Faithful Republic

Religion and Politics in Modern America

Andrew Preston, Bruce J. Schulman, Julian E. Zelizer, Andrew Preston, Bruce J. Schulman, Julian E. Zelizer, Andrew Preston, Bruce J. Schulman, Julian E Zelizer

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780812247022, 9780812247022
• eBook ISBN: 9780812291124
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Despite constitutional limitations, the points of contact between religion and politics have deeply affected all aspects of American political development since the founding of the United States. Within partisan politics, federal institutions, and movement activism, religion and politics have rarely been truly separate; rather, they are two forms of cultural expression that are continually coevolving and reconfiguring in the face of social change. Faithful Republic explores the dynamics between religion and politics in the United States from the early twentieth century to the present. Rather than focusing on the traditional question of the separation between church and state, this volume touches on many other aspects of American political history, addressing divorce, civil rights, liberalism and conservatism, domestic policy, and economics. Together, the essays blend church history and lived religion to fashion an innovative kind of political history, demonstrating the pervasiveness of religion throughout American political life. Contributors: Lila Corwin Berman, Edward J. Blum, Darren Dochuk, Lily Geismer, Alison Collis Greene, Matthew S. Hedstrom, David Mislin, Bethany Moreton, Andrew Preston, Bruce J. Schulman, Molly Worthen, Julian E. Zelizer.

CHAPTER 1

“Against the Foes That Destroy the Family, Protestants and Catholics Can Stand Together”: Divorce and Christian Ecumenism

David Mislin

“In one respect,” mused the author of an 1882 article, “the Roman Catholic Church has proved itself the conservator of the family. By a consistent and stringent discipline it has always maintained the sacredness of the marriage bond.” In and of itself, such a claim was not unusual in nineteenth-century America. Roman Catholics frequently asserted that their tradition’s prohibition of divorce left them better equipped than Protestants to prevent the dissolution of the nuclear family. In this instance, however, it was not a Roman Catholic making the argument; it was a Protestant, and a Protestant clergyman at that. The Congregationalist minister Washington Gladden hoped that his article in the popular Century magazine would serve as a call to action against the increasing divorce rate in the United States, which Gladden viewed as a perilous threat to the nation’s overall moral health. But he also identified an additional benefit to be found in Protestants’ enthusiastic efforts to curtail the rising tide of divorces. “Such explicit testimony and energetic action,” he observed, might not only “avert the evils now assailing the peace and security of our homes,” but also “convince our Roman Catholic brethren that Protestantism is not the foe of the Christian family.”¹

Nor was Gladden, who was one of the most outspoken Protestant critics of Gilded Age anti-Catholicism, unique in believing that Catholics might well have a point when they accused members of his own tradition of allowing the collapse of the family.² Another prominent Protestant, retired Yale University president Theodore Dwight Woolsey, lauded his Catholic neighbors for their views about divorce. “We are not Catholics, but we admire their firmness in standing by an express precept of Christ,” he declared.³ The editors of the Century, which communicated the sentiments of the overwhelmingly Protestant establishment class to readers throughout the United States, concurred. They noted that in “matters of discipline, vitally affecting the life of the family and of society,” the Catholic Church stood on the “high ground,” and Catholic “doctrine and practice respecting divorce” were in fact “closer to the law of the New Testament” than the teachings of Protestant churches. “In contending against the foes that destroy the family,” there was no hindrance to common action, and thus, they proclaimed, “Protestants and Catholics can stand together.”⁴

During the closing decades of the nineteenth century, a rapidly rising divorce rate convinced many Americans that the family was indeed being destroyed. Nearly one million divorces were granted between 1887 and 1906, a near tripling of the rate during the previous twenty-year period. This increase significantly outpaced the growth of the nation’s population.⁵ Historians have offered numerous explanations of this phenomenon, including the overall social upheaval caused by rapid urbanization and industrialization, the increasing tolerance of divorce (especially in western states and territories), and louder calls from feminists for the right of women to leave unhappy marriages. Moreover, a growing number of states eased the burden on women by recognizing the more general category of “cruelty” as grounds to end a marriage, rather than limiting divorce to less ambiguous circumstances such as spousal abandonment.⁶

