Religious Intolerance, America, and the World: A History of Forgetting and Remembering

Abstract

john corrigan begins religious intolerance, america, and the world with the premise that the American past has been more characterized by religious intolerance and persecution than by tolerance and harmony, particularly of marginal groups. Even as Americans have “congratulated themselves” (2) on religious freedom as an exceptional ideal in the early republic, “religious violence came early and often as colonial New Englanders executed a series of devastating military campaigns against Native Americans” (3). Protestants later turned their persecutions to other undesirable religious minorities, including Catholics and Latter-day Saints.This is also more than a religious history: it is a history of remembering and forgetting the trauma of religious violence. Corrigan characterizes Americans’ periodic and persistent lapses in religious toleration as examples of forgotten memory because “their religious violence and all that it implied was too painful to face” (3). This is a history of how America's Protestant majority influenced US international relations to protect Christians living overseas from religious intolerance, even while forgetting their own intolerance at home. Thus, Corrigan is trying to show how “identity, memory, trauma, international relations, and religious intolerance” are interrelated (2).Corrigan's 2010 documentary collection Religious Intolerance in America (edited with Lynn S. Neal) brought together a wide array of sources on religious intolerance. The 2020 edition added fresh material on what he calls the “Christian persecution complex,” plus Islamophobia, White nationalism, and social-sexual politics in today's America, with much of that research informing Corrigan's new and important exploration of religious intolerance.1Corrigan's narrative culminates with a look at more recent tensions over religious intolerance in America. Mobilized Protestants on the Religious Right have deflected attention away from their exclusionary attitudes against mostly Muslim refugees and immigrants by focusing on a perceived “War on Christianity,” in which evangelicals consider themselves the primary targets of persecution in a morally ambiguous society. The victimizers have become victims. By forgetting that majority Protestants have persecuted other minority religions throughout American history, they have reinvented themselves as modern martyrs of a secular culture war against Christianity. Corrigan's unique stamp on this theme is to show the “oppressed Christian” narrative not as a recent anomaly but as a culmination of a long history of Protestants proclaiming their persecuted status, selectively erasing those events that “do not conform with familiar, comfortable, and inspiring narratives of national achievement” (7).“Proscribing Amalekites,” chapter 1, examines how colonial Americans framed English-Indian conflicts as righteous Children of Israel versus evil Amalekites. Corrigan has thoroughly mined early political, religious, and cultural commentary to show how the Amalekite trope was commonly used to justify religious and racial intolerance, and even served as a “shorthand for an ideology of genocide” (41–42) against Native Americans, but also with calls to “exterminate” Catholics and Mormons, which meant “destroying their traces in collective memory—forgetting them” (44). The use of “blotting out” showed intentions of the erasure of unsavory groups, but also of memories of their existence. For Protestant Americans, that meant eradication of their own role in those events.But Corrigan argued that in forgetting, the “agents of genocide” continue to remember, because “national identity is shaped by the remembering of trauma alongside the unwillingness to remember” (54). Thus, by forgetting the trauma of religious violence, Americans instead turned to “projecting the violence overseas” by seeking out anti-Protestant persecution in other nations (55).2In chapter 2, “Projections,” Corrigan discusses how Americans celebrated religious liberty while also fearing the loss of it, especially as this loss might affect Protestants, who then turned their accusations of sectarian bigotry toward Catholics and Mormons. Typically associated with secrecy, heresies, and treason, Catholics were accused of “conspir[ing] to overthrow Protestant authority and American democracy” (61). It is noteworthy that while the perceived threat of a global Catholic conspiracy drove the creation of the Know Nothing Party—itself a contradiction because of the requirement of secrecy among party membership—anti-Mormonism became embedded in the official platform of the Republican Party itself. Anti-Catholic feeling led to violent attacks on churches, seminaries, and convents in places like Boston, Philadelphia, New Orleans, and Galveston in the 1830s and ’40s. As these episodes darkened America's claims to religious tolerance, Protestants turned their attention to uncovering intolerance against American missionaries in Burma, China, India, Siam, Persia, Turkey, and even Europe. They feared a worldwide papal state centered in Spain, Portugal, and Austria, and extending to young South American republics, nations that Americans believed could never succeed under Catholic domination.Perhaps it goes without saying that episodes of intolerance against missionaries in colonized areas all over the world represented those local civic authorities’ rejection of American imperialist ambitions. It went a bit understated that Americans seemed unable to recognize the inherent contradiction of sending missionaries abroad for zealous proselyting efforts while demanding native citizens’ tolerance of their own religious colonization. This chapter would also have benefitted from a further exploration of how Americans viewed Mormons not only as religiously other but also as a threat to American democracy. As historian Benjamin E. Park has shown, beyond the religious prejudices Corrigan highlights, both Catholics and Mormons were suspect groups whose governance and leadership structures ran counter to republicanism in the antebellum period. Whether it was Catholics’ insistence upon the use of ecclesiastical intervention to defend their own group mobilization, or Mormons’ use of bloc voting at the direction of