We are faced with great opportunities and challenges in the study of nonliter-
ate peoples. The opportunities rest upon extending our knowledge of religious
belief and practice in the cultural domains where religion is lived by all the
people of a culture, a dimension to which in nonliterate cultures we are nearly
confined. This cultural dimension exists in religions everywhere, but it has
been largely ignored by religion scholars because of a preference to study reli-
gion in terms of its written documents. We are presented with the challenge to
learn how to read and to understand the religious significance of elements of
expression that are not written, such things as art, architecture, oral traditions,
and ritual. ²

The culture of America is measured to a great extent by its diversity.
American art, architecture, music, and oral traditions have been shaped
by diversity and by the need to accommodate the desire for unity to the
necessity of accepting "manyness." The mutual encounters of Europeans,
Native Americans, and Africans have fashioned a culture in which the re-
ligious need to give expression to ultimate order and meaning must take
constant account of diversity. In America there are not only many reli-
gions; there is a religiousness that arises from the circumstances of that
manyness. In other words, even if Americans live within their own reli-
gious particularities, when they accept manyness they acknowledge
some perception of order and meaning not confined to their traditional
religious loyalties.

The culture of religious pluralism is ever changing as new religious and
ethnic groups arrive upon the scene, and also as our religiousness breaks
out of its existing forms and joins in the many struggles for order and
meaning in the midst of chaos. European religious consciousness in the
North American context emerged out of the cultural revolution known as
the Reformation of the sixteenth century. This was a chaotic struggle
among diverse claims to authentic Christianity. Even the colonialism that
accompanied the Reformation was more than a matter of economic or po-
litical manipulation. Geographic and demographic horizons were being
radically shifted, and the questions of ultimate truth and salvation were
directed toward mastering those who threatened existing perceptions of
reality. The diversity generated in the sixteenth century, and exported to
the New World almost immediately, has been a constant factor in
American religious and cultural life.

The story of America is the story of this diversity and the hope of tran-
scending its fragmentary effects. The thesis of this book is that the trans-
formation of diversity into pluralism is a religious phenomenon that
serves as a prevailing factor in the development of American culture.
Pluralism denotes the acceptance of diversity; and this acceptance, we
have observed, always works within some perception of ultimate order
and meaning not confined to traditional religions. ³

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