Secularization, Pluralism, and Moral Minimalism: David Sehat Responds to his Respondents

Paul Harvey

Some time ago I posted a very substantive two-part interview with David Sehat, author of The Myth of American Religious Freedom. In the interim, over at David's group blog U.S. Intellectual History, several of his fellows (and some others, including Dan Williams, whose book on the religious right, God's Own Party, has received extensive attention here) have responded to and critiqued David's book. More specifically, the blog has posted responses and critiques from Daniel K. Williams, Andrew Hartman, Ray Haberski, and Christopher Hickman.

That forum has now been completed, with David's response to his critics. Taking the responses, and David's reply, all together, is a great intellectual treat, so I wanted to make sure and provide the links to it here for those of you who don't customarily cruise over to their blog. This is pretty hefty intellectual history, so I wouldn't advise it for beach reading, but for those who complain that U.S. historians are excessively specialized and never take on the big picture or grand narrative anymore, here's your answer (or at least one answer) to that.

I also call attention to this because in his response David provides some of the intellectual/theoretical underpinning behind the structuring of his book -- so this is sort of his short "discourse on method," if you will, or a kind of theoretical appendix. He also uses his response to emphasize a point sometimes lost in discussions of his book, which is how much of the book is actually about religious dissenters who stood outside the moral establishment, poked holes in it, and (to my mind) showed that American religious freedom ultimately was not a myth after all.

Sehat divides his responses up into issues of 1) secularization; 2) pluralism; and 3) moral minimalism. Here's a brief excerpt from the first part, about his understanding of the term "secularization":

Those who have read The Myth of American Religious Freedom will know that the issue of religious authority is a major theme of the book. Religious partisans have long argued that their religion provides the morals to be enforced in law. Another way of saying it is that religious partisans made their religious authority determinative in law and government, sometimes explicitly, sometimes less so. The success of religious partisans in imposing their religious authority on law resulted in a moral establishment, a proxy religious establishment that provided religious authority with the coercive powers of law.

My book focuses on the role of dissenters to the moral establishment—those who objected to the reach of religious authority into law and government. Dissenters were central to the decline of the moral establishment and the secularization of American public life, a secularization that, I must add, is tenuous and seems, in the last several decades, to be moving into reverse. And it is this understanding of secularization that apparently did not come across as clearly as I wished. Williams, for example, thinks that I depict religious liberals as people “who quickly realized that their arguments did not depend upon religious faith and who therefore embraced secular language in advancing human rights.”

But this is not quite what I say, or at least what I intended to say. I sought to say something at once more specific and also stronger: Religious liberals, precisely because of their religious beliefs, were agents of secularization, a secularization that involved the expansion of rights because it meant the decline of religious authority outside the sphere of religious institutions.

Just a short addendum. IN the middle of his response, after a lengthy explanation of how exactly he is using the term secularization (basically, to mean a decline in the public authority of religious institutions, not to mean a decline in individual religiosity), Sehat says that this secularization is "tenuous and seems, in the last several decades, to be moving into reverse.." Just after initially posting this, I came across this piece about Governor Rick Perry (R, Texas) and his call for and imminent leadership in an August 6 "day of prayer and fasting on behalf of our troubled nation." The event is sponsored by (among other groups) the American Family Association -- of which much could be said, but which most recently linked homosexuality to "increasing ungodliness and depravity assaulting our nation" (you know, like all those political sex scandals, Ensign, Weiner, et all -- oh wait, they weren't gay scandals, never mind). Perry described the event, which will be held in a stadium in Houston, as an "apolitical Christian prayer service" which will provide "spiritual solutions to the many challenges we face in our communities, states and nation."

This blog expects Historianess to be there and live-blogging this latest gathering of the erstwhile moral establishment.

Myth of American Religious Freedom: Part II

Paul Harvey

Today we continue our interview with David Sehat, author of The Myth of American Religious Freedom.

PH: A good portion of your book is taken up with dissenters -- the abolitionists, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Mormons, freethinkers, and progressive intellectuals in the twentieth century. Time after time, they get beaten down by the moral establishment, yet in the end they more or less triumphed in crafting a new definition of religious freedom. Can you give us briefly one example of how you use dissenters in your book, and how they confronted and, over time, whittled away at the foundations of the moral establishment?

DS: Of all the people I talk about, my favorite is Elizabeth Cady Stanton. As most of your readers know, Stanton was a radical women’s rights activist who argued that the subservient place of women in law grew out of a Christian patriarchy. To make way for the emancipation of women, Stanton was relentless in her criticism of the connection of Christianity to law. According to her opponents, women’s liberation would entail societal degradation, because treating a woman as an individual before the law would undermine the institution of the family, the mechanism for inculcating morals in society. As a result, Christian proponents of the moral establishment placed the obligations of society over the desires of individual women such as Stanton. By contrast, Stanton placed the individual above society. She argued that laws too often required that the individual—especially the female individual—to be “sacrificed to the highest good of society,” which was the fundamental error of the moral establishment. She claimed instead that a society could not suppress the individual and still uphold the highest social good. Only when individuals possessed full freedom would the possibilities of a society be realized.

