Religious Intolerance in America

A Documentary History

John Corrigan, Lynn S. Neal

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780807833896
• eBook ISBN: 9780807895955
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: History of Religion

American narratives often celebrate the nation's rich heritage of religious freedom. There is, however, a less told and often ignored part of the story: the ways that intolerance and cultures of hate have manifested themselves within American religious history and culture. In the first ever documentary survey of religious intolerance from the colonial era to the present, volume editors John Corrigan and Lynn S. Neal define religious intolerance and explore its history and manifestations, including hate speech, discrimination, incarceration, expulsion, and violence. Organized thematically, the volume combines the editors' discussion with more than 150 striking primary texts and pictures that document intolerance toward a variety of religious traditions. Moving from anti-Catholic Ku Klux Klan propaganda to mob attacks on Mormons, the lynching of Leo Frank, the kidnapping of "cult" members, and many other episodes, the volume concludes with a chapter addressing the changing face of religious intolerance in the twenty-first century, with examples of how the problem continues to this day.

CHAPTER ONE
Religious Intolerance in Colonial America

The Europeans who crossed the Atlantic and colonized the Americas, and who fashioned through their explorations and migrations an Atlantic World that interconnected Africa, the Americas, and Europe, were not tolerant. Much has been written, and much has been said in speeches and sermons, about how the earliest English settlers of North America came to the New World seeking refuge from religious intolerance in England. It is true that English Puritans had suffered misfortunes beginning with the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, and minority religious groups from the Continent—from German- and French- and Spanish-speaking lands, especially—likewise sought relief from mistreatment by dominant churches and by the state apparatus that was joined to those churches. The idea of toleration, however, as historian Perez Zagorin has observed, had not yet coalesced in the West.¹ The pioneering efforts of the Dutch humanist Erasmus (d. 1536), particularly his imaging of Jesus as a loving, generous, and appealingly simple manifestation of God, were lost in the theologically and politically driven preoccupation with heretic hunting and the persecution of religious minorities, as well as the ongoing horror of massive religious warfare. In the climate of acute religious fear and fury that shaped the times, other visions of toleration also were kept cloistered within the sterile confines of intellectual debate, far removed from implementation. The Geneva-trained humanist scholar Sebastian Castellio’s Concerning Heretics, occasioned in 1553 by the author’s revulsion at the burning of the heretic Michael Servetus earlier that year in Geneva, argued passionately against the notion of heresy and persecution and proposed that toleration was beneficial to a society. Castellio criticized the Calvinists for playing God and ignoring the conscience of individuals, and he challenged Calvin directly by maintaining that reason and religion worked together in bringing about the good society. Europe was not ready to hear him, however. Nor was Europe prepared to embrace the ideas of the Dutch writer Dirck Coornhert (d. 1590), a somewhat unorthodox Catholic who fashioned in several publications a plea for toleration in which he claimed that religious freedom, the exercise of individual conscience, and pluralism were good for the state. Hugo Grotius (d. 1645) and Jacob Arminius (d. 1609) added arguments critical of state religion and the notion of God as a tyrant, but it was not until the beginning of the Enlightenment, in the writings of John Locke and Pierre Bayle, that the idea of toleration began to acquire the momentum that would lead to its formalization as a policy advantageous to the state. In the meantime, Jews, expelled from Spain in 1492, struggled, like other persons accused of infidelity and heresy, under the brutal machinery of the Inquisition. Catholics found themselves at war with Protestants across a vast and shifting front, and Protestants attacked each other—as in the case of the Church of England’s campaign against the Puritans—with cannon and sword as well as preaching and writing.

The ideas of John Milton, the Puritan advocate of toleration, were rudimentary in the seventeenth century, and in any event did not translate easily to the American environment, where Indians and Catholics vigorously competed with Puritans for space. Puritans arrived in the New World persecuted, and intolerant. Catholics, in New Spain and New France, brought their own brands of intolerance, not only of Protestants but of Indians and Jews. European Christians also brought with them to the Americas interpretations of the Bible that supported not only intolerance of non-Christian religions (and intolerance of brands of Christianity that differed from their own) but supplied guidance about how to deal with those who were different. Intolerance, after all, is not merely an abstract intellectual position. Intolerance, in reality, is practice as much as theory. It is the implementation of a theory of difference in the form of actions taken against religious opponents. Accordingly, one of its components is an argument for the vigorous and unrelenting persecution of others, and that argument typically is made in bold terms, in actions as well as words. For many of those who crossed the Atlantic to the New World, the trope or story that informed their practice of intolerance was the Old Testament account of God’s dealings with the Amalekites.

