Judeo-Catholic-Protestant America

Chris Beneke

Kevin Schultz’s Tri-Faith America begins with the story of a priest, a rabbi and two Protestant ministers. It might be the first line of a joke, but it's deadly serious. The four chaplains were aboard the U.S.S. Dorchester when it was sunk by a German torpedo in February 1943. They all went down with the ship, prayerfully, arm-in-arm after having given their life jackets to sailors who lacked them.

The sacrifice of the Four Chaplains represented something of a landmark in the history of American religious comity. These men were "celebrated ... as emblems of the new tri-faith nation." Yet, as Schultz shows, Americans were already prepared to appreciate the larger significance of their heroism because of the ecumenical groundwork that had been laid over the previous decade by the anti-prejudice proselytizing of the National Conference of Christians and Jews (NCCJ), which confronted a revitalized Ku Klux Klan and a swelling, virulent strain of Western antisemitism in the 1920s and 30s.

Schultz's assiduous research demonstrates that the NCCJ wasn'tmerely engaged in a half-ass exercise of holier-than-thou idealism. During WWII alone, the organization sponsored traveling "tolerance trios"--consisting of a rotating roster of priests, rabbis, and Protestant ministers--who visited nearly 800 military installations and addressed 9 million Americans. This was missionary work on a par with the massive evangelizing and Bible distribution efforts undertaken by American Protestants during the Civil War.

In the early postwar period, such everyday features of American culture as films, manners, and educational programming were shaped by the tri-faith model that the NCCJ had so carefully cultivated. Postwar liberalism was in turn infused with the mostly tolerant and religiously derived moral imperative that went by the name of the "Judeo-Christian tradition."

Upon this somewhat narrow foundation, postwar Americans would adopt broader conceptions of tolerance that included a larger range of religious groups. Religious bigotry and discrimination certainly didn't disappear, but they were largely driven from public life by the early 1960s. Though groups such as the NCCJ proved slow to promote civil rights for African Americans, the trope of inclusion that they popularized resonated throughout the 1960s. Meanwhile, before the Judeo-Christian tradition was appropriated by the Religious Right in the 1970s, it was employed by Martin Luther King and other civil rights leaders to discredit racist institutions and policies in the 1950s and 60s.

There were deep, intangible costs accompanying the triumph of the tri-faith ideal, which Schultz details. Among them was the loss of communal identity by Jews, Catholics, and Protestants. Also endangered were some of the vibrant, distinctive traditions within each of these larger faith categories. Prophecy withered as ecumenism bloomed.

Still, Schultz provides us with an unapologetically progressive account. He makes clear how profoundly important religious differences were to early twentieth-century Americans and how tirelessly some worked to transcend, or at least mediate, them. Tri-Faith America gives religious tolerance its due as a crucial component of postwar liberalism. In this, it represents a sharp rebuke to the fashionable idea that American religious freedom and religious tolerance have been little more than subtle exercises in coercion

Religion and the New Congress

Chris Beneke

The Pew Forum's religious survey of the 112th Congress (table on the right is theirs) is out. No surprise that Protestants and Catholics abound, though roughly in line with their proportion of the overall population. Perhaps also unsurprising to historians will be the fact that 69% of Congressional Republicans identify as Protestant, while 34% of Congressional Democrats identify as Catholic and 15% as Jewish. Pew also reports:

A few of the country’s smaller religious groups, including Episcopalians, Presbyterians and Jews, have greater numerical representation in Congress than in the general population. Some others, including Buddhists and Muslims, are represented in Congress in roughly equal proportion to their numbers in the adult U.S. population. And some small religious groups, such as Hindus and Jehovah’s Witnesses, are not represented at all in Congress.

Perhaps the greatest disparity between the religious makeup of Congress and the people it represents, however, is in the percentage of the unaffiliated – those who describe their religion as atheist, agnostic or “nothing in particular.” According to information gathered by CQ Roll Call and the Pew Forum, no members of Congress say they are unaffiliated. By contrast, about one-sixth of U.S. adults (16%) are not affiliated with any particular faith. Only six members of the 112th Congress (about 1%) do not specify a religious affiliation, which is similar to the percentage of the public that says they don’t know or refuses to specify their faith.