Stanton laid out the basic question in the debate, which was: which is most basic, the society or the individual? This claim about the importance of the individual and of individual rights in a liberal, democratic society circulated among the many dissenters to the moral establishment in the nineteenth century. But the notion did not finally triumph until the twentieth century, through progressive intellectuals, such as Herbert Croly and Walter Lippmann, and liberal legal theorists, such as Louis Brandeis, who used the Court to enforce individual rights.

PH: You hit liberal justices pretty hard for misusing history, particularly in claiming a strict separationist position on the First Amendment that basically never really existed. In other words, since the "wall of separation" is basically a historical myth, it is a bad idea to use that myth in reasoning in legal cases. How do you think those on the center/left of the spectrum should view your history of the moral establishment in making arguments favorable to their position? Is this akin to Brown v. Board –acknowledge crimes against freedom committed in the past, including by the Court, and just say we need a completely different model than that?

DS: Yes, that’s exactly right. Using bad history does not help public debate and it does not make stable law. Liberals should acknowledge that the past did not feature a harmonious arrangement of freedom that sprang from the minds of Jefferson and Madison. By reframing their arguments away from that bad history, I actually think liberals would strengthen their own position because the most powerful argument for liberal jurisprudence is historical. It goes something like this: Once upon a time, the individual was subject to religious oppression that used the apparatus of the state. But then the Supreme Court realized that the Bill of Rights, which defines the rights of American citizens, should apply to the states because the states were infringing upon the rights of the individual guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment. As the Supreme Court began applying the Bill of Rights to the states, it made a host of questionable historical arguments. But it did so for a still legitimate purpose that is now under attack by religious partisans in the present. The Court sought to free the individual from oppression in order to make the United States into a liberal democracy. We can uphold those rulings while not repeating the same bad history, because acknowledging past Protestant power helps to show why the liberal jurisprudence is necessary.

PH: The latter portion of the book deals with some more contemporary controversies and decisions, and you suggest very strongly that the Roberts Court, when it has the chance, will "continue to aid political conservatives and religious activists in rehabilitating the moral establishment." This is a different argument than I have seen from some other legal scholars, who have suggested that recently the Supreme Court has moved more towards a position of shying away from big religion decisions, because First Amendment law as to what is or is not a "religion" has just become a huge mess of contradictory decisions (as in the one a few years ago allowing for the use of a religious symbol in a public place in one state, but disallowing it in another state). In what ways do you foresee a possibly more activist court under Roberts, and why would it be interested in rehabilitating a moral establishment that has led to so much dissent and conflict over two centuries, as you trace in your book?

DS: It depends upon what you mean by “big religion decisions.” I agree that the Court seems chastened by the daunting (if not impossible) theoretical task of defining religion in a way that is fair and stable and does not violate the establishment clause. But I don’t think that this strongly conservative Court is going to calmly accept past liberal jurisprudence. Part of my argument is precisely that a case doesn’t have to be about “religion” per se to uphold religious power.

Consider two cases. The Court currently has a case before it that involves an Arizona law which funnels money to private religious schools through a complicated tax credit system. I find this an instructive case. In the nineteenth century, Protestants controlled the schools but they lost that control in the mid-twentieth century as the Supreme Court forbade prayer and Bible-reading in schools. When the Supreme Court dismantled religious control over schools, religious conservatives began to advocate the use of public money in private schools. The Arizona law is in that tradition of seeking an end-run around mid-twentieth-century legal decisions. The state claims that the money given to private, often sectarian schools is not public money because an individual donates the money to a school and is then reimbursed by the state through a tax credit (not a tax deduction) on a matching basis up to a certain amount. As a result, Arizona claims, it cannot be considered a violation of the establishment clause. This sounds like money laundering to me, and I would like to think that the Court would strike it down. But the last thirty years has seen the Court ever more comfortable in providing public money to private schools, even private sectarian schools. If the Court upholds the Arizona law, it would be in keeping with the general jurisprudential trend of rehabilitating Christian schools through the use of public money.

The second case that bears watching is the California gay marriage case, which is going to wind up in the U.S. Supreme Court. The Court has been amenable in the recent past to the notion that the law cannot be used to advance private moral norms. In Lawrence v. Texas in 2002, Justice Kennedy used that argument to strike down all anti-sodomy laws in the United States. Moreover, in 1967 when the Court struck down miscegenation laws, it ruled, “The freedom to marry has long been recognized as one of the most vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men.” Putting these two opinions together might suggest that the Court will uphold gay marriage, but it is not at all clear. As usual, the decision seems likely to boil down to Kennedy’s position. He wrote the opinion striking down sodomy law but did not give any indication of his stance on gay marriage. If I had to read the tea leaves (always a dangerous practice), I’m not optimistic that the Court will rule in favor of gay rights because I don’t think it likely that Kennedy will use the same kind of argument that he made in Lawrence. I hope I’m wrong, but should the Court strike down gay marriage, the ruling would, once again, serve as an extension of religious power.

PH: Getting to the bottom line: in 3 or 4 sentences, can you tell us what is the single most important takeaway point you want people to get from your book?

DS: I think it is time that we stopped celebrating ourselves. And by “we” I mean both liberals and conservatives. This nationalist self-celebration has generated a debate on religion in public life whose most notable feature is a pervading sense of falsity. By looking squarely at the religious coercions of the past and the multiple limits of religious freedom, I’m hoping that we can have a new conversation—both a more honest conversation and a more productive one—on a better historical foundation.

