History of religion in the United States
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The religious history of the United States begins more than a century before the former British colonies became the United States of America in 1776.
Some of the original settlers were men and women of deep religious convictions. That the religious intensity of the original settlers would diminish to some extent over time was perhaps to be expected, but new waves of 18th century immigrants brought their own religious fervor across the Atlantic, and the nation's first major religious revival in the middle of the eighteenth century injected new vigor into American religion.
The result was that many of the people who rose in rebellion against Great Britain in 1776 cited reasons of a religious nature for their actions, and most American statesmen, when they began to form new governments at the state and national levels, shared a conviction that religion was, to quote Alexis de Tocqueville's observation, "indispensable to the maintenance of republican institutions".
The efforts of the founding fathers to find a proper role for their support of religion—and the degree to which religion can be supported by public officials without being inconsistent with the revolutionary imperative of freedom of religion for all citizens—is a question that is still debated in the country today.
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[edit] America as a religious refuge: 17th century
Many of the British North American colonies that eventually formed the United States of America were settled in the seventeenth century by men and women, who, in the face of European religious persecution, refused to compromise passionately-held religious convictions and fled Europe.
The Middle Atlantic colonies of New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Maryland, were conceived and established "as plantations of religion." Some settlers who arrived in these areas came for secular motives—"to catch fish" as one New Englander put it—but the great majority left Europe to worship in the way they believed to be correct. They supported the efforts of their leaders to create "a City upon a Hill" or a "holy experiment," whose success would prove that God's plan for churches could be successfully realized in the American wilderness. Even colonies like Virginia, which were planned as commercial ventures, were led by entrepreneurs who considered themselves "militant Protestants" and who worked diligently to promote the prosperity of the church.
[edit] European persecution
The religious persecution that drove settlers from Europe to the British North American colonies sprang from the conviction, held by Protestants and Catholics alike, that uniformity of religion must exist in any given society. This conviction rested on the belief that there was one true religion and that it was the duty of the civil authorities to impose it, forcibly if necessary, in the interest of saving the souls of all citizens.
Nonconformists could expect no mercy and might be executed as heretics. The dominance of this policy, denounced by Roger Williams as "enforced uniformity of religion," meant majority religious groups who controlled political power punished dissenters in their midst.
In some areas, Catholics persecuted Protestants; in others Protestants persecuted Catholics; in some other areas one Protestant group persecuted Protestants of other groups; and in still others Catholics and Protestants persecuted wayward coreligionists. Although England renounced religious persecution in 1689, it persisted on the European continent. Religious persecution, as observers in every century have commented, is often bloody and implacable and is remembered and resented for generations.
[edit] Puritans
Puritans were English Protestants who wished to reform and purify the Church of England of what they considered to be unacceptable residues of Roman Catholicism. In the 1620s, leaders of the English state and church grew increasingly unsympathetic to Puritan demands. They insisted that the Puritans conform to religious practices that they abhorred, removing their ministers from office and threatening them with "extirpation from the earth" if they did not fall in line. Zealous Puritan laymen received savage punishments. For example, in 1630 a man was sentenced to life imprisonment, had his property confiscated, his nose slit, an ear cut off, and his forehead branded "S.S." (sower of sedition).
Beginning in 1630, as many as 20,000 Puritans emigrated to America from England to gain the liberty to worship as they chose. Most settled in New England, but some went as far as the West Indies. Theologically, the Puritans were "non-separating Congregationalists." Unlike the Pilgrims, who came to Massachusetts in 1620, the Puritans believed that the Church of England was a true church, though in need of major reforms. Every New England Congregational church was considered an independent entity, beholden to no hierarchy. The membership was composed, at least initially, of men and women who had undergone a conversion experience and could prove it to other members. Puritan leaders hoped (futilely, as it turned out) that, once their experiment was successful, England would imitate it by instituting a church order modeled after the New England Way.
[edit] Bible commonwealths
The New England colonies have often been called "Bible Commonwealths" because they sought the guidance of the scriptures in regulating all aspects of the lives of their citizens. Scripture was cited as authority for many criminal statutes, a tradition that still impacts modern state laws.
[edit] Persecution in America
Although they were victims of religious persecution in Europe, the Puritans supported the Old World theory that sanctioned it: the need for uniformity of religion in the state.
Once in control in New England, they sought to break "the very neck of Schism and vile opinions." The "business" of the first settlers, a Puritan minister recalled in 1681, "was not Toleration, but [they] were professed enemies of it." Puritans expelled dissenters from their colonies, a fate that in 1636 befell Roger Williams and in 1638 Anne Hutchinson, America's first major female religious leader.
Those who defied the Puritans by persistently returning to their jurisdictions risked capital punishment, a penalty imposed on four Quakers between 1659 and 1661. Reflecting on the seventeenth century's intolerance, Thomas Jefferson was unwilling to concede to Virginians any moral superiority to the Puritans. Beginning in 1659, Virginia enacted anti-Quaker laws, including the death penalty for refractory Quakers. Jefferson surmised that "if no capital execution took place here, as did in New England, it was not owing to the moderation of the church, or the spirit of the legislature."
[edit] Founding of Rhode Island
Expelled from Massachusetts in the winter in 1636, former Puritan leader Roger Williams issued an impassioned plea for freedom of conscience. He wrote, "God requireth not an uniformity of Religion to be inacted and enforced in any civill state; which enforced uniformity (sooner or later) is the greatest occasion of civill Warre, ravishing of conscience, persecution of Christ Jesus in his servants, and of hypocrisy and destruction of millions of souls." Williams later founded Rhode Island on the principle of religious freedom. He welcomed people of religious belief, even some regarded as dangerously misguided, for nothing could change his view that "forced worship stinks in God's nostrils."
[edit] Execution of Quakers
Mary Dyer first ran afoul of Massachusetts authorities for supporting theological dissenter Anne Hutchinson. As a result Dyer and her family were forced to move to Rhode Island in 1638. Converted to Quakerism in England in the 1650s, Dyer returned to New England and was three times arrested and banished from Massachusetts for spreading Quaker principles. Returning to Massachusetts a fourth time, she was hanged on June 1, 1660.
[edit] Jewish refuge in America
For some decades Jews had flourished in Dutch-held areas of Brazil, but a Portuguese conquest of the area in 1654 confronted them with the prospect of the introduction of the Inquisition, which had already burned a Brazilian Jew at the stake in 1647. A shipload of twenty-three Jewish refugees from Dutch Brazil arrived in New Amsterdam (soon to become New York City) in 1654. By the next year, this small community had established religious services in the city. By 1658, Jews had arrived in Newport, Rhode Island, also seeking religious liberty. Small numbers of Jews continued to come to the British North American colonies, settling mainly in the seaport towns. By the late 18th century, Jewish settlers had established several thriving synagogues.
[edit] Quakers
The Religious Society of Friends formed in England in 1652 around leader George Fox.
