Pluralism Comes of Age

American Religious Culture in the Twentieth Century

Charles H. Lippy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317462736
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This acclaimed work surveys the varied course of religious life in modern America. Beginning with the close of the Victorian Age, it moves through the shifting power of Protestantism and American Catholicism and into the intense period of immigration and pluralism that has characterized our nation's religious experience.

CHAPTER 1

Planting Pluralism in the United States

In his now famous endeavor to explain the American experience to a European audience in the 1840s, the Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville noted that the Christians of America were divided into a “multitude of sects.”¹ In this way, de Tocqueville highlighted what has since become a commonplace: In the United States religious pluralism prevails. When de Tocqueville wrote, that pluralism usually referred to the multiplicity of Christian groups that flourished on American soil. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, religious pluralism still prevails in the United States, but it is a different sort of pluralism than one marking a “multitude of [Christian] sects.” In the twentieth century, religious pluralism came of age, for now pluralism encompasses not merely a host of groups clustered under the Christian umbrella. Changes within denominations increased pluralism as well. A range of worship styles may exist within different congregations of the same Christian group; for example, Methodists whose worship music comes from guitar, keyboard, tambourine, and drums augmented by the latest high-tech amplification system are part of the same denomination as Methodists who still look to the majestic organ to guide congregational singing. Among Christians, both Protestant and Catholic, Pentecostal and charismatic expressions became accepted from the 1960s on outside of the historic Pentecostal denominations.

Pluralism points also to the way different ethnic heritages may bring a variety of styles to a given religious tradition. African-American Protestant groups are different from other Protestant religious families in part because of the African ethnic component. Hispanic Catholicism looks and feels different from Irish or Italian Catholicism, even though all are part of the same Christian body in the United States.

Today pluralism embraces not only Christian groups, but an increasing number of non-Christian traditions, including but not limited to Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, and the Hindu religious tradition. In addition, pluralism provides a lens through which to view distinctive approaches to individual spirituality that gained currency during the twentieth century. One obvious example is the mushrooming of approaches to personal spirituality that emerged from women’s experience, ranging from a recovery of pre-Christian pagan elements to a recasting of traditional Christian belief in feminist terms.

Pluralism provides the context for movements and trends that move across the boundaries of those many groups that intrigued de Tocqueville more than a century and a half ago. Pointing to this expanding scope of religious pluralism in twentieth century United States, however, merely suggests the richness that marks American religious life; the full story is more finely nuanced.

Creating the Environment for Religious Pluralism

If we are to discern how pluralism came of age in the twentieth century, how it moved from referring to the host of Protestant communions to take in so much more, we must first understand how that earlier pluralism came to be and how social and cultural forces in place by the close of the Victorian age laid the groundwork for the new pluralism that now characterizes American religious life. We must return briefly to the religious patterns that developed in those English colonies that declared their independence from Great Britain in 1776, to why the Bill of Rights in the Constitution prohibited formal or legal establishment of a single religion and extended a measure of freedom to all, and to the Protestant consensus that emerged, even if expressed through a “multitude of sects.” Then we will be prepared to understand how the massive immigration, urbanization, and industrialization of the later nineteenth century, changes in domestic culture that accompanied them, and the emergence of countless new religions (or at least religions that were new to the American experience) around the turn of the previous century significantly transformed religious pluralism in the twentieth century.

Decades ago Sidney Mead argued that space and time were fundamental to understanding how American religious patterns developed.² The Europeans who came to the New World left time behind in the sense that the past, including religious history, became consigned to the Old World. In North America, something new was happening without the shackles of time or tradition determining its shape. Of course, the Europeans were cavalier at best about the different sense of time and history propelling the Native American tribal cultures they so readily displaced. But the absence of the constraints of time created an openness to experimenting with new ways, with fresh approaches to structuring religion, with different understandings even of the basics of belief.

All this was possible, Mead argued, because of the space or distance separating these new Americans from Europe. The 3,000 miles of Atlantic Ocean made it difficult for colonial powers to control the settlements as closely as they desired. Yet space was not just a geographic phenomenon measured in miles. It was a psychological one, for Americans developed new collective identities out of their relationship with the space or context around them.

The seemingly limitless land stretching before those who came to North America made space important in another way.³ For those who disagreed with others, whether on matters of religion or politics, one option was always simply to move away, to go to another space and nourish a culture molded after one’s own ideas. One widely known example of how space worked in this sense is the case of Roger Williams.⁴ The Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony were intent on using the space that separated them from England to create a commonwealth based on their own ideals; in this sense, they sought religious freedom. But they were hardly tolerant of those who differed with them; admitting persons of diverse beliefs into a holy commonwealth would pollute its purity and ultimately bring its demise. When Roger Williams diverged from Puritan orthodoxy, the political authorities banished him from the colony. In Europe, he might have faced imprisonment or death. Banishment simply meant he took advantage of space; he moved elsewhere and began the enterprise that became the core of the Rhode Island colony, where religious seekers were welcomed so long as good order was maintained.