The Amalekites, according to Biblical accounts, had always been the enemies of the Jews. They were especially reviled because in spite of some manner of blood relationship to the Jews, they raided the weak and slow at the rear of the column of Jews who were fleeing Egypt and attacked the Jews at other times as well. The Old Testament reports that God commanded the Jews to annihilate the Amalekites, to utterly destroy them without mercy—their men, women, children, and animals—leaving no trace of them. The Jews were to exterminate the Amalekites, to cleanse the world of them, and of any memory of them as well. According to Biblical sources, the Jews eventually accomplished that mission.

English writers during and after the English Reformation adopted the image of cowardly, duplicitous, menacing Amalekites to illustrate for their readerships the dangers posed by Roman Catholics to Protestantism in England. Theological differences between Catholics and Protestants (and between different Protestant groups) led to a long period of terrible violence in Europe beginning in the early sixteenth century. The Reformation was as much a revolution in social and political life as it was religious innovation, and the sudden and profound changes that took place in all of those areas produced an environment that was exceedingly volatile and frequently ripe for the enactment of violence when ideological support could be mustered for that. The rhetorical justification for such violence invariably was drawn from the Bible, and in the case of the English, the Amalek story proved particularly effective as a motivating image for dealing with religious enemies. English Protestant writers cultivated an anti-Catholic perspective that blossomed, poisonously, into characterizations of Catholics as evil, plotting traitors to England and to God. They compared them to Amalekites, noting that Catholics, as at least nominal Christians, should have embraced the Protestant emphasis on the word of God in the Bible and Protestant criticism of Roman Catholic Church government, and ritual, as corrupt. Because they did not, they existed as a deadly element inside the tent of Christianity, and by means of conspiracies and deceptions were spreading their malignancy throughout the newly reformed church. They were Amalekites—seeming kin, but not truly kin—whose influence posed such a danger to the fledgling Protestant churches that extreme measures were required to ensure that through their plottings of evil they did not subvert the purified Christian church. The inflammatory rhetoric of writers such as Thomas Taylor and John Flavel informed and reinforced English Protestant thinking about intolerance of Roman influences, and it traveled to the New World with the earliest Puritan colonists. John Winthrop, best known for his speech about God’s providence that he delivered while aboard the vessel bringing the first Puritans to Massachusetts Bay, invoked in that very speech the story of God’s command to the Jews to annihilate the Amalekites. Once ashore, the story was adapted to the new circumstances and marshaled in campaigns against Indians, Catholics, and non-Puritans.

The religious people who crossed the Atlantic to settle in New England in the early seventeenth century inhabited an enchanted world. For them, earthquakes were not the shifting of tectonic plates, violent storms were not the accidental meeting of weather fronts, and fires that burned down houses, towns, or even cities were not random tragedies. All such events were ordained by God, who punished and rewarded as he pleased. God’s ways sometimes bewildered men and women who placed their trust in Him, but faith led persons to embrace the events that shaped their days on earth as part of God’s plans for their lives as individuals and for the good of the Christian church as a collective body. The religious worldview of the colonists in New England led them to picture Native Americans in various ways, but always through a lens ground by colonists’ investment in the idea of a world where divine providence and demonic evil shaped events and influenced lives. Some colonists sought out missionary success among the Indians, believing that conversion of Indians was a condition in the covenant that God had made with New Englanders for their survival in the New World wilderness. Other colonists regarded Indians suspiciously, and at times that suspicion was distilled into fear and hatred of Indians as demonic, warlike, and meant by God for extermination.

