learned society for the study of religion. He's the author of many books, including the more recent book, Religion in the Lands, That Became America, a New History, published by Yale University Press. Super excited about this conversation.

I learned a ton. I loved Dr. Tweed's posture and his wealth of knowledge, and I think you will too. So please welcome to the show for the first time, the one-year-old Thomas Tweed. Welcome to Theology in the Raw, Dr. Thomas Tweed. I'm very excited about this conversation. You are an expert in the history of the land we now call the United States of America that precedes 1776. How long did it take you to write your recent book, first of all? I mean, I'm looking at it and it's just like every line of the book is like built on extensive research, it seems like. I mean,

this must have been a massive project. Yeah, it was really massive. I started writing actually 12 years ago, but started researching before that. And the first time I said we should do a new narrative was when dinosaurs roamed the earth in 1988. I was first year of teaching and I said, you know, I wonder if maybe we should tell it in a new way. So I've been working on it a long time, and every paragraph is like a mini article or a book, but readers don't want to read all that, so I just try to make it move more quickly.

So it took a long time to figure out where to start and to figure out to learn what I had to learn, things I didn't know. So it meant crossing from history, my home field, to other fields and from history, my home field, to other fields and looking at archaeology, climatology, all kinds of things. And so as I spent years thinking about what to do, I ended up starting this story in a place I never would have expected, Texas, about 11,000 years ago. Eleven thousand years ago. Is that the earliest archaeological data that we have? Well, that's a great question. Basically, I had to decide, so how do we decide where to start? And what I came up with, and I tried this idea out with people who study the distant

past and they thought it was reasonable, we should start wherever we have the earliest evidence for the kinds of things we think of when we think of religion. So there are earlier sites than that, but we don't really have material remains or evidence of those kind of ritual practices and communities. So I looked at some of the earliest burial sites, ritual centers, other kinds of things, and I found a rich array in a ritual center in a burial place in central Texas called the Horn Shelter. And Horn Shelter man and Horn Shel shelter girl were buried side by side in a clearly careful ritual for somebody folks really revered. And there was more than 100 objects all around them, some of them from the Gulf of Mexico.

So they came up and down the river. Some of them clearly really special. And some of them showed he was probably a ritual presider. He was probably a shaman. He had red ochre, which shamans used to put used for ritual things like funerals and lots of shells and turtle shells everywhere. This was clearly a staged commemoration and not just sort of an accident. So I thought, okay, that's where I have to start.

Okay, wow. Can we go back even a little bit further? When and how did people first arrive in the land? Because I know there's different theories about that. And I do that. I have a kind of map in the book where I thought, I basically thought like, what would I need if I was just starting all this stuff?

What would I need? We're all different kinds of learners. So there's a map that should have shows the basic routes that people came in. Scholars are debating this all the time, and every other minute there's a new find somewhere. But it's changed. It used to be thought that maybe it was 12 or 13,000 years ago. But then we kept finding things like way down in Chile, there's this stuff earlier than that. So you have now human footprints, what I really love, I actually decided to just print them in the book, sets of human footprints in what is now White Sands Park in New Mexico that are probably 22

or 23,000 years ago. So the question is, wait a minute, that's not possible. Wasn't the ice age around then? So people were probably here before the ice age, maybe not many. And then after the Ice Age, folks started to come in larger numbers. Most people now think down the Pacific coast, what some people call it the Kelp Highway, all the way down the coast, some later inland. Some folks think maybe from Europe too, but most folks think down along the Pacific. And so that by 13,000 years ago, you had humans all the way throughout the continent. Wow. I always heard that they came over along the ice bridge that connects the East to the East, I guess, Asian. And that played a role in it, right? And there was the problem with that is is ice is over most of North America.

Think of it like going down to somewhere like Ohio. Oh, wow. Well, how the heck did they get there and all that kind of thing? There's debates about there's an inner corridor going down where the ice opened later. Increasingly folks think they came down across the Beringian Bridge and some and came down the Pacific coast all the way through Alaska and all the way down to what we know is now Chile and other places. So everybody, nobody that I know thinks that there weren't humans up and down the hemisphere by 13,000 years ago. Some of them much earlier, like the human footprints in Arizona.

There's some other sites that I mentioned in different parts of the country. They've been here for a really long time, but the question of, okay, yeah, but how do we find culture? More importantly, how do we find religion? That meant you had to figure out, so what is it? But how do we find culture and have more importantly, how do we find religion? So that meant you had to figure out so what is religion and at that point you sort of want to give up the project and go Go bowling or do something else But I thought okay. This is what I think religion is and we've we see the first signs of it In this in this particular ritual in Central Texas around 11,000 years ago.