Many scholars today consider Quakers as radical Puritans because the Quakers carried to extremes many Puritan convictions. They stretched the sober deportment of the Puritans into a glorification of "plainness." Theologically, they expanded the Puritan concept of a church of individuals regenerated by the Holy Spirit to the idea of the indwelling of the Spirit or the "Light of Christ" in every person.
Such teaching struck many of the Quakers' contemporaries as dangerous heresy. Quakers were severely persecuted in England for daring to deviate so far from orthodox Christianity. By 1680, 10,000 Quakers had been imprisoned in England and 243 had died of torture and mistreatment in jail.
This reign of terror impelled Friends to seek refuge in New Jersey in the 1670s, where they soon became well entrenched. In 1681, when Quaker leader William Penn parlayed a debt owed by Charles II to his father into a charter for the province of Pennsylvania, many more Quakers were prepared to grasp the opportunity to live in a land where they might worship freely. By 1685, as many as 8,000 Quakers had come to Pennsylvania. Although the Quakers may have resembled the Puritans in some religious beliefs and practices, they differed with them over the necessity of compelling religious uniformity in society.
[edit] Pennsylvania Germans
Pennsylvania Germans are inaccurately known as Pennsylvania Dutch from a misunderstanding of "Pennsylvania Deutsch", the group's German language name. The first group of Germans to settle in Pennsylvania arrived in Philadelphia in 1683 from Krefeld, Germany, and included Mennonites and possibly some Dutch Quakers. During the early years of German emigration to Pennsylvania, most of the emigrants were members of small sects that shared Quaker principles—Mennonites, Dunkers, Schwenkfelders, Moravians, and some German Baptist groups—and were fleeing religious persecution.
Penn and his agents encouraged German and European emigration to Pennsylvania by circulating promotional literature touting the economic advantages of Pennsylvania as well as the religious liberty available there. The appearance in Pennsylvania of so many different religious groups made the province resemble "an asylum for banished sects." Beginning in the 1720s, significantly larger numbers of German Lutherans and German Reformed arrived in Pennsylvania. Many were motivated by economic considerations.
[edit] Roman Catholics in Maryland
Although the Stuart kings of England did not hate the Roman Catholic Church, most of their subjects did, causing Catholics to be harassed and persecuted in England throughout the seventeenth century.
Driven by "the sacred duty of finding a refuge for his Roman Catholic brethren," George Calvert obtained a charter from Charles I in 1632 for the territory between Pennsylvania and Virginia. This Maryland charter offered no guidelines on religion, although it was assumed that Catholics would not be molested in the new colony.
In 1634, two ships, the Ark and the Dove, brought the first settlers to Maryland. Aboard were approximately two hundred people. Among the passengers were two Catholic priests who had been forced to board surreptitiously to escape the reach of English anti-Catholic laws. Upon landing in Maryland, the Catholics, led spiritually by the Jesuits, were transported by a profound reverence, similar to that experienced by John Winthrop and the Puritans when they set foot in New England.
Catholic fortunes fluctuated in Maryland during the rest of the seventeenth century, as they became an increasingly smaller minority of the population. After the Glorious Revolution of 1689 in England, the Church of England was legally established in the colony and English penal laws, which deprived Catholics of the right to vote, hold office, or worship publicly, were enforced.
Until the American Revolution, Catholics in Maryland were dissenters in their own country, living at times under a state of siege but keeping loyal to their convictions.
[edit] Virginia and the Church of England
Virginia was settled by businessmen operating through a joint-stock company, the Virginia Company of London, who wanted to get rich. They also wanted the Church to flourish in their colony and kept it well supplied with ministers.
Some early governors sent by the Virginia Company acted in the spirit of crusaders. Sir Thomas Dale considered himself engaged in "religious warfare" and expected no reward "but from him on whose vineyard I labor whose church with greedy appetite I desire to erect."
During Dale's tenure, religion was spread at the point of the sword. Everyone was required to attend church and be catechized by a minister. Those who refused could be executed or sent to the galleys.
When a popular assembly, the House of Burgesses, was established in 1619, it enacted religious laws that "were a match for anything to be found in the Puritan societies." Unlike the colonies to the north, where the Church of England was regarded with suspicion throughout the colonial period, Virginia was a bastion of Anglicanism.
The House of Burgesses passed a law in 1632 requiring that there be a "uniformitie throughout this colony both in substance and circumstance to the cannons and constitution of the Church of England." The church in Virginia faced problems unlike those confronted in other colonies—such as enormous parishes, some sixty miles long, and the inability to ordain ministers locally--but it continued to command the loyalty and affection of the colonists.
In 1656, a prospective minister was advised that he "would find an assisting, an embracing, a comforting people" in the colony. At the end of the seventeenth century the church in Virginia, according to a recent authority, was prospering; it was "active and growing" and was "well attended by the young and old alike."
[edit] Eighteenth century
Against a prevailing view that eighteenth century Americans had not perpetuated the first settlers' passionate commitment to their faith, scholars now identify a high level of religious energy in colonies after 1700. According to one expert, religion was in the "ascension rather than the declension"; another sees a "rising vitality in religious life" from 1700 onward; a third finds religion in many parts of the colonies in a state of "feverish growth." Figures on church attendance and church formation support these opinions. Between 1700 and 1740, an estimated 75-80% of the population attended churches, which were being built at a headlong pace.[citation needed]
By 1780 the percentage of adult colonists who adhered to a church was between 10-30%, not counting slaves or Native Americans. North Carolina had the lowest percentage at about 4%, while New Hampshire and South Carolina were tied for the highest, at about 16%.[1]
[edit] Churches
Churches in eighteenth-century America varied greatly, from the plain, modest buildings in newly settled rural areas to elegant edifices in the prosperous cities on the eastern seaboard. Churches reflected the customs and traditions as well as the wealth and social status of the denominations that built them. German churches contained features unknown in English ones.
[edit] Deism
Deism is a loosely used term that describes the views of certain English and continental thinkers. These views attracted a following in Europe toward the latter part of the seventeenth century and gained a small but influential number of adherents in America in the late eighteenth century. Deism stressed morality and rejected the orthodox Christian view of the divinity of Christ, often viewing him as a sublime, but entirely human, teacher of morality.
Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin are usually considered the leading American deists. There is no doubt that they subscribed to the deist credo that all religious claims were to be subjected to the scrutiny of reason. "Call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion," Jefferson advised.
Other founders of the American republic, such as Ethan Allen and Thomas Paine, were authors of deistic books. George Washington, James Madison, and James Monroe (all Virginians also affiliated with the Episcopal Church there) are often thought to have held deist beliefs, though each was famously quiet about his religious beliefs beyond declarations of faith in a Creator. Though influential, Deists in the United States amounted to only a small percentage of the general population.
Deism also influenced the development of Unitarianism in America. By 1800, all but one Congregationalist church in Boston had Unitarian preachers teaching the strict unity of God, the subordinate nature of Christ, and salvation by character. Harvard University, founded by Congregationalists, became a source of Unitarian training. John Adams and his family attended one of the first Unitarian churches in Massachusetts.