The apparent non-electability of the unaffiliated might prompt us to again ask what exactly "unaffiliated" means. It may not be the same thing as agnosticism or atheism (a 2006 Baylor survey in fact indicated that a healthy majority of the un-affiliated "believe in God or some higher power") though it might be fairly close (Pew itself concluded that "the majority of the unaffiliated population ... is made up of people who simply describe their religion as 'nothing in particular.'") If we were examining these numbers the way early American historians and journalists study the founders, we might also wonder about the percentage of deists residing among both the non-affiliated and the affiliated.

As the Pew report notes, the change from the 111th Congress is very modest. However, the change from the 87th (1961-62) Congress is significant with Catholics (who have gone from 19 to 29% of the total) and Jews (who have gone from 2 to 7% of the total) now serving in noticeably larger numbers. I'm looking forward to Kevin Schultz's forthcoming Tri-Faith America: How Catholics and Jews Held America to Its Protestant Promise (Oxford UP, due in March) to help us shed some light on all of this.

Historians and Books vs. Journal Articles

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Chris Beneke, a contributor to RiAH, has written an interesting piece on history publishing and gauging scholarly output. (I just posted it at the HS blog.) Beneke zeroes in on the significance of book publishing vs journal publishing and asks some questions about how historians could or should measure the weight of their work.

Chris Beneke, "The Journal Standard," The Historical Society, November 15, 2010

Historians are people of the book. We write piles of them—monographs, textbooks, and edited books, strictly academic books and books intended (usually with no foundation in reality) for the bestseller list. Some of our better books are histories of the book; some of our better historians are historians of the book. We cherish books dearly, not least for their narrative artistry. But we also value their utility within the academic world. At research universities and colleges with research aspirations, after all, the scholarly book serves as the elusive ticket to the vastly overrated world of the tenured, Associate Professor, and later to invitations to speak, comment, and publish still more books. . . .

In short, historians are producing, recognizing, and even celebrating work that runs sharply against the grain of research in other disciplines. To put it in the bluntest terms, we have a Book Standard; they have a Journal Standard. It’s not that we don’t value that other form of scholarly currency. We just don’t value it quite as much.>>>

Thanks to these our brethren: George Washington on Religious Civility in Wartime

by Chris Beneke

General David Petraeus’ warning this week about the dangers posed to U.S. troops by Koran burning in the states brings to mind a notable incident in American religious history. Amid the siege of British-occupied Boston in 1775, the recently appointed commander of the Continental Army, General George Washington issued an order that must have resulted in some grumbling in the ranks. For decades, English and American Protestants had burned effigies of the Pope to celebrate the thwarting of (the Catholic) Guy Fawkes' attempt to blow up Parliament on November 5, 1605. Bostonians marked the anniversary in a particularly lively way that featured fireworks, two flammable "Popes," and one grand fistfight. But in November 1775, with Catholic support for the American war effort desperately needed, an irritated Washington ordered his soldiers to forgo their beloved Pope's Day festivities. The words that he included in his orders may be worth recalling:

As the Commander in Chief has been apprized of a design form’d for the observance of that ridiculous and childish custom of burning the Effigy of the pope – He cannot help expressing his surprise that there should be Officers and Soldiers in this army so void of common sense, as not to see the impropriety of such a step at this Juncture; at a Time when we are solliciting, and have really obtain’d, the friendship and alliance of the people of Canada, whom we ought to consider as Brethren embarked in the same Cause. The defence of the general Liberty of America: At such a juncture, and in such Circumstances, to be insulting their Religion, is so monstrous, as not to be suffered or excused; indeed instead of offering the most remote insult, it is our duty to address public thanks to these our Brethren, as to them we are so much indebted for every late happy Success over the common Enemy in Canada.

The campaign in Canada didn't end well. But Washington's sentiment--that we have good friends, of different faiths, aiding us against a common enemy--might still be of some value.

Non-Papists

By Chris Beneke

A Friday post on the New York Review of Books site by the distinguished Notre Dame scholars John T. McGreevy and R. Scott Appleby looks at the "Ground Zero mosque" controversy through the lens of American Catholic history. The duo offer several important insights. Among them: "the American acceptance and encouragement of Catholic parishes and schools once seen as threatening reshaped an international religious institution [the Catholic Church]" and that "if the Catholic experience in the United States holds any lesson it is that becoming American also means asserting one's constitutional rights, fully and forcefully, even if that assertion is occasionally taken to be insulting." McGreevy and Appleby concede that the analogy between nineteenth-century Catholics and modern Muslims is imperfect. Nonetheless, it is illuminating, and should inspire at least a glimmer of hope.

