5 Things Everyone Should Know About America’s Religious History
http://www.faithstreet.com/onfaith/2015/01/28/5-things-everyone-should-know-about-americas-religious-history/35990 January 28, 2015 Why we need to retell the American story. by Peter Manseau Peter Manseau is a journalist, historian, and novelist. His most recent book, One Nation, Under Gods: A New American History , is a deeply researched account that challenges standard Christian perspectives of the country’s story. Here, he offers a list of counter-intuitive facts about religion in America. 1. Islam was here from the beginning. Far from a twenty-first century problem, the fraught relationship between Islam and Christianity shaped the earliest interactions between the Old World and the New. In the shadow of the Reconquista — the reconquering of the Iberian Peninsula from the Moors — the Spanish established laws to prevent Islamic influence from reaching the Americas, yet made use of enslaved Muslim convert...