Unmixed America

Stephen Warner argues that in analyzing American religion and culture, we need to go beyond the contrast of assimilation v. multiculturalism, and beyond the simple opposition of the “culture war.” He suggests that the category of mestizaje, mixing, is more fruitful. In particular, he briefly explores the historical reasons why the United States sees so little of it.

Warner writes, “US society and its culture have changed greatly over our history, but we have not wanted to admit it. From early colonial days, we have been a people who worry over boundaries, borders, and stockades. Protestant Europeans arrived in North America with the intention to settle what they imagined was a wilderness, and eventually they came across the Atlantic in sufficient numbers to realize that goal, pushing the native inhabitants out of the way as a nuisance. The colonists were proud of maintaining their European purity, and the national conceit was that everyone, with the exception of the imported Africans, had maintained that purity.”

In contrast, Catholics in Central and South America plundered and slaughtered, but “Among them were those who came to convert and care for the souls of the indigenous inhabitants. If all Catholic Europeans had had the intention to plunder, we would know far less today about their depredations, chronicled by the men of the cloth, than we in fact do.” Instead of expelling the natives, the Catholics of Latin America absorbed them, so that “a new people was born, and racial classification in Latin America, though no less invidious than in the US, is more finely graded. Thus in much of Latin America, mixture is part of the social consciousness instead of just its subconscious, whereas we in the US still think publicly in categorical terms, no matter how ambiguous our nightmares.”

With our historic dream of purity, “we tend to be suspicious of cultural difference and to insist on assimilation to a pre-existing ideal.”

(Warner, “Religion, Boundaries, and Bridge,” Sociology of Religion 58 [1997] 217-38, at 233-4.)