Religious Freedom and Religiously Sanctioned Repression

For generations, Americans passed down a national myth featuring intrepid settlers—Pilgrims and others—seeking refuge and finding religious freedom in the “New World.” By now, even most schoolchildren learn a more complex story, and yet the stale cliché about America being founded by those seeking religious freedom still is reported back dutifully to professors on each opening day of undergraduate classes in American religious history. In recent years, skeptical scholars have highlighted the obverse of this myth. They have stressed how early colonists operated in a fury of conquest, colonialism, and enslavement of Native and African peoples. American religious idealism and greed propelled the expansion of American empire across the West and then abroad. This version of the tale foregrounds Euro-American repression as opposed to a universal human desire for freedom.
Both stories—that of religious freedom, and that of religious repression—can be true, all the more so when they are self-consciously juxtaposed against each other. For example, did the settlers come for religious freedom? That depends on what your definition of “freedom” is. Certainly the settlers sought freedom from religious persecution. At the same time, the Pilgrims, the Puritans, and the Anglicans all designed colonies to exclude or repress those outside their faith. They directed rhetorical blasts at Roman Catholicism, jailed and exiled Protestant dissenters, and executed Quakers. Moreover, they never made the slightest attempt to comprehend that black Africans or New World “sauvages” practiced anything that could be called “religion.” More than anything, the persistence of the myth that early Anglo-Americans were proponents of “religious freedom” in the modern sense—that religion is a matter of individual conscience—enables the continuation of usable national mythologies. Linford D. Fisher explores these stories in “Colonial Encounters.”
More accurately, one might say that many early Americans—English, Spanish, French, Dutch, and others—arrived seeking the right to cultivate purity for them- selves and practice religious intolerance toward others within the bounds of their own habitations. With few exceptions, they believed in eliminating heretics, not encouraging them; they prized religious homogeneity, not pluralism. The Puritans, for example, despised the French Jesuits in Canada and furiously repressed Quakerism; this hardly left any room for sympathy toward Algonquian shamans or African Muslims. Europeans and others quite correctly saw a remarkably diverse world of peoples in North America, but British colonists closer to the scene recognized that de facto diversity was hardly a sufficient condition for tolerance. North America was far too large to support any sort of repressive action emanating from a strong centralized state, but individual localities frequently prohibited or disparaged religious practices that they either detested or misunderstood.
Many settlers came to enact their visions of holy societies. In the early colonial era, religious freedom for Anglo-American settlers as well as French and Spanish priests and colonists meant the ability to set up a religious common- wealth in which a particular set of beliefs would be normative. All other faiths and people were to be converted or else excluded, repressed, or punished. Ironically, it was the very proliferation of these visions that propelled a variety of intolerant early Americans toward the necessity of some religious tolerance. This, of course, did not entail any celebration of diversity for diversity’s sake. The North American landmass was extensive enough geographically to separate Anglicans living out their idea of a “comfortable faith,” Puritans ever-anxious about the fate of their city set upon a hill, Moravians practicing their love feasts and attracting a considerable following of slaves in North Carolina, Jesu- its struggling to missionize in the land of the Iroquois, Franciscans introducing Natives in the Southwest to the Catholic gospel, and Quakers attempting the experiment of something more akin to a modern idea of religious freedom for all—even Indians—in Pennsylvania.
The Enlightenment in America was itself a religiously driven phenomenon in very good measure. It introduced more recognizably modern ideas about the heavy human costs of religious intolerance, and therefore the philosophical and social imperative of understanding religious faith as a compact between the individual and his or her God. When the state established or interfered with religious faith, James Madison and Thomas Jefferson vigorously argued, both religion and the state were harmed. “It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God,” Jefferson famously wrote in Notes on the State of Virginia (1781). “It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” Jefferson and others had only to look to the recent (and ongoing) European religious wars to draw a bloodbath of evidence for their pleas for religious liberty. The views of the founding generation received classic expression in James Madison’s “Memorial and Remonstrance” (a tract arguing against religious tax assessments in Virginia), in Jefferson’s Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom, and finally, of course, in the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

Still, individual states in the new United States could, and did, make laws “respecting an establishment of religion.” New England, for example, was not about to disestablish Congregationalism (the institutional successor to Puritan- ism), even if Anglicans in Virginia were compelled to accept disestablishment and a name change as well, to “Episcopalians.” The First Amendment was about what the federal Congress could and could not do. It did not circumscribe individual states. Nonetheless, the die was cast, and over the next thirty years even the “Standing Order” of Connecticut, the “land of steady habits,” was felled by the ideological ax of religious freedom. The history of religious freedom in constitutional law through this era, and then the application of that history to the rest of American history, is explored further in Frank S. Ravitch’s “Religion and the Law in American History.”