Okay. During that time period, can you paint us a really broad brush stroke of, maybe not just religion, but based on probably the little evidence we have, what do we know about the practices, the people, the culture, what kind of people were they? Yeah, no, it's great.

They're still what we would call foragers. So the book, the structure of the book is not the way histories usually work about religion. It's from foraging to farming to factories to fiber optics. So this is the period when foraging means like just finding berries, hunting, not all large game. So, it begins just after the ice is starting to melt, climate's getting warmer.

And in central Texas, it would have been pretty lush. And there would have been lots of ways of, they were catching turtles all over the place. There's turtles, all kinds of other things. There would have been fish, there would have been berries. So they're foragers, hunter gatherers, and they live in relatively small human communities. And there's a, so they hang out in that area, but it's somewhat mobile. And the place where you find the ritual is in an overhang on the Brazos River in Texas. They probably had a space that they traveled for necessities, but to find other mates,

to find special things, they maybe went a little further, even as far maybe as Arkansas, like there's red ochre, a kind of material that they use for ritual purposes that probably came from further away. So you have folks coming in aquatic things, up and down rivers, walking through things, and there's no farming yet, and the communities aren't really large, and they're diverse. In what way? Diverse? Well, and this gets delicate because some indigenous folks think you are really nervous about thinking about DNA and thinking about other things, and I try to honor that. But if you do a study of what their bones look like, of DNA and other things, some of the people in the Americas at this time come from multiple different groups in different parts of the world, including Southeast Asia.

Some scholars think the folks in Central Texas had a lot to do with the Ainu, indigenous peoples of northern Japan and the Pacific. And you think, what? What does that make? It doesn't make any sense. But you find multiple language families, multiple people who came from multiple places, mostly from Asia, peopling the Americas. I mean, you mentioned in passing European descent. Is there any people from- Well, there's a scholar at the Smithsonian who has argued that folks came across kind of the ice from Europe. And other scholars, I'm not an expert in that, and so I just kind of defer to colleagues. And so in the book, to honor that view too, I put a kind of dotted line to say some people

think it came that way. Others so, it couldn't make any sense. It wouldn't have been possible from climate or something else. But there was some debate about that. And I think this is one of those things, you know, one of the things I really love about you and your work is that you're sort of curious and open. And I think we have to be curious and open about this. There could be a headline tomorrow in the news about a new find, probably at a deep water site off Alaska or off somewhere that revises our understanding of this and thought people came

much earlier or they came in a different way or something else. So I hold all these views lightly, in a different way or something else. So I hold all these views lightly, but at the moment, it looks like most people came to land down that Pacific coast and they were here certainly by 13,000 years ago. Well, I mean, you have to hold your views lightly, right? We're dealing with some scant evidence, piecing things together that's subject to a lot of interpretation, right? Since it's so far back in time. Right? Yeah. piecing things together that's subject to a lot of interpretation, right? Since it's so far back in time. So that makes sense. Did the different groups, clans, tribes, whatever we want to call them, did they get along with each other? Do we know about conflict, war, things like that, this far back in the history or is it

hard to tell? You know, the further back you go, the less evidence there is. And so the answers to those kinds of questions, how would you find out evidence? You'd have to actually look at, again, a kind of sensitive subject that we should be respectful about. Right. We actually have to look at the remains of humans that you found. And is there evidence of violence?

Is there a bashed in skull? Is there a broken this? Is there an arrow through something? And in later periods, mostly after farming, and bigger dense populations by about the year 10,000, 1020, you find bigger places and you do find new farming communities getting dense and then you can actually read in the architecture, they're building like forts, they're building walls and in the bones themselves that people died more violently. But earlier it's harder to figure that out, how they died and all that happened. So you have a few clues, but you don't have all the details you want. So you have to surmise.

That's why you have to hold all these kinds of judgments. Well, it seems that most warfare and violence ultimately comes down to land. And if there's enough to go around, it seems like there would be no reason for conflict. But once it starts to get more and more populated, it would just be part of human nature, right? That some violence might show up. All right, take us to the next stages of history.

And what do we know about religion yeah, religion, religious practices, especially as it starts to get more quote unquote recent, you know, we're still dealing with the, you know, ancient history here. But what can you tell us about the actual religious practices based on what we know? So in the early foraging communities where you're doing hunting and gathering things, you have to stay on gathering things, you have to stay on the move because you have to follow the resources when climate changes, when food resources change.

