Government Surveillance of Religious Expression

Mormons, Quakers, and Muslims in the United States

Kathryn Montalbano

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351393096
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Theology & Religion
• Categoría: Religion, Politics & State

Recent revelations about government surveillance of citizens have led to questions about whether there should be better defined boundaries around privacy. Should government officials have the right to specifically target certain groups for extended surveillance? United States municipal, territorial, and federal agencies have investigated religious groups since the nineteenth century. While critics of contemporary mass surveillance tend to invoke the infringement of privacy, the mutual protection of religion and public expression by the First Amendment positions them, along with religious expression, comfortably within in the public sphere.This book analyzes government monitoring of Mormons of the Territory of Utah in the 1870s and 1880s for polygamy, Quakers of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) from the 1940s to the 1960s for communist infiltration, and Muslims of Brooklyn, New York, from 2002 to 2013 for suspected terrorism. Government agencies in these case studies attempted to understand how their religious beliefs might shape their actions in the public sphere. It follows that government agents did not just observe these communities, but they probed precisely what constituted religion itself alongside shifting legal and political definitions relative to their respective time periods.

Together, these case studies form a new framework for discussions of the historical and contemporary monitoring of religion. They show that government surveillance is less predictable and monolithic than we might assume. Therefore, this book will be of great interest to scholars of United States religion, history, and politics, as well as surveillance and communication studies.

1 Regulating religion in the United States

I. Introduction

United States government agencies at the municipal, territorial, state, and federal levels have long monitored religious expression, the union of religious belief and action, that they considered threatening to the United States public. Religious groups, in turn, have claimed that government monitoring practices obstructed their religious expression. This book examines how, from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, United States government agencies monitored the religious expression and, to varying extents, tried to assess religious belief through preliminary research and analysis, in order to curtail any consequential subversive action of three groups: Mormons in the Territory of Utah in the period between 1870 and 1896, with a focus on six prominent United States Supreme Court anti-polygamy cases; Quakers of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) between the 1940s to the 1960s, based on a remarkable trove of FBI documents in the AFSC Archives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; and Muslims in Brooklyn, New York, from 2002 to 2013, based on the federal law case, Raza v. City of New York, filed by a handful of surveilled Muslim Brooklynites in June 2013 and settled in January 2016 in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York. Nineteenth-century federal and territorial governments perceived Mormon polygamists as disruptive to state sovereignty and cultural uniformity. The Federal Bureau of Information (FBI) was preoccupied with international communist conspiracies permeating domestic networks, including the network of the AFSC. The NYPD applied the anti-terrorism platform of the federal government to its surveillance of Brooklyn Muslims. All three cases forced government agencies to reach some form of judgment about what constituted reasonable religious expression as byproducts of their monitoring systems.

My initial interest in this topic dates back to 2012 when we learned that the New York Police Department had targeted Muslims for surveillance in mosques and public spaces in Newark, Manhattan, and Brooklyn. How, I wondered, could this be explained? Shortly thereafter, I learned about the National Security Agency’s massive PRISM Internet surveillance program, a stark reminder of the scale and scope of government surveillance today. Everything has a history, and I was determined to figure out how the phenomenon of government surveillance has evolved. I decided to focus on the surveillance of religious expression, a realm in which the constitutionally protected right of religious expression intersected with state interest in public morality, counter-subversion, and national security.

This book consequently centers on two research questions. First: What pre-September 11 precedents might there be for government surveillance of religious expression? Was national security historically the primary rationale for the monitoring of religious expression, and has there been a consistent approach to the collecting of information about religious groups deemed subversive to the state? Second: How have government officials distinguished the religious from the secular? What does the history of government surveillance of religious expression reveal about how government officials understood the difference between belief and conduct? Has there been a consistent framework for protecting the separation of church and state and the distinction between the religious and the secular? And what do we mean by the secular? Secularism, as Charles Taylor (2007, p. 53) reminds us, is less the successor to religion than its byproduct. That is, it is itself a product of specifically Western ideas about the sacred and the profane that, as anthropologist Talal Asad (2003, p. 183) has explained, has “accepted the assumptions of liberal discourse.” For this reason, it should not be a surprise that the surveillance of religious expression has proved so contentious since it is embedded in widely shared assumptions about the sacred and the profane.