One can find the dialectic of repression and freedom throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Irish Catholics fleeing dire poverty met anti-Irish mobs and nativist parties in mid-nineteenth-century America, as Leslie Woodcock Tentler details in “Catholicism in America.” In an unceasing torrent of publications, Protestants excoriated Catholics as anti-democratic. Early Mormons found the freedom to establish their own commonwealth in the desert, but not before their first generation had experienced relentless persecution, and their founder, Joseph Smith, had been murdered. For more on that and on the early history of Mormonism, see D. Michael Quinn’s chapter, “The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (‘Mormons’).” Later, in the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan carried the American tradition of racist nativism and vigilante terrorism into the “jazz age.” By winning political elections, lynching African Americans, enforcing Protestant customs of morality, and dispatching “poisoning squads of whispering women” to destroy the lives and reputations of those they attacked, Klansmen and -women guarded their vision of an Anglo-Protestant America. Through all this time, as well, millions of immigrants found their way into the United States, and many got what they came for: economic opportunity and personal freedom, including the ability to establish flourishing religious institutions.
African Americans, Mexican Americans, and Native Americans experienced the dialectic of repression and freedom in particularly sharp ways. Perhaps the most fundamental paradox and tension of American religious history is the fault line between religious freedom and democracy, on the one hand, and religiously sanctioned intolerance and repression, on the other. Both arose from American republican providentialism; that which is most honorable, and that which is most execrable, in the dominant story of American religion emerges from the same source. African Americans (and Native American writers and theologians such as William Apess) brought to light this deeply contradictory impulse in American religion, and in American life more generally. Thus the explosively providentialist and universalist rhetoric of the Second Great Awakening emerged alongside works forgotten or submerged or repressed, such as David Walker’s Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World (1829), his cri de couer against the base hypocrisy of American Christianity.
Democratic politics and the rapid rise of populist Christian sects in the early nineteenth century created a new context for American ideas of religion political freedom. The ebullient expressions of popular nationalism and the expansive and millennialist visions of religious groups such as the Methodists were part of a democratic culture that diverged radically from the more deferential and hierarchical cast of American thought and life in prior decades. From the underside of that millennium, however, American ideas of freedom promised universalist visions but delivered a republic that was, in practice, racially exclusivist and white supremacist. That paradox lay at the heart of African American religious thought and practice. Comparing Mark Noll’s essay “Theology” with Edward J. Blum’s contribution, “Religion, Race, and African American Life,” and Suzanne Craw- ford O’Brien’s chapter, “Native American Religions,” makes painfully vivid this point about the racialized nature of American civil and religious freedom. The universalist language of democratic Christianity provided a base for alternative visions of American ideas of freedom. As expressed by James Forten, a free black man from Philadelphia who served in the colonial navy during the American Revolution, the truth that “god created all men equal” embraced the “Indian and the European, the Savage and the Saint, the Peruvian and the Laplander, the white Man and the African, and whatever measures are adopted subversive of the inestimable privilege, are in direct violation of the letter and spirit of our Constitution.” Natives and African Americans alike seized on the universalist languages of Christianity and republicanism. With those two bodies of thought so directly paralleled and mutually reinforcing in American discourse, Natives and African Americans found a means to make race matter in exploiting the connection between religion and American ideas of freedom.
The United States guaranteed constitutionally protected religious freedoms, a legacy of the ideas of the Founding Fathers and Mothers and also the reality of religious diversity in early America. Anglo-Americans created the evangelical synthesis: the deep connection between Protestant belief, individual liberty, republican government, and human freedom. They also fostered a racially exclusivist and religiously restrictive culture that limited the freedom of those defined outside the ranks of the free and the citizen. This remained true during the era when America’s God was a republican and providentialist one (as Mark Noll details further in his essay). American religious history fundamentally has been about this dialectic of religious freedom in the dominant nation-state, the racialization of peoples, and the resulting struggle to forge spaces of freedom and autonomy, often through the creation or preservation of religious customs and institutions. Religious freedom, democracy, and republicanism fostered religiously based repression, as well as the ideological power and universalist language of liberty that emboldened the fight against that repression.