[edit] Great Awakening: emergence of evangelicalism
Evangelicalism is difficult to date and to define. In 1531, at the beginning of the Reformation, Sir Thomas More referred to religious adversaries as "Evaungelicalles." Scholars have argued that, as a self-conscious movement, evangelicalism did not arise until the mid-seventeenth century, perhaps not until the Great Awakening itself. The fundamental premise of evangelicalism is the conversion of individuals from a state of sin to a "new birth" through preaching of the Word.
The first generation of New England Puritans required that church members undergo a conversion experience that they could describe publicly. Their successors were not as successful in reaping harvests of redeemed souls.
During the first decades of the eighteenth century, in the Connecticut River Valley, a series of local "awakenings" began. By the 1730s, they had spread into what was interpreted as a general outpouring of the Spirit that bathed the American colonies, England, Wales, and Scotland.
In mass open-air revivals powerful preachers like George Whitefield brought thousands of souls to the new birth. The Great Awakening, which had spent its force in New England by the mid-1740s, split the Congregational and Presbyterian churches into supporters—called "New Lights" and "New Side"—and opponents—the "Old Lights" and "Old Side." Many New England New Lights became Separate Baptists. Largely through the efforts of a charismatic preacher from New England named Shubal Stearns and paralleled by the New Side Presbyterians (who were eventually reunited on their own terms with the Old Side), they carried the Great Awakening into the southern colonies, igniting a series of the revivals that lasted well into the nineteenth century.
The supporters of the Awakening and its evangelical thrust—Presbyterians, Baptists and Methodists—became the largest American Protestant denominations by the first decades of the nineteenth century. Opponents of the Awakening or those split by it—Anglicans, Quakers, and Congregationalists—were left behind.
[edit] American Revolution
Religion played a major role in the American Revolution by offering a moral sanction for opposition to the British—an assurance to the average American that revolution was justified in the sight of God. As a recent scholar has observed, "by turning colonial resistance into a righteous cause, and by crying the message to all ranks in all parts of the colonies, ministers did the work of secular radicalism and did it better."
Ministers served the American cause in many capacities during the Revolution: as military chaplains, as scribes for committees of correspondence, and as members of state legislatures, constitutional conventions and the Continental Congress. Some even took up arms, leading Continental Army troops in battle.
The Revolution split some denominations, notably the Church of England, whose ministers were bound by oath to support the king, and the Quakers, who were traditionally pacifists. Religious practice suffered in certain places because of the absence of ministers and the destruction of churches, but in other areas, religion flourished.
The Revolution strengthened millennialist strains in American theology. At the beginning of the war some ministers were persuaded that, with God's help, America might become "the principal Seat of the glorious Kingdom which Christ shall erect upon Earth in the latter Days." Victory over the British was taken as a sign of God's partiality for America and stimulated an outpouring of millennialist expectations—the conviction that Christ would rule on earth for 1,000 years. This attitude combined with a groundswell of secular optimism about the future of America helped to create the buoyant mood of the new nation that became so evident after Jefferson assumed the presidency in 1801.
[edit] Anglicans
The American Revolution inflicted deeper wounds on the Church of England in America than on any other denomination because the King of England was the head of the church. Anglican priests, at their ordination, swore allegiance to the king.
The Book of Common Prayer offered prayers for the monarch, beseeching God "to be his defender and keeper, giving him victory over all his enemies," who in 1776 were American soldiers as well as friends and neighbors of American Anglicans. Loyalty to the church and to its head could be construed as treason to the American cause.
Patriotic American Anglicans, loatheing to discard so fundamental a component of their faith as The Book of Common Prayer, revised it to conform to the political realities.
[edit] Continental Congress
While many members of The Continental Congresses and Congress of the Confederation, legislative bodies that governed the United States from 1774 to 1789, were religious Christians, a large number of the more influential members were Deist.[2] The amount of energy that Congress invested in encouraging the practice of religion in the new nation exceeded that expended by any subsequent American national government[citation needed]. Although the Articles of Confederation did not officially authorize Congress to concern itself with religion, the citizenry did not object to such activities[citation needed]. This lack of objection suggests that both the legislators and the public considered it appropriate for the national government to promote a nondenominational, non-polemical Christianity.[3]
The Congress appointed chaplains for itself and the armed forces, sponsored the publication of a Bible[citation needed], imposed Christian morality on the armed forces, and granted public lands to promote Christianity among the Indians. National days of thanksgiving and of "humiliation, fasting, and prayer" were proclaimed by Congress at least twice annually throughout the war[citation needed]. Congress was guided by "covenant theology," a Reformation doctrine especially dear to New England Puritans, which held that God bound himself in an agreement with a nation and its people[citation needed]. This agreement stipulated that they "should be prosperous or afflicted, according as their general Obedience or Disobedience thereto appears." Wars and revolutions were, accordingly, considered afflictions—as divine punishments for sin—from which a nation could rescue itself by repentance and reformation.
The first national government of the United States was convinced that the "public prosperity" of a society depended on the vitality of its religion. Nothing less than a "spirit of universal reformation among all ranks and degrees of our citizens," Congress declared to the American people, would "make us a holy, that so we may be a happy people."
[edit] State governments
Many states were as explicit about the need for a thriving religion as Congress was in its thanksgiving and fast day proclamations. The Massachusetts Constitution of 1780 declared, for example, that "the happiness of a people, and the good order and preservation of civil government, essentially depend on piety, religion and morality." The states were in a stronger position to act upon this conviction because they were considered to possess "general" powers as opposed to the limited, specifically enumerated powers of Congress.
[edit] Nursing Fathers
During the debates in the 1780s about the propriety of providing financial support to the churches, those who favored state patronage of religion urged their legislators, in the words of petitioners from Amherst County, Virginia, in 1783, not "to think it beneath your Dignity to become Nursing Fathers of the Church."
The idea stretched back to the beginning of the Reformation. The term was drawn from Isaiah 49:23, in which the prophet commanded that "kings shall be thy nursing fathers, and their queens thy nursing mothers." The responsibilities of the state were understood in an early work like Bishop John Jewel's Apologie of the Church of England (1562) to be comprehensive, including imposing the church's doctrine on society.
The term "nursing father" was used in all American colonies with established churches. It appeared in the Cambridge Platform of 1648, the "creed" of New England Congregationalism; in numerous Anglican writings; and in the Presbyterian Westminster Confession. By the time of the American Revolution, the state was no longer expected to maintain religious uniformity in its jurisdiction, but it was expected to use its resources for the churches' benefit.
[edit] Church and state debate: Massachusetts
After independence the American states were obliged to write constitutions establishing how each would be governed. For three years, from 1778 to 1780, the political energies of Massachusetts were absorbed in drafting a charter of government that the voters would accept. A constitution prepared in 1778 was decisively defeated in a public referendum. A new convention convened in 1779 to make another attempt at writing an acceptable draft.
