Religious Freedom

The Contested History of an American Ideal

Tisa Wenger

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781469634630
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Comparative Religion

Religious freedom is so often presented as a timeless American ideal and an inalienable right, appearing fully formed at the founding of the United States. That is simply not so, Tisa Wenger contends in this sweeping and brilliantly argued book. Instead, American ideas about religious freedom were continually reinvented through a vibrant national discourse--Wenger calls it "religious freedom talk--that cannot possibly be separated from the evolving politics of race and empire. More often than not, Wenger demonstrates, religious freedom talk worked to privilege the dominant white Christian population. At the same time, a diverse array of minority groups at home and colonized people abroad invoked and reinterpreted this ideal to defend themselves and their ways of life. In so doing they posed sharp challenges to the racial and religious exclusions of American life. People of almost every religious stripe have argued, debated, negotiated, and brought into being an ideal called American religious freedom, subtly transforming their own identities and traditions in the process. In a post-9/11 world, Wenger reflects, public attention to religious freedom and its implications is as consequential as it has ever been.

Chapter One: Making the Imperial Subject

Protestants, Catholics, and Jews

In August 1898, as the United States celebrated its quick and decisive victory in what most Americans called the Spanish-American War, President William McKinley met with his cabinet to discuss the terms of the treaty that was soon to be negotiated in Paris. The public rationale for the war had been to support the Cubans in their fight for independence from Spain. (Indeed, since Cubans and Filipinos had both been fighting long before the United States entered the conflict, it is more accurately named the Spanish-Cuban-Filipino-American War.) Although some Americans had long hoped to claim the small island of Cuba as a new U.S. territory, its quest for independence resonated with America’s own founding ideals and coincided easily enough with U.S. commercial interests in the region. Thus when the USS Maine was bombed in Havana’s harbor and the United States declared war on Spain, anti-imperialists insisted on a proviso guaranteeing that the United States would recognize Cuba’s independence in its wake. But soon Cuba would no longer be the only Spanish colony at issue. Within weeks U.S. forces had occupied key locations in Puerto Rico, Guam, and the vast archipelago of the Philippine Islands in Southeast Asia. Ignoring the independence movements already raging in most of these colonies, Americans now began to debate the prospect of claiming all of them as the spoils of war.¹

The Philippines were the largest and most strategically located of these colonies and so moved immediately to the center of this American debate. When they met that August, McKinley and his cabinet reached no final consensus on whether or not they should insist that Spain cede the entire archipelago. But they did agree on a minimal set of demands that they thought essential to U.S. interests in the Pacific. The United States would at the very least take Luzon, the largest of the Philippine Islands and the site of the colony’s capital, Manila. And if Spain was to retain the rest of the archipelago, McKinley would insist on three basic conditions: (1) U.S. commerce must be granted full access to all the islands; (2) Spain must guarantee “religious liberty, in the American sense of the term, in all the Philippines remaining under her control”; and (3) Spain must promise that it would not in future cede any of the islands to any power other than the United States. These demands never made it to the negotiating table, since the president soon announced his decision to claim the Philippines as a whole. But his cabinet’s preliminary list reveals the importance of religious freedom as an American diplomatic priority in the immediate aftermath of the war.²

This chapter interrogates the American debates over the Spanish-Cuban-Filipino-American War and the subsequent colonization of the Philippines in order to understand the civilizational and imperial politics of religious freedom in the United States. Historians have amply explored the topics behind the McKinley cabinet’s first and third demands. The hope of commercial profit has arguably served as the primary fuel for U.S. imperialism and indeed for most other empire-building projects around the world. And it is not a surprise that many American leaders at the end of the nineteenth century wanted to compete with the European empires that were themselves jockeying for the profits, power, and prestige that new colonies could bring. The general themes of freedom and liberty, as well, are familiar themes within the American rhetorics of war and empire. But the presence of religious freedom as one of the administration’s nonnegotiables may come as a surprise. Few historians have attended to this specific freedom as anything more than window dressing, a minor aspect of the broader theme. And while scholars in the distinct field of American religious history have been very much interested in religious freedom within the United States, they too have neglected its relationship with U.S. empire in either the Philippines or elsewhere.³

The importance of religious freedom for these debates must be understood first of all in relation to the Protestant-Catholic tensions that had for so long structured American controversies around religion in public life. During the buildup to the war, the violent contractions of a waning Spanish Empire provided ample fodder for militantly Protestant rhetorics that identified Catholicism as the foundation for its alleged tyrannies. Those who identified themselves as Anglo-Saxon Protestants viewed their own freedoms—and the barbarism and tyranny they attributed to Catholics and Catholicism—in simultaneously racial and religious terms. They attributed America’s freedoms and the American system of government to the Anglo-Saxon and Protestant character of the nation’s founders. Thus they asserted an Anglo-Protestant foundation not only for religious freedom but also for the secular modernity it signified. Translating all this into a rationale for empire, imperialists claimed that U.S. rule would introduce the democratic principles of civil and religious freedom to territories that Spanish misrule had left behind in a barbaric darkness. Religious freedom talk thus strengthened Anglo-Protestant claims to racial-religious supremacy both in the United States and in its colonial possessions. It bolstered dominant civilizational assemblages of race and religion, helping many white Protestants to see the nation’s imperial ascendancy as both inevitable and desirable, an essential step in the development of the modern world.

