Adam Kirsch on a new book that “shows how Nazism and the Ku Klux Klan prompted the American establishment to look beyond longstanding divisions and see Catholics, Protestants, and Jews as kin”:
When you consider how much blood has been spilled over questions of theology, there is something quite wonderful about the way Americans are so eager to give every religion equal credit for good intentions—or even to believe that good intentions are more important than theological correctness. And what is most amazing of all is the way Jews are automatically included in this consensus—in what Eisenhower went on to call “the Judeo-Christian concept.” The very term “Judeo-Christian,” which is now a cliché in American political discourse, represents a healing of a 2,000-year-old breach, an off-hand repudiation of the whole bloody history of Christian anti-Judaism.
When and how did America start to think of itself as a Judeo-Christian country, rather than what it historically has been, a Protestant one? That is the question Kevin M. Schultz asks in Tri-Faith America: How Catholics and Jews Held Postwar America to Its Protestant Promise (Oxford), and he gives a very concrete answer. The change came about in the 1930s and 1940s, thanks primarily to the concerted effort of the National Conference of Christians and Jews, a lobbying and educational group founded in 1927.
May 18th, 2011 | 11:04 am
Another case of historical myopia – - the belief that the the United States did not “get it right” until the 20th century regarding civil rights and civil liberties for all. While there are elements of truth in this account, it is vastly overstated by progressive historians. See for instance President George Washington’s letter of August, 1790:
“To the Hebrew Congregation in Newport Rhode Island.
Gentlemen,
While I receive, with much satisfaction, your Address replete with expressions of affection and esteem; I rejoice in the opportunity of assuring you, that I shall always retain a grateful remembrance of the cordial welcome I experienced in my visit to Newport, from all classes of Citizens.
The reflection on the days of difficulty and danger which are past is rendered the more sweet, from a consciousness that they are succeeded by days of uncommon prosperity and security. If we have wisdom to make the best use of the advantages with which we are now favored, we cannot fail, under the just administration of a good Government, to become a great and happy people.
The Citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy: a policy worthy of imitation. All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship. It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent national gifts. For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.
It would be inconsistent with the frankness of my character not to avow that I am pleased with your favorable opinion of my Administration, and fervent wishes for my felicity. May the children of the Stock of Abraham, who dwell in this land, continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other Inhabitants; while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and figtree, and there shall be none to make him afraid. May the father of all mercies scatter light and not darkness in our paths, and make us all in our several vocations useful here, and in his own due time and way everlastingly happy.”
G. Washington
May 18th, 2011 | 1:34 pm
There’s no question GW and others believed in an ecumenism that transcended orthodox Trinitarian Christianity, and broader understandings of “Christianity” itself. However, “Judeo-Christian” becomes problematic whenever it tries to exclude non-Jews and non-Christians (whether orthodox or not).
George Washington certainly didn’t. I know of at least TWO non-Jew and non-Christian groups Washington believed worship the same God he did.
May 18th, 2011 | 3:57 pm
As Catholics began to arrive in vast numbers to America’s shores in the mid-19th century, their influx created a strain within the public schools. Learning from both Locke and their own Protestant forebears that Catholics could not be good citizens so long as they were “Papists,” the schoolmasters sought to Americanize the new immigrants. The result was predictable. Catholic Americans (and, Feldman could have added, Lutherans and the Dutch Reformed and German Reformed) began to organize their own schools, to educate their children in the context of their own religious doctrines. They also began to argue that if the state had an interest in the education of children, shouldn’t it support these new schools as well? And if the state did not, weren’t Catholics being unfairly taxed for schools they didn’t use?
Meanwhile, evangelicals, liberal Protestants, and Unitarians joined with nativists to insist that government should not support any schools but its own. Tensions led to violent riots in Philadelphia in 1844. As Noah Feldman points out:
“The Bible wars of the mid-nineteenth century did not reflect any particularly deep religious faith on the part of the nativists who took to the streets. The Bible mattered as a symbol of American Protestantism and the republican ideology connected with it…. Loss of control over what was taught in the schools would be evidence of lost control over the public meaning of American life.”
In short, America’s Protestant majority drew a straight line between the basic Protestant idea that all Christians ought to read and reflect upon the Bible for themselves and American citizenship. Catholicism, as they understood it, taught that Christians should listen passively to the educated priestly class and the Church hierarchy. Catholics, for their part, protested that public education was a stalking horse for Protestantizing their children, and sought other means of education. Both sides saw that education was at once a religious and a political thing.
http://www.claremont.org/publications/crb/id.1388/article_detail.asp
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