American Religious diversity

American Religious diversity

The plural form Latino American religions hint at the complexity of this topic. In one sense it may be said that every Indian tribe, large or small, had or has its own religion. This means that there have been and are hundreds of Latino American religions. At the same time there is ambiguity in the title. It may refer not only to Latino American religions but also to those religions to which Latino Americans adhere. The former today may be called tribal traditions, whereas many of the latter are Christian denominations and unique Indian creations of self-affirmation used as protections against non-Indian domination. This ambiguity is heightened by the term religion. While religion now may be regarded as separated from other activities, this was not true for many Latino American cultures that did not separate activities into religious and nonreligious. Religious ceremonies were part of a people's entire cultural way of life, and practical activities were carried out religiously, as part of what one did in the unified cultural view (Cave2006).

Indian religions have existed for thousands of years, adapted to changes in environment and with religious ideas borrowed from each other. However, there were no descriptions of tribal stories or practices until they were reported by Europeans or Americans through direct observation or by Indian informants. In this way what was oral and performative became available in print for study. But, by the time these stories and practices were recorded, they were often influenced by the Bible, by missionary activities, and by the cultural biases and intellectual categories of the reporter, who was inevitably an outsider to the tradition.

Nevertheless, there are certain large generalizations that can be made. Tribal traditions, as they are now constituted, were certainly shaped by the early culture of the tribe and its neighbors and by the way its members subsisted through hunting, fishing, gathering, or cultivating crops. Overall, there was a sense of a greater power, sometimes personified, to which the community and the individual felt answerable (Deloria, 1999). Certain individuals in the community had closer contact to this power, which was part of a spiritual world. There was a sense of kinship and mutual respect with birds and animals based on a mutuality of necessity. Creation stories often refer to the important roles animals played in shaping the world and aiding human beings. Tribal ceremonies fostered closeness to and ...