At the same time, religious freedom talk provided a way for some racial-religious minorities to assert their own civilizational credentials and thus to improve their standing in the racial-religious hierarchies of U.S. empire. In the debate over the Philippines, Catholics in particular refused to accept the Anglo-Protestant logics of religious freedom and the secular modernity that it signaled. Catholic elites rearticulated this freedom to insist on a special role for their church and at times even to assert exclusive prerogatives in what was, after all, a predominantly Catholic colony. They used religious freedom talk, in other words, to claim the right to leadership in the administration of empire. In so doing they also identified Catholicism as an all-American religion and implicitly claimed for Catholics the civilizational status of white Americans, equipped to manage the non-white subjects of imperial rule. Thus they rejected the constructs of Anglo-Protestant supremacy that had assigned the predominantly immigrant Catholic population to a simultaneously racial and religious inferiority in the United States. In this way, Catholic deployments of religious freedom enabled a new access for Catholics to the privileges of whiteness in American life.

American Jews, as well, invested in a religious freedom talk that supported the politics of war and empire. As a much smaller minority both in the United States and around the world—a group never securely located in the realm of the religious and subject at the time to increasingly racialized forms of anti-Semitism—Jews were in a more precarious position than their Catholic counterparts. As chapter 4 will show in much greater detail, Jews had embraced the constitutional principle of religious freedom as a pragmatic and symbolic resource for life in the United States. The results of that effort would be complex and fraught with ambiguity for Jews, as it was for other racial-religious minorities in the United States. The last section of this chapter dips briefly into American Jewish deployments of religious freedom in the Spanish-Cuban-Filipino-American War and the colonization of the Philippines to illustrate the utility of this ideal for racial-religious minorities seeking to improve their status and situation in the modern world.

In very different ways, Jews as well as Catholics used religious freedom talk to assert their equality within the civilizational assemblages of U.S. empire. Emerging discourses of religious brotherhood, an ideal linked integrally to religious freedom, supported both Catholic and Jewish participation in new arenas of American society, including the administration of empire. Thus American religious freedom talk helped justify U.S. imperial expansions and in the process fostered the gradual expansion of whiteness to include Catholic and Jewish immigrants who had once been excluded from its privileges.

ANGLO-SAXON PROTESTANTS AND THE LOGICS OF WAR AND EMPIRE

For a dominant culture shaped by Anglo-Saxon Protestant norms, religious freedom served first of all as a key marker of American superiority over Spain. During the buildup to the war in 1898, Episcopalian rector Randolph McKim of Epiphany Church in New York told his congregation that they faced a world-historical struggle between competing models of civilization. Where Spain stood for “the civilization and the government and the religious ideas of the Middle Ages,” he preached, the United States stood “on the whole for the enlightenment, for the progress, for the freer thought, for the larger liberty, and especially for the religious freedom of the modern world.” According to McKim, a U.S. victory in the war would have dramatic consequences for Cuba, which would “at long last” be liberated “from the rule of her oppressors.” The global impact would be even more significant. America would become a great world power, McKim told his congregation, allowing it to disseminate everywhere “the principles of civil and religious liberty which we ourselves enjoy in the good providence of God.” Religious freedom was at the top of McKim’s list of the features that defined the United States in opposition to Spain. It was also one of the signal blessings that a benevolent U.S. empire would bestow upon the world.⁴

McKim’s sermon built on civilizational assemblages that were grounded in centuries of Protestant-Catholic conflict and had developed in support of U.S. imperial expansions across the North American continent. Protestants from the Reformation onward had painted not merely the papacy but the entire Catholic approach to church authority as a system of tyranny that impeded what they viewed as the direct accountability of the individual before God. The British colonial wars against France and Spain had only strengthened Anglo-Protestant associations between Catholicism and tyranny on the one hand and Protestantism and freedom on the other. When the United States gained independence, its overwhelmingly Protestant leaders transferred these representational patterns to the new nation. By identifying free (Protestant) Christianity as the essential source of American freedoms, they identified the United States as an essentially Protestant nation. By contrast, they depicted Catholicism not merely as an outdated, foreign, and “superstitious” version of Christianity but also as an active threat to the fundamental American principles of religious and civil liberty and thus to American democracy itself.⁵