One of the most contentious issues was whether the state would support religion financially. Advocating such a policy—on the grounds that religion was necessary for public happiness, prosperity, and order—were the ministers and most members of the Congregational Church, which had been established, and hence had received public financial support, during the colonial period. The Baptists, who had grown strong since the Great Awakening, tenaciously adhered to their ancient conviction that churches should receive no support from the state. They believed that the Divine Truth, having been freely received, should be freely given by Gospel ministers.
The Constitutional Convention chose to act as nursing fathers of the church and included in the draft constitution submitted to the voters Article Three, which authorized a general religious tax to be directed to the church of a taxpayers' choice. Despite substantial doubt that Article Three had been approved by the required two thirds of the voters, in 1780 Massachusetts authorities declared it and the rest of the state constitution to have been duly adopted. Such tax laws also took effect in Connecticut and New Hampshire, and were passed but not implemented in Maryland and Georgia.
[edit] Persecution in Massachusetts
The Salem witch trials may have been pre-Revolutionary intolerance, but Congregationalists publicly harassed Anglicans because it was thought they were Tory spies and "subversives". Baptists were considered "intractable", because they did not share the same Federalizing (willing assimilation) intentions of the Revolution and wanted to be left alone from the New England standard. Generally, dissenting denominations were sidelined and ostracized by the Boston Brahmins; never being allowed entrance to the "in-crowd" and consequently had little influence in regional decisions which affected them. Rhode Island was surrounded by Massachusetts and Connecticut, both entities hostile religiously and politically as well as in matters of the worth of that colony's charter. Both establishments repeatedly nipped at Rhode Island's Baptist independence.
Roger Williams made polemics about the Yankee and Quaker standards as fundamentally hypocritical, but Baptist churches and notable personas did not fare well in the region, so the focus of that denomination relocated further south. Browns of Providence, whose surname was given to the first Baptist university, were torn apart from within by the persecuting zeal of Boston Congregationalists and Philadelphia Quakers making converts of family members. Even though adherents of all denominations (including Sephardi Jews at Touro Synagogue) participated in the slave trade and/or invested in King Cotton to support textile manufacturing, Baptists were targeted as those singularly "guilty" for not being active abolitionists. Massachusetts clergymen perceived that the Antinomianism of Anne Hutchinson influenced Rhode Islanders to condemn slavery as immoral and non-Christian. [1]
Williams's writings and John Brown's associations would later augment Baptist animosity towards the "Carpetbagger" elite, when antebellum tensions driven by Congregationalists like William Lloyd Garrison, John Brown (abolitionist) as well as numerous Quakers and the resulting American Civil War and Reconstruction swelled Baptist churches throughout Dixie. To this day, the only Christian denomination having Northern colonial roots with any weight in the American South is Baptist. [2]
[edit] Church and state debate: Virginia
In 1779, the Virginia Assembly deprived Church of England ministers of tax support. Patrick Henry sponsored a bill for a general religious assessment in 1784. He appeared to be on the verge of securing its passage when his opponents neutralized his political influence by electing him governor. As a result, legislative consideration of Henry's bill was postponed until the fall of 1785, giving its adversaries an opportunity to mobilize public opposition to it.
Arguments used in Virginia were similar to those that had been employed in Massachusetts a few years earlier. Proponents of a general religious tax, principally Anglicans, urged that it should be supported on "Principles of Public Utility" because Christianity offered the "best means of promoting Virtue, Peace, and Prosperity." Opponents were led by Baptists, supported by Presbyterians (some of whom vacillated on the issue), and theological liberals. As in Massachusetts, they argued that government support of religion corrupted it. Virginians also made a strong libertarian case that government involvement in religion violated a people's civil and natural rights.
James Madison, the leading opponent of government-supported religion, combined both arguments in his celebrated Memorial and Remonstrance. In the fall of 1785, Madison marshaled sufficient legislative support to administer a decisive defeat to the effort to levy religious taxes. In place of Henry's bill, Madison and his allies passed in January 1786 Thomas Jefferson's famous Act for Establishing Religious Freedom, which brought the debate in Virginia to a close by severing, once and for all, the links between government and religion.
[edit] Persecution in Virginia
In Virginia, religious persecution, directed at Baptists and, to a lesser degree, at Presbyterians, continued after the Declaration of Independence. The perpetrators were members of the Church of England, sometimes acting as vigilantes but often operating in tandem with local authorities.
Physical violence was usually reserved for Baptists, against whom there was social as well as theological animosity. A notorious instance of abuse in 1771 of a well-known Baptist preacher, "Swearin Jack" Waller, was described by the victim: The Parson of the Parish [accompanied by the local sheriff] would keep running the end of his horsewhip in [Waller's] mouth, laying his whip across the hymn book, etc. When done singing [Waller] proceeded to prayer. In it he was violently jerked off the stage; they caught him by the back part of his neck, beat his head against the ground, sometimes up and sometimes down, they carried him through the gate . . . where a gentleman [the sheriff] gave him . . . twenty lashes with his horsewhip.
The persecution of Baptists made a strong, negative impression on many patriot leaders, whose loyalty to principles of civil liberty exceeded their loyalty to the Church of England in which they were raised. James Madison was not the only patriot to despair, as he did in 1774, that the "diabolical Hell conceived principle of persecution rages" in his native colony. Accordingly, civil libertarians like James Madison and Thomas Jefferson joined Baptists and Presbyterians to defeat the campaign for state financial involvement in religion in Virginia.
[edit] Federal government
In response to widespread sentiment that to survive the United States needed a stronger federal government, a convention met in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787 and on September 17 adopted the Constitution of the United States. Aside from Article VI, which stated that "no religious Test shall ever be required as Qualification" for any public office or trust, the Constitution said nothing about religion. Its reserve troubled two groups of Americans—those who wanted the new instrument of government to give faith a larger role and those who feared that it would do so. This latter group, worried that the Constitution did not prohibit the kind of state-supported religion that had flourished in some colonies, exerted pressure on the members of the First Federal Congress. In September 1789, the Congress adopted the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, which, when ratified by the required number of states in December 1791, forbade Congress to make any law "respecting an establishment of religion."
Like all the presidents after them, the first five Revolutionary War veteran Presidents of the United States were patrons of religion—George Washington was a reverent theist, and often attended Episcopal services with his wife (though he refused Holy Communion.) John Adams once described himself as "a church going animal," though his church was (what would become) Unitarian, not Christian. Both statesmen discouraged religious support at the Constitutional level because of its divisiveness. They confined themselves to promoting religion rhetorically, offering frequent testimonials to its importance in building the moral character of American citizens, that, they believed, undergirded public order and successful popular government. In his Farewell Address of September 1796, Washington called religion, as the source of morality, "a necessary spring of popular government." (The document was largely written, with Washington's approval, by his Catholic friend and former Cabinet member Alexander Hamilton. Washington never actually spoke the address, but simply dropped it off to be published in newspapers.)