Joseph Smith—who also proposed a theocratic government called the Council of Fifty—both groups sought greater “social cohesion through religious authority” in order to redeem the American nation.3Americans continued to identify and interfere in Catholic threats overseas, where they demanded religious freedom for their own citizens. These efforts culminated in treaties that outlined religious protections for Americans abroad, demonstrating their “aspirations to be a place where religious freedom is everywhere implemented and respected” (99). The 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ending the Mexican War demonstrated these ideals by including broad guarantees of religious freedom for Mexican Catholics who were new US citizens. But for Corrigan, Mormons’ exile to the Great Basin “abetted Protestant understanding of them as inhabitants of a foreign land” (107).In the nineteenth century, narratives that celebrated the triumph of religious liberty obscured past records of religious intolerance. Corrigan describes this phenomenon in his chapter “Protections.” This especially applied to the complicated history of Puritans, who could be criticized for their religious excesses while also receiving a pass for living in a “faraway place” that “did not know about religious freedom” (117). Like other episodes of American amnesia, the self-congratulations about religious freedom became a “means of forgetting the trauma of religious violence, a fact too hard to remember” (113). This left me questioning whether the Salem Witch Trials have been “forgotten” as a culmination of a long trajectory of Puritan intolerance, or just “remembered” as an anomaly in a history of general piety and goodness.America's move to post–Civil War internationalism directed economic investment into Cuba, Mexico, and other areas, which brought renewed interest in evangelizing the peoples living in these nations away from Catholic intolerance and dominance. The Monroe Doctrine, which started as a treaty of neutrality for preventing foreign interference in the Americas, became by 1912 a justification for unilateral American interference in those same places, but with Protestant religious ambitions attached to it (124).Corrigan mentions only briefly the World's Parliament of Religions of 1893 as a moment of hope for Protestantism to promote religious toleration worldwide (139). But the Parliament deserves closer attention as a key event in nineteenth-century American aspirations, where the pretenses of religious tolerance and pluralism espoused by the Protestant establishment benefitted only mainstream religions and a few marginal groups, while falling far short for Latter-day Saints. Catholics received some inclusion on the Parliament board; Native Americans and Africans were barely represented, but “the LDS Church . . . was the single American religious group that was completely denied the promised hospitality from the beginning.”4 The reason given to church representative B. H. Roberts for this denial was that “the Church did not qualify as a ‘religion,’ largely because of its practice of plural marriage.”5In “Pursuits,” chapter 4, Corrigan considers White Anglo-Saxon Protestantism following World War II as America turned its attention to the threat of Soviet expansion abroad. Protestant plans for world conversion found a place within the emergent Cold War because “World Christianity” would save Christians from Soviet atheist domination. Because of an international and domestic threat of “Godless Communism,” American Protestants successfully projected their fears of religious intolerance onto the Soviet Union and other Communist regimes who sought the outward persecution and eradication of Christianity. American domestic policy also reacted to internal fears that atheism would always follow Communist sympathizers and infiltrators.Differences between Protestants, Catholics, Jews, and even Mormons melted away as they joined forces against the shared enemy of pernicious and Satanic Soviet atheism. Two key figures would have nuanced Corrigan's discussion of how anti-Communism and religious toleration met in the new terrain of the Cold War. First, Latter-day Saints were helped along on their path toward religious—or at least cultural—acceptance by the Religious Right because of their high-profile church apostle Ezra Taft Benson, who served as President Eisenhower's secretary of agriculture from 1953 to 1961. He was staunchly anti-Communist, politically ultraconservative, and a religiously devout and patriotic family man who embodied most of the values of conservative America.6 And second, John F. Kennedy's victory as America's first Catholic president in 1960 indicated some softening of anti-Catholic fears of a papal state in the US. Still, most evangelicals maintained their prejudices against Mormons, Catholics, Asians and New Age religions, and any other perceived cult-like group as threats to Protestants’ design for world Christianity.The final chapter is on “Persecutions.” Emboldened by passage of the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998, which was “first and foremost a program to identify overseas sites of religious intolerance” (5), Protestants in the late-twentieth and twenty-first centuries once again rallied to identify acts of persecution against Christians at home and abroad. As American Christians have identified themselves among persecuted Christians in other parts of the world, they have inserted themselves as joint victims in a global war on Christianity.What is missing from this discussion is how Latter-day Saints have positioned themselves in this larger shift by aligning with evangelical (and Catholic) positions on abortion, birth control, and the defense of traditional marriage.7 And as Paul Reeve has argued, even efforts to reclaim their Whiteness and identity as mainstream Americans has been done in part due to earnest but often unsuccessful efforts to gain acceptance by the Religious Right. Perhaps the clearest example of this courtship is how Mormon leaders have enthusiastically joined the campaign against the perceived decline of religious freedom in America. By claiming joint status as “persecuted Christians” with their former persecutors, Mormons have carried out their own exercise in forgetting the past of religious intolerance in America.