Native Americans posed a particularly challenging ideological problem for colonists. Speculation about who they were and where they came from frequently made its way to the conclusion that Indians were descendants of the Jews, the surviving remnant of Lost Tribes that had been dispersed in ancient Jewish history to far-flung lands. English Christians’ understanding of the historical unfolding of God’s plan for the world, grounded in suggestive but often vague biblical references to peoples, places, and events, demanded of them an effort to link Native American history to Old Testament accounts of the populating of the world. The Americas, the territory that Indians inhabited, was the territory to which Indians were led by God long ago, in the aftermath of a Jewish crisis of faith and identity in the eastern Mediterranean. By such reckoning, Indians were assessed as distant religious kin of the Puritans, and in some more elaborate English imaginings of Indian history, as a people very much like the Britons who occupied England in an earlier age. The English, moreover, were not alone in reflecting on the Jewish origins of Indians. Spanish and French writers offered up similar analyses of the Indian presence and past, sometimes suggesting (like some English) that they were in fact lapsed Christians. In the writings of the renowned Dominican missionary Bartolomé de Las Casas and Spanish writers such as Garcilaso de la Vega, Pedro Cieza de León, and José de Acosta, Native Americans were linked to Judaism and Christianity through interpretation of their mythologies, rituals, and material cultures. Indians, said some writers, had over time “forgotten” the Jewish revelation. Other writers argued that Indians had fallen away from Christianity over time, and that Amerindian religion in general was, accordingly, praeparatio evangelica, that is, preparation for the gospel. The Capuchin Pacifique de Provins echoed this theological rumination when he expressed the view that the role of the missionary was to recover the faith, to reawaken it, in Amerindians. In his words, the missionary labored to “bring these savage people back to the knowledge of the true God we adore.” The abbé Bobé in 1719 likewise explained how “Israelites under the dispersion by Salmanasar passed into North America,” and he linked them specifically with the Sioux. Among Puritans, the missionary John Eliot embraced the theory that Indians were descended from the Lost Tribes, and he was joined in that cause by the Jewish Rabbi Menasseh ben Israel in Amsterdam, who authored Hope of Israel (1650), and in Norfolk, England, by Presbyterian clergyman Thomas Thorowgood, author of Iews in America; or Probabilities that the Americans are of that Race (1650). Boston minister Cotton Mather, Rhode Island founder Rodger Williams, the Quaker William Penn, and the theological giant Jonathan Edwards all adopted the theory in whole or in part.²

The crucial element in colonial theories about the linkage of Indians to Judaism and Christianity was the colonists’ sense that Indians were, in some fashion, part of a global and transhistorical family of believers in God. Indians were lapsed, perhaps, or had come to be degraded in their faith over time, but they were relatives nevertheless. They were, in short, religious kin to Christians, and when things did not go well between Indians and colonists, Indians were not just opponents but, in the Puritan world of interwoven religion and society, religious traitors. Like the Amalekites, they were deserving of the penalty of extermination that God long ago had ordained as judgment on those who, in spite of their kinship with a people favored by God, betrayed their relatives. Such reasoning, refined in English anti-Catholic religious writings and transmitted to the colonies in the seventeenth century, was applied to the interpretation of relations between Indians and New Englanders. Those applications led to rhetorical adaptations that could be exploited for generations in campaigns against Indians, Catholics, Mormons, Quakers, persons identified as witches, and others. Moreover, those patterns were reinforced in English Protestant relations with Catholics in the New World. In the seventeenth century, for example, French Catholics who settled the St. Lawrence Valley and other areas west of New England met with stiff opposition from the English. When territorial and commercial disputes, framed by already difficult relations between the English and French in Europe, gathered momentum and issued in armed conflict, religious imagery shaped the rhetoric of violent encounter. During the French and Indian War (1754–63) and at other times, New Englanders cast the French as minions in the army of the papal Antichrist, and the French retaliated with depictions of the Puritans and their descendants as people seduced from the true church by demonic influence.

English settlers in the Chesapeake found themselves, like New Englanders, periodically in conflict with Native Americans. The colonial enterprise in the Chesapeake differed from that of New England, however, in that the people who settled Jamestown, and their Virginia Company overseers in England, were not infused with zeal born of a sense of religious destiny. The prospect of commercial profit weighed more heavily than religion in their calculation of reasons to carry forward the colonial enterprise. That did not mean, however, that religion was unimportant in Virginia and the surrounding plantation territories. Keenly aware that the work of building a colony required the realization of some measure of order, discipline, and common cause among the persons involved, officials at Jamestown and elsewhere in the region enforced religious statues that served the purpose, at least in their minds, of fostering progress toward those goals. An early instance of the subsequent codes governing behavior were the statutes enforced under Governor Thomas Dale several years after the founding of the colony in 1607. Dale considered the English undertaking in Virginia to be a species of “religious warfare” that involved the enforcement of severe penalties for immoral behavior among the settlers as much as battle against the Indians. Dale’s laws represented intolerance of any drift from Anglican moral standards or theological tenets. Heresy, the public pronouncement of religious ideas contrary to Anglican theology, was punishable by death. Although the standard for behavior for colonists became less rigid over time, the tone of that earliest code set the terms for Protestant thinking about Catholics who settled nearby Maryland (as well as others who came later). By the end of the seventeenth century in Maryland, with Catholics a religious minority, the Church of England officially established, and Virginia exercising de facto rule of the colony, Catholics there suffered under the enforcement of statutes that forbade them from holding office, voting, or worshipping publicly. The anti-Catholic mood was still strong in the colonies when the Georgia charter of 1732 forbade Catholics the practice of their religion.

