Tolerance to Diversity to Pluralism

North America was one of the most diverse religious societies in the world in the colonial era, as Linford D. Fisher details in “Colonial Encounters.” French Jesuits interacted with powerful Iroquois bands; Spanish Franciscans were more or less powerless to stop Puebloans in New Mexico, including Christianized as well as “heathen” Indians, from practicing kachina dances and other ceremonials of their heritage; Anglicans in Virginia and South Carolina sent out missionaries to preach the gospel to enslaved Africans who came from a diverse variety of religious backgrounds, ranging from Islam to Catholicism to tribal faiths; Protestants of all sorts in Pennsylvania interacted both peacefully and violently with Natives, who often used Christian intermediaries to try to protect their dwindling land base; Puritans in New England leveled charges against “popery” as Catholics in the originally Catholic colony of Maryland found themselves as minorities even in their own world; and Natives from hundreds of different tribes pursued richly di- verse religious practices that differed from one another as much as from European forms. European observers, most famously the philosophe and wit Voltaire, saw in America, especially among the Quakers in Pennsylvania, a peaceable kingdom of diverse peoples and faiths living in harmony.
Voltaire’s idea was not totally imaginary. Compared with many places, notably Europe, colonial North America appeared as a thriving ecosystem of religious profusions shooting up everywhere. Yet one must not date pluralism too early on American soil. Coexistence did not mean mutual understanding, and contact created conditions for causus belli more so than pax Americana. Whatever its primary economic and political motivations, the entire colonial project was shot through with religious justifications, including the conquering of Native peoples and the exponential growth of the trade in slaves.
Yet if homogeneity was the ideal, heterogeneity was the real. De facto diversity meant that tolerance existed simply because there was little other choice. Thus America’s heritage of religious freedom became a reality on the ground before it arose as a philosophical or theological position. William Penn’s vision for Pennsylvania—as a refuge for men to live peaceably, worship as they wished, and get along with the Natives who had been there for centuries already—was the first real expression of a diversity that was not just grudgingly tolerated but actively promoted. It worked better in theory than in practice, but even in its imperfect practice it appeared to some European intellectuals, such as Voltaire, as paradisiacal in contrast to the horrendous European religious wars of the seventeenth century. As in so many other cases in American history, the very success of the experiment in Pennsylvania inevitably engineered its demise. As European settlers (especially Germans, with their variety of Anabaptist faiths, and Scots-Irish, with their revivalistic Presbyterianism) moved westward from Philadelphia into the backcountry, tensions grew. As early as 1737, the famous Delaware “Walking Purchase” presaged an era of treaty scams that invariably defrauded and therefore embittered the Natives. By the era of the American Revolution, Paxton’s Boys and similar bands were terrorizing Natives in the countryside. This vigilantism culminated in the massacre at Gnadenhutten (in Ohio Territory) in March 1782. In a spasm of ethnic cleansing that set the stage for many more instances of the same to come, white back countrymen slaughtered about ninety Delaware Indians who had been converted by the Moravians and moved to a “safe” town. The Delawares had already evacuated the village in the previous year, but had returned to harvest their crops when they were seized. Enraged by the massacre of two whites nearby earlier, the white band, led by Captain David Williamson, wielded their mallets and systematically crushed the skulls of their Indian victims, including thirty-nine children.
In the confusing world produced by the “Great War for the Empire” (1754– 1763, formerly known as the French and Indian War, and sometimes now called the first world war), and then the American Revolution, religious and ethnic conflicts accompanied the territorial shifts toward Anglo-American dominance. Over time, the multicultural world of colonial America gave way to an Anglo-American state with various groups—French, Spanish, Indians, and others—adapting to its power. For the Anglo-Americans as well as other Europeans, “tolerance” meant the necessity of living on the same continent, and occasionally in the same neighborhood, with a proliferating variety of Protestant sects and with Anglicans and Catholics. In the minds of white settlers, this was a remarkable feat in and of itself. It was also a social reality that made the disestablishment of religion necessary, inevitable, and fruitful. What looks to us like Protestant homogeneity through much of the colonies, in other words, struck contemporaries as an amazing religious diversity. By the late eighteenth century, enlightened thinkers and even many plain-folk Americans were coming to see diversity among Christians as a strength rather than a violation of God’s will that might implode on itself.