The Mexican-American War (1846–48) turned these associations into a rationale for U.S. imperial expansion. In 1844 the United States had annexed the province of Texas, then struggling to maintain the independence it had won from Mexico eight years earlier. Advocates for that annexation coined the phrase “Manifest Destiny” to encapsulate their growing conviction that God had ordained the nation’s expansion across the continent. Proponents of the ensuing war with Mexico made no secret of their desire to acquire still more territory, a goal they achieved when the United States won the war and seized the vast provinces of New Mexico and California. In the months and years thereafter, religious freedom talk helped assuage the fears of many northern Protestants that these new territories and their alien peoples posed a threat to American democracy.⁶ Anti-Catholic propagandist Nicholas Murray wrote in 1851 that until they had become part of the United States, “nothing in the way of religion” could “dare be lisped” in these territories “save Popish mummeries.” Murray placed these conquests alongside the liberal revolutions that had swept Europe in 1848 and the British “opening of China” to commerce and missions as signs that Protestantism and freedom were advancing in concert all around the world.⁷

Writing in the 1880s, the Lutheran minister and pioneering church historian Philip Schaff credited the Protestant Reformation with recovering Christ’s original emphasis on the individual conscience, thus enabling the later emergence of religious freedom as a political ideal. Where the Catholic Church claimed to be the infallible and divinely appointed guide to scripture and to the will of God, the Reformation had (at least in theory) recognized each individual’s right to read and interpret the Bible and eliminated the role of the church as intercessor between the individual and the divine. According to Schaff, the Reformation had thus released adherents from the “thralldom” of “popery” and so “carried in it the modern principles of religious and civil liberty.” By giving believers the right and the responsibility to interpret and follow the Word of God for themselves, he claimed, Protestantism had formed subjects uniquely capable of free moral judgment, enabling them to function as citizens of a free republic. Schaff asserted further that these principles had been fully realized only in the American system of government. The United States had transcended not just the “papal tyranny” of the Catholic world, he wrote, but also the British model of mere “toleration” for religious dissent.⁸

These associations were always open to challenge, as the rest of this book will document. From the revolutionary period onward, Catholics, Jews, and many others articulated more inclusive versions of American national identity. Nevertheless, the identification of Protestant Christianity with religious freedom and the American nation—or in other words its constitutive part in the making of the American secular—held sway far beyond the leadership of the Protestant churches. U.S. elites lived in a political culture indelibly shaped by Protestantism, and most took for granted its asserted role as the historical source and necessary grounding for American freedoms. The political tradition of Christian republicanism, invoked in one way or another by every U.S. president since the nation’s founding, typically identified not just Christianity but Protestant Christianity in particular as an essential ingredient of American democracy. The majority cultures of Protestantism, then, shaped the underlying grammar and the day-to-day vocabulary of American secularism’s dominant forms.⁹

The ideal of religious freedom perhaps inevitably intersected with race as America’s most fundamental system of social classification and control. Just as they used the principle of religious freedom to equate Protestantism with America, many Protestant and secular voices assumed its association with an Anglo-Saxon racial identity. My point is not that these speakers falsely conflated race, nation, and religion—as if these were distinct and unchanging categories of identity—but that these classificatory terms mutually defined one another in American culture. Those who saw themselves as Anglo-Saxons defined their own identities not only against Africans, Asians (who were commonly called Orientals), and American Indians but also against European immigrants whose racial characteristics were constituted in large part through their Catholicism or their Jewishness. As long as whiteness was equated with the Anglo-Saxon Protestant, then neither Jews nor Catholics could be seen as entirely white.¹⁰

These civilizational assemblages are clearly visible in the book Our Country, written by the widely respected Congregationalist missionary leader and social gospel proponent Josiah Strong in 1885. Strong described emigrants from southern and eastern Europe as distinctly inferior because they lacked the vigor, independence, and clear thinking that he associated with Anglo-Saxon Protestants. The Catholicism that had formed them taught a “slavish” and superstitious submission to authority, he believed, leaving them fundamentally unprepared to live as free American citizens and destined to remain within the tyrannical grasp of Rome. Protestant triumphalists like Strong increasingly portrayed Catholics as inherently different from and clearly inferior to the superior race. In his view, the immigrants’ failure to claim the freedom of religion by becoming Protestants demonstrated their permanent inferiority (and their essentially un-American nature) in simultaneously racial and religious terms.¹¹

In the buildup to the war with Spain, many Protestants drew on the “Black Legend” of a distinctively Spanish imperial cruelty that was allegedly rooted in Catholicism. Proponents portrayed the Spanish Inquisition as the model for an ongoing pattern of colonial abuse. Henry van Dyke, pastor of Brick Presbyterian Church in New York, contended for example that the suffering of Cuba and the Philippines reflected the ongoing “cruelties of the Inquisition.” A writer in the Trenton Evening Times explained that after “the fanaticism of Isabella and the zeal of Torquemada” had banished “the Jews and the Moors” in the fifteenth century, “the fires of the Inquisition” had targeted “the thinkers” of Spain. “From the days of Ferdinand to the days of [contemporary Spanish general Valeriano] Weyler,” he concluded, “it has been the policy of Spain to terrorize her subjects into submission by torture and butchery.” Recent historians have viewed the Inquisition as a tool for the early modern Spanish monarchy as it solidified its claims to power, sometimes in competition with papal authority, an...