The evolution in the arenas in which surveillance has occurred – territorial, federal, municipal – has hastened the erosion of the once-robust boundary between constitutionally protected belief and illegal conduct. Therefore, this analysis of the three levels of government surveillance provides a unique lens to understand the targeted nature of surveillance of religion. Officials at each of the three levels (territorial, federal, and municipal) held different concerns and interests, and, therefore, willingly took different steps in surveilling religious expression. Scholarship on surveillance in the United States has focused quite narrowly on the post–September 11 period, twentieth-century New Religious Movements (more problematically referred to as “cults”), or, more recently, twentieth-century FBI surveillance (Johnson & Weitzman, 2017) or either ignored or minimized religion. This book contends that we can better understand present-day developments in surveillance of religion by analyzing how government officials have surveilled religious groups over a longer time span as well as across levels of government. Contrary to what has become conventional among surveillance scholars today, government officials in the pre-September 11 period exerted great effort to understand the religious belief of the groups they were surveilling. In this way, this book offers a corrective to the ahistorical and anachronistic bias that mars so much work on present-day surveillance of religious expression. Surveillance theory has analogous limitations. With much of what I found in this literature, it is not so much that it is right or wrong, but rather that it lacks a framework that locates it in a wider historical context. The beginning and conclusion of this book provide commentary on relevant material in surveillance theory as well as theories of secularism and religion.

Chapters 2, 3, and 4 are each dedicated to one of the three case studies. The final chapter draws from larger themes of secularism and religion across the three case studies and then considers future research on religion, communication, and the state. Whenever possible, I drew on the existing secondary literature to supplement the primary research upon which my study is based. In the Mormon case study, scholarship on polygamy and constitutional conflict proved particularly valuable. For the Quaker case study, I was surprised to discover that not much has been written in recent years on the Quaker-backed American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) – though I did find some valuable monographs on AFSC communication strategy and organizational structure. The Muslim case study, of course, deals with very recent events; here I drew heavily on the government documents, the periodical press, and a bit of participant observation.

My core argument can be put simply. Beginning in the 1870s, the United States government has investigated not only whether certain religious groups were subversive, but also what their members believed. In so doing, it has helped define the boundary between forms of religious expression that were and were not permissible. Over time, the surveillance techniques that government officials relied on to investigate religiously motivated behavior shifted from the monitoring of past conduct to the prediction of future threats. This shift has been hastened by the waning of Protestant cultural hegemony and the shifting locus of authority within the government itself. José Casanova (1994, p. 137) traces the “loss of Protestant cultural hegemony over the public sphere of American civil society” to the “secularization of American higher education” in between the Civil War and the First World War, a period characterized by an urbanized, industrialized, immigrant-driven United States that preempted the beginning years of the second AFSC case study. In addition to the urbanization of this time, Protestantism split into liberal and conservative evangelical factions, and it further split within evangelical Protestantism into White and Black subgroups (Casanova, 1994, p. 138). The paradoxical impact of a waning Protestant hegemonic culture on the protection from government monitoring of religious expression in the public sphere can be further illustrated by Christian Smith (2003), who has argued against the notion that secularization is a byproduct of modernization. Instead, he argues that differentiation in religious culture through the decline of religious authority and the rise of religion privatization ultimately contributes to secularization. Although the decline of Protestant religious authority and the rising religious diversity within a secularizing public sphere (that was provoked by non-religious intellectual elites) presumably would permit religious minorities to emerge, the increasing privatization of religion complicated free religious expression for all actors in the United State public spheres in a different way: by removing religiosity from the public sphere, prompting government officials attempting to monitor said religiosity – as in the case of the Mormons – to instead try to predict actions based on religious belief – as in the case of the Muslims.

