Katharine Gerbner is Associate Professor of History at the University of Minnesota, where she also serves as Director of the Religious Studies program. She is the author of Christian Slavery: Conversion and Race in the Protestant Atlantic World (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018) and Archival Irruptions: Constructing Religion and Criminalizing Obeah in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica (Duke University Press, 2025).
What Counts as American Religion?
Whether or not one agrees with Tweed’s definition of religion, his choice to begin his story in ancient Texas toward the end of the last Ice Age in North America, rather than New England or Jamestown in the 1600s, is the first of many refreshing narrative twists about who belongs in American religious history and what should count as religion.
September 8, 2025