Still, the personal religious beliefs of the Revolutionaries were quite complex. Washington, for example, left more than thirty volumes of his diary and public papers, yet they contain not a single reference to Jesus Christ or Christianity as a personal belief. (Or, for that matter, any other religious credo.) Adams's views on religion are much more profuse, and clearly non-Christian, though usually sympathetic to its better natures.
Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, the third and fourth Presidents, were less hospitable to religion than their predecessors, though while in office both gave public displays of religion sporadic support. Both expressed regret for some of these decisions later.
Curiously, the only one of the Founders who ever unequivocably stated that he was a 'Christian' was Thomas Jefferson. In an April 21, 1803 letter to his friend and fellow Revolutionary hero Dr. Benjamin Rush, Jefferson wrote: "I am a Christian, in the only sense he wished any one to be; sincerely attached to his doctrines, in preference to all others; ascribing to himself every human excellence; & believing he never claimed any other." [4] Obviously, Jefferson realized that such a definition of Christ as a great teacher but not a divine, was unacceptable to most Christians, so it was a claim he never repeated in public.
[edit] Constitution of the United States
When the Constitution was submitted to the American public, many "pious people" complained that the document had slighted God, for it contained "no recognition of his mercies to us… or even of his existence." Accommodationists argue that the Constitution may have been reticent about religion for two reasons: first, many delegates were committed federalists, who believed that the power to legislate on religion, if it existed at all, lay within the domain of the state, not the national, governments; second, the delegates believed that to introduce such a politically controversial issue as religion into the federal Constitution would lead to dissension and be a tactical mistake.
Strict separationists would argue that omitting God could hardly have been a mere oversight; the Constitution of the United States was thus clearly intended to be the world's first truly secular document.
Accommodationists counter that by not directly endorsing religion, the Constitution is not necessarily an "irreligious" document any more than the Articles of Confederation was an "irreligious" document. They argue the Constitution deals with the church precisely as the Articles had, thereby maintaining, at the national level, the religious status quo. In neither document, they maintain, did the people yield any explicit power to act in the field of religion. They add further that the absence of expressed powers did not prevent either the Continental-Confederation Congress or the Congress under the Constitution from sponsoring a program to support, even promote a general, nonsectarian Christian Protestantism (e.g., the passage of The Northwest Ordinance, which provided stipends for Christian preachers to exhort the benefits of Christianity to mollify 'savage Indians.'")
Strict separationists would argue that not living up to the promises of the Constitution's lack of religion did not alter its intent. The explicit Constitutional benefits of male suffrage were often refused to African-American males simply because white males were blinded by their own racial prejudice. Religious bigotry was equally prevalent.
[edit] Bill of Rights
Many Americans were disappointed that the Constitution did not contain a bill of rights that would explicitly enumerate the rights of American citizens and enable courts and public opinion to protect these rights from an oppressive government. (Opponents believed it to superfluous because you simply could not name all human rights.) Supporters of a bill of rights permitted the Constitution to be adopted with the understanding that the first Congress under the new government would attempt to add a bill of rights.
James Madison took the lead in steering such a bill through the First Federal Congress, which convened in the spring of 1789. The Virginia Ratifying Convention and Madison's constituents—among whom were large numbers of Baptists who wanted freedom of religion secured—expected him to push for a bill of rights.
On September 28, 1789, both houses of Congress voted to send twelve amendments to the states. In December 1791, those ratified by the requisite three fourths of the states became the first ten amendments to the Constitution.
Religion was addressed in the First Amendment in the following familiar words: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." In notes for his June 8, 1789, speech introducing the Bill of Rights, Madison indicated his opposition to established religion.
[edit] Worship Services on Public Property
Within a year of his inauguration, Thomas Jefferson began attending worship services in the House of Representatives..[5]
Madison also attended these services in the Capitol. Such services in the House—a practice that continued until after the Civil War—were acceptable to Jefferson because they were not necessarily Christian[citation needed], were nondiscriminatory and voluntary. The specific content of these services varied. Some were clearly Christian, others were what would now be considered Unitarian. Preachers of every Protestant denomination appeared. Catholic priests began officiating in 1826.
Throughout his administration, Jefferson permitted worship services in executive branch buildings. These services were also held in the Supreme Court chambers.
Jefferson's actions may seem surprising given his famous belief that there be a "wall of separation between church and state". But much of the modern objection to that formula comes from thinking that 'worship' implies 'Christian worship.' In attending worship services on public property, Jefferson and Madison's actions are often misconstrued by some Christians as a symbolic support for their beliefs, but not others.[citation needed] Jefferson himself faced such religious hostility in his own lifetime. It was one of the reasons he and other Founders supported the separation of church and state.
[edit] The Wall of Separation
In October of 1801, members of the Danbury Baptists Associations wrote a letter to the new president-elect. Baptists, being a minority in Connecticut, were still required to pay fees to support the Congregationalist majority. The Baptists found this intolerable. They wrote that under the existing state constitution: "...religion is considered as the first object of Legislation; and therefore what religious privileges we enjoy (as a minor part of the State) we enjoy as favor granted, and not as inalienable rights: And these favors we receive at the expense of such degrading acknowledgements, as are inconsistent with the rights of freemen."
Clearly, the Baptists were well aware of Jefferson's own unorthodox beliefs and sought him as an ally in making all religious expression a fundamental human right and not a matter of government largesse. Supporting a particular state denomination was no different than supporting a religion.
In his January 1, 1802 reply to the Danbury (Connecticut) Baptist Association Jefferson cited the First Amendment and, in summing up its original intent, coined a now-familiar phrase in today's political and judicial circles: the amendment established a "wall of separation between church and state." Largely unknown in its day, this phrase has since become a major Constitutional issue.
The first time the U.S. Supreme Court cited that very phrase from Jefferson was in Reynolds vs. U.S. in 1878.
Before drafting his letter, Jefferson consulted Postmaster General Gideon Granger of Connecticut and Attorney General Levi Lincoln, Sr. of Massachusetts. Some accommodationists argue that because Jefferson consulted two New England politicians, his reply to the Danbury Baptists can simply be dismissed as a 'political' letter. Strict separationists reply that if the opinions of Thomas Jefferson can be ignored, then the Constitution itself should be ignored.
That the idea of the separation of church and state had widespread acceptance in the United States as early as the 1830s is testified to by Alexis de Tocqueville: "I found that they [clergymen, including several Roman Catholic priests] differed upon matters of detail alone, and that they all attributed the peaceful dominion of religion in their country mainly to the separation of church and state. I do not hesitate to affirm that during my stay in America I did not meet a single individual, of the clergy or the laity, who was not of the same opinion on this point." Democracy in America,1835, Book One Part 3 Chapter 17, Section 6. "Principal Causes Which Render Religion Powerful in America."
