Candace Lukasik: Tisa, it’s wonderful to be in conversation with you. I’d love to start with you offering an overview of Spirits of Empire’s main arguments and interventions. If I may, I’d also like to begin with a more specific question, since your book is such a groundbreaking intervention in the field of American Religion (and beyond). The book introduces “settler secularism” to describe how settler colonialism structures both the category of religion and the governing frameworks that manage it in the United States. Can you walk us through what you mean by it—especially for readers more familiar with either secularism studies or settler colonial studies separately? And how does it differ from or extend what scholars like Talal Asad have described as the colonial genealogy of secularism, given that Asad’s framework has been largely oriented toward European and Middle Eastern contexts rather than the US settler colonial one?
Tisa Wenger: Candace, I’ve really been looking forward to this conversation! Spirits of Empire contends that we can’t understand religion in the United States without paying attention to Native Americans and the settler colonial systems that dispossessed them. By religion, I mean both the category—what gets treated as legitimate religion and how its boundaries are defined—and the lived traditions that this word conventionally names. Settler colonialism is a type of colonialism that seeks to eliminate Native peoples and replace them with settlers who impose new forms of government and seize Indigenous lands as their own.
I decided to focus on the early nineteenth-century Midwest because it was one of the growing edges of the US empire at the time. My argument unfolds through the overlapping stories of Catholic priests, Protestant missionaries, government agents, Latter-day Saints (Mormons), and Native people—Shawnee, Potawatomi, Odawa, Ojibwe, and Kickapoo—struggling to keep their lands or to survive after genocidal removals. Their stories show how settler colonial imperatives formed the institutions, practices, and traditions of White settler churches. Settler colonialism also incentivized the reconfiguration of Native American traditions as religion, and many of the Native people in this book adapted Christianity and/or the category of religion for themselves as part of their struggle to survive under settler colonial rule.
Spirits of Empire argues further that settler colonialism shaped how “religion” came to be conceptualized and governed in the United States. The term settler secularism encapsulates that argument. As your question suggests, my approach here draws in part on work by scholars in the anthropology of Islam, especially Talal Asad, Saba Mahmood, and Hussein Ali Agrama. Asad especially initiated new ways of thinking about secularism as a constitutive part of the colonial world order of the nineteenth century. His work first helped me see how secularism was part of a larger imperial system that made Europe (and the United States) the model for the “modern” and the “civilized” that the rest of the world was expected to follow. But I am also building on Americanists like Tracy Fessenden, John Modern, Jonathan Kahn and Vincent Lloyd, Peter Coviello, Emily Ogden, and Charles McCrary, all of whom have interrogated the contradictions of secularism in the United States. Some of this work identifies ties between secularism and race and/or empire, but very little of it touches on settler colonialism specifically. And none of the otherwise excellent scholarship on U.S. settler colonialism addresses secularism at all.
Settler secularism is historically specific, but it does not stand alone. I see it instead as a particularly influential variation on secularism’s imperially generated and globally intersecting forms. Spirits of Empire shows how this variation took shape in the early nineteenth century and how it disciplined American religion in service of settler colonial ends. The secular state claims the role of the neutral arbiter: the ultimate sovereign with the right to determine the scope of religious exceptions and what can and should be granted special protections as “religion.” Standing above the fray, it assumes the position of the sovereign with the transcendent power to make the final call. Under the structural logics of settler secularism, White settler Christianity has been able to assert expansive rights and a public voice that (implicitly or explicitly) authorizes White settler rule.
Candace: That tension between the state’s claim to neutrality and the expansive authority it quietly grants White settler Christianity seems to be precisely where spirits enter—both as what settler secularism tries to manage and as what exceeds its grasp. So, I want to direct us now toward spirits and haunting. The title Spirits of Empire carries remarkable theoretical and theological weight simultaneously—spirits as Indigenous animate forces, as the Holy Spirit invoked to legitimate conquest, as haunting presences that imperial projects can never fully contain, and as the ontological category weaponized to deny Indigenous peoples their relationship to land. You write that these unruly spirits, invoked by settler scientists in their efforts to “divinize whiteness,” could never entirely be controlled—that they haunted settler secularism from within its own cracks and fissures. How did you arrive at “spirits” as the organizing substance or thread of the book? And how do you navigate its theological valence for your Indigenous interlocutors in the book, particularly in relation to scholars who argue for refusing the matter/spirit binary that settler secularism itself imposes?
