In his 1855 poem “Song of Myself,” Walt Whitman wrote: “I hear and behold God in every object, yet understand God not in the least.” The line encapsulates his complex, ever-changing views about a creator, which were at once deeply spiritual and blazingly unconventional. One of America’s greatest poets didn’t adhere closely to any organized religion; instead, he envisioned God as an all-pervading presence that infuses every person, creature, and object in the universe.
These notions, though unique to Whitman, rhymed with the intellectual zeitgeist of the American 19th century, a time when religion was evolving from its European roots into something truly homegrown. Whitman was influenced by the Transcendentalist circle — particularly the democratic individualism of Ralph Waldo Emerson, but also the writings of Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Bronson Alcott, and Theodore Parker. Their movement was a prime example of the way America can be defined, more than most countries, not by submission to a deity but by a productive tension with God. In a nation that prides itself on challenging received wisdom, many believers struggle with the divine — which is to say that they plead, they reject, and sometimes they compromise. They also believe in the mystical concept of God wrestling back.
The history of God in America, since before the arrival of the Mayflower, is the story of a contentious and unstable relationship. Its earliest colonists imported a strict monotheistic faith presided over by a providential God. But as independence was won, another conception of American religion emerged, as codified in the Bill of Rights: that of a pluralist nation whose citizens were free to choose from among a panoply of coexisting versions of God. The tension between these two visions is reflected in the evolving national motto. Currently, it reads IN GOD WE TRUST, but for a very long time it was E PLURIBUS UNUM — out of many, one.
Both versions of the American idea give the divine a uniquely American face. Consider the recent criticism of Pope Leo XIV by Donald Trump and J.D. Vance. After Leo declared that Christ is “never on the side of those who once wielded the sword and today drop bombs” — a fairly obvious rebuke of American actions in Iran — Vance advised him to “be careful when he talks about matters of theology.” The vice president, who has just published a book about his conversion to Catholicism, was speaking back, if not to God, than to His acknowledged representative on Earth as decreed by Vance’s faith. Trump, for his part, said that the pontiff was “terrible on foreign policy.” Underlying this pushback was the deeply American attitude that we are free to interpret God as we wish, even on major moral questions. The president and vice president were saying, in essence, “In our God we trust.”
Trump and Vance’s quibbles with the Pope might feel cynical because they argue for a version of Christianity tailor-made to specific policy preferences (including hasty wars). Yet the urge to resist doctrine where it contradicts national values, or to reshape it in an American mold, is not unique to this administration. It goes back to the beginning.
Although the Founding Fathers didn’t share a single view of God — they included deeply pious Christians as well as deists and religious skeptics — most of them believed, as a majority of Americans still do, that religion had a positive role in public life. The second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence affirms that humans are “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights,” and made equal by God. This is, no doubt, a comforting idea. God, and not we alone, gives us access to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
As every generation does, the Transcendentalists tested that premise, not to debunk it but to adapt it to their elastic view of the divine and their deep faith in American individualism. Among Whitman’s contemporaries, Emerson believed in God not as a remote, even disengaged supernatural being, but as a force permeating all of nature, including every human being. Although he had been a Unitarian minister, he’d gradually rejected many traditional Christian doctrines. He admired Jesus of Nazareth as a great spiritual teacher but did not regard him as uniquely divine. In his address of 1838 to the Harvard Divinity School, he posited that Jesus exemplified the divine potential present in all people. His version of this divinity was more mystical, even animist. He explains some of this in his essay “The Over-Soul,” released in 1841, referring to the Over-Soul as a universal spiritual reality that connects all people, nature, and God.
Thoreau, the other major Transcendentalist figure, wrestled with God along similar lines, except that his spirituality was less about philosophical speculation and more about the direct experience of nature. He believed that the divine could be encountered firsthand in the natural world and within one's own conscience. “Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads,” he wrote in his 1854 book Walden, which described his two years of solitude in the woods. Among the first major American writers to read Hindu and Buddhist texts earnestly, he admired the Bhagavad Gita, the Vedas, and other Asian traditions. These works reinforced his belief that spiritual wisdom could be found beyond Christianity, and that divine reality transcends any single religious tradition. This hybridity characterizes the significant minority of Americans who today consider themselves “spiritual but not religious.”
One of Thoreau’s greatest struggles with authority was over the institution of slavery. He believed that no law or government could justify the ownership of one human being by another, and he made clear that individual conscience must take precedence over unjust laws. This conviction is central to his essay “Civil Disobedience,” published in 1849, where he writes that citizens shouldn’t cooperate with governments that support injustice, including slavery. His deep distrust of institutions extended to religion as well. He believed that, even if the divine created our world with its own laws and mysteries, that did not mean we should submit to an order we considered to be unjust. Near the end of his life, when someone asked whether he had made his peace with God, Thoreau replied: “I did not know we had ever quarreled.”
Quarreling, of course, is different from wrestling. Quarreling entails anger and bitterness, whereas wrestling is what Jacob does in the biblical episode with the angel. He is terrified of facing his rivalrous brother, Esau, who is approaching with four-hundred armed men. A “heel-catcher,” meaning a notorious deceiver who relied on his own wits, Jacob is suddenly forced to realize his human limits. He can only truly overcome his past and receive God’s blessing by finding a channel of communication with Him. That kind of strenuous effort at overcoming an obstacle is what many Americans, including skeptics, atheists, and agnostics, do as they accept or reject the divine: their struggle is private, introspective. What defines this battle is the fact that, like anything in nature, it is in constant flux.
One significant doctrinal deviation of the Transcendentalists was their opinion on the afterlife. Although, again, they took no united approach, as a group they viewed the soul as part of a larger spiritual reality that transcends the physical world. They rejected the traditional Christian picture of heaven and hell as fixed destinations assigned by divine judgment. The condition of the soul mattered more than its location. Rather than a reward after death, salvation is an awakening to divine reality. Margaret Fuller expressed perhaps the most optimistic Transcendentalist hope: that death opens the road to continued spiritual growth.
Fuller’s religion, focused on improvement and perfectibility with no pre-determined endpoint, feels very American, especially when set against Europe’s more static social structures. God isn’t only a companion, nor a supernatural being forever on the side of American exceptionalism, but a sort of divine engine of perpetual self-improvement. This God can be found in the New Age movement that took hold in the 1970s, but also among many born-again Christians, and in the post-game speeches of athletes expressing gratitude for personal triumphs.
During the Civil Rights era, another generation of believers helped recalibrate many Americans’ views on God. At a time when establishment rules — and traditional religious beliefs — were fervently tested, key leaders of the period were immersed in theological teachings, but unafraid to share with the public their religious doubts alongside their spiritual certainties.
Martin Luther King Jr.'s understanding of God was rooted in Christianity, especially the Black church tradition. He believed God was a loving moral force guiding history toward justice. In his view, the Civil Rights Movement was a partnership between human action and divine purpose. Influenced by theologians such as Walter Rauschenbusch and Paul Tillich, he saw the “Kingdom of God” as something that should be partially realized on earth through social reform. Malcolm X, whose views evolved dramatically, was quite different. During his years in the Nation of Islam, he believed that God had a special mission for Black people and that white society was acutely corrupted. After his pilgrimage to Mecca, he embraced mainstream Sunni Islam and came to see God as the creator of a universal human brotherhood that transcended race.
Many other leaders of the 20th century wrestled God into the service of improving America. The activist Fannie Lou Hamer, a Baptist, believed God stood with the oppressed and gave ordinary people the courage to challenge injustice. Her speeches frequently blended biblical language with political demands. Bayard Rustin, who came from a Quaker background, believed (as Quakers traditionally do) that there is “that of God” in every person. James Baldwin, too, struggled profoundly with religion. Although he rejected much of organized Christianity, he often argued that genuine love — a force larger than individual self-interest — was the closest thing to the divine.
Then there were the dedicated theologians, including Thomas Merton and Abraham Joshua Heschel. Merton, a Trappist monk, died in 1968, too early to have played a direct role in later civil unrest, but his teachings, equating God with love, were deeply influential among antiwar activists. Heschel, who for years taught at the Jewish Theological Seminary, was also a mystic, albeit from a Jewish perspective. Walking shoulder-to-shoulder next to King in the voting rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, Heschel argued that humans are in need of God as much as God is in need of humans. For him, the divine is a living, personal presence who cares passionately about humanity and the moral state of the world.
Obviously, it would be a mistake to conflate the vanguard of the Civil Rights movement or Transcendentalism with the majority of religious believers. A country that enshrines the doctrine of individualism will never follow its leaders blindly. But prominent figures do establish guardrails for the relationship between earthly and spiritual forces. All in all, the Civil Rights era was guided by the belief that God is concerned with human dignity, freedom, and equality. The God defined by many religious leaders today is a different one — wrestled by other forces for other purposes.
Yet the constantly changing face of the divine is what makes America so perpetually compelling: our history is a testing ground for experimentation, mixing, and struggle with and against doctrine. It works best when we are free to reinvent our relationship with God, rather than when God is invoked in the service of domination or power. Not knowing what the divine ultimately wants, from us and from the nation, is a stimulant. This mystery is what inspired Whitman and some of the country’s greatest thinkers, who sensed that the right path lay not in finding a single answer, but in formulating questions for ourselves.
Ilan Stavans is Lewis-Sebring Professor of Humanities and Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College and a consultant to the Oxford English Dictionary. His new book, A Nation Wrestles with God: American Prophets, Philosophers, and Firebrands (Restless Books), is just out.