You don't have permanent... You're not building a big old church in the middle of some place because you might not be back there for six months. You have kind of mobile niches that come with you, and you have places you return to seasonally or something. So ritual practices would have been around birth and death, would have been about communal celebrations, would have been about honoring animals and other beings that were killed, and there would have been religious ritual specialists who we might call shamans or medicine men. But what you get with the introduction of farming, which allows sedentary, bigger communities,

is that you can actually stay put. And then you get what the scholars would call priests. They don't mean Catholic priests as opposed to Protestant ministers. They just mean people who hang out at ritual centers that are in a particular place. And suddenly, then you get rituals that do things like thank the gods for the corn, which was such an important crop in the Americas. And the gods are said to bring it or not bring it. Then of course you have the same kind of problem with the Odyssey that some Christians today deal with, what happens if the crops don't grow?

Well, maybe we should have a new religion that challenges that one. So you have sedentary shrines, ritual spaces, graves that people come back to, pilgrimage sites, and different kinds of religious practices than you had with among foragers earlier. Okay. Would it be right to say they're polytheistic or is that too simplistic? They don't have what we would think of as kind of monotheism, a kind of the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob that Muslims, Jews and Christians affirm. There was not quite that, though many did have a kind of hierarchy of who's the creator or which God has to do with the growth of corn or who brings birth.

So there would be more than one God and there would be sacred places devoted to healing or the growth of crops or something else. So there wouldn't be a single God, though there would be creation stories about how we all got here. So there would be a place for like a supreme deity that might be specific to certain geographical areas. Kind of like we see in the ancient Near East where you have like different deity, like Baal is the storm god or whatever. So if it's not raining, you might need to pray to him. Or Artemis is the goddess, you know, like many things, but like she helped

women in childbirth. And so if that's your issue, you might need to focus on her. I mean, I don't want to simplify it, but is it similar to kind of what we see in ancient Nereus? Yeah, it's similar to that. And similar to what you find in, say, West Africa, where there would be multiple gods and a kind of a high god, but you don't especially care so much about the high god. You care more about the god associated with childbirth or with rivers or something else. So we can't really reconstruct the whole theology of what's going on. You can just look at the ritual spaces and the artifacts that left them, and we can sort of surmise that there's deities associated with things and some change. So,

there's a change from fertility female goddesses to kind of male warrior figures at Cahokia near St. Louis around 1300. And you can see this in what's left behind and you think, whoa, what's that about? So there are shifts of those kinds of things, but it isn't always one single God, but there's an impulse to attend to the supernatural broadly and to think that more than human forces are at work.

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See you there. At what time period do we start to have a lot more evidence inscribing inscriptions in caves or pictures? Or when do we start to say, wow, now we have a lot more material to go on to really understand the history, religion and culture. Is that pretty recent or? It depends. I mean, it depends on what you want you want. There's people who I think will read my book tapping their foot. I actually say to readers, if you've been tapping your foot impatient, waiting for texts,

because you thought that would clear it up, I'm so sorry, it doesn't quite work. You can read about Vikings in European Latin documents, and you can read about Icelandic sagas, but there's kind of biased attempts. It doesn't clear it all up, but texts come much later. But you do have architectural remains. So in Chaco Canyon, near the Four Corners region, you have enormous architectural structures and you can see the spaces they worshiped in, kivas, these underground circular spaces, and there's benches. You can almost reconstruct what ritual life was like.

You can see what they left in the ground. You can see the images they created. And you can see the same acrohoccia in Illinois, near, across the river from St. Louis, you can see the same kind of worldview and ethics and ritual inscribed in the landscape. If you want somebody to say, Jesus my personal Lord and Savior, you have to wait a little later. Until you get first-person narrative, you're not getting that. And writing comes, of course, with Columbus.

Comes in the 1400s and the 1500s. But you have other systems of communication that are important and you can read, but maybe not as clearly. Well, this is important. This is super important because like we often think written sources are hands down the absolute best. And, and yes, they, I want to, I want you to push back if I'm getting this wrong, but from my vantage point, especially, so I do a lot, you know, a lot of reading like Greco-Roman history and it's like, wow, they have all these details

and so much better than archeology or, you know, inscriptions or papyri or something like that. But then it's like, well, the problem with that though, is that written history is extremely biased. You're dealing with the perspective of the one to 5% of Uber elite males and their view of the world. And so while it may be way, way, way more detailed, it doesn't represent accurately the voice of the 90%. So while artifacts and archeology and stuff you're talking about may be like less clear, you know, it's also a lot less bias. It's a lot more objective. Would that, would that be an accurate assessment or what? I think sometimes the build environment and objects can be even more revelatory.