Dissenting Protestants also suffered at the hands of the Anglican ecclesiastical establishment in the Chesapeake. Thomas Jefferson, who led the cause of religious freedom in Virginia in the 1780s, observed that the execution of Quakers—which came to a head when Puritans put to death Quaker missionaries in Massachusetts in the mid-seventeenth century—likely would have happened as well in Virginia had historical circumstances conspired more actively with hatred of Quakers there. As it happened, Quakers were fined and banished but not executed in Virginia. Religious conflict among other Protestants—involving Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians, and Anglicans—was intense and sometimes violent in Virginia and the Carolinas.

Jews were not treated as badly in the American colonies as they were in Europe. This was due in part to their very small presence in America: they were barely visible and did not strike observers as capable of the kinds of subversive plottings of which they were constantly accused in Europe. Also, in the difficult colonial environment, cooperation among persons of different backgrounds—in the interest of advancing common commercial and social projects—was generally more important than the cultivation of animosity toward potential partners in those enterprises. In New England, Quakers suffered misfortunes, however unearned, because they violated religious laws regarding public preaching and the espousal of heretical doctrines. Jews were not evangelical. They were disinclined to convert others to their faith, and they made no effort to enforce their view of religion upon others through manipulation of law or custom. Jews, however, brought with them from Europe the baggage that for centuries had plagued them. They were conceived in much religious literature primarily as Christ killers, and in some writings as fiends who required the blood of innocents for their rituals. Moreover, the image of the Jew as a sneaky commercial fraud, as a person duplicitous in commercial transaction with others and single-minded in a determination to fleece trading partners, followed Jews wherever they were dispersed around the globe. Jews were cast as enemies of Christ and were linked with Catholics, Indians, and Muslims in blasphemy of Christian truth. With some exceptions, they were left alone during colonial times; but in later centuries, as their numbers grew larger from immigration, Jews experienced overt and violent persecution.

The vast and extraordinarily wealthy Spanish empire in the Americas was built upon the search for gold, the desire to convert Indians to Christianity, and the hope of achieving military glory. Beginning with Columbus’s voyages after 1492, the Spanish treated American indigenes in ruthless fashion, killing, torturing, and enslaving them, shipping Indian gold back to Spain, and systematically constructing a brutal regime of colonial exploitation of the human and natural resources of the Americas. Conversion to Christianity was a crucial component of the Spanish plan of acculturation and integration of Indians into the economic machinery of the colonial territories. Dominicans, Jesuits, and Franciscans came to the New World in large numbers, bringing with them some measure of hopefulness for baptizing Native Americans as Roman Catholics, and bringing the everyday lives of the converts under close and constant moral supervision. The records of missionary activities in New Spain indicate that sacrifice and devotion to religious ideals were not generally lacking in the efforts of the clergy. But the religious enterprise was mingled with the economic rationale for Spanish exploration and dominion, and the resistance of Indians to the Spanish demand for submission was viewed as resistance to Christianity as much as to Spanish political will. Accordingly, the fundamental ends of Spanish exploration and colonization—conversion of Indians and the extraction of wealth through military dominance—were intertwined from the very beginning of the Spanish presence in the Americas. To resist Christianity was to resi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Religious Intolerance in America
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• contents
• acknowledgments
• introduction
• CHAPTER ONE Religious Intolerance in Colonial America
• CHAPTER TWO Anti-Catholicism
• CHAPTER THREE Anti-Mormonism
• CHAPTER FOUR Intolerance toward Nineteenth-Century Religious Groups
• CHAPTER FIVE Intolerance toward Native American Religions
• CHAPTER SIX Anti-Semitism
• CHAPTER SEVEN Intolerance toward “New” Religions in the Twentieth Century
• CHAPTER EIGHT The Branch Davidians and Waco
• conclusion
• Notes
• Index