At least four additional points might be added to McGreevy and Appleby's analysis:

1) Muslims (particularly Sunnis) lack the centralized direction that bound nineteenth-century Catholic clergy and laity to a non-democratic foreign agenda--American Muslims are not constrained by the pronouncements of distant authorities, and certainly not by al Qaeda.

2) American Muslims are supported by a large constituency of civil rights advocates. More importantly, they are protected by a federal government with much broader powers than its nineteenth-century counterpart (nor should we forget the support and protections offered by the mayor, the Governor, and state and local law.) Nineteenth-century Catholics had many allies and sympathizers among Protestants. They also benefited from an already vibrant tradition of religious liberty and mutual respect. Still, their position vis-a-vis both state authority and public opinion was probably more precarious than that of modern Muslims.

3) American Catholics arrived in massive numbers during the mid-nineteenth century. Today, U.S. Muslim population growth is robust, but it pales in relative terms to the hundreds of thousands of Irish Catholics who landed in U.S. cities during the 1840s and 1850s. As much as the growing Muslim community will contribute to American society, its social and political footprint is likely to be less conspicuous than the one left by mid-nineteenth-century Irish Catholics.

4) Particularly in the last decades,the United State has prided itself on a tradition of religious diversity and religious inclusion. We have also gained a sharper appreciation for our previous failings in this regard. Appleby and McGreevy are not just champions of this formidable tradition; they are illustrations of it.

In sum, our history--especially our recent history--bodes well for our future. We have seen the same sort of reaction before, and it passed. Hackles were raised, distant authorities were cited, and brutal violence was invoked, yet our better natures prevailed and our tradition of equal rights was enriched. There will have to be accommodation and there will have to be time for healing. But if we take history as our guide, there is reason for optimism.

Disestablishments

Chris Beneke

I just finished Steven K. Green's The Second Disestablishment: Church and State in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford 2010). My hunch is that the book will end up on the shelves of Supreme Court justices and their clerks, not to mention religious historians (who will probably use the library's copy) and constitutional law scholars (who can probably afford to buy their own). We needed a comprehensive account of the relationship between civil government and religion from the founding period through the early twentieth century. Now we have it.

The Second Disestablishment's title and subtitle are misleading. The first quarter of this thick volume is devoted to late eighteenth-century America, the era of what Green calls the “First Disestablishment.” It lasted from 1775 through 1833, though most of the critical work was accomplished by 1790. (Massachusetts, with its town-centered system of church support, was the chief laggard, stretching the national story of constitutional disestablishment out until 1833.)

Green takes the interpretive fight directly to those (generally called "Accommodationists") who maintain that the early federal system was designed to preserve existing, nonpreferential state establishments of religion. He makes a persuasive case that instead of buttressing publicly supported religion in the states, the Constitution and the religious clauses of the First Amendment actually sustained the states' momentum toward disestablishment.

Historians use the term "disestablishment" to describe the end of state support for churches and state-enforced religious doctrine. Green has a broader conception (a forthcoming book by David Sehat may take a comparably broad view). For Green, disestablishment also included the de-Christianization of the common law and the secularizaton of educational policy. The story is generally progressive: there was more evidence of disestablishment at the end of the nineteenth century than there had been in the late eighteenth or mid-nineteenth century. Still, what he calls "legal" and "cultural" disestablishment--the Second Disestablishment--followed a less direct trajectory than the First, constitutional disestablishment. In fact, the notion that Christianity was integral to the common law did not reach its apex until the antebellum period. As a consequence, anti-Christian remarks were still prosecuted and non-Christians still barred from serving as witnesses through the Civil War era.

A major turning point occurred in the middle decades of the nineteenth century when judges began to demand that prosecutions for blasphemy, Sabbath violations, and profane swearing be shown to constitute a discernible public “nuisance." For their part, Sabbath laws themselves were increasingly treated as contributions to public health and welfare, rather than divine injunctions. (When else would laborers rest, and how else were you going to keep them out of the pubs on Sunday?) At the same time, Bible reading in the schools was given secular justifications (Where else would children be taught morality?) and gradually abandoned. Law and culture were both de-sanctified.

The Second Disestablishment is judicious in its use of evidence, with only a few excursions into polemics. The argument flows easily from Green's detailed study of legal opinion and court decisions (more than 400 cases apparently). Along the way, he takes aim at another distinguished legal historian, Philip Hamburger, whose Separation of Church and State should be read in conjunction with this one. The debate over the history of church and state in America won't end with this book. But it just might be more interesting, and better informed.

