Religious Freedom: The Contested History of an American Ideal

by Tisa Joy Wenger

Religious freedom is so often presented as a timeless American ideal and an inalienable right, appearing fully formed at the founding of the United States. That is simply not so, Tisa Wenger contends in this sweeping and brilliantly argued book. Instead, American ideas about religious freedom were continually reinvented through a vibrant national discourse--Wenger calls it "religious freedom talk--that cannot possibly be separated from the evolving politics of race and empire.

More often than not, Wenger demonstrates, religious freedom talk worked to privilege the dominant white Christian population. At the same time, a diverse array of minority groups at home and colonized people abroad invoked and reinterpreted this ideal to defend themselves and their ways of life. In so doing they posed sharp challenges to the racial and religious exclusions of American life. People of almost every religious stripe have argued, debated, negotiated, and brought into being an ideal called American religious freedom, subtly transforming their own identities and traditions in the process. In a post-9/11 world, Wenger reflects, public attention to religious freedom and its implications is as consequential as it has ever been.

Genres: Religion, Nonfiction, History, American History, Academic

312 pages, Hardcover

First published August 1, 2017

Reviews

[Karis · Rating 4 out of 5]

man am i lucky to work with tisa

[Michael Nichols · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wenger examines how the concept of religious freedom was wielded by various groups, but especially by the US government over the course of the twentieth century. She basically demonstrates that “religious freedom” was frequently tailored to a white, Protestant (of a kind) religion. Whenever other groups tried to retain it – Muslim Moros, Filipino Catholics, Native Americans, African American religious movements – they were denied legitimacy, or the form of their religion fundamentally shifted in an individualistic direction and adopted a modern sacred-secular dichotomy. Jews and American Catholics were also once religious outsiders in the US, but they were able to position themselves as safe democratic subjects, and so successfully appealed to religious freedom rights. Unfortunately, these groups then came to be seen as “white,” which only hardened the boundary lines between white America and other racial/religious minorities.

[Douglas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Most people in the U.S., when they hear "religious freedom" or "religious liberty," will think of the right to believe and practice their religion without encumbrance by the civil authority. And that is inherent in the civil right we understand to be addressed in the First Amendment. However, in this magnificent critical study of religious freedom at the end of the nineteenth, beginning of the twentieth century, Tisa Wenger has demonstrated that "religious freedom," precisely as codified in the First Amendment, has contributed remarkably to U.S. imperialism/colonialism and the construction of the white racial identity. More particularly, perhaps, I should say the construction of a white Protestant racial identity.

Showing exceptional command of her historical source material, Wenger examines the intersectionality of ethno-racial, religious, and national identities under the watchful and exploitive eye of white American Protestant religion during a time in this country when the dominant form of Christianity was its evangelical Protestant tradition embraced expansively among European-Americans. Her case studies of this phenomenon range across American imperialism in the Philippines and the quashing of indigenous religious traditions and their development in the U.S. Equally subject to her historical-critical analysis are the emergence of Jewish identity in the era between World Wars I and II, and the whitening of Catholics and Jews in the emergence of the American troika of Protestant, Catholic, and Jew. Her final case study is the inception of ethni-religious movements in the African American community, such as the historic African American denominations, the United Negro Improvement Association, and the Islamic traditions of the Moorish Science Temple and the Nation of Islam. In all these cases, Wenger demonstrates how these religious communities and their unrelenting appeal to the codification of religious freedom advanced their right to practice their religion in the face of white Protestant opposition.

This is not a history of racism. Rather, it is a history of religious freedom wherein contested religious identities appealed to religious freedom to advance their cause, and members of the dominant ethni-racial and religious group suppressed these identities because there were perceived to be neither white, Christian, or Protestant. This book is a study of the imperialist and racist ways in which white Protestant Americans contributed to twentieth-century racism.

[Sam · Rating 5 out of 5]

dang this was so good. wenger does an exceptional job at the difficult task of showing how racial, colonial, gendered, and religious ideologies have coalesced in US history to produce a very distinct and narrow understanding of “religious freedom,” and how minoritized people have struggled to make this concept more capacious.

[Rachel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fabulous account of the often-neglected developments between 1900s and 1960s in the "religious freedom/tolerance" discourses, including how inseparable race and ethnicity have been in the forming of "religious" definitions in the U.S.