Space and time were not the only elements in the colonial experience conducive to the development of some forms of religious pluralism. Several of the colonies began as joint stock companies from which investors hoped to reap a profit; some were proprietary ventures from which individuals expected to see financial gain. For both, assuring the success of the colonial endeavor was paramount, and success required a critical mass of colonists. Two examples, each of which in different ways set the stage for developing pluralism, must suffice.

One is Maryland, a proprietary venture of the Calvert family, prominent English Catholic converts.⁵ When Maryland was opened for colonization, overt Catholic practice in England was theoretically illegal, although particularly among some aristocrats, like the Calverts, it endured. Public Catholic practice could bring legal recrimination; Catholics by law were prohibited from voting, holding elected office, or attending such universities as Oxford and Cambridge. The Calverts intended Maryland to be a place where their coreligionists could practice their faith openly and without fear. But the pragmatics of drawing enough settlers to assure Maryland’s success meant that early on, non-Catholics were welcomed and soon became a majority of the non-native population. An Act of Toleration in 1649 guaranteed a modicum of liberty for Christians, although Catholics were urged not to be blatant in public manifestations of their belief. Even though that Act of Toleration was revoked five years later when Puritans dominated the colonial legislative assembly, by recognizing multiple Christian groups and giving them all some legal sanction, Maryland buttressed an emerging pluralism.

More indicative of later developments was Pennsylvania, the proprietary enterprise of English Quaker William Penn.⁶ Regarded as radical extremists, not the quietist devout plain folk of a later age, Quakers were also subject to legal recrimination in seventeenth-century England. Penn knew there were too few Quakers in England and even fewer who would come to the New World to make his colony a success. From the start, he advertised for others, particularly German Protestants who were also on the fringes of the religious establishment there, to come. So long as they promoted peace and good order, all who acknowledged belief in God were welcome. Although Quakers dominated Pennsylvania political and economic life for generations, they were soon a minority of the population. Ironically, Pennsylvania, not Maryland, boasted the largest Catholic population in the colonies at the time of independence. In Pennsylvania, too, in the early eighteenth century colonial Presbyterians first organized a structure to link their churches together.

What Penn called his “holy experiment” demonstrated that religious pluralism could prevail without shattering political stability. In European life from the time of the Reformation and the numerous wars and armed conflicts following the Reformation, a conviction prevailed that religious uniformity was essential to political stability. Because religious beliefs cut to the heart of personal identity here and in the hereafter, they could divide people, cause conflict, and generate constant political unrest unless everyone adhered to the same belief system. Pennsylvania demonstrated that such was not the case. To a lesser degree, as the Puritan strongholds in New England were forced by Britain to tolerate others, they too began to become models for an early modern pluralism.

Yet another major ingredient creating a religiously pluralistic environment in the United States is the ethnic diversity marking colonial life. The numerous German clusters in Pennsylvania represent only one part of the story. What the English called New York owed its colonial founding to the Dutch, who naturally brought their Reformed religious perspective influenced by the Calvinist heritage.⁷ In areas nearby, including what later became New Jersey, Scandinavians planted churches that reflected the Lutheran tradition, but because churches usually conducted services in the native language of the congregation, there were Finnish, Swedish, Norwegian, and other churches that flourished. The Presbyterian approach linked to Scotland gained increasing prominence throughout the colonies in the eighteenth century, when Scots-Irish immigrants became the numerically largest group coming to the English New World. The same factors of time and space that paved the way for other forms of pluralism to develop also helped imprint ethnic diversity on colonial America. Different ethnic groups found there was sufficient land for each of them to carve out areas of settlement, although by the later colonial period, strict isolation of one from the others was virtually impossible.

Add to this mix clusters of Jews, concentrated primarily in coastal port cities, with Charleston, South Carolina, having the largest Jewish population at the time of American independence.⁸ Although small in number, the various Jewish communities served as reminders that pluralism even in the colonial period was not restricted exclusively to Christian groups. Then, too, there was a strong African religious presence, thanks to the thousands of immigrants forced to come to the colonies as slaves. Although the Christianity of the slave owners should have nudged them to seek Christian converts among the slaves, the prevalent racism meant there were few sustained endeavors to do so until the age of the Great Awakening. Even then the religious style that held sway among the slaves represented a rich blend of African and Christian elements, making it distinctive from any other Christian expression and thus another dimension of colonial religious pluralism. Omitted from most discussions of American religious pluralism are the many manifestations of tribal religious expression that gave meaning to Native American Indian life. Although not usually subject to the same racist prejudice as African slaves, Native American Indians were nonetheless relegated to the periphery, and their tribal patterns dismissed as forms of paganism. All these, however, made colonial religious life extraordinarily diverse and pluralistic for the times.