Thanks for the stimulating questions, Paul, and thanks again for reading the book.

Seneca Possessed

Paul Harvey

From Choice, a quick hit review of a new book that should be of interest to many:

Dennis, Matthew. Seneca possessed: Indians, witchcraft, and power in the early American republic. Pennsylvania, 2010. 313p bibl index afp; ISBN 9780812242263, $45.00. Reviewed in 2010nov CHOICE.

This fascinating study examines how the Senecas struggled to maintain their community, autonomy, and land between 1780 and 1825. Dennis begins by describing the dangerous chaos that shook western New York in the wake of the Revolutionary War. He then analyzes the message and effects of the Seneca prophet Handsome Lake, including connections to the Second Great Awakening, and provides a nuanced view of how witch hunting before, during, and after served as "a unified defense of Seneca integrity and sovereignty." Next, the author examines the connections that the tribe developed with Quaker missionaries, who proved useful partly by providing needed technology and education and partly by acting as a "firebreak" against other, less compliant missionaries, but mostly by supporting the Senecas in their fight against efforts by the Ogden Land Company and the State of New York to take their land and autonomy. The book seems disjointed because of the separate Handsome Lake and Quaker-focused sections, but that is outweighed by its analysis of Seneca social and cultural change and continuity, and its examination of the connections between the tribe and the surrounding US culture. Summing Up:Recommended. All levels/libraries. -- D. R. Mandell, Truman State University

From the Underside of the Millennium: My Take on God in America

Paul Harvey

Today's Religion Dispatches features a few of my thoughts on the God in America series which premiered last week: "The Brutality of the American Eden: From the Underside of the Millennium." As the post makes clear, I enjoyed and appreciated the series, but wanted to raise some questions about freedom and authority in American history:

But I do want to ask what this series would look like if we also understand American religious history to be about coercion and authority? Most of God in America is about the white Protestant majority in American history. In a series on religion and public life, that is fair enough; they have dominated religion and public life. But what if we make coercion,establishment, and repression as central to our narrative as freedom, disestablishment, and expression? What if this is a show in which Americans’ self-understanding as derived from Exodus is more critically examined than celebrated?

Read the full post here, and I'd love to hear your thoughts either at Religion Dispatches or here.

Oh, and while you're at it, catch Matt Sutton's take on the series here, also at Religion Dispatches. Matt defends the series against professorial carping, praises its success in reaching a broader public, and points out how much we all engage in our own forms of condensation and simplifying to get across a few basic points.

God in America Alongside the Myth of American Religous Freedom

Paul Harvey

I'm working up a more coherent response to the God in America series, and hope to have that up soon. Over at Killling the Buddha, Nathan Schneider is live-blogging the series (last part is tonight), with Stephen Prothero (a major commentator on the series) and others joining in the fun, so check that out if you want to chat about the show while watching it.

For those of you (I'm talking to you pesky scholars here, especially, but others will be interested) annoyed at something of fundamental importance missing in the series, or of the treatment given to some individual or episode, make sure to check out the full website accompanying the series. It's full of detail, and presents a more complex and satisfying narrative than is possible in a documentary that, of necessity, has to distill and narrate in very broad strokes. For those of you wanting to use clips from the film for class, the author interviews, background stories, and further narrative provided in the "study guide" available at the website will be indispensable in enriching students' understanding. As some have noted here, this is basically a series about religion and public life (that's the subtitle to the series, in fact), but it could certainly be used as a springboard to lead students to explore other avenues of religious expression (music, art, interior experiences, religion and the body, and numerous others) that the film does not attempt to cover at the same level it devotes to the "intersections" of religion and public life.

As it happens, I'm watching the series while having just finished David Sehat's forthcoming book (out this January from Oxford) The Myth of American Religious Freedom, and Sarah Barringer Gordon's The Spirit of the Law: Religious Voices and the Constitution in Modern America. If God in America is basically a story of religious liberty and freedom and their effects on religion in public life (and is at times, as John Fea writes below, a pretty Whiggish version of that story), Sehat's and Gordon's books taken together tell a story of the coercive nature of what Sehat calls the "moral establishment," and the struggles of religious dissenters (including in David's book the abolitionists, Stanton and early feminists, Mormons, progressive intellectuals, and others; and in Gordon's book everyone from the Jehovah's Witnesses to Elijah Muhammad to Beverely LaHaye and the Concerned Women of America to gay religious activists arguing on behalf of same-sex marriage) to articulate a fundamentally different vision of freedom than that establishment wanted to allow. Taken together, both of them present a kind of intellectual and social history of how people dealt with the abstract concept of religious freedom from the Founders down to the 2000s. They are both dealing with a basic contrast in what Gordon calls legal (or "technical") constitutionalism versus popular constitutionalism, and with the broad forces that have fundamentally altered constitutional "regimes" in different periods of American history. I hope in the future to post here an author interview with Sehat, and further thoughts of my own on the social history of what "religious freedom" has meant in American history, a subject I aim to write a book about one of these days.

I've blogged a bit before about Gordon's work, which is out and available from Harvard (having now read the book, I commend it to you wholeheartedly; apart from the intellectual content, it's really a fun read, and to say that it covers a "big tent" of fascinating and often ornery and cantankerous characters is putting it mildly).

As for Sehat's book, he's been producing a series of blog posts over at U.S. Intellectual History, where he outlines and develops some of his themes. His posts are a real intellectual treat, so check them out as a preview of the book; here's a brief description from Oxford:

In the battles over religion and politics in America, both liberals and conservatives often appeal to history. Liberals claim that the Founders separated church and state. But for much of American history, David Sehat writes, Protestant Christianity was intimately intertwined with the state. Yet the past was not the Christian utopia that conservatives imagine either. Instead, a Protestant moral establishment prevailed, using government power to punish free thinkers and religious dissidents. In The Myth of American Religious Freedom , Sehat provides an eye-opening history of religion in public life, overturning our most cherished myths. Originally, the First Amendment applied only to the federal government, which had limited authority. The Protestant moral establishment ruled on the state level. Using moral laws to uphold religious power, religious partisans enforced a moral and religious orthodoxy against Catholics, Jews, Mormons, agnostics, and others. Not until 1940 did the U.S. Supreme Court extend the First Amendment to the states. As the Supreme Court began to dismantle the connections between religion and government, Sehat argues, religious conservatives mobilized to maintain their power and began the culture wars of the last fifty years. To trace the rise and fall of this Protestant establishment, Sehat focuses on a series of dissenters--abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, socialist Eugene V. Debs, and many others. Shattering myths held by both the left and right, David Sehat forces us to rethink some of our most deeply held beliefs. By showing the bad history used on both sides, he denies partisans a safe refuge with the Founders.

It's been a fascinating exercise comparing and contrasting the vision presented in these two wonderful books alongside the (mostly) more optimistic story spun out in the film. It's sort of an exercise in narrative and counter-narrative. More on that in the coming days.

Surveying Religious Knowledge: The Founding Fathers, and the Pew Poll

Paul Harvey

For anyone interested, an announcement from History News Network:

Join Thomas Kidd, author of God of Liberty: A Religious History of the American Revolution for a live Q&A on HNN's Ning Network at 3 p.m. Eastern on Wednesday, October 13.

Kidd's take on the poll of Americans' religious knowledge, which Chris Jones blogged about here a few days ago, may be found at "The Founding Fathers Would be Shocked at Our Religious Ignorance." He makes the point that the relatively high degree of religious knowledge evinced by skeptics, noted by the recent pollsters, is not new.

Over at Immanent Frame, a variety of other scholars offer their views on, and take a number of shots, at, the Pew Poll: Surveying Religious Knowledge. In her contribution, Kathryn Lofton asks, if a person is polled about rock and roll history and is unable to identify Big Mama Thornton, does this make them ignorant of rock and roll history? She continues:

For now, I can only observe that a survey which pits religious groups against one another in a Quiz Bowl, and which imagines that praying Protestants ought to know the authority of Martin Luther, tell me very little about religious knowledge, and tell me even less about what the humanities do to serve such a surveyed public. It may be that we live in a budgetary time that begs for base descriptions of our basic (un)knowing. I would only warn that the minute we believe the answers we offer begin with multiple choice questions is the same minute when we cede our complexity to that formation of ignorance.

George Washington's Religion, the Founding, and the Perils of Glorified Self Published Books

I'm pleased to guest post a contribution from Jon Rowe, who normally blogs at American Creation and at his own blog as well. Jon has done a lot of reading on religion and the American founding, and has the following thoughts on a popular history text, George Washington's Sacred Fire by Peter Lillback, which has stormed from Glenn Beck's show onto the top seller lists. On Glenn Beck's show, they had the following conversation:

BECK: Yesterday, it was like 475,000 on Amazon.com. I think it was two or three when I checked.

LILLBACK: Up to two now. Thanks to you. Boy, I'll tell you, you're the best publicist in town.

BECK: This is — America, this is a book that every house should have. Buy this book. It is an avalanche of information. It so discredits all of the scholars and it's amazing. Best — best book on faith and the founding I think I've ever read.

Wow -- "all of the scholars" are wrong! With Fox News street cred like that, who could ask for anything more? Immanent Frame has more on this bizarre story here (the story notes a silver lining, which is the attention given to the excellent historian Thomas Kidd after his appearance to talk about George Whitefield and the Great Awakening).

Review of George Washington's Sacred Fire

by Jon Rowe

Peter A. Lillback’s George Washington’s Sacred Fire, now a top seller on Amazon.com thanks to Glenn Beck’s promoting it, attempts to overturn wisdom conventional in scholarly circles that George Washington was a Deist, but rather argues Washington was an orthodox Trinitarian Christian. Lillback is President of Westminster Theological Seminary and a notable figure in the “Christian America” movement.

That “the masses” are buying the book in great numbers is ironic. Most ordinary folks will not, like me, finish or even read a fraction of a 1200 page book with 200 pages of fineprint footnotes. No, this book aims squarely at respected scholars, notably experts on Washington's life, from Paul F. Boller to James Flexner, who claim Washington was some kind of Deist.

Boller's George Washington & Religion, among respected historians, is the generally accepted standard-bearer work of scholarship on the matter. And Boller claims Washington some kind of "Deist," that evidence lacks for his Christian orthodoxy.

To his credit, Lillback is familiar with almost every claim Boller makes and seeks to answer them. Most "Christian America" scholars asserting Washington’s devout Christianity simply ignore such evidence, like for instance that Washington refused to take communion in his church such that his own minister termed him a "Deist" or "not a real Christian.”

Lillback does answer the claim that GW was a strict Deist, that is one who believes in a non-interventionist God and categorically rejects all written revelation. Though some notable scholars have so claimed, Boller did not. And Lillback didn’t need to write 1200 pages to demonstrate Washington believed in an active personal God. Michael and Jana Novak and Mary V. Thompson both have written books in the 300 page range that prove Washington’s belief in an active Providence.

Indeed, Boller admits that Washington’s Grand Architect “Deist” God was an active intervener. Here Lillback rightly objects that terming such theology “Deism” when that term, to too many modern ears, connotes a non-interventionist God, is problematic. George Washington was a theist, not a Deist.

But Boller rejects Washington’s “Christianity” because, as he put it,
[I]f to believe in the divinity and resurrection of Christ and his atonement for the sins of man and to participate in the sacrament of the Lord's Supper are requisites for the Christian faith, then Washington, on the evidence which we have examined, can hardly be considered a Christian, except in the most nominal sense.

So Boller and Lillback both agree that Washington believed in an active Providence. They disagree on whether Washington’s creed is properly termed “Deist” or “Christian.” And Lillback, to solidify the case for Washington’s “Christianity,” disputes Boller’s above passage and terms Washington “orthodox.”

The problem is, the evidence Lillback offers from Washington’s mouth, though it shows belief in an active Providence, fails to refute Boller’s challenge. Instead, Lillback strives mightily to "read in" orthodox Trinitarian concepts to Washington's more generic God words, and otherwise to explain away evidence that casts doubt on Washington’s belief in orthodox Trinitarianism.

In over 20,000 pages of Washington’s known recorded writings, the name “Jesus Christ” appears only once. One other time Jesus is mentioned by example, not name. And both of these were in public addresses, written by aides but given under Washington’s name. Nowhere in Washington’s many private letters is the name or person of Jesus Christ invoked. Though Washington’s private correspondence mentions “Providence” and other more generic God words very often.

Why this is so, Lillback can only speculate. And Lillback slams Boller for enaging in similar speculation. For instance, Lillback, not Washington himself, claims GW didn’t discuss Jesus because he was afraid of profaning Jesus’ holy name. When pondering why Washington let the one references to Jesus written by an aide pass, Boller claims Washington must have been pressed for time, or would have revised the document before he signed it. Lillback terms Boller’s speculation “feeble.” If so, Lillback’s speculation on why Washington avoided mentioning Jesus’ name is equally “feeble."

Though Washington didn’t, as far as we know, identify as a “Deist,” Lillback can marshal only one letter, to Robert Stewart, April 27, 1763, where Washington claims to have been a “Christian.”

More often, he talked of Christians in the third person, as though he weren't part of that group. The following statement of Washington’s, to Marquis De LaFayette, August 15, 1787, is typical: "I am disposed to indulge the professors of Christianity in the church, that road to Heaven, which to them shall seem the most direct, plainest, easiest, and least liable to exception."

Or, to Edward Newenham, October 20, 1792: "I was in hopes, that the enlightened and liberal policy, which has marked the present age, would at least have reconciled Christians of every denomination so far, that we should never again see their religious disputes carried to such a pitch as to endanger the peace of Society." (Emphasis mine.)

Since Lillback can’t prove Washington’s Trinitarian orthodoxy from his words, he instead turns to GW’s membership in the Anglican/Episcopalian Church. Since that body formally adhered to orthodox Trinitarian doctrine, Lillback argues, Washington, as an Anglican, did as well.

Indeed, Lillback charges if Washington were a member of an orthodox church, at times taking oaths to its officially orthodox doctrines, but didn’t believe in those doctrines, he was a hypocrite. And he saddles more “secular” or “skeptical” scholars with smearing the Father of America as a hypocrite. As we will see below, Lillback’s logic falters.

Lillback doesn’t do well with the reality that deistically and unitarian minded figures abounded in the churches that professed orthodoxy in that era. Washington’s church attendance of, on average, once a month is consistent with such reality. Further, the two American Presidents who followed Washington, without question, fit that description. And the three who followed them likely did as well.

Deistically and unitarian minded members of orthodox churches were the ones who, like Washington, systematically avoided communion in said churches because they didn’t believe in what the act symbolically represented: Christ’s Atonement.

This was the explanation that Washington’s own minister, Rev. James Abercrombie, offered when he reacted to Washington‘s behavior. He noted, "I cannot consider any man as a real Christian who uniformly disregards an ordinance so solemnly enjoined by the divine Author of our holy religion, and considered as a channel of divine grace."

Lillback offers another explanation, which again, is sheer speculation: That GW didn’t commune because he had problems with “Toryish” ecclesiastical authorities. Instead Washington was a “low church,” latitudinarian Anglican, while still an orthodox Trinitarian Christian.

No doubt, as a leader of a Whig rebellion, Washington did have a problem with Tories. Lillback’s explanation, however, doesn’t avoid the charge of hypocrisy that he accuses skeptical scholars of making. Washington, when he became a Vestryman for example, didn’t take an oath to “low church” latitudinarian Anglicanism, but rather, those oaths were “high church” and demanded loyalty to the crown. And those oaths and doctrines demanded Anglican believers partake in the Lord’s Supper.

Many Anglicans remained loyalists precisely because their church taught a theological duty to remain loyal. Washington was in rebellion, then, not just against England, but against his church’s official doctrines. If not to believe in the official doctrines of your church, indeed, doctrines in which you took oaths, makes you a hypocrite, then Lillback unavoidably falls into a trap that he set for scholars who argue GW was not an orthodox Christian.

Lillback attempts to marshal other facts that prove Washington’s orthodox Christianity. As President, Washington communicated with many pious churches in a friendly manner, and friends and acquaintances often would send him sermons for which GW invariable gave perfunctory thanks.

Straining, Lillback sees this as evidence of Washington’s orthodox Christianity. True, Washington did seem to approve orthodox figures and sermons. But, trying to be all things to all people, Washington also seemed to approve heterodox and heretical figures as well.

For instance, Washington stated, “I have seen and read with much pleasure,” an address by Richard Price, a non-conformist minister and author, that slammed the Athanasian creed, the quintessential statement of Trinitarianism that Washington’s Anglican church used. Washington also stated to the Universalists, a notoriously controversial church that preached universal salvation,

It gives me the most sensible pleasure to find, that, in our nation, however different are the sentiments of citizens on religious doctrines, they generally concur in one thing; for their political professions and practices are almost universally friendly to the order and happiness of our civil institutions. I am also happy in finding this disposition particularly evinced by your society. (Emphasis mine.)

Twice when speaking to uncoverted Native Americans, Washington referred to God as the “Great Spirit,” suggesting they all worshipped the same God. This is even more generous than claiming the Muslims’ “Allah” is the same God Jews and Christians worship -- a sentiment to which most “Christian Americanists” balk -- because Allah at least claims to be the God of Abraham, while the “Great Spirit” made no such claim.

Lillback, of course, tries to dismiss these as outliers. Yet the two times GW referred to God as the “Great Spirit” are exactly as many times the name or person of Jesus is found in Washington’s entire writings.

On Washington’s non-Christian death, where he asked for no ministers and said no prayers, Lillback likewise makes excuses. Indeed, in addition to a great deal of facts, “George Washington’s Sacred Fire” contains much idle speculation, illogical arguments, and redundant prose in 1200 pages. No respectable academic publisher would publish a book that length where so much could have been edited down. “Providence Forum Press,” the publisher, is part of a group of which Lillback himself is leader. This is essentially a glorified self published book.

The Paradox of Religion and Violence, and Why Religions Are Not Shit: An Interview with Jon Pahl

Paul Harvey

As promised a few posts ago, I'm posting here an interview with Jon Pahl, one of our occasional contributors here at the blog, and most recently author of Empires of Sacrifice: The Religious Origins of American Violence, just out with NYU Press.

It's not every book that juxtaposes theories of religion drawn from the likes of Bruce Lincoln and Thomas Tweed, reflections on violence (defined very broadly as "any harm to or destruction of life, whether intended by individuals or enacted by systems of language, policy, and practice") inspired by Rene Girard's Violence and the Sacred, youth culture in post-World War II America and films from Reefer Madness to Halloween to Spike Lee's Malcolm X, slaveholding religion and the resistance to it from Frederick Douglass and Jarena Lee, the culture of public executions from Quakers in 17th-century New England to Sean Penn in Dead Man Walking, and finally the rhetoric of "sacrifice" surrounding American wars and how that rhetoric has shaped recent involvements in Afghanistan and Iraq. Pahl analyzes such diverse texts in exploring what he believes to be a characteristic American trope, "innocent domination," or power over others exercised without conscious malice. Pahl intends his work as a call to take up the opportunity missed after 9/11, to "shape a remarkable global consensus against religious violence." The basic paradox of the work is this: religions "produce violent power," but religions exist ultimately to "eliminate violence." That paradox captures the troubling message but hopeful conclusion to the work.

In the interview, Pahl elaborates and summarizes some of the key points made in his provocative work. And, as you'll see, he also finds a way to scam a free beer off me next time we meet up. May that be soon, Jon.

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PH: Jon, you’ve written (among other books) Paradox Lost¸about 17th-18th century theology; a book about shopping malls; a book about religion and youth culture; and now this work about the religious origins of American violence. Describe if you can the intellectual trajectory that has taken you so far afield over all these disparate topics -- or are they all that disparate?

JP: Part of the reason for the diverse range in topics that I've written about is that I may suffer from academic attention deficit disorder--I'm easily distracted. Another part of it is opportunistic--I was commissioned to write two books about youth ministry in American history, and stumbled onto the wonderful collegial group the Society for the History of Childhood and Youth, where I'm kind of the token "religionist." Part of it is principled--I truly believe we're more responsible intellectually when we break with the hyper-specialization of the corporate academy and its silos of knowledge. But the consistent thread throughout all of my writing is the interrelationship between religions and violence--so this work is in some way the culmination of all of my previous study.