Like, for example, we were trying to, if we're from 5,000 years in the future and we're coming back to understand us, I don't know what would be most useful. They encounter what used to be the Dallas Cowboys football stadium And they say, huh. So they gathered in a lot of people came in here and they did, they probably would say ritual things. Say this is a religion. Yeah, or if they looked at all the plastic along coast and they said, they might call this

the age of plastic or something. They would say, boy, they sure did use this new material and it's everywhere. Was it special to them? Was it sacred? What's going on? So some things would be misleading, but I'm not sure the Dallas Cowboys in the football stadium would be misleading. I think that would tell us something important about religion, almost religion, not quite religion today. So we could focus on big stadiums and get it something. We can't get the whole mythology back, but we can get something. That's super interesting. I don't want to fa- I do, I am eager to get to kind of the eve of European settlement.

But let's, before we get there, so we're dealing with, you know, thousands of years before 1492. Give us a, yeah, an overview from that really ancient period to the eve of European settlement. Yeah. So, so what you have with Columbus coming in 1492 to what is now the Caribbean, and others coming, other European folks coming, you have the coming of more farmers, although the farmers from Europe don't think that the indigenous farmers from the Americas actually seem to farm. They're annoyed eventually because it's women who farm, not men. And that annoys them. Women are farmers.

Yeah. And they use the wrong kind of implements. But with that, you get the plow and the Bible, you get written text, you get book religion, and you get a kind of global institutions, and it transforms things. And some of the changes are accidental. They didn't know they were bringing germs that would decimate folks. And some of them in purpose. They brought seeds of particular things to grow here that would change the ecology and change everything else.

And, of course, they brought the gospel. And those who identify as Christian, and I do, although in the context of the book, I'm an historian thinking about things, you know, that can't be all bad, but a lot of things that happened with that, it led to the displacement of indigenous people and the enslavement of Africans. After there were fewer indigenous peoples to do what the colonizers wanted to do in the Caribbean, for example, they said, can't we bring some folks from Africa? So slavery came right after that. And it's that kind of displacement that really causes a kind of a sustainability crisis early on.

And you get this kind of impulse to convert indigenous peoples. And you get book religion, and you get, especially among Protestants, and you get the ritual elasticity among Catholics. And so from 1492 on, when Columbus comes back with architects, construction workers, I mean, we're building here, you get a kind of colonization of that. In the lands that became the United States and the continent, by 1565 you have St. Augustine, the earliest colonial settlement arriving, and there we're building churches, sometimes near kivas or near council houses where indigenous peoples would be too, and there's a blending of traditions

between the two. And then, of course, there's a kind of a, it's a big old battle, a religious empire battle among the French, the Spanish, the British, and others for who gets to both colonize, to convert the natives and have the new land. And that's the period that in which the colonial period that leads to the revolution, that's how that period is framed. Okay, so this is a big question.

And yeah, I'll just keep it large right now, but what do we know about how the first European settlers were perceived and received by the indigenous people? Yeah. Well, like, first of all, what do we know? I almost went like from the perspective of the indigenous people, or is that almost impossible to tell because we're reading that encounter through European sources? Or do we know how indigenous people viewed? Like,

were they welcome? Were they like, let's kill these settlers? Were they curious? Were they like scared or? We don't know all we want to know. But as the decades and centuries goes on, we have more sources filtered through European eyes, but other kinds of sources that suggest that some of the first response, the Taino in the Caribbean who greeted Columbus probably thought, that's cool. This is interesting. Maybe this is a God. And the folks who greeted Europeans later often thought, okay, well, now we have to do a diplomacy thing. So we'll get my daughter over here to marry into that. And now we'll have kind of a kind of ritual formulated kinship

and we'll do diplomacy. And the Europeans were like, what? And they didn't quite see that. And I think one of the central things that just didn't work, you know, sometimes in communications, people are not really arguing because they don't really agree. Indigenous, the Europeans are saying,

we'd like to be all here. And they say, sure, you can use our hunting grounds, but they didn't get that often that they meant, no, this is ours now. But the notion that you would own property, land, just seemed so alien to most indigenous peoples. It just didn't make any sense. So much so that it took a long time before folks could figure out, oh, you mean like you think you own that and we can't come

there and we have to leave. So I think initially there was kind of outreach toward it. Sometimes there was arrows were flown in Massachusetts after colonizers came. You know, there's evidence of early skirmishes among folks, but only because they were like stealing their corn. That's true. And they came a kind of grave site and they thought, well, we should probably not ruin this because we wouldn't want them to ruin that. They were respectful about that. But I think there was fundamental misunderstandings.

