In addressing constitutional issues concerning religion and government, the Supreme Court has faced two fundamental challenges. The first is to give appropriate effect to the First Amendment's dual restriction on laws “respecting an establishment of religion” and laws “prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Although the Court sometimes has treated these two provisions as conflicting, at other times it has sought to identify values that underlie both of them. One suggested common value is separation between the institutions of church and state, or more broadly between religious ideas and government. A second value is government “neutrality” toward religion in the sense of equal treatment among religions and between religion and nonreligious ideas or activities. Finally, a different sense of neutrality emphasizes liberty or private choice in matters of religion without state compulsion or interference. In particular cases, these values sometimes coincide but at other times conflict. The Court's decisions since the 1940s at first made separation the preeminent value, but more recently have emphasized equality and choice as well.
Application of these values has taken place against the backdrop of a major shift in American public values from Protestant Christianity toward religious pluralism and secularism. From the founding era well into the 1900s, Protestant religion was thought to be a crucial component of public values. In the last half century, however, American public life has become much more secular, in part because government adoption of any religious ideal appears unacceptably partial in a pluralistic society. At the same time, large numbers of Americans remain seriously committed to religious beliefs and practices in their personal lives, and many insist that religion has public import as well. The Court's struggles in religion cases often reflect debates about whether and to what extent the government must be secular.
Original Understanding and Historical Development
The evidence is controverted concerning precisely what the First Congress intended the two religion provisions to mean. At a minimum, the Establishment Clause prevented the newly created federal government from granting to any denomination the official privileges and status that the Anglican church had in England. On the other hand, clearly the clause was not intended to eliminate religious establishments then existing in several states. And the new federal government gave various supports to religion such as legislative prayers, presidential Thanksgiving proclamations, and religious missions to Native Americans.
There are likewise debates concerning the historical understanding of the Free Exercise Clause. Most of the framers intended the clause to prevent the governmental persecution of dissenting religions that occurred in England under the Anglican establishment. One strain within the founding generation also understood “free exercise” to require that religious believers be exempted from the application of laws that would force them to violate their religious beliefs. But another strain saw free exercise as simply preventing government from becoming intentionally involved in religious matters and emphasized the government's power to legislate on secular matters even if this conflicted with religious tenets.
The range of founding‐era arguments for religious freedom and disestablishment appears in James Madison's “Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments,” written in 1785 in opposition to Virginia's proposed tax to support clergy. Madison's arguments included the preeminence of duties to God, as the individual perceives them, over the demands of society; the unequal treatment that state favoritism in religion gives to dissenting citizens; the harms that establishment causes to the favored religion, including dilution of its independence and vigor; and the societal discord caused by government involvement in religious disputes.
De Facto Establishment.
State religious establishments, in the sense of tax support for clergy, died a natural political death early in the 1800s. The Constitution was understood to require separation of church and state at the institutional level; an establishment of religion existed when the government coerced support for a particular denomination or sect. However, this did not mean that government or politics should be secular or separate from religious influence. Indeed, as Madison's arguments above suggest, Americans' understanding of religious freedom itself rested in significant part on theological claims. Nineteenth‐century America generally affirmed that Protestant values formed an important part of the foundation on which society was built.
Accordingly, church‐state relations into the 1900s reflected what the legal historian Mark De Wolfe Howe called the “de facto Protestant establishment.” Public schools had a Protestant flavor, with teachers leading prayers and reading passages from the King James Bible without clerical comment. Legislative prayers became widespread; Thanksgiving, Good Friday, and Christmas became official holidays; and political rhetoric made frequent references to the Almighty. States prohibited blasphemy, enforced the Christian Sabbath, and forbade atheists and sometimes non‐Christians to hold public offices. Protestant evangelicals rallied to pass laws prohibiting Mormon polygamy, enforcing temperance, and forbidding the teaching of evolution (see Evolution and Creation Science). Protestant activism also fueled movements to abolish slavery, give women the vote, and ameliorate conditions for industrial workers.
The First Amendment's religion provisions played little direct role in these developments because the federal government's activities were limited and, under Barron v. Baltimore (1833), the Bill of Rights did not apply to the states. (The Court applied the Free Exercise Clause to states in Cantwell v. Connecticut [1940] and the Establishment Clause in Everson v. Board of Education [1947].) The only decision from this period that retains significance in contemporary constitutional law is Reynolds v. United States (1879), which rejected a free exercise challenge by Mormons to the federal law prohibiting polygamy.
The de facto establishment melded government with religion in many ways, but usually in a diffuse and nonsectarian sense. Because Americans thought that the de jure Anglican establishment in England exemplified the kind of arrangement prohibited by the Constitution, they did not take seriously the possibility that more subtle involvements of government with religion could create similar evils. They honored institutional separation—forbidding a national church, abandoning taxes to support clergy and churches—but beyond that, they saw little reason to cabin the public influence of religion.
Modern Pluralism, Secularism, and Expanded Government.
The assumptions of the de facto establishment about the legitimacy and importance of public religious influence came under serious pressure in the twentieth century. The growth in numbers and legitimacy of non‐Protestant faiths made any explicit government religious statement seem too partial toward one group of citizens. Challenges also arose from explicitly secularist ideas, such as the growth of naturalistic approaches to science spawned by Charles Darwