North America, the continent north of Mexico, holds two very different religious stories that its modern political borders obscure. The first and older is that of the indigenous nations, whose traditions long predate the states now drawn over them and whose diversity is immense: the sky-and-earth cosmology and Blessingway ceremonies of the Dine (Navajo); the sacred pipe, the vision quest, and the Sun Dance of the Lakota and other Plains peoples; the relationship with the animal world and the land of the Inuit of the Arctic. These are not a single religion but hundreds, bound loosely by a common emphasis on the sacredness of land and place, on ceremony and vision, on kinship extending to the non-human world, and on oral rather than scriptural transmission, and all of them survived, often underground, through centuries of dispossession, missionary suppression, and the trauma of the boarding-school era, to be reasserted in the modern period, sometimes with legal protection hard-won through cases over sacred sites and religious freedom.
The second story is that of the United States and Canada as a religious laboratory: a land whose disestablishment of religion and openness to immigration produced an extraordinary proliferation of new movements, from the Latter-day Saints, Adventists, and Pentecostals to Christian Science, the Nation of Islam, and countless new religious movements, alongside the transplanted churches of every immigrant community. North America thus juxtaposes some of the world's oldest indigenous traditions with the most fertile modern ground for religious innovation.