One of them is just about what is land and what is property. And that's actually how John Locke, who wrote the Constitution, who helped write the Constitution for South Carolina, he thought when you put a fence around something and then farm it, it's yours. Of course, native peoples didn't think that way. Fences and farms meant it was yours in some fundamental way. I think there was a lot of misunderstandings. They were always interested in each other's

creation stories and how they dealt with the dead. So in some ways, there was a kind of fascination, a wonder about, whoa, what is that? That's interesting. But some of the misunderstandings were pretty catastrophic for the folks who were already here. So the indigenous view of land is it's intrinsically communal and the European understanding is it's intrinsically kind of private. And we would put it in Christian terms and some some indigenous would put it this way too. It's the creator's land.

It's not yours. It's for us to use and to use respectfully so that multi-generations ahead can use it too. So we don't own land. We might say this mountain is sacred to us or this particular site is, but not because it's ours in the way that Europeans and early settlers were thinking about what property was.

That's fascinating. Were there some European? I mean, the answer is probably yes. Of course, there were some. But can you open up our understanding to the European perspective? Were there some? Was there a spectrum of European beliefs and attempts to take the land?

Like you said, some were like, no, we're not coming to share this plot. We're coming to take it. And it's going to be ours now. Were there some that really made an attempt to share the land, to come in peacefully, to exist alongside indigenous people? Or was that a tiny tiny percentage of minority percentage? Yeah, it's hard to say percentages, but there were clearly folks, Christians who spoke out against what they saw as the atrocities of what their fellow Europeans were doing. So,

in New Mexico, in the Caribbean, Las Casas, who was interested in converting indigenous peoples, actually wrote back to the Vatican and said, look what these people are doing, this is horrible, stop. The Vatican eventually said, not really newsworthy, not a big hot take, but natives are human beings. They issued a statement saying natives are humans. And you think, huh, like, why did that have to be said? Why did you need to say that?

And in the Southwest, when some Spanish came, like Onyate came to places that are near, let's say Santa Fe, they did all kinds of really brutal things, taking land. They were already farmers. I mean, that's what's so odd about it, and had a sustainable way of living, but they brought the plow different ways, and they were brutal, including chopping off limbs and being horrible. And so there's a letter that I cite in the book where some of the Franciscans and others

writing back to Mexico City are saying, look, if we're trying to bring them to the gospel, we cannot treat them this way. They just won't listen. Why would they listen to us? This is atrocious. Stop that. And so you do find kind of righteous protest. That's encouraging because sometimes Christians

are on the other side of that, historically speaking. So it's good to know that we weren't all that bad or at least as brutal. Yeah. Yeah. And there was Christians against slavery early on too. And sure, there's been, I mean, the big theme of the book, which is, I'm not sure this is newsworthy either, but is that religion both made things better and made things worse. Sure. Sure. Which is easy. But it did make things better.

So some people want to say it only made things worse. That's not right. But, and if you insist on saying only positive things, that's also not right. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. And in this, today, the eve before 4th of July, sometimes we only focus on the good parts of the story, or we're just ignorant to the many negative parts of the story. I'm curious, well, I have two kind of somewhat different questions. Let me ask the first one. How receptive were the indigenous people to Christianity, the gospel? Were conversions hard to come by or were they...

Dr. Tom Pfeiffer It varied because indigenous peoples were so different. So, if you're in the Pacific Northwest and you're dealing with clams and other kinds of things, you just have a whole different understanding of what gods are, what rituals are. So they were really varied. Some of them were still doing more foraging and farming than farming. Some of them, they varied a lot.

And it depends on what they thought. Protestants tended, and this was not maybe the best evangelical strategy, if we were to go back and teach third year MDiv students about how to deal with this, the Catholic approach might have been a little bit better. Protestants wanted them to be able to read the Bible and to have, for example, as in New England with Puritans, have a convincing oral testimony about how you were brought to the Christian faith.

It's a very high bar. Whereas Catholics tended to say, to be more ritual focused and said, look, learn how to bless yourself, come to mass. These are the saints. And in that context, they just sort of pushed together indigenous spirits and beings with Catholic saints and just blended the two a little bit more. Whereas Protestants tended to insist on kind of a doctrinal purity and a kind of the word

more than the ritual deed done. But both of them did wonderful things and terrible things. If you're keeping store and we're not. My other question is, did or why did they not, well, let's just say did, did the Europeans try, once slavery became pretty dominant, did they try to enslave indigenous people? Like why ship over people from Africa when they have, seems like, well, why don't we just enslave the people that are here in the land? I guess it's a horrific question

to even ask, even as I say it, it makes me cringe. Yeah, sure. I mean, and what you know, and you know much more about it than I do about the Greek and Roman world, I mean, there was slavery there. And there was slavery, meaning there was the taking of people from other communities into yours after battles, but in indigenous context, before Europeans came. But in indigenous context, that would have been ritually bringing them into a new kinship system. Congratulations, you're now uncle, you're now sister, brother to this people, and they would be brought into that community, whatever their original indigenous community was.

So there was something, and some of them were were maltreated and we would actually think look like what we would call slaves, but not chattel slavery like happening in the States. And so there was that before then, and some Europeans did more of taking, but indigenous were in fact enslaved in some way. And even when they weren't, they were captive in a way that it's hard to miss. Meaning, if you're in a mission someplace and your other land has been confiscated, a mission along the California coast up and down or some other place. Mission system enforced a kind of enclosure that wasn't that much different than kind of slave patrols with plantations in the South. Sometimes you literally could not leave under force, but

it was at least coercive. So there was indigenous peoples. The indigenous peoples actually also owned slaves. So Greek and others who had been farmers in the South in the early 19th century or the 1800s, when they moved to Oklahoma, when they moved to other places and where they were there, they actually owned African slaves, too. So, nobody's without blame and then owning of folks went on among lots of folks. I mean, slavery seems to be one of the most historic

atrocities in human history. I wasn't unique to like Europeans or... Yeah, it just got worse in the version of it that emerged in, I would say in the South and the Caribbean. I see that I sort of talk about the greater South. So Barbados is as important as South Carolina, meaning the Europeans look to places like, what's up with those sugar plantations? Boy, they bring in a lot of money. In Barbados, I know, let's do that here in South Carolina.

Yikes, sugar doesn't grow, let's do rice. But how it developed, where basically, eventually became that humans are property and seen the same way in a way that wasn't the case with slavery globally everywhere the same way. And in that system, it's even more traumatic and morally hard to justify, I think. And that's sort of what developed in the United States. Yeah. Yeah. From what I know about the slavery, like in the Greco-Roman time period, first of all, I mean, incredibly widespread. 20% of the Roman Empire were slaves. But like, it sounds like what you're describing here, there was a lot of diversity around the livelihood that a slave would have lived. All the way from on the

one end, they could have been highly educated doctors treated as part of the broader household of the family. Again, I should say publicly, I think all forms of slavery are intrinsically immoral. However, the treatment of slaves, there's a wide spectrum of how they treat all the way down to like, you know, slaves being sexually abused and treated, you know, like not very much like they're not humans. Do we have an idea of when the dust was settled? You know, let's just say between 1600s and 1776. Or let's just say by 1776. Do we know how many indigenous people were killed directly or indirectly by European settlement?

Are we talking like 90% of the population was wiped out, 10% somewhere between? Yeah, I mean, that's a great question. We don't really know. So scholars who spend their lives thinking about that vary from saying maybe a couple of million to many millions. So a significant, meaning a significant proportion. We're not sure how many indigenous folks were in the Americas and in North America at the time, but I mean, millions, clearly, lost their life from either

disease, from warfare, from something else. So significant things. By 1776, when there's Christian churches, a few synagogues, Muslims on the plantations and other faiths. Indigenous peoples had been mostly pushed out of what were the British colonies, but still there in some ways. And west of the Mississippi was still kind of Indian country. And there was indigenous up and down the Mississippi and into what is now Canada. So there would have been some indigenous presence around in the colonies, but many of them would have been folks living in kind of Christian communities, might have been identifying as Christian in some way, but they just kept getting pushed across. So by 1776, it's in Ohio that you find the

Lenape and Shawnee and others. And then west of St. Louis, you have indigenous people still already kind of impacted by the Spanish and Russians coming down here into what is now Alaska, Spanish coming up, the French coming up to Mississippi. There was impact, but there was indigenous communities that lived much as they had earlier in 1776. And some indigenous people actually visited Philadelphia when the Continental Convention was going on, the folks that is most widely known today as the Iroquois were present in Philadelphia while the deliberations for the declaration were

going on. Interesting. I'm curious, this is a personal question. What can you tell me about, might be a big question, my home state of Idaho? I know there's a rich indigenous tradition here. I know Shoshone, and I think I can't even name the other tribes to my shame, but do you have any specific knowledge on Idaho? I live in Boise, Idaho. I don't know if... Yeah. I haven't thought much about Boise, but as you know, there was an important early burial sites, not far from that in Idaho and Montana and other places like that. So if you just look at the earliest sites, and there's a map in the book that shows some