Tisa: This is a great question. And I must admit that the title Spirits of Empire and with it the focus on the spirits did not come until the tail end of my work on this book. We were already at the copyediting stage when Mark Simpson-Vos (then my editor at UNC Press) and I brainstormed titles and settled on this one. I had wanted to title the book “Settler Secularism” or simply “How Settler Colonialism Made American Religion.” The press wanted something less jargony and more evocative. I proposed “Spirits of Empire” as one in a list of brainstormed possibilities.
A simple word search found that variations of the word “spirit” were already present in the manuscript, over a hundred times, in the primary source quotations. You might say that the spirits were haunting this book all along. All I had to do was notice them. I did a final round of revisions, adding a few sentences here and there to think explicitly with and about the spirits. Immediately they added new layers to my argument. These are the threads you pull together above about the multiplicity and unruliness of the spirits—but also how the very concepts of “spirit” and “spiritual” can be (and have been) weaponized against Indigenous people.
Theorizing these haunting presences helped me better address a challenge I’d been wrestling with throughout my work on this book: how to strike the right balance both narratively and analytically between describing settler colonialism as a structure of power, which can seem all too hegemonic, and recognizing that no hegemony is ever complete. I wanted to lift up Indigenous voices and Indigenous strategies of survivance, to use Gerald Vizenor’s evocative term. I also wanted to acknowledge that there will always be stories that remain beyond my reach. Foregrounding the spirits helped me make all these points. The structuring power of settler secularism affects everyone who lives under the US empire. The empire itself has its animating and haunting spirits, and none of the spirits in this book exist entirely outside of settler secularism’s structuring power. Spirits may be called into being by and for empire—or to resist or simply survive it. Settler secularism aims to control religion and limit the spirits to their designated domain. But they can never entirely be contained.
Your final point, about the matter/spirit binary, is an important one. The word “spirits” immediately suggests and so threatens to re-impose this binary. But the Native people in this book (and some of the non-Native people) who called on the spirits clearly did not conceive of them as belonging to some otherworldly sphere. These spirited powers were more than human, but they were not divorced from the material. Indeed, the US authorities who denigrated Indigenous “superstitions” often did so precisely by ridiculing what they saw as the Native inability to make such distinctions. Perhaps the spirits themselves—along with those who invoked them—were refusing settler secularism and its binaries all along.
Candace: That image of refusal—spirits and their invokers quietly exceeding the binaries meant to hold them—feels like the most hopeful thread running through the book, and maybe the most unsettling one for settler secularism’s self-understanding. This brings me to a question about how long those unsettlements last. Your analysis of the “affective politics of benevolence”—the emotional economy of missionary sentiment that simultaneously motivated conquest and obscured its violence—seems to have a remarkably long afterlife beyond the antebellum Midwest. In your conclusion you note that the justificatory logics of benevolence were more culturally formative for White settlers than the missions themselves, and that these patterns show up today in the “perennial efforts of the United States and its corporate empires to export American democracy, freedom, and capitalism around the world” (276)—including, one might add, in contemporary foreign policy discourse around persecuted religious minorities abroad. How do you think about the relationship between these 19th-century affective formations and their later iterations? Is there a direct genealogical line, or something more like the sedimentation you describe—layers of meaning that never fully disappear but get reactivated in new contexts?
Tisa: My answer to this question is necessarily more speculative. I do have some ambivalence about the longevity of the shaping power I diagnose in this book. On one hand, my subtitle suggests a strong impact on every aspect of American religion. And the framework of settler secularism suggests that this impact extends well beyond those things conventionally named as “religion” to the ongoing structures of US governance and the logics of benevolence that you’ve mentioned here. On the other hand, settler colonialism is clearly not the ONLY shaping influence on religion or on secularism in the United States. There are many other intersecting histories, dynamics, and power relations that have also been important. An earlier version of my introduction elaborated on this point, but my editor wanted me to avoid equivocations and to state my thesis in the strongest possible terms.
Settler secularism aims to control religion and limit the spirits to their designated domain. But they can never entirely be contained.
All that said, I do think there are continuities and afterlives that can be productively tied to the histories thematized in this book. As you suggest, I find the metaphor of sedimentation particularly useful as a way to think about how this takes place. Drawing on Reinhart Kosellek’s Sediments of Time, I think about social forms, including religion and secularism, as historically sedimented. They are products of time and history, made by human actions, and upheld by human institutions. Like a rock formation or a monument, they may seem natural and they might naturalize a powerful social order. But they are not eternal. They can be gradually eroded or sometimes rapidly exploded. This metaphor captures how past events create embedded layers of meaning that rarely disappear entirely but continue to exert influence and sometimes visibly reassert themselves over time. Even ruins can be impactful. And they can always be rebuilt, albeit always with a difference, for new times.