No matter the cause, the apparent willingness of so many Americans to end their marriages worried Protestants and Catholics alike. Leaders from both traditions joined forces to combat the perceived moral danger of rampant divorce. In 1879, a coalition of Protestant and Catholic reform organizations united to amend Connecticut’s liberal divorce laws, thereby making it more difficult for couples to end their marriages. The New England Divorce Reform League, organized by Theodore Dwight Woolsey as part of this campaign, quickly emerged as a force in the wider political discussion of marriage and divorce. Within a few years, the organization proved so successful that it removed “New England” from its name and became known, more accurately given the scope of its work, as the National Divorce Reform League (NDRL). The renamed group’s 1885 annual report heralded the ecumenical nature of its membership, noting that among its many affiliated clergy and laity were “distinguished representatives of all leading bodies, (including Catholic).”⁷ Similar cooperation took place with some frequency for the better part of three decades, such as during the 1890s, when Protestants enthusiastically endorsed efforts by the Roman Catholic bishop of North Dakota to curb the permissive divorce laws in that recently admitted state.⁸

These combined efforts by Catholics and Protestants to fight divorce—and the broader rhetoric of common endeavor surrounding the issue—constitute an important turning point in the history of the relationship between the two major branches of Christianity in the United States. In the late nineteenth century, nationally prominent Protestant and Catholic Americans became willing to set aside centuries of disagreement about issues of belief and practice in order to unite around a political and social cause. Identifying such instances of cooperation provides an important corrective to a historical narrative that focuses almost exclusively on anti-Catholic sentiment during this period and suggests that Protestants and Catholics had little sense of shared purpose.⁹

The religious leaders who came together tended to represent the theologically liberal wings of their respective churches, and liberals were more favorably disposed than conservatives to ecumenical cooperation. To be sure, there remained many Americans with more conservative religious outlooks, Catholic and Protestant alike, who saw little reason to bridge the divide between the traditions. But the preponderance of theological liberals in their ranks does not provide an excuse for overlooking or minimizing these ecumenical enterprises. The 1880s and 1890s witnessed both the rise of liberals to prominence in Protestant denominations and the apogee of liberal Catholicism in the United States. Many of the nation’s most respected Catholic and Protestant leaders—the people who occupied the most prestigious pulpits, taught at leading seminaries and divinity schools, and published their sermons, lectures, and essays in books and popular journals like the Century and the North American Review—were theological liberals.¹⁰

More than any other issue, divorce offered a vehicle for ecumenically oriented Catholics and Protestants to cooperate as equals. As both Gladden and Woolsey conceded, American Protestants could not claim the same moral high ground in discussions of divorce that they believed they held on other high-profile social issues, such as temperance reform, where the stereotype of the lazy, drunken Catholic immigrant continued to persist. When it came to marriage, Catholics had seemingly proved much more capable of preventing divorce and preserving the family.

For cooperative endeavors to succeed, members of both traditions needed to adjust their views on both religious and political issues. This essay examines precisely how the intellectual foundation for this common work developed. For their part, Protestants affirmed that families were the fundamental unit of society and, in rhetoric that closely resembled long-standing Catholic critiques of Protestantism, criticized the historical individualism of their tradition. Meanwhile, many American Catholics abandoned their suspicion of government efforts to regulate morality and joined Protestants in championing efforts by states to curtail seemingly permissive divorce statutes. For members of both traditions, these ecumenical endeavors signaled major revisions of their worldview. They provided Protestants an impetus to abandon the individual-centered nature of their religious thought. These enterprises likewise inspired many Catholics to set aside long-standing suspicions of state authority as they adopted the view that government represented a better mechanism for preserving morality than their own institutions did. Most significantly, they demonstrated to Catholics and Protestants alike that it was possible to undertake a common effort for political and social change without engaging in theological disputes.

* * *

The shared endeavor by Protestants and Catholics to combat divorce would have amounted to naught were it not for a fundamental point of agreement: members of both groups believed that the family constituted the foundational unit of a healthy, functioning society. Gladden frequently championed such views. “The monogamous family … is the structural unit of modern society,” he wrote in one of his many books that offered a Christian response to contemporary social issues.¹¹ By “breaking up homes and weakening the bonds of the family, which is the very foundation of society,” he elaborated in a later volume, divorce was “making great havoc in society.”¹² Gladden’s fellow Congregationalist minister, Newman Smyth, imbued the family with a religious purpose as well as a social one. In his Christian Ethics, a major treatise of late nineteenth-century liberal theology that was recommended by the NDRL, Smyth declared that “the most effective and purest ethical as well as religious influences must always find their abiding place and power in the Christian home.” He also described “the Christian family” as one of the “great redemptive forces of the world.” By calling the family a “means of grace,” Smyth bestowed on it a sacramental function, and thereby suggested that the spread of divorce would by necessity obstruct the development of Christianity in American communities.¹³