[edit] 19th century
The religion of the new American republic was evangelicalism, which, between 1800 and the Civil War, was the "grand absorbing theme" of American religious life. During some years in the first half of the nineteenth century, revivals (through which evangelicalism found expression) occurred so often that religious publications that specialized in tracking them lost count. In 1827, for example, one journal exulted that "revivals, we rejoice to say, are becoming too numerous in our country to admit of being generally mentioned in our Record."
During the years between the inaugurations of Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln, historians see "evangelicalism emerging as a kind of national church or national religion." The leaders and ordinary members of the "evangelical empire" of the nineteenth century were American patriots who subscribed to the views of the Founders that religion was a "necessary spring" for republican government; they believed, as a preacher in 1826 asserted, that there was "an association between Religion and Patriotism."
Converting their fellow citizens to Christianity was, for many Christians, an act that simultaneously saved souls and saved the republic. The American Home Missionary Society assured its supporters in 1826 that "we are doing the work of patriotism no less than Christianity." With the disappearance of efforts by government to create morality in the body politic (symbolized by the termination in 1833 of Massachusetts's tax support for churches) evangelical, benevolent societies assumed that role, bringing about what today might be called the privatization of the responsibility for forming a virtuous citizenry.
In the late 18th century and early 19th century, Bishop Francis Asbury led the American Methodist movement as one of the most prominent religious leaders of the young republic. Traveling throughout the eastern seaboard, Methodism grew quickly under Asbury's leadership into one of the nation's largest and most influential denominations.
[edit] Camp meetings
In 1800, major revivals that eventually reached into almost every corner of the land began at opposite ends of the country: the decorous Second Great Awakening in New England and the exuberant Great Revival in Cane Ridge, Kentucky. The principal religious innovation produced by the Kentucky revivals was the camp meeting.
The revivals were organized by Presbyterian ministers who modeled them after the extended outdoor "communion seasons," used by the Presbyterian Church in Scotland, which frequently produced emotional, demonstrative displays of religious conviction. In Kentucky, the pioneers loaded their families and provisions into their wagons and drove to the Presbyterian meetings, where they pitched tents and settled in for several days.
When assembled in a field or at the edge of a forest for a prolonged religious meeting, the participants transformed the site into a camp meeting. The religious revivals that swept the Kentucky camp meetings were so intense and created such gusts of emotion that their original sponsors, the Presbyterians, as well the Baptists, soon repudiated them. The Methodists, however, adopted and eventually domesticated camp meetings and introduced them into the eastern United States, where for decades they were one of the evangelical signatures of the denomination.
[edit] Emergence of African American churches
Scholars disagree about the extent of the native African content of black Christianity as it emerged in eighteenth-century America, but there is no dispute that the Christianity of the black population was grounded in evangelicalism.
The Second Great Awakening has been called the "central and defining event in the development of Afro-Christianity." During these revivals Baptists and Methodists converted large numbers of blacks. However, many were disappointed at the treatment they received from their fellow believers and at the backsliding in the commitment to abolish slavery that many white Baptists and Methodists had advocated immediately after the American Revolution.
When their discontent could not be contained, forceful black leaders followed what was becoming an American habit—they formed new denominations. In 1787, Richard Allen and his colleagues in Philadelphia broke away from the Methodist Church and in 1815 founded the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, which, along with independent black Baptist congregations, flourished as the century progressed. By 1846, the AME Church, which began with 8 clergy and 5 churches, had grown to 176 clergy, 296 churches, and 17,375 members.
[edit] Mormonism
The origins of another distinctive religious group, the Latter-day Saints (LDS)—also widely known as Mormons—arose in the early 1800s during the "Golden Day of Democratic Evangelicalism." Founder Joseph Smith, Jr., and many of his earliest followers came from an area of western New York called the burned-over district, because it had been "scorched" by so many revivals.
The revivals sparked a strong desire in fourteen-year-old Joseph Smith and his family to unite themselves to one of the Protestant churches exuberantly evangelizing in the area, and the Smith family divided itself among several denominations. Despite a growing affinity for the Methodist sect, Smith resolved to appeal to God for guidance. As a result of his inquiry, Smith claimed to have received a revelation in 1820 in which God called him to restore the early Christian church, which had presumably fallen into apostasy centuries earlier. Smith claimed to have subsequently received a series of revelations from God and visitations from angelic messengers, providing him with ongoing instruction in the execution of his role as a prophet and a restorationist. After publishing the Book of Mormon — which he claimed to have translated by divine power from a record of ancient American prophets recorded golden plates — Smith organized the "Church of Christ" on April 6, 1830.
The church subscribed to many mainstream Christian beliefs but professed distinctive doctrines based on post-biblical revelation. Because of persecution that began with Smith's First Vision, the Mormons moved from New York to Ohio to Missouri to Illinois, where they built up the city of Nauvoo. On June 27, 1844, Smith and his brother, Hyrum, were murdered by a mob. By the winter of 1846, persecution and violence threatened the LDS in Nauvoo.
Under the leadership of Brigham Young, most LDS migrated to Utah to escape persecution. The first pioneer parties arrived in the Salt Lake Valley on July 24, 1847. The church headquartered in Utah is The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church) and is a worldwide denomination with over twelve million members. Some LDS did not migrate to Utah and reorganized its followers eventually under the leadership of Smith's son Joseph Smith III. This group is now known as the Community of Christ and has a membership of about 140,000. Several other much smaller sects are also derived from the Latter-day Saint legacy.
[edit] Benevolent societies
Benevolent societies were an extremely new and conspicuous feature of the American landscape during the first half of the nineteenth century. Originally devoted to the salvation of souls, although eventually to the eradication of every kind of social ill, benevolent societies were the direct result of the extraordinary energies generated by the evangelical movement—specifically, by the "activism" resulting from conversion. "The evidence of God's grace," Presbyterian evangelist Charles Grandison Finney insisted, "was a person's benevolence toward others."
The evangelical establishment used this powerful network of voluntary, ecumenical benevolent societies to Christianize the nation. The earliest and most important of these organizations focused their efforts on the conversion of sinners to the new birth or to the creation of conditions (such as sobriety sought by temperance societies) in which conversions could occur. The six largest societies in 1826-27 were all directly concerned with conversion: the American Education Society, the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, the American Bible Society, the American Sunday-School Union, the American Tract Society, and the American Home Missionary Society.