That pluralism was here to stay becomes obvious in examining some of the religious considerations that went into the writing of the Constitution and Bill of Rights. In the Constitution proper, mention of religion is conspicuous by its absence; the only direct reference is the prohibition of any religious test for federal office. The Constitution’s framers made a powerful statement by their silence, a statement receiving scant clarification when the First Amendment stated that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” This famous sentence provides the basis for “separation of church and state,” although that term appears nowhere in the text. By establishment, the First Amendment referred to arrangements common in Europe, where one religious body in a nation received formal recognition and concomitant advantages, such as financial support through tax monies. Others had to fend for themselves, exist underground as dissenting movements, or in some cases be regarded as illegal. For Americans in the later eighteenth century, the most familiar example of an established religion was the Church of England.

Two considerations regarding the First Amendment’s “religious freedom” clause are central to nurturing an ethos where religious pluralism of many varieties could flourish. One is pragmatic: the framers of the Constitution could not have selected one religious group for legal establishment since no single group held the allegiance of a majority of the population. To be sure, Christianity broadly construed could claim a majority, but already so many different Christian groups were developing into denominations—Congregationalists, Methodists, Baptists, Episcopalians, several ethnic varieties of Lutherans, Presbyterians, Quakers, and more—that none dominated nationally. Having a legal establishment was a practical impossibility. A pluralism denoting the coexistence of a multiplicity of Christian bodies was the order of the day. The other consideration regards “free exercise.” If no one religious communion was legally sanctioned, then all must be on an equal footing, at least in the eyes of the law and the government. Hence, individuals must have freedom to believe as they wished and engage in religious practices that stemmed from their beliefs—or freedom not to believe—so long as they did not undercut the primary aim of government proclaimed in the preamble to the Constitution, promoting the general welfare.

All this represented a fundamentally new approach to how religion and the state were properly connected. Likewise, the development of the denomination as the standard religious institution stands as a distinctive American innovation and contribution to the story of religion in human culture. Absence of legal constraints meant, too, that the United States would be a place where thousands of new religions and religious movements would emerge or gain followings over the centuries, sometimes attracting just a few and often disappearing after a generation or so. Many would also mature in the American context. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the Mormons), Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Churches of Christ, Christian Science, the Assemblies of God, the Christadelphians, several groups calling themselves the Church of God, and the Pentecostal Holiness Church are only a few of those that had their genesis on American soil; all of these had some relationship to the Christian tradition. There have been hundreds with roots outside the Christian orbit.⁹

The First Amendment did not mean that government had no interest in things religious or that individual states could not give formal support to particular religious groups. In New England in the early years of the Republic, some states did offer forms of financial support from tax monies to certain religious groups. Massachusetts was the last to end the practice in 1833, and the subsequent passage of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1868 ended even that possibility. On a federal level, what mattered about religion was its fostering morality and responsible behavior on the part of citizens. Those of the founding generation, such as Benjamin Franklin and George Washington, who were inclined toward Deism and its accompanying rationalism, believed that as long as a religion stimulated moral behavior and not fanaticism, it made a positive contribution to society.¹⁰

At the same time, however, Protestant notions of Christianity pretty much shaped the pluralism prevailing in the early decades of the Republic. To be sure, most U.S. citizens were not formal members of any religious group. Indeed, most estimates suggest that not more than 10 percent of the population held formal church membership at the time of the first federal census in 1790.¹¹ Yet that seemingly low rate of religious affiliation did not signal a corresponding lack of religious influence in society. Thousands who were not church members would have identified themselves as Protestant Christians of one sort or another. So as the various Protestant bodies organized as American institutions (some because structural ties with parent bodies in Bri...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Chapter 1. Planting Pluralism in the United States
• Chapter 2. The Shifting Public Presence of Mainline Protestantism
• Chapter 3. Pluralism’s Promise and Perils: American Catholicism in the Twentieth Century
• Chapter 4. The Paradox of Pluralism: The Jewish Experience
• Chapter 5. Religion and the Pride of a People: Black Religion in the United States
• Chapter 6. Syncretism and Pluralism: Native American Experiences in the Twentieth Century
• Chapter 7. Personal Religious Expression in a Pluralistic Culture
• Chapter 8. The Proliferation of Pluralism
• Chapter 9. The Politics of Religion in a Pluralistic Society
• Chapter 10. Pluralistic Turns in American Religious Thought
• Chapter 11. The Persistence of Pluralism
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index