Civil Society and Religion in the Early U.S.

by Chris Beneke

The Sunday Boston Globe "Ideas" section includes an interview by Samuel P. Jacobs with Johann N. Neem, associate professor of history at Western Washington State. The subject is Neem's book, Creating a Nation of Joiners: Democracy and Civil Society in Early National Massachusetts (Harvard, 2008), which considers, among other things, the role of churches and ministers in America's emergent civil society. The book, Neem writes, "questions the assumption that America's voluntary tradition emerged naturally out of the democratic ideals of the American Revolution. Americans were uneasy about becoming a nation of joiners and accepted it only when other options failed." Here's an excerpt from Jacobs' interview with Neem:

IDEAS: We think of freedom of association as a right like freedom of assembly. But this idea is not a concept we can date back to the American Revolution.

NEEM: Today we are much more pluralistic. We tend to think of society as divided up into groups with their own interests, each of which has the right to divide up and pursue their own welfare. That is our modern right, which emerged out of this idea that the hope for a government with one interest is constantly being threatened by people dividing. Freedom of association emerges as a way for outsider groups to continue to pursue their private or political causes. Freedom of association is in a sense the embodiment of a failure of a certain kind of revolutionary hope.

IDEAS: Another thing that we read backwards onto the founders, you argue, is a separation between church and state.

NEEM: One of the things that is important to remember is that Massachusetts had a tax-supported church until 1833. The only competitors, in a sense, were Connecticut in 1818 and New Hampshire in 1819. Only in New England. Most of the states separated church and state right after the Revolution. Why did they do that? Why did it last so long is the question. The answer is that in many ways the public church as well as the militia or the public school were seen as sources of social unity by providing a common institutional experience and also common values.

IDEAS: In many parts of the US, today’s church leaders have become as important as political leaders. How engaged were church leaders in Massachusetts in the 19th century?

NEEM: Church leaders, as well as religious people, congregants, were very active in politics. What is interesting is that the church leadership in Massachusetts started to discover in the 1820s and 1830s that their influence would be greater less through state sanction and more through the cultivation of their congregants. Increasingly church leaders said less we need an alliance with the state, in fact that is a handicap. What we need is to convert people and then mobilize those people. Some of the most mobilized Americans in the 1820s and 1830s were Evangelicals coming out of these churches.

What is a continuation is the ways in which the church has some of the most active citizens. Citizens who still have the ability to write legislators, to organize themselves, are coming out of churches. You see it today not just in today’s conservative movement. You saw it in the civil rights movement coming out of the African-American churches. It is not really liberal or progressive or conservative, it has to do with how citizens participate in public life.

Christian Witnessing

by Chris Beneke

How Christian was the early national U.S.? Providing a credible answer to that question is not as easy as some politicians and journalists would have us believe.

Short of blurting responses that accord with our ideological prejudices, we can cite the founders(the most popular approach), use church membership data, or skimpier but perhaps more revealing church adherence data, consult state and federal constitutional language, examine early national publications, diaries, letters, etc. Unfortunately, there was no Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life on Religion & Public Life in 1790. So to determine who went to church and what believers believed we must rely on often un-reliable observers and scattered records.

Ronald P. Formisano and Stephen Pickering introduce another form of evidence in the summer issue of The Journal of the Early Republic. Their focus is the early national debate over witness competency (i.e. the religious tests that were imposed on potential witnesses in the early republic).

Formisano and Pickering are not the first to look at such laws. But they appear to be doing it more systematically than anyone before them. The authors’ key finding “is that religious tests for ‘witness competency’ remained on state statute books and in judges’ decisions a much longer time” than scholars have generally thought. Formisano and Pickering point out that “[m]any state courts retained religious tests for most of the nineteenth century” (it’s not clear that anyone knows how many and for how long. It appears that a conservative estimate would be: 1) a dozen or more states, and 2) into the early twentieth century). A witness’s success in passing such tests usually hinged on whether she or he believed in “a future state of rewards and punishments.”