[edit] Anti-Catholicism
John Highham described anti-Catholic bigotry as "the most luxuriant, tenacious tradition of paranoiac agitation in American history".[6] The bigotry which was prominent in the United Kingdom was exported to the United States. Two types of anti-Catholic rhetoric existed in colonial society. The first, derived from the heritage of the Protestant Reformation and the religious wars of the sixteenth century, consisted of the "Anti-Christ" and the "Whore of Babylon" variety and dominated anti-Catholic thought until the late seventeenth century. The second was a more secular variety which focused on the supposed intrigue of the Roman Catholics intent on extending medieval despotism worldwide.[7]
Harvard professor and historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr. characterized prejudice against the Catholics as "the deepest bias in the history of the American people"[8] and Yale professor Peter Viereck once commented that "Catholic baiting is the anti-Semitism of the liberals." [9]
[edit] Origins
The roots of American anti-Catholicism go back to the Reformation, whose ideas about Rome and the papacy traveled to the New World with the earliest settlers. These settlers were, of course, predominantly Protestant. A large part of American culture is a legacy of Great Britain, and an enormous part of its religious culture a legacy of the English Reformation. Monsignor John Tracy Ellis, in his landmark book American Catholicism, first published in 1956, wrote bluntly that a "universal anti-Catholic bias was brought to Jamestown in 1607 and vigorously cultivated in all the thirteen colonies from Massachusetts to Georgia." Proscriptions against Catholics were included in colonial charters and laws, and, as Monsignor Ellis noted wryly, nothing could bring together warring Anglican ministers and Puritan divines faster than their common hatred of the church of Rome. Such antipathy continued throughout the 18th century. Indeed, the virtual penal status of the Catholics in the colonies made even the appointment of bishops unthinkable in the early years of the Republic.
John Jay in 1788 urged the New York legislature to require officeholders to renounce foreign authorities "in all matters ecclesiastical as well as civil." [3].
[edit] Nineteenth century
Anti-Catholic animus in the United States reached a peak in the nineteenth century when the Protestant population became alarmed by the influx of Roman Catholic immigrants. The resulting "nativist" movement, which achieved prominence in the 1840s, was whipped into a frenzy of anti-Catholicism that led to mob violence, the burning of Roman Catholic property, and the killing of Roman Catholics. This violence was fed by claims that Catholics were destroying the culture of the United States. Irish Catholic immigrants were blamed for raising the taxes of the country as well as spreading violence and disease. The nativist movement found expression in a national political movement called the Know-Nothing Party of the 1850s, which (unsuccessfully) ran former president Millard Fillmore as its presidential candidate in 1856. Similar sentiment was also manifested in the Ku Klux Klan.
In 1834, lurid tales of sexual slavery and infanticide in convents prompted the burning of an Ursuline convent in Charlestown, Mass., setting off nearly two decades of violence against Catholics. The resulting anti-Catholic riots (which included the burning of churches), were largely centered in the major urban centers of the country and led to the creation of the nativist Know-Nothing Party in 1854, whose platform included a straightforward condemnation of the Catholic Church.
By 1850 Catholics had become the country’s largest single religious denomination. And between 1860 and 1890 the population of Catholics in the United States tripled through immigration; by the end of the decade it would reach seven million. This influx, largely Irish and Italian, which would eventually bring increased political power for the Catholic Church and a greater cultural presence, led at the same time to a growing fear of the Catholic "menace." The American Protective Association, for example, formed in Iowa in 1887, sponsored popular countrywide tours of supposed ex-priests and "escaped" nuns, who concocted horrific tales of mistreatment and abuse.
As the nineteenth century wore on animosity waned, Protestant Americans realized that Roman Catholics were not trying to seize control of the government. Nonetheless, fears continued into the twentieth century that there was too much "Catholic influence" on the government, and presidents who met with the pope were criticized.
[edit] Twentieth century
By the beginning of the 20th century, approximately one-sixth of the population of the United States was Catholic. Nevertheless, the powerful influence of groups like the Ku Klux Klan and other nativist organizations were typical of still-potent anti-Catholic sentiments.
During the 20th century, suspicion of the political aims and agenda of the Roman Catholic Church have been revived several times.
In 1928 the presidential candidacy of Al Smith was greeted with a fresh wave of anti-Catholic hysteria that contributed to his defeat. (It was widely rumored at the time that with the election of Mr. Smith the pope would take up residence in the White House and Protestants would find themselves stripped of their citizenship.)
In 1949, Paul Blanshard's book American Freedom and Catholic Power portrayed the Roman Catholic Church as an anti-democratic force hostile to freedom of speech and religion, eager to impose itself on the United States by boycott and subterfuge
As Charles R. Morris noted in his recent book American Catholic, the real mainstreaming of the church did not occur until the 1950’s and 1960’s, when educated Catholics—sons and daughters of immigrants—were finally assimilated into the larger culture. Even so, John F. Kennedy was confronted during his 1960 presidential campaign with old anti-Catholic biases. He eventually felt compelled to address explicitly concerns of his supposed "allegiance" to the Pope. Many Protestant leaders, such as Norman Vincent Peale, publicly opposed the candidacy because of Kennedy’s religion. And after the election, survey research by political scientists found that Kennedy had indeed lost votes because of his religion. Although most historians have argued that Kennedy's election eliminated anti-Catholic bias as a major factor in American life, it should be noted that, while several Catholics have been nominated for President, no Catholic has been elected President of the United States since Kennedy in 1960.
[edit] Twenty-first century
Philip Jenkins, an Episcopalian historian, in The New Anti-Catholicism: The Last Acceptable Prejudice (Oxford University Press 2005 ISBN 0-19-515480-0) maintains that some people who otherwise avoid offending members of racial, religious, ethnic or gender groups have no reservations about venting their hatred of Catholics.
A May 12, 2006, Gallup states that 30% of Americans have an unfavourable view of the Roman Catholic faith with 57% having a favourable view. This is a higher unfavourability rate than in 2000, but considerably better than in 2002. While Protestants and Roman Catholics themselves had a majority with a favourable view, those who are not Christian or are irreligious had a majority with an unfavourable view, but in part this represented a negative view toward all Christianity. The Roman Catholic Church's doctrines, the priest sex abuse scandal, and "idolising saints" were top issues for those who disapproved. On the other hand greed, Roman Catholicism's view on homosexuality, and the celibate priesthood were low on the list of grievances for those who held an unfavourable view of Roman Catholicism. [4] That stated a more recent Gallup Poll indicated only 4% of Americans have a "very negative" view of Roman Catholics. [5]
[edit] Human sexuality, contraception and abortion
Many feminists and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender activists criticize the Catholic Church for its policies on issues relating to human sexuality, contraception and abortion.
[edit] Anti-Catholicism in the entertainment industry
According to James Martin, S.J. the U.S. entertainment industry is of "two minds" about the Catholic Church. He argues that,
On the one hand, film and television producers seem to find Catholicism irresistible. There are a number of reasons for this. First, more than any other Christian denomination, the Catholic Church is supremely visual, and therefore attractive to producers and directors concerned with the visual image. Vestments, monstrances, statues, crucifixes - to say nothing of the symbols of the sacraments - are all things that more "word oriented" Christian denominations have foregone. The Catholic Church, therefore, lends itself perfectly to the visual media of film and television. You can be sure that any movie about the Second Coming or Satan or demonic possession or, for that matter, any sort of irruption of the transcendent into everyday life, will choose the Catholic Church as its venue. (See, for example, End of Days, Dogma or Stigmata.)