PH: A key term in your work is innocent domination, by which you mean “patterns or systems of domination, hegemony, or power over others that are largely absent of malice on the part of the perpetrators.” But in some of the examples you cover, such as Frederick Douglass’s contest with his master’s domination, the malice is self-evident. So can you discuss and define that term further, to introduce readers to a central concept of your book?

JP: I'm not suggesting that all of the cases I attend to only manifest "innocent domination." As you point out, there's plenty of overt malice and sheer domination in evidence in American history. The cases illuminate for me patterns. I try to surface in the book not only the overt physical destruction that usually gets called "violence" in public discourse, but also the systems of violence that manifest patterns in discourse and practice around constructions of age, race, gender, and the nation. These systems kill just as surely as a gunshot, only more slowly and with greater suffering over time. And systemic violence, not only in America, but in a peculiar form here, implicates discourses and ritual processes that shroud domination in an entrenched collective sense of innocence that I find rooted, finally, in religion. Now how I mobilize that term "religion" is of course one of the experiments in the book; but you didn't ask about that so I'll happily avoid defending that choice, for now.

PH: You suggest that critical to the process of fostering a culture of innocent domination “is the socialization of youth, to accept violence as a part of culture, [and] to see brutalities as blessed.” Can you elaborate on that point a bit further?

JP: This is one of the ways that the book builds on my earlier research into youth culture in America. Young people today live with awareness of violence once known only to combat soldiers. That knowledge has been produced or mediated through manifold mechanisms, and I try to track one of those trajectories by studying the representation of young people in American cinema--from Reefer Madness to Hostel. Films featuring what I call the "sacrifice" of youth have been increasingly bloody in American history--mirroring the actual treatment of young people by the systems of American society. Once again, though, it's hard to find anybody to hold responsible for this "socialization," since we're dealing less with intentional practices than with systems that take on a life of their own and become, like religions, self-replicating patterns of what Rene Girard calls "mimetic desire." Two other scholars with whom I've collaborated a bit out here on the Atlantic coast are tracking some more specific patterns of this socialization. Lehigh's John Pettegrew in his Brutes in Suits explored some early 20th century constructions of "manhood" in ways that reinforce the trajectory I pick up later, and Kelly Denton-Borhaug at Moravian College will be publishing a book later this year that explores quite directly American "war culture," and especially rhetorics of sacrifice and how they help turn young people into killers through military advertisements and training regimes. It's nice to know there are others out there seeing similar things at work, since at times I feel like I'm "out there" a bit for actually caring about the young people who populate our classrooms, and (even more) those who never get the chance to experience the "privilege" of studying with us. . . . Bear with me on a tangent here, but someday it might be fun to track the effects of systemic violence on the profession of teaching in the academy--the ways we ourselves participate in or get socialized into "innocent domination." Power dynamics on most college campuses between faculty and students are rife with possibilities for exploring modes of discourses and practices that replicate themselves "religiously" to justify the domination (if not exploitation) of young people by supposedly "innocent" scholars merely engaged in the "objective pursuit of knowledge." But I'll probably not write that book; some administrator might (since they usually have few illusions about the innocence of the academy). Or, as one college President told me recently, in a conversation about Machiavelli: "of course I want to be feared rather than loved. Who wouldn't?" I'm interested in how young people have to negotiate systemic violence, in short, in ways that are quite complicated but not without historical tracers in the record.

PH: You are bitterly critical of the use of the concept of “sacrifice” to justify violence, and give the example of how the apparently neutral and innocent "sacrifice" of soldiers that we are all supposed to celebrate is part of the process of turning war into religion. But isn’t sacrifice sometimes necessary to combat further violence -- as in the case of the war against Hitler, for example, or the war which ended slavery in America?

JP: I prefer to call killing killing, and not drape tragic policy decisions (which I hope we can agree every war is) in the cloak of religion. Harry Stout's and Drew Gilpin Faust's books on the Civil War make evident, I think, what happens when war gets cloaked in religion--and how these discourses and practices have remarkably long half-lives.

And as for World War II--it's the litmus test for everyone who wants to treat war realistically rather than romantically or religiously. If I had a dollar for every time I get asked about WWII when I speak about nonviolence and peacemaking, I'd be a much wealthier man than I am now (and I'll be happy to collect from you, Paul, in food and/or beverage in the near future). My criticism of sacrifice is rooted in a deeper mistrust of the ascetic potential of religions--the way they produce sadistic and masochistic practices that amplify rather than reduce human suffering. I just don't think asceticism is a particularly helpful way to orient human living, especially when it's the State that is asking us to sacrifice (which implies suffering) on behalf of some imagined community that is as much a fiction as any "god" has ever been. God knows there's enough suffering in the world; I'd like to find ways to minimize or reduce that suffering, rather than participate in or promote it, and I suspect even God would agree with me on that, actually (it's always nice when that happens), rather than on wanting more sacrifices, in whatever form.

PH: Your individual chapters range from discussions of movies such as “Reefer Madness” and “Halloween,” to the execution of Quakers by 17th-century Puritans, to Frederick Douglass and Spike Lee’s version of the life of Malcolm X, to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Tell us how you came to think through putting such diverse and seemingly unrelated topics into a work.