Benevolence—with its imperial politics and justificatory logics—is a key theme that brings our books into conversation. This too is a sedimented form, and so its logics are neither inevitable nor permanent. There may be a genealogical line between past and present, but I would wager that it is not direct. Rather it is wavy and perhaps indistinct at times. Like other sedimentations, it maintains and regains its power when people invoke it (and remake it) to meet their own needs. But they can do so only because the earlier sedimentations are there to unearth. The image of the poor suffering heathen (as Kathryn Gin Lum’s book Heathen also helps us see) has enabled missionary labors alongside imperial invasions. The image of the persecuted Christian, which is more important in your book, draws on quite different histories but also facilitates benevolent interventions. Both images were mobilized and sedimented for settler colonial purposes in the early United States. Both remain significant in the logics of US imperialism today.
Candace: Tisa, it has been such a gift to think alongside you in this conversation. I have one final question about scholarly responsibility and the limits of critique. Throughout Spirits of Empire you are careful to describe settler secularism as a structure rather than the product of any single actor’s intentions—no individual religious leader, missionary, or government agent fully understood what they were building. But your conclusion suggests that understanding this history carries obligations. For scholars of American religion working today within institutions that are themselves products of settler colonialism—universities built on unceded lands, archives organized by the same categories your book deconstructs—what does it actually look like to reckon with that inheritance? Are there methodological or institutional commitments the field needs to make, or does the very language of “reckoning” risk becoming another iteration of the benevolence politics your book so carefully anatomizes?
Tisa: Yes, there is that risk. I am a non-Native scholar of American religion and share a desire with many colleagues to decolonize the field along with the institutions in which we work. But I am wary of easy solutions and do not believe that my scholarship by itself is decolonizing anything. If we are to write accurate histories or seek meaningful solutions, we need to take it slowly, build relationships with the people who are the most affected, and, where possible, follow their lead. I don’t buy into the myth of scholarly neutrality or objectivity. It’s obvious to me that allegedly objective scholarship across humanistic and scientific fields has (often unwittingly) imposed hierarchies of knowledge that continue today to facilitate imperial and racial violence. I do my best to write in a way that honors the full humanity of everyone in my story, while foregrounding the structures of power in which they are so inequitably embedded. I hope that this book (and others like it) can move us a step further towards more honest accounts of our shared histories and the ongoing injustices of the present.
Like other sedimentations, benevolence maintains and regains its power when people invoke it (and remake it) to meet their own needs. But they can do so only because the earlier sedimentations are there to unearth.
Settler colonialism is not a problem that exists only in the past. Native nations in the United States, like Indigenous communities around the world, continue to suffer not only from their histories of stolen land and sovereignty but from ongoing processes of dispossession and governing systems that were set up to erase them. Most lack a sufficient land base for their people. We live in an age of unprecedented capitalist wealth and power, fueled by new technologies such as AI that require new kinds of resource extraction and exacerbate environmental injustices and the destruction of Indigenous lands and waters. Places that many Native people relate to as kin (cf. Dana Lloyd, Land is Kin) are being violated at an accelerating rate. These are problems that (albeit unevenly) affect us all. Writing this book has helped me see how the taken-for-granted concepts and categories that organize our worlds–categories such as “religion”—can and do facilitate these extractive systems.
Given these realities, what approach should scholars of religion take? Scholarship is not the same as activism, even though some scholars may also be activists. Scholarship is slower because (among other things) it seeks to unpack complex histories and diagnose historically embedded systems of power. But again, it does not exist in some distant, rarified world. If done well, it can inform and sometimes have the effect of redirecting more practical initiatives. As scholars, the questions we ask are always informed by our identities, locations, and webs of relationships. And so I repeat: if we want to develop our analyses and critiques with any degree of efficacy; if non-Native scholars like me want to avoid replicating the imperial politics of benevolence; and if we want to push our institutions towards meaningful accountability, reparations for past harm, or collaborations for sustainable futures, then we need to do the slow work of building relationships with, and learning from, Indigenous communities and knowledge-keepers rather than jumping in with our own solutions.