Second, the Catholic Church is still seen as profoundly "other" in modern culture and is therefore an object of continuing fascination. As already noted, it is ancient in a culture that celebrates the new, professes truths in a postmodern culture that looks skeptically on any claim to truth, and speaks of mystery in a rational, postEnlightenment world. It is therefore the perfect context for scriptwriters searching for the "conflict" required in any story.
Martin argues that, despite this irresistible fascination with the Catholic Church, the entertainment industry also holds the most obvious contempt for the Catholic Church. He suggests that, "It is as if producers, directors, playwrights and filmmakers feel obliged to establish their intellectual bona fides by trumpeting their differences with the institution that holds them in such thrall."
However, Martin suggests that "it is television that has proven the most fertile ground for anti-Catholic writing. Priests, when they appear on television shows, usually appear as pedophiles or idiots, and are rarely seen to be doing their jobs." The Last Acceptable Prejudice
One group that has energetically brought the question of anti-Catholicism to the fore is the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, an organization founded in 1975 by Virgil Blum, S J. Under the leadership of William Donohue, the Catholic League has organized protests over such entertainment offerings as Nothing Sacred, Priest, Dogma and Corpus Christi. In October 1999 they purchased a full-page advertisement in The New York Times denouncing Vanity Fair magazine for its alleged anti-Catholic slant. The Last Acceptable Prejudice [6]
[edit] Anti-semitism
During the American Civil War Major General Ulysses S. Grant issued an order (quickly rescinded by President Abraham Lincoln) expelling Jews from areas under his control:
The Jews, as a class violating every regulation of trade established by the Treasury Department and also department orders, are hereby expelled …within twenty-four hours from the receipt of this order.[citation needed]
Grant later issued an order "that no Jews are to be permitted to travel on the road southward." His aide, Colonel John V. DuBois, ordered "all cotton speculators, Jews, and all vagabonds with no honest means of support", to leave the district. "The Israelites especially should be kept out…they are such an intolerable nuisance." Nevertheless, when he ran for President in the election of 1868, Grant was able to carry the Jewish vote and appointed several Jews.
Some Jewish traders were forced to relocate forty miles. In Paducah, Kentucky, military officials gave the town's thirty Jewish families — all long-term residents, none of them speculators and at least two of them Union Army veterans — 24 hours to leave. A group of Paducah's Jewish merchants successfully appealed in person to Lincoln two days after the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect.
In the first half of the twentieth century, in the USA, Jews were discriminated against in employment, access to residential and resort areas, membership in clubs and organizations, and in tightened quotas on Jewish enrollment and teaching positions in colleges and universities. The Leo Frank lynching by a mob of prominent citizens in Marietta, Georgia in 1915 turned the spotlight on antisemitism in the United States and led to the founding of the Anti-Defamation League. The case was also used to build support for the renewal of the Ku Klux Klan which had been inactive since 1870.
Antisemitism in America reached its peak during the interwar period. The pioneer automobile manufacturer Henry Ford propagated antisemitic ideas in his newspaper The Dearborn Independent. The radio speeches of Father Coughlin in the late 1930s attacked Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal and the notion of a Jewish financial conspiracy.
In the 1940s the aviator Charles Lindbergh and many prominent Americans led The America First Committee in opposing any involvement in the war against Fascism. During his July 1936 visit he wrote letters saying that there was “more intelligent leadership in Germany than is generally recognized.”
"While I still have my reservations, I have come away with great admiration for the German people. .. Hitler must have far more vision and character than I thought….With all the things we criticize he is undoubtedly a great man…. He is a fanatic in many ways and anyone can see there is fanaticism in Germany today…. On the other hand, Hitler has accomplished results (good and bad), which could hardly have been accomplished without some fanaticism."
America First avoided any appearance of antisemitism and voted to drop Henry Ford as a member for as much. Ford continued his good friendship with the prominent America First member Lindbergh. Lindbergh visited Ford in the summer of 1941. “One month later; Lindbergh gave a speech in Des Moines, Iowa in which he expressed the decidedly Ford-like view that, ‘The three most important groups which have been pressing this country towards war are the British, the Jews, and the Roosevelt Administration.’” In an expurgated portion of his published diaries Lindbergh wrote: “We must limit to a reasonable amount the Jewish influence….Whenever the Jewish percentage of total population becomes too high, a reaction seems to invariably occur. It is too bad because a few Jews of the right type are, I believe, an asset to any country.”
The German American Bund held parades in New York City in the late 1930s which featured Nazi uniforms and flags featuring swastikas along side American flags. The zenith of the Bund's history occurred 1939 at Madison Square Garden. Some 20,000 people heard Bund leader Fritz Kuhn criticize President Franklin Delano Roosevelt by repeatedly referring to him as “Frank D. Rosenfeld”, calling his New Deal the "Jew Deal", and espousing his belief in the existence of a Bolshevik-Jewish conspiracy in America. The New York district attorney prosecuted Kuhn. The US House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) were very active in denying their ability to operate. With the start of the US involvement in World War II most of the Bund's members were placed in internment camps, and some were deported at the end of the war.
Sometimes, during race riots, as in Detroit in 1943, Jewish businesses were targeted for looting and burning.
[edit] See also
- Religion in the United States
- List of U.S. Presidential religious affiliations
- Separation of church and state in the United States
- Freedom of religion in the United States
- First Amendment to the United States Constitution
- Establishment Clause of the First Amendment
- Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment
- Episcopal Church in the United States of America
[edit] References
- ^ Carnes, Mark C.; John A. Garraty with Patrick Williams (1996). Mapping America's Past: A Historical Atlas. Henry Holt and Company, p. 50. ISBN 0-8050-4927-4.
- ^ Mead, Sidney (1963). The Lively Experiment. Harper and Row, 41-47.
- ^ Mead, Sidney (1963). The Lively Experiment. Harper and Row, 41-47.
- ^ From Revolution to Reconstruction: Presidents: Thomas Jefferson: Letters: THE MORALS OF JESUS
- ^ Religion and the Federal Government: PART 2 (Religion and the Founding of the American Republic, Library of Congress Exhibition)
- ^ Jenkins, Philip (1 April 2003). The New Anti-Catholicism: The Last Acceptable Prejudice. Oxford University Press, p. 23. ISBN 0-19-515480-0.
- ^ Mannard, Joseph G. (1981). American Anti-Catholicism and its Literature.
- ^ "No You Don't, Mr. Pope!": A Brief History of Anti-Catholicism in America, A Three Part Series Offered by the Saint Francis University's Catholic Studies at a Distance Program Delivered by Arthur Remillard, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies. Saint Francis University CERMUSA website, retrieved May 2007
- ^ Herberg, Will. "Religion in a Secularized Society: Some Aspects of America's Three-Religion Pluralism", Review of Religious Research, vol. 4 no. 1, Autumn, 1962, p. 37
[edit] Sources
- Sydney Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People, Yale University Press, 1972, ISBN 0-300-01762-6, 2nd edition 2004, ISBN 0-300-10012-4
- Harold Bloom, The American Religion, Simon & Schuster, 1992, ISBN 0-671-86737-7
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