JP: Well, the common thread across the diverse chapters is the cultural construction of "sacrifice" in American history--of youth, of people who are members of a different religion, of those who of are a different race, of people who are a different gender or sexual orientation, or who are members of a different "nation" or "tribe." It's the excluded one who constitutes the "us" in any us-them dualism that I find interesting and culturally generative, or at the root of "religion." By that term (I can't get away from it!), I mean to point to a process of compression and displacement of desire (what I call 'projections of transcendent authority') into replicable patterns that create (and consolidate) cultural power. I organize my history of these compressions and displacements in an inverse chronology, from the "present" of the representation of young people to the execution of Mary Dyer on Boston Common. In short, I'm happy to blame America's religious violence on the Puritans (and their arcane theological arguments that were all about power), but it is Puritanism as transmuted or translated into all kinds of religious hybrids that have little or nothing to do with the actual ecclesiastical communities that trace their roots to the Puritans today that I find interesting. Religious discourses and practices migrate under conditions of pluralism and disestablishment. That gives them their vitality--they get mobilized in surprising ways. I suppose here I've been tainted as a historian by my forays into cultural studies; I can see shopping malls and Walt Disney World as sacred places or pilgrimage centers, so I find "religion" in surprising places in history, as well. So I talk about American "civil religion" or "cultural religion," as ways to identify these hybrids that have operated along the lines of age, race, gender, and the nation to produce violence.

PH: It will surprise some readers when they come to the passage in which you explain that “religions exist to eliminate violence,” in a book that suggests some of the religious origins of American violence. Can you explain this a bit further?

JP: I teach at a seminary, and formerly in a theology department, and I'm engaged in religious practices across traditions (Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim, and a variety of Christian communities), so I see not only the destructive features of religion, but also the beauty, goodness, and truth they create and preserve. In trying to puzzle out this paradox of the destructive and creative elements in religions, I've come up with the broad notion that religions are the cultural equivalent of biological systems of elimination. Religions exist to eliminate things; to rule out options; to limit the field of contingency and its radical chaos to some replicable patterns.

This is not, as one earlier reader of the book put it, that "religions are shit" (although there surely are aspects of some traditions that have plenty to say about shit, and some that can be pretty shitty in one way or another). But it is to say that religions function for people (to mix metaphors) as maps that reduce territory to symbolic processes that (again) compress and displace matter and its associated desires with cultural markers. At root, given their ultimate dependence upon symbols (most historic religious traditions do NOT possess armaments!), I'm willing to wager that religions exist to eliminate violence--that they arose among human beings as ways to resolve conflict and disputes nonviolently and through persuasion, rather than with brute force.

I can't support that claim empirically, yet, but I think a rather persuasive case can be made that as historic religious traditions have gradually disentangled themselves from state and military power (officially), we can begin to see the development of this "heart and soul" of religion in nonviolence, conflict resolution, and cultural reconciliation in some very surprising (and empirically verifiable) cases. In fact, that's the book I'm working on at present, under the tentative title A Coming Religious Peace. It's the sequel to this book, and tracks precisely the ways traditional religious communities in American history (with an eye on global trends, from Gandhi to Tutu) have promoted developments to create a more peaceful (and just) existence for young people, for racial minorities, for women and sexual minorities, and (even) for religious and national "others." In short, the emergence of religious nonviolence, peacemaking, and reconciliation across traditions is what I take to be the major subplot in 20th century American religious history, the counterpoint to the exploitation of religious discourses and practices for violent purposes that I tracked in this book. We tend to fixate on religious violence precisely because it is anomalous and hypocritical. Human (and historical) attention is like that: we gawk at the one automobile wrecked on the side of the road, and miss the 999,999 that move smoothly down the expressway.

PH: Likewise with surprising passages, you end with Immanuel Kant’s “Perpetual Peace” and some suggestive thoughts on how “Holy hatreds might finally give way to sheer blessing.” Where is it ultimately that you derive the hope that American religions can be extracted from a culture of violence in which they have always played a critical role? What steps do you think religious people should take towards that end?

JP: Finally, I'm a true patriot--I like the First Amendment and its paradoxical disestablishment of religion and protection of free exercise. The State is better off when religions hold it accountable to promote justice and peace, insofar as possible, without wandering into utopian projects or imperial fantasies of one kind or another that construct the State (or its extensions in laws and policies) as innocent. And religions are true to themselves when they're not complicit with policies and practices by means of which a State protects its citizens and restrains those who do not live nonviolently by rationalizing them as anything other than violence to check violence. Finally, I think something akin to what David Cortright calls "realistic or pragmatic pacifism," in which religious agents serve as critics of (even necessary) State violence, and promoters of reconciliation and peacemaking (insofar as possible), is the paradoxical way opened up by the First Amendment. The specific forms this might take are open to debate. But that something like this is already happening is evident not only in the structures of American law and society, but also within the internal histories of religious traditions.

I'm in dialogue with a surprisingly large number of socially "progressive" people of faith--some of them quite conservative theologically--who articulate and practice in many and various ways the creative and peaceful potential of religions. But, of course, as a historian I know that, finally, it all depends: everything is contingent on what actually happens. So you're right to use the word "hope." That is what it comes down to. And, yes, I did vote for Obama.