Ever since conquistadores claimed Taino land in the name of their Catholic God and New England Puritans formed their strictly Protestant “city on a hill,” religion has been central to American life. Even as some found religious freedom—Rhode Island welcomed the Quakers, Jews, and Baptists that Massachusetts expelled as dissenters—indigenous people and Africans forced into slavery struggled to protect their religious practices. With the constitutional separation of church and state, it fell to the American people to decide: would they sharpen religion’s formidable powers of division, or reimagine its creative possibilities?

In A God-Shaped Nation, Brook Wilensky-Lanford follows this essential American tension from first contact through the 2024 election. This is an expansive history of extraordinary religious questions, told through the ordinary people who grappled with them. It is a story of defiance: Anne Hutchinson, preaching against Puritan clergy; Reform rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise serving soft-shell crab to his kosher guests at an 1883 banquet; and Wovoka, a Paiute man who envisioned the Ghost Dance movement, which persisted in the face of violent government repression at Wounded Knee. It is also a story of community: Millerites waiting together in vain for Jesus’s return on a rainy October night in 1844; Chinese immigrants bringing Daoist and Buddhist gods to their California temples; Mormons pushing westward to build their “new Zion” in Utah. And in the last fifty years, it has been a story of muscular political power, as the religious right has sought to shape the present and paint the past in its own image.

At a moment when religion penetrates even the most secular aspects of American life, understanding its history is more essential than ever before. “It is in history that the very human work of religion happens,” Wilensky-Lanford shows us, “and in ordinary time that even the most carved-in-stone tenets can and do change.”

Praise for A God-Shaped Nation:

“The madness and the beauty, the inspiration and the frustration, the violent outbreaks and reformist impulses, the superficiality and profundity of American religious history—it’s all here in Wilensky-Lanford’s engrossing book. Alert to the extraordinary diversity and the constantly evolving nature of the subject, and vital for anyone who wants to understand our present political moment, this is the history of American religion as it should be done.”—Katherine Stewart, New York Times bestselling author of Money, Lies, and God

“To write an overarching history of religion in America is an ambitious undertaking—to grapple with the dissonance, diversity, power, and publicness of religion across a continent and a half millennium. Brook Wilensky-Lanford meets that challenge with unusual grace and clarity in A God-Shaped Nation. Her lustrous narrative is at once sweeping in breadth and absorbing in detail, a skilled feat of historical synthesis and artful storytelling.”—Leigh Eric Schmidt, author of Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality

“Serious histories of American faith for a general readership come around only once every decade. Wilensky-Lanford’s is ours, and has immediately become my favorite. It encompasses the entire historical scope, with generous coverage of important groups either ignored or given just-sufficient recognition in previous surveys. A prodigy of organization with no visible seams, and written in a conversational but elegant style, it will leave you understanding both the nation and its ever-expanding, ever-changing religious partners far better than when you came in. A necessary and important book.”—David Van Biema, former religion writer, Time, and coauthor of The Prayer Wheel

“This book clearly and effectively explains America at its best and worst, providing a full and magisterial accounting of church and state.”—Booklist

“The breadth of ideas and people featured is impressive. A key work for readers who want to learn how religion developed in America.”—Library Journal

“A fluent, always engaging study of America’s religious traditions.”—Kirkus Reviews

Praise for Paradise Lust:

“Paradise Lust is a pleasure. Wilensky-Lanford tackles her subject with an appealing mix of serious research and tongue-in-cheek humor. Neither too academic nor too whimsical, the storytelling in Paradise Lust is often irresistible.”—Andrea Wulf, New York Times Book Review

“Absorbing . . . In writing Paradise Lust, Ms. Wilensky-Lanford faced the unenviable task of translating intellectual history into popular history, and her approach relies heavily on speed and whimsy. . . . But her interest in her subject is deep, her narrative is expertly layered, and her interpretations of the seekers’ motives are more than convincing.”—Jennie Erin Smith, Wall Street Journal

“A gloriously researched, pluckily written historical and anecdotal assay of humankind’s age-old quixotic quest for the exact location of the Biblical garden.”—Elle

“One of the most enduring and mysterious places in the Bible, the Garden of Eden has fascinated people around the world since ancient times. Those who believe that it is a real place are . . . a diverse and prominent group of personalities that Brook Wilensky-Lanford describes in her lively new book. . . . The desire to put Eden on the map is a timeless quest to discover our origins, all told in charming detail.”—The Daily Beast, a “Daily Beast Must Read”

“Witty and exhaustively researched.”—Carl Hartman, The Associated Press

“Wilensky-Lanford approaches her subjects with respect, enthusiasm and conscientious research, and succeeds in doing what the best one-subject historical studies do, which is to reframe history, freshening up long-familiar events.”—Liz Coville, San Francisco Chronicle

“Each sojourn Eden-ward is . . . a personal journey into the mirage where unattainable desires and reality meet.”—Caroline O’Donovan, New Republic