"Told through stories filled with rich detail and a wide cast of relatively unknown characters, Kaleidoscope reveals that religions, cultures, and ethnicities are integral elements in an account of American history. The book begins with a frank consideration of the first Indigenous-European encounters. The settler-colonial Puritans and others had no toleration for diversity of peoples, cultures, or religions-the contrast between spoken-word Earth-based communal spiritualities of the former and the text-and rule-based hierarchical individualism of the latter could not be more incommensurable-and proceeded to slaughter them en masse. The Native inhabitants held their own in many instances, so the invaders attempted to convert them using cruel methods of cultural eradication. In similar fashion these colonialists enslaved African Black populations and rarely acknowledged that their spirituality was not a weak variant of white supremacists beliefs but an Atlantic-spanning faith that came out of Africa. Latin spiritual traditions combined much-transformed versions of Christianity with African elements and spread across the Global South. The next section of the book turns to the Protestant majority in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the quest for whiteness on the part of new immigrants from southern Europe, Asia, and Latin America. The Great Awakenings, a series of revivals that rose up in response to rapid and turbulent social and economic change, reoriented the beliefs and values of a culture toward a more hierarchical, individualistic notion of power rooted in white supremacy.

The final two chapters spotlight new religious movements-spiritualism, New Thought, and Mormonism-and, hidden in plain sight, Catholics and Jews in Protestant America and the contrasting trajectories each has had in the quest for whiteness and acceptance"-- Provided by publisher.