Abstract
During the 1920s and 1930s, the American Committee on Religious Rights and Minorities offered a potent challenge to the view of the United States as a Christian nation. The Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish members of the committee drew on a wealth of interfaith commitments to develop a critique of religious persecution around the world, especially the increasing anti-Semitism across Europe. In an era marked by isolationism, nationalism, and Christian triumphalism, the committee offered a competing vision of pluralist internationalism.
Highlights
During the 1920s and 1930s, the American Committee on Religious Rights and Minorities offered a potent challenge to the view of the United States as a Christian nation
Issuing petitions such as this one represented the principal work of the American Committee on Religious Rights and Minorities (ACRRM), which had been established as an informal working group in 1920 with the initial goal of examining the “status of religious minorities” in the newly independent nations of Eastern Europe
Roman Catholic members of the ACRRM likewise demonstrated a longstanding commitment to a broader idealization of religious pluralism
Summary
What became the American Committee on Religious Rights of Minorities began as a special committee within the Federal Council of Churches, an ecumenical body which, having reaped the benefits of a close relationship with the federal government during World War I, greatly expanded the scope of its work during the interwar period. Within a year of Hitler’s rise to power, the group issued a statement—again, circulated in the press—that denounced as “deplorable” the increasing “persecution of Jewish citizens” in Germany As they had done for over a decade, committee members grounded their critique in assertions of a fundamental right to free religious practice. In its report on the event, the New York Times noted the “closely integrated fight” by members of all three faiths Such language reinforced the degree to which Protestants, Catholics, and Jews were viewed as equal partners in these efforts. Despite the committee’s formation under the umbrella of the Protestant Federal Council of Churches, the Catholic and Jewish representatives were not relegated to second-class status in the group They were fully integrated into the group’s work, so much that the prayer of invocation at meetings rotated among representatives of the three faiths [4]. The ACRRM embodied an expanding understanding of pluralism as it exported its vision to the world at large
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