It therefore made sense for organizations like the NDRL to cast their antidivorce message in terms of saving the family. Samuel Dike, its secretary and most outspoken proponent, described the organization’s mission to “promote an improvement in public sentiment and legislation on the institution of the Family, especially as affected by existing evils relating to Marriage and Divorce.”¹⁴ He identified the weakening of marital ties as the root of a host of social ills. NDRL research, he claimed, showed that divorce led to an increase of illegitimate births and—in a thinly veiled reference to abortion—other “connected evils.” These in turn “contributed much more to the causes of crime, insanity and poverty than is suspected by most people.”¹⁵ The popular weekly periodical Outlook, edited by the Protestant clergyman Lyman Abbott, championed the work of the NDRL and affirmed its assertions about the correlation between stable families and a healthy society. Abbott and his fellow editors cited the organization’s report on the importance of the home in ensuring temperance, preventing crime, and encouraging education and personal uplift. They averred that “the student of sociology” was increasingly “led … back to the base of society in the Family.”¹⁶

While Protestants and Catholics remained severely divided over many aspects of Christian teaching, the view of the family as fulfilling an essential function for society offered a crucial point of agreement. John Ireland, the bishop (and later archbishop) of Saint Paul, Minnesota, and a leading voice for the so-called Americanist wing of the church that saw little inherent tension between Catholicism and modern American culture, cited Gladden’s article on divorce as evidence of Protestant-Catholic agreement. Although Ireland vehemently disputed some of Gladden’s assertions (primarily about morality in the Catholic countries of Europe), he lauded the Congregationalist for admitting “the truth of history” that the Catholic Church had long served as the most ardent defender of marriage. It did so, Ireland declared, because it firmly held to the belief that the family represented “the great constitutive factor in human society.”¹⁷ Like Protestants, Ireland emphasized a larger social purpose to marriage. It existed so that parents would “bring up children in the practice of the virtues that fit them for their duties as citizens of earth and heirs of heaven.”¹⁸ Central to his understanding of marriage was the expectation that it provided the basis for the morality of the entire society.

Other Catholics were even more explicit in making such a case. Ireland’s fellow bishop, John Lancaster Spalding, called the family “the basis of our civilization” and “the stronghold of all that is best in our social life.”¹⁹ The Catholic press drove the point home. Articles in the widely read Catholic World frequently stressed the role of the family as “the corner-stone of society,” “the corner-stone of our social fabric,” “the foundation of society,” and the institution on which sat “the whole structure of civil society.”²⁰ The language varied, but the message was clear: divorce caused the demise of the family, which in turn signaled a grave moral threat to the United States.

* * *

That Protestants should join Catholics in affirming the importance of the family was not, in some respects, a novel development. For over a generation the leading voices of American Protestantism had idealized the middle-class home and family as a primary site of religious development.²¹ But the emphasis on the family that emerged in discussions of divorce during the 1880s and 1890s was not simply the extension of a Victorian domestic fantasy. It constituted one element of a broader critique of individualism that emerged within Protestant circles during the late nineteenth century. Simply put, many Protestant Americans began to question the emphasis on the individual that had long represented the heart of their tradition. It was also an assessment that echoed a central Catholic argument against Protestantism.

Ever since the Reformation, Roman Catholics had criticized what they perceived to be the excessive individualism found in Protestant churches; in the nineteenth-century United States, they frequently invoked this argument in discussions of marriage and divorce. “At the door of Protestantism we have to lay much of the present deplorable condition of the moral world,” Ireland declared, believing that Protestantism “dealt a death blow, by its principles and practice, to the indissolubility of the marriage contract.”²² The bishop’s main critique centered on the right of private judgment that stood at the heart of Protestant doctrine. He argued that such teaching led individuals to evaluate Christian moral teaching for themselves, especially teachings related to marriage and the family.

Other Catholics shared Ireland’s views. Frequent Catholic World contributor Augustine Hewit, despite his praise for Theodore Dwight Woolsey’s efforts, nevertheless blamed Protestantism for undercutting the “moral law of Christianity” and replacing it with “mere opinion,” thereby ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. “Against the Foes That Destroy the Family, Protestants and Catholics Can Stand Together”: Divorce and Christian Ecumenism
• Chapter 2. American Jewish Politics Is Urban Politics
• Chapter 3. Fighting for the Fundamentals: Lyman Stewart and the Protestant Politics of Oil
• Chapter 4. A “Divine Revelation”? Southern Churches Respond to the New Deal
• Chapter 5. The Rise of Spiritual Cosmopolitanism: Liberal Protestants and Cultural Politics
• Chapter 6. “A Third Force”: The Civil Rights Ministry of Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.
• Chapter 7. The Theological Origins of the Christian Right
• Chapter 8. More than Megachurches: Liberal Religion and Politics in the Suburbs
• Chapter 9. Knute Gingrich, All American? White Evangelicals, U.S. Catholics, and the Religious Genealogy of Political Realignment
• Notes
• List of Contributors
• Index
• Acknowledgments