Government investigations of Mormonism, Quakerism, and Islam, prompted by concerns about polygamy, communism, and terrorism, affected the conditions for – but did not explicitly transform – religious expression of these monitored groups in their specific political and historical contexts. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints eventually decided to abandon polygamy.¹ The AFSC altered its institutional identity, veering away from its pacifist origins toward an organization that was more radical, political, and legally engaged. The Raza plaintiffs of Brooklyn, as well as many Muslims throughout the United States, adjusted their doctrinal and community practices in response to government surveillance. In other words, government officials probed not just whether subversion existed in these religious networks, but how to define religion. This argument does not suggest that monitoring has served as a causative factor in directly changing religious expression, but it unveils the ways in which government agents have placed religious practices into dialogue with a larger, mutable definition of valid United States religion. A new perspective of religious surveillance in the United States emerges by analyzing how government officials have attempted to understand the religions of the communities they have monitored in response to the ideological threats – in these case studies, of polygamy, communism, and terrorism, respectively.

These three case studies complement the narrative of surveillance in the digital age. Research on the topic of surveillance in the United States often focuses on the late twentieth century and early twenty-first century, and it often employs the phrases “surveillance society” or “surveillance state” to examine the largely twenty-first-century phenomenon of the blurred line between governmental and commercial surveillance. There are many benefits to these approaches to surveillance research, but I demonstrate the significance of pushing back the study of surveillance to periods in which monitoring systems did not rely on big data collection. The phrase “monitoring system” refers to the collection and ongoing analysis of information by government agencies about targeted subjects of interest. Monitoring system is intentionally used instead of surveillance to appropriately characterize the nineteenth-century historical case study, while surveillance system is used in the twentieth- and twenty-first-century case studies. Still, definitions of surveillance are still helpful to understand this phenomenon. Sociologist David Lyon (2001, p. 2) has defined surveillance as “any collection and processing of personal data, whether identifiable or not, for the purposes of influencing or managing those whose data have been garnered.” To delineate a broader lesson for contemporary policymakers, these findings emphasize the need to examine specific communities entangled in government surveillance programs as opposed to offering generalizations about the impact of surveillance on all citizens. This point does not mark members of surveilled religious communities as unequal to their fellow citizens, but it emphasizes the disproportionate impact of government surveillance on certain individuals. As Saba Mahmood (2016, p. 209) has argued, “[T]he principle of religious equality, when the provenance of the state, is subject to majoritarian norms and sensibilities.” The growing inclusion of different religions has created its own tensions within our society about what is or is not religious.

Federal marshals who collected information on Mormon polygamists, for instance, relied on the testimonies and eavesdropping of Mormon neighbors to collect information. Federal marshals, given the difficulties they faced in gathering evidence of polygamous marriages, eventually narrowed their monitoring to Mormon leaders. FBI agents who surveilled the AFSC Quakers in the twentieth century were able to focus on both minor and major members of the AFSC, but they also surveilled specific members based on leads from other government agencies, or based on surveying large gatherings. Even the NYPD targeted specific mosques and community leaders in its surveillance of Brooklyn Muslims, but the instructional manual it provided its officers to detect terrorism among the general Muslim population encouraged a form of mass surveillance.

This book examines how, why, and what kind of information different government agencies collected about religious communities within these distinct time periods, and how the three case studies shed light upon one another. The changing nature of the protection of religion depends on the distinction between legally protected activity and crime, and more subtly, on the evolving boundary of what government agents considered legitimate and illegitimate religious expression. This evolving boundary affected how United States government agencies in distinctive temporal and spatial environments grappled with what beliefs and actions could and could not be protected under the rubric of religious expression. In this regard, I found that what was most interesting or important was not the monitoring techniques themselves, but the ways and lenses that government agents used to discuss the religious group at hand, largely reflective of the parameters for the religious and secular dichotomy in each respective point in time. The diverse contexts of these case studies and parameters for religious-secular frameworks therefore justified organizing the chapters around each individual religious community, rather than around comparisons of the monitoring methods utilized across the three case studies.