Formisano and Pickering identify two primary judicial approaches to witness competency in religious matters. The first emphasized that "a future state" entailed belief in an afterlife of rewards for some and punishments for others, which excluded Universalists who professed that every soul would eventually be saved. A second, more common approach accommodated Universalists by allowing that a belief in rewards and punishments in this life could also be a sufficient qualification. On the whole, the trend was away from strict religious requirements for witness competency and toward their abolition. Nonetheless, these laws changed much more slowly than those that had maintained tax support for Protestant churches. Their persistence gestures towards a fairly robust Christian sensibility in the understanding of early national law and culture. In the end, however, Formisano and Pickering are careful to observe that “[n]either a narrow interpretation of the First Amendment nor … the ‘nonpreferentialist’ advocacy of federal aid to religion follows from the recognition of Christianity being ‘interwoven’ in the common law and influencing other areas of governance and ritual within the states.”

Crosspost: The New History of Toleration

The following is from our newest contributing editor Chris Beneke's post on the Historical Society blog. (I thought this would be of some interest to readers of Religion in American History.) Beneke is associate professor of history and director of the Valente Center for Arts and Sciences at Bentley University. In the American Historical Review Peter S. Field called Beneke's book, Beyond Toleration: The Religious Origins of American Pluralism (Oxford, 2006), a "wide-ranging, ambitious survey... well written and engaging." Reviewing it in Church History, Frank Lambert described it as an "engaging, thoroughly researched and documented book, [in which] Beneke explains why colonial Americans avoided the religious wars that plagued European states in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries." We blogged previously about Beyond Toleration here, and also noted and blogged about his important edited volume, Religious Tolerance and Religious Intolerance in Early America, forthcoming 2010 from U. Pennsylvania Press.

A warm welcome for Chris Beneke, and we look forward to future contributions here.

The New History of Toleration
Chris Beneke

The latest issue of the William and Mary Quarterly includes a forum on Stuart Schwartz’s groundbreaking All Can Be Saved: Religious Tolerance and Salvation in the Iberian Atlantic World (2008), which argues that a surprisingly large proportion of ordinary people within the early modern Spanish and Portuguese empires maintained that salvation was available to a wide range of believers. Drawing on his extensive archival work on both sides of the Atlantic, Schwartz contends that these two Catholic regimes, famous for their religious exclusivity, actually harbored a substantial number of religious relativists. Schwartz’s book is distinctive in another way: its subject, he notes, “is not the history of religious toleration, by which is usually meant state or community policy, but rather of tolerance, by which I mean attitudes or sentiments.” (6)

The WMQ comments are generally positive. Lu Ann Homza does find fault with Schwartz’s heavy reliance on statements drawn from inquisitorial tribunals and suggests that when “Schwartz found over and over again the phrase that ‘each could be saved in his own law,’ we must ask whether Inquisition notaries were fitting defense testimony into rhetorical formulas.” David D. Hall sets Schwarz’s book within the new, non-linear and anti-triumphalist historiography of toleration in early modern Europe, specifically Alexandra Walsham’s Charitable Hatred: Tolerance and Intolerance in England, 1500-1700 and Benjamin J. Kaplan’s Divided by Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe. Hall suggests that Schwartz’s universalist-minded subjects might be evidence of “the persistence of tensions within any strong cultural system.” Marcy Norton expresses her wish that Schwartz had given more weight to the impact of religious and ethnic diversity in prompting tolerant attitudes. And Andrew R. Murphy argues that we need to devote more attention to the “borderland between attitudes and political practices” than Schwartz does in All Can Be Saved.

As engaging as it is for specialists, this WMQ forum might seem a bit esoteric to the un-initiated. Fortunately, Murphy summarizes recent historiographical developments in his conclusion. The new literature on toleration in the early modern (Anglo-American) world, he writes, is characterized by four “corollaries”:

* Intolerance was—theoretically, conceptually, and theologically speaking—as robust as tolerance.

* Elites often had “good,” or at least comprehensible, reasons for persecuting religious dissenters.

* Toleration often resulted from the intentional plans of tolerationist elites but as an unintended consequence of actions growing out of complex motivations (economic, political, strategic).

* Toleration, when it happened, was due as much to exclusionary impulses and intolerance (separatism, anti-Catholicism) as to humanistic and skeptical ideals.

The WMQ forum on All Be Saved falls on the heels of a fascinating September 2008 conference organized by Evan Haefeli, Brendan McConville, and Owen Stanwood on “Anti-popery” in the Protestant Atlantic world from 1530 to 1850, which also offered a generally non-triumphalist and socially grounded take on the extent of early modern toleration across the Atlantic world.

Beneke's essay, "America’s Whiggish Religious Revolution: An Instance in the Progress of History," will appear in the June 2009 issue of Historically Speaking.