John Corrigan, Religious Tolerance, America, and the World: A History of Forgetting and Remembering

Abstract

Reviewed by: Religious Tolerance, America, and the World: A History of Forgetting and Remembering by John Corrigan Jeffrey I. Israel John Corrigan, Religious Tolerance, America, and the World: A History of Forgetting and Remembering (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020) John Corrigan’s Religious Tolerance, America, and the World addresses a fascinating and important question about Protestant Christian politics in the United States: How have Protestants managed the dissonance between Christian violence in American history and the cherished myth of the United States as a paragon of “religious tolerance”? In order to preserve this myth, Corrigan argues, American Protestants have repressed the trauma of their own historical participation in Christian violence and projected the intensity generated by this repression abroad. Such projection is evident, Corrigan claims, in foreign policy initiatives ostensibly intended to fight religious intolerance in other countries. Corrigan is most persuasive where he identifies related dynamics at work among twenty-first century evangelical Christians in the US. Many evangelicals today are passionate advocates on behalf of persecuted Christians abroad. Corrigan suggests that this advocacy is integrally related to the sense among some American Protestants that they too are persecuted Christians, now living in a secular America that has abandoned its once cherished ideal of religious tolerance. Religious Tolerance, America, and the World invites readers to appreciate the irony of this sense of persecution and loss, given that Protestant Christians have been responsible for so much persecution and intolerance in US history. [End Page 124] Corrigan covers a broad span of history with erudite, masterfully crafted chapters on early America, the antebellum period, the later nineteenth century, the Cold War, and the twenty-first century. Each chapter presents a rich world of intra-Protestant debates about the meaning of violence and persecution at home and abroad. Each is well worth reading as a window into particular moments of Protestant Christian political activism in the United States. However, while each chapter can serve independently as a thought-provoking historical vignette, I find the overarching argument meant to tie these vignettes together less compelling. The problem starts with the idea of “religious intolerance.” Corrigan relies on this idea in order to tell a single story over the many centuries of US history that he covers. Each historical vignette featured in the book is meant to represent a case of religious intolerance, or the repression of memories of religious intolerance, or the projection of the idea of religious intolerance abroad. Insofar as each case is a case of the same thing (i.e., religious intolerance or the repression of its memory), Corrigan can connect them into a chain of repressed collective memories of religious intolerance transmitted from the seventeenth century to the twenty-first. What is more, for the overarching argument to work, each case must be a case for a singular collective that maintains sufficient continuity over this span of time. In the argument of the book, this is “America,” understood as a nation. Unfortunately, by insisting that his cases cohere as a very general story about the collective memory of “religious intolerance” repressed by the “American nation,” while in fact telling a very particular story in which Protestant Christians are the clear protagonists, Corrigan reinforces the idea that America is essentially the Christian nation that his Christian protagonists so often take it to be. This is jarring in a book that calls so forcefully for Protestant Christians in America to confront a repressed history of intolerance. Likewise, Corrigan misses an opportunity to show how categories like “religious intolerance,” “religious freedom,” and “religious liberty” emerge as distinctively meaningful at different times and places in US history as a product of Christian political discourses, designed to serve particular Christian political interests. By writing, instead, as though these ideas have a clear, stable, and generically “religious” meaning across US history, Corrigan reinforces the project of Christian activists who operate under the cover of a disingenuously general idea of “religious freedom,” which is in fact contrived precisely to promote particular Christian interests. These problems could have been avoided. Corrigan recognizes the historical and theological embeddedness of “religious freedom” as it has been deployed in the United States. And he is familiar with recent scholarship...