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The valley's organised religion begins as a mission to the Potawatomi — and no mission was ever seated on this township's ground. The mission era's founding act stands documented: in August 1830, Leopold Pokagon, chief of the Catholic Potawatomi of the St. Joseph valley, having trekked to Detroit to ask for a priest, brought Father Stephen Badin back to the valley — the first resident Catholic missionary effort in the region, its seat among the band's villages in the valley's Michigan ground and at the portage, not in the southern tier of townships. The mission's fruit was a Catholic Indigenous valley whose treaty history (the religious-creed article of the 1833 Treaty of Chicago, in this section's before-the-city file) is the mission era's political monument. For Union Township the record is a printed negative at the histories' strength: neither Chapman (1880) nor Howard (1907) seats a mission, mission station, or missionary residence on this ground — their church chapters for the township open with the settler societies (the Methodist society of c. 1839 at the religion file's head), a full decade after Badin's arrival and twenty miles from his seat. The era therefore enters this build at boundary strength: the valley had a mission age; this township's religion begins after it, with settlers, and the difference is a fact of the record, not a slight to fill.
Principal sources: the Pokagon/Badin record as carried by the band's and the valley's histories (Clifton, The Pokagans; the diocesan and Notre Dame carriers); the banked Churches & Religion (the c. 1839 opening) and Native Nations; Chapman and Howard township church chapters as read for this build.