of them, you find clearly there were important communities there. And indigenous folks were always sort of on the move, but there was a whole range of folks before the US government started to allow missionaries into the so-called, into the West, West of the Mississippi, and they got allotted, okay, Methodists, you take them, Baptists, you get him, Catholics, you get them. Baptists, you get him. Catholics, you get them. So there were Catholic missionaries in what became Idaho and the Mountain West, for example, and Protestants all the way to Oregon where you have some really impactful kind of stories about how folks encountered each other. But it was a lot of stories of missionaries deciding they were Protestant and Catholic wanting to folks, to deal with folks in the mountain west, many of whom were not farmers,

of course, who were still hunting. And part of what the folks who came to places like Idaho and the West was that they were trying to convince them that they need to be settled because Christians are settled. They grow things. They have the Bible and they have a plow. We now know plows aren't so great for soil actually. Oh really? I didn't know that. But yeah, so that they were basically pushing against the kind of lifeways of most of the

indigenous peoples who hunted and were more itinerant. It wasn't as if they didn't have any place. They had sacred grounds, they had hunting places, they had seasonal spots, but they wanted everybody to be settled. So by the middle of the 19th century after 1776 the US began to sort of say we're gonna we're gonna plot out Indian country and you each get your allotment and That's a place where you can read the Bible Plow plow some land and be civilized American so there wasn't a lot of respect for the differences of original, of native peoples who would have been in that vast, in the mountain region,

in the intermountain region, all the way to the Pacific coast. I'm curious, from your perspective, in your opinion, given where we're now at, From your perspective and your opinion, given where we're now at, 2025, you can't undo some of the negative parts of the history. But what could the United States of America do for indigenous people? Do you feel like this country is doing everything they could or not nearly enough? Or at this point, what should be done to repair some of the atrocities that have been committed for hundreds of years? I mean, is there anything? Yeah. I think it's like slavery and like a lot of other things. But I also think just

to make it more complicated, some of the folks who are left out of conversations today in rural America, that kind of woke libs would say who don't pay much attention to. They're not paying attention to the factories of left. Generations just can't live the same life they were before. They feel alone. So I would say anybody who's been sort of marginalized, displaced in some way, we should attend to. And then we should go through what I would think of,

I'm also associated with peace studies at Notre Dame. And I think of like conflict of resolution. So I would say with any of the problems, you should begin by just telling the truth as best as you can say it. This is what happened. You can't rush to, yeah, we're real sorry. By the way, here we go.

And as you're with apologies and with reconciliation and getting back together, maybe there's someone in your family that nobody talks to or something. If you're going to get back together, you actually have to say, this is what happened. I'm sorry this happened. I did these things wrong and if you don't name them it's not going to get any far. I did this and I did that and I did that and I shouldn't have done that because I can see that it really hurt you in this way and this way and this way. Then you have to sort of so you

have to sort of name it then you actually have to begin to say how can we make things better and what do you want to what do you think we could do? And the final process might be something like just beginning with acknowledgement, moving on to regret, and then moving on to try to make things better in some way. And that could be something simple like for African-Americans in the North,

if zoning laws kept you out of neighborhoods, if you can show that your ancestors used to live in this place where nobody lived, we'll give you a reduced tuition rate for college, or we'll give you a 1% off housing loans. If you're living in land that we took away, we obviously can't reconfigure everything, but what do you need most? Let's find some targeted way to make things a little bit better. It will never be enough. That's what folks who are apologized to often say, but sometimes symbolic and real expressions of regret, followed by some concrete things that

might make things a little bit better. And it could be anything from, we're going to put a clinic on that rez, or we're just going to make sure we try to restore some of the lands. For example, Navajo Nation, the Dene, are pushing back against everything from uranium mining that they did for bombs and the kind of destruction of traditional lands around there. Helping to restore some traditional land so that livelihoods can happen might be a small step. So it could take different forms from different people. But I think the excruciating and almost impossible step, first step is to take a deep breath

and just tell the truth. Yeah. Yeah, that's good. That's always helpful to begin by telling the truth. As we're getting close to the end here, I'm curious, let's just go to 2025, July 3rd, 2025. How do you, knowing what you know, how do you celebrate or view something like the 4th of July? When you look at the history of the country, it's mixed history. How does that shape your view of the country we live in?

And its celebratory practices? Yeah, I mean, I put out the flag on 4th of July, and I put out a known flag day, a memorial day. I would say I'm patriotic, but I push back from kind of religious nationalism, which almost idolatrously identifies God and the nation. But I'm deeply grateful for the American experiment.

