Whose Freedom of Religion?

Abstract

Whose Freedom of Religion? Peter Heinegg Religious Freedom: The Contested History of an American Idea. By Tisa Wenger, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2017. 298 pp. $34.95. In this intellectually original, carefully conceived, cogently argued, but dully written work, Wenger (who teaches American religious history at Yale) surveys the baffling variety of ways the sacrosanct principle of freedom of religion has been used as a tool or weapon in crucial episodes of our history where politics, culture, and race were at least as much the issue as religion. Starting in the late nineteenth century and working through the mid‐twentieth century, Wenger focuses on the role of religious freedom in the U.S. occupation of the Philippines, government interference in ritual practices on Indian reservations, the quest for social acceptance by Catholics and Jews, and the African‐American struggle for equality. To call the concept a double‐edged sword would be an understatement. The American seizure of the Philippines in the wake of the Spanish‐American War might have been (was) an act of naked aggression, but politicians, clergymen, and journalists liked to see it as a Christian liberation of Filipinos from the medieval yoke of Spanish Catholicism. (The same notion applied to Cuba and Puerto Rico.) Of course, given the “infantile” condition of the natives, any real self‐determination would have to be put on hold (until 1946, as it turned out). But turnabout is fair play; and fighters for Philippine independence could claim that, like their white Protestant liberators‐adversaries, they believed in both the unique greatness of Christianity and the separation of church and state. And even traditional Catholics loyal to Rome could stress their superiority to both the Moros (militant Muslims in the south of the country) and pagan peoples. Yet, as with most of the other oppressed groups Wenger has studied, whatever American‐style rights the Filipinos maintained they had were not enough to move their American conquerors. And by stressing religion (the only legal card they had) to the exclusion of other elements of their identity, Filipinos were both misrepresenting themselves and not confronting the massive racism behind U.S. imperialism (but how could they?). Even before this time, American Indians, decimated and robbed of practically everything, were making desperate attempts to hold on to what was left of their native traditions, which included such late developments as the Ghost Dances (whence the catastrophic Battle of Wounded Knee in 1890), the “Shakers” in the Pacific Northwest (unrelated to the New England followers of Mother Ann Lee), and the peyotists (later incorporated as the Native American Church) in the Southwest. But they faced fierce resistance from the committed racists running the all‐powerful Bureau of Indian Affairs; and their invoking of freedom of religion to defend their folkways largely went for naught. What little success they had—at least until FDR's wise appointment of John Collier as head of the B.I.A. in 1934—was won by shaping their ceremonies to resemble Christian worship (and underlying belief) as much as possible. And once again, presenting their cause as wholly religious involved a serious distortion. The classical Enlightenment distinction between the sacred and the profane simply didn't apply to the Indians, whose languages often had no word for “religion” and whose “services” formed part of an all‐encompassing way of life. The most successful saluting the flag of religious freedom took place among Catholics and Jews, though the Jews plainly faced much deeper and more bitter bias. But by the end of World War II, the “tri‐faith” of Protestant–Catholic–Jew had become more or less established as the normal spectrum of religion in America. To fit into this scheme, Jews had to downplay the role of “race” (history, language, and a vast array of customs and habits) in a manner that Zionists, among others, could never be comfortable with. But this adjustment basically worked, as the thousands of panels ever since that feature a team of minister‐priest‐and‐rabbi have demonstrated. (How long will it take before the presence of an imam is also de rigueur?) One downside to this equal status, Wenger insists, is that...