Chapter 10 explores three competing visions of American national religious identity: Christian nationalism, strict secularism, and pluralist civil religion. After identifying problems with Christian nationalism and strict secularism, the chapter argues that an inclusive, dynamic, and pluralist civil religion offers the best way forward for continuing the American experiment.

Although the United States was established with a distinctly Christian framework, over time the religious landscape has changed. American civil religion has adapted to make room for growing religious pluralism and the rise of secularism.

Religion is central to human experience. This chapter examines the influence of religion on the political culture from America’s founding to the present, provides a framework for classifying and measuring religion, and gives an overview of religious belief, belonging, and behavior.

This chapter considers some of the sources of divisiveness in American religious and political culture, discussing the decline in public trust and the rise of identity politics and affective polarization. The chapter also notes ways that politicized religion negatively affects civil society and examines racial divides in the American religious landscape.

The book concludes with recommendations for the future of religion in America, suggesting that a commitment to pluralism and inclusive civil religion is necessary to maintain one, indivisible nation. The authors make a case for allowing for public and private expressions of religion, promoting respectful religious pluralism, carefully balancing religious mission and activism, and broadening American civil religion beyond Judeo-Christianity to foster a vibrant American religious landscape.

This chapter explores an often-overlooked religious group in the United States: those who are not affiliated with religion. The chapter discusses the quantitative and qualitative challenges in measuring religious “nones” and considers historical patterns of stigma and prejudice against the religiously unaffiliated. The number of secular Americans is growing and they need a seat at the table of civil religion.

The book’s introduction outlines its ambition to read literature as a variety of cartography, and presents a technical vocabulary for grasping literature’s role in the changing geo-epistemology of the twentieth century. It begins by exploring Langston Hughes’s creation of literary maps, and introduces the concept of "counter-mapping," a practice of producing knowledge that challenges official geographies. It then sets out to reexamine modernism’s connection to technology by arguing that the spatial ramifications of media and transit technologies imbued early twentieth-century writing with a unique geotechnical aesthetic. Drawing from postcolonial theory, the book aims to map this geotechnical aesthetic across a range of authors from across the dominion of the United States.

Chapter 3 reads two maritime fictions against the cartographic and photographic records of US War Department’s Bureau of Insular Affairs. I argue that the camera’s unpredictable mode of development heightened colonial anxieties about the assimilation of the Philippines into the United States. For a literary counterpoint to the Bureau’s colonizing project, I read back and forth between the island-hopping narratives of Ernest Hemingway and Ramon Muzones, a Hiligaynon language novelist from the Visayas. Their shipboard fictions set adrift the repressive and racializing logics of US military technics. But the novelists move in different directions. Disillusioned, the late Hemingway gets lost at sea, uninterested in a return to national homeland. Muzones complies a pre-Hispanic nautical map, a regional Visayan space within the newly independent Philippine republic.

The coda to the book reads the contemporary author Craig Santos Perez to reflect on the violence of US territory making and the role of literary language in reorganizing its effects. I provide a close reading of Perez’s from unincorporated territory and its orientation toward the modernism of Claude McKay. By reworking McKay, Perez makes a contribution to cartographic literature that helps to see the US map as a dialectical image, provisional and contingent as opposed to authoritative and final.

The chapter demonstrates how religious freedom and robust pluralism can be catalysts for social healing – benefiting individuals and communities, building social capital, and encouraging solidarity. The chapter concludes with four case studies of bridging religious divides to achieve positive change, address injustice, reach compromise, and overcome adversity.

Chapter 4 provides a demographic and historical overview of Protestantism in the United States, describing how it has shaped civil religion and examining the political and cultural influence of Mainline Protestantism, Evangelical Protestantism, and the historic Black church.

Chapter 4 explores how the literary collection adapted to audio recording to form a species of sonic cartography. I argue that Zora Neale Hurston’s fieldwork in Jamaica and Haiti presented US borders in stereo, both offset from Caribbean islands and overlapping with them. Hurston’s notion of a sonic boundary is distinct from that heard by Jean Toomer, for whom folksong is a spiritual rejoinder to the violence of agricultural labor. Toomer’s swansong to Georgia’s small-town sugarcane harvest is echoed and distorted by Cuban soundscapes. Poems about cane harvest by Agustin Acosta and Nicolás Guillén document of Cuba’s rather different agricultural identity and pose toward US imperium. In these cartographies, I argue, the line demarcating continental nation from island colony is not just aquatic, but also sonic: heard in stereo, and often out of phase.

Chapter 2 turns to loco-descriptive lyric poetry, read in the context of expanding highway infrastructure. It opens with a consideration of oil maps deposited in Ezra Pound’s Cantos, some of which critique the expropriation of former Ottoman territories by Anglo-American cartels. At that very locus, the Iraqi modernist poet Nazik al-Malā’ikah envisioned a very different kind of energy poetics, where the dividing line between oil’s extractive and consumptive spheres is decidedly smudged. In postcolonial counterpoint, the chapter closes by reading the automotive aesthetics in Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, and Wallace Stevens. The US highway system provides them with a conflicted linguistic resource, where the trace of oil’s violent extraction is smeared by the exhilarations of their lyrics.