I think it's a brilliant experiment in democracy from the ground up. And in terms of religion, I think the First Amendment's brilliant but impossible to implement solution to how we deal with religious pluralism is wonderful. Namely, you can't say any particular religion is the official religion of the country. Right. But you can practice religion the way you want. And by the way, will even allow kind of biblical imagery to come into American political discourse. Yeah, maybe it is the new Israel in some way, or maybe Harriet Tubman

was the new Moses or something. So American political discourse does that. So I celebrate the 4th of July because of the power of the Declaration of Independence. And for reasons that not everybody cares, I mean, it doesn't just talk about nature's God, but it says that everyone has a right to, has certain rights, including the right to pursue happiness. And happiness for Jefferson didn't mean, boy, this sure is fun here at the beach. Let's turn up the radio. It was not that. He meant flourishing or well-being in a kind of old way that goes way back to Aristotle and other things. He meant you have the right to have full flourishing. So I think you find in the declaration and the preamble of the Constitution, also great, where it says we

should promote the general welfare of everybody, not just me. I think you have kind of moral principles for how to run a country. Not only free speech, free religion, but we should care about the welfare of everyone else who's not us. So I think it has a brilliant kind of vision for flourishing and it has failed in some ways, but it still has promise. And so I think whatever politics emerges from the politics of identity and the politics of grievance,

I say, forget both of them. Let's have a politics of flourishing where we ask each other, how do we make the world better starting with you? And I think the declaration is a document that can inspire us to do that. It is a beautiful declaration. So it's kind of the way I see it, and this is not my area, so it's just my opinion. It's like, man, this is a great goal to shoot for. Has America always kept its promise

or pursued that goal consistently? No. But the goal itself should be celebrated. Yeah. So I would just say there's been blind spots and brilliant moral principles. say there's been blind spots and brilliant moral principles and there's been both And the push among some in 2025 is is that anybody who says anything negative is On patriotic doesn't love America. It's not true. It's the opposite. I

Love America so much that I want to look at its great history With all of its rich truth. And some of it was spectacular ideas, not fully implemented. How can we do better to implement the wonderful vision of the force? That's where I am. A true patriot would be honest with its own history. Of course. I think if you're not honest with the history

and all its complexity and diversity, then I would say that's not honest with the history and all its complexity and diversity, then I would say that's not even true patriotism. That's just blind allegiance to something that is more mythical than actual. Someone could say the very project of colonialism is itself intrinsically immoral, meaning the very fact that Europeans came over and colonized the land means that the very foundation of the United States of America is built on immorality that you can never undo. It's colonized.

So as long as we are still maintaining colonization, then that puts a very bad light on all the positive things. Do you see that as, how would you respond to that? Or because somebody else would say, look, colonization is just, it just is what it is. The people are always going to be moving around, settling different lands. Like you can't, it's not realistic to think that like every European was just going to stay in their little narrow plot of land, but you know and no one's going to ever travel and settle other lands. I've never actually thought about this question, so I'm curious. The bad news and good news, I've thought a lot about it.

I agree. In fact, part of the argument of the book is, as we're looking back from... The book ends in 2020. I really didn't want to bring it up to 2020, but I thought I owed it to readers. How does it look? I thought you couldn't understand the problems of contemporary America and us in 2025 without understanding the ways in which there's been two major crises that we haven't really fully dealt with. The colonial crisis, where we displaced folks and did all this, is somewhat.

And some of that has been dealt with to some extent, but not fully. Until we actually deal with that fully, more fully, it's not going to work. And the second one is the industrial crisis. You have fossil fuels, you have the beginning of the industrial revolution, and that has led to kind of environmental harms, some social harms, and we haven't really dealt with that either. So whatever we're about to do,

and we now have new problems in this post-industrial era of AI and other things, and that's the problem we face, is we haven't fully confronted the two crises of colonial and other things. That's the problem we face, is we haven't fully confronted the two crises of colonial and industrial processes as we now begin something that we're all just trying to figure out, and I'm as lost as everyone else. But naming them as things we have to return to and deal with more fully, I think is a good place to begin and move forward from this July 4th to the next, when of course, will be the 250th anniversary of the Declaration.

And you'll have a lot of patriotism, I hope, but maybe with honest reckonings of what we need to do to make the world better. That's such a great perspective. Thank you, Thomas, for being a guest on the show. I know this is a little hard to nail down at times. I really, really appreciate your flexibility and grace and man, I learned so much and yeah, thank you for the work that you do. Really appreciate it. Thank you so much. It was really wonderful. This show is part of the Converge Podcast Network.