Given the complexity of these themes, I chose to employ a historical-comparative method to answer the following question: did events in the past shape the present condition of government surveillance of religious communities in the United States? To fill out my research, I spent a year doing archival work with primary sources. Government documents proved especially revealing, since – as authoritative pronouncements – they can shape directly or indirectly how surveilled religious groups operate in the public sphere. The resulting importance of my research was not merely which media government agents used to collect information, but also how they collected that information. The project therefore transformed into a related but distinctive one: since we cannot explain the history of government monitoring of religious communities with a linear or monolithic narrative, what patterns emerge from these case studies? The answer, I found, was that government agencies in different periods of the United States determined what forms of religious expression were legitimate within United States culture through their monitoring systems. The three monitoring systems provided a window into the shifting role of the government in defining legitimate religious expression when confronted with ideological threats.

Understanding past episodes of religious monitoring can assist contemporary policymakers in refashioning surveillance policies to reconcile the civil liberties of surveilled groups with the public good. Government agencies in the past, despite their unique political and legal environments, shared the challenge of interpreting the unfamiliar religions that they were monitoring. In the case of the Mormons of the Territory of Utah, territorial officials contemplated how to collect information about polygamists who concealed their marriage ceremonies and spouses. Supreme Court justices ultimately acknowledged that polygamy was a religious belief, but they did not offer a legal protection for polygamy in their rulings. In the case of the Quakers of the American Friends Service Committee, Federal Bureau of Information (FBI) agents simultaneously pondered allegations of communism and the extent to which the AFSC subscribed to the beliefs of the Quaker religion. The AFSC’s story is but one of many twentieth-century cases of FBI surveillance of religion that, in the context of twenty-first-century surveillance of Muslims, Sylvester A. Johnson and Steven Weitzman (2017, p. 2) attribute to “the FBI’s long, often tortuous relationship not just with Islam but with religion in general.” In the case of the Brooklyn Muslims, the New York Police Department (NPYD) admitted to surveilling Muslim New Yorkers in Raza v. City of New York, but it did not concede that its surveillance policy was predicated on Islamic affiliation. Yet NYPD officers oftentimes surveilled Muslims without evidence of criminal activity.

The monitoring of religious communities is distinctive from contemporary mass surveillance, whose critics tend to invoke the infringement of privacy. None of the protagonists of these case studies hinged their arguments for religious expression on privacy claims. The mutual protection of religion and public expression by the First Amendment places them, along with religious expression, in the public sphere. As shown throughout the case studies, most explicitly in the Mormon case, the religion clauses of the First Amendment prevent the United States government from interfering with religion, as well as from promoting or favoring a specific faith, but they do not protect religious beliefs in all circumstances. Casanova (1994, p. 135) has noted that the Constitutional dictate that protected citizens from governmental interference in their religious activities, known as the Free Exercise Clause, led to the rapid expansion of Protestant denominationalism. By the 1830s, the main Protestant denominations homogenized, permitting a “transdenominational evangelical crusade” that aimed for cultural hegemony (Casanova, 1994, p. 136). Were it not for the work of Jefferson, Madison, and Virginian Baptists resisting the dominance of three colonial churches – Congregational, Presbyterian, and Anglican – the United States might have become a Christian nation through the establishment of a small handful of religions or the monopoly of one Christian religion (Casanova, 1994, p. 136). The second clause that comprises the freedom of religion in the First Amendment, called the Establishment Clause, prevents Congress from legislating one religion as the established religion and prevents the government from favoring one religion over another. Protestant fundamentalists by the late twentieth century insisted they harbored no desire to violate the Establishment Clause by becoming an established church or the Free Exercise Clause. But, Casa...