This was not “diversity” in our modern sense of the word, and certainly not pluralism. Diversity in a more contemporary sense was yet another accident of American history, deriving largely from homeland miseries and immigration opportunities that sucked in people from all over the world. Irish Catholics fleeing English oppression and the potato famine significantly “Catholicized” the American population beginning in the 1830s and 1840s, and their presence was augmented by a massive European Catholic and Jewish immigration from the 1870s to the 1920s—Poles, Italians, Catholic Germans, Hungarians, Czechs, Russian and eastern European Jews, and a multitude of other European nationalities. The waves of Catholic immigration in the nineteenth century were met with the usual strident attacks on their alleged inability to assimilate to republican ideals, their purported slavish obedience to the pope, their assumed inferior ethnic stock, and their supposed love of drink and hatred of work. Protestants developed their ideas of the “wall of separation” of church and state—a phrase originally coined by Jefferson in a letter to a Connecticut Baptist association in 1802, and promptly forgotten until revived by Protestant nationalists in the mid-nineteenth century— largely to combat what they perceived as a Catholic threat to the public school system. And still the Catholics came, permanently altering the religious and cultural landscape. And once again, Protestants acceded to reality.
In the twentieth century, far from being unassimilable, Catholics staunchly supported many of the most conservative forms of “Americanism,” as seen especially by Catholic support for Father Charles Coughlin’s nationalism in the 1930s and Joseph McCarthy’s anti-Communist campaigns in the 1950s. By the late twentieth century, it was secular liberals rather than Protestant conservatives who most often expressed fears about Catholicism in the intellectual imagination, most notably in Paul Blanshard’s American Freedom and Catholic Power (1949), which warned of the deleterious and pervasive Catholic influence over American institutions. Two years later, Blanshard, an editor at the liberal publication the Nation, extended his analysis in Communism, Democracy, and Catholic Power (1951), which argues that the Kremlin and the Catholic Church were organized on the same tyrannical principle.
Diversification of American religion was not limited to Irish Catholic immigration, of course. Later in the nineteenth century, eastern European Jews, southern and eastern European Catholics, Mexican and South American Catholics, Chinese men and women of various religious faiths, and Japanese Buddhists came to America in a mammoth wave of immigration (counting nearly 25 million people total) from 1870 to 1920. As usual, they were met with suspicion and considerable hostility for their exotic ways and strange (by American Protestant standards) faith practices; as usual, the reality of population shifts and migration trends eventually overwhelmed the increasingly defensive rhetoric about preserving a Protestant America. For the most part, immigrants set about constructing and preserving their own religious institutions regardless of the relentless assault on their foreign ways. Even in doing so, they nevertheless eventually wove themselves into the American fabric. By the early twentieth century, intellectuals such as Herbert Croly (author of The Promise of American Life [1909]) and literary critic Randolph Bourne celebrated an America beyond the melting pot that looked surprisingly like a modern understanding of pluralism, what Bourne famously called “Trans- national America.”
If tolerance came about fitfully and accidentally in the eighteenth century, and increasing diversity was a hallmark of the American religious landscape in the nineteenth century, then pluralism was the paradigm for the latter half of the twentieth century. Once again, the unceasing turmoil of population movements across the globe and onto American shores shattered long-cherished assumptions held by white Protestants about the necessary connection of Protestantism and Americanism. While the National Origins Act of 1924 (which enforced a quota system on immigration allotments per country, with the vast majority going to the British islands and northern European countries) gave one last final push toward realizing an ideal of America as a white, northern European, largely Protestant republic, the Immigration Act of 1965 has spurred a dramatic pluralizing of the American population over the past forty years. In 1955, Will Herberg’s Protestant, Catholic, Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology pointed out that the classic theological and sociological divisions between these major religious traditions had gradually been swallowed up by a larger tide of Americanism. Herberg himself could hardly have foreseen how limited and provincial the title of that work now appears, with the advent of large-scale immigration from South and South- east Asia, China, Africa, the Caribbean, the Middle East, South America, and other parts of the world.
More recently, sociologist Robert Wuthnow has shown that religious divisions formerly based on animosities between Catholics and Protestants, and between contending versions of Protestantism, have transformed into cross-denominational “liberal” and “conservative” religious groupings. Conservative Protestants, Catholics, Jews, Mormons, and Muslims have more in common with one another, by this interpretation, than do, say, liberal and conservative Presbyterians. Religious groupings thus increasingly reflect a philosophical split between progressive and conservative ways of viewing the world. Nonetheless, the old sectarian divisions have little substantive meaning for most Americans, who accept the premises of religious pluralism and (inaccurately) read those backward into the American past. Nowhere is that anachronistic way of thinking more evident than in examining the painful legacy of racialized religion in American history.