Kaleidoscope : Pluralism, White Supremacy, and American Religious History

Catherine L. Albanese explores collisions between a white Protestant majority and the diversity of faiths flourishing beside it from the colonial era to the present, offering timely insights into transformations in American religion.

There is an abiding tension in American religious history—and in how that history is told—between the pervasive ideology of white supremacy and the reality of a multicultural, multireligious North American landscape. Visiting this tension from the colonial era to the present, Catherine L. Albanese explores collisions between a white Protestant majority and the diversity of faiths flourishing beside it, offering timely insights into transformations in American religion. Beginning with how Indigenous peoples felt the heavy hand of settler violence, Kaleidoscope examines coexistence and conflict across American history in a series of essays. Albanese considers a number of moments and movements in Anglo-American Protestant religiosity even as she looks to Native, Black, and Latinx spiritual traditions. She highlights the uncertain status of Catholics and Jews, following their quest for whiteness and acceptance, and shows how Mormons too asserted their place within the United States by extolling their whiteness. Filled with rich detail and a varied cast of characters, Kaleidoscope offers a new lens on diversity within American religious history. Elegantly written and powerfully argued, this book calls for overturning frameworks that place whiteness at the center and for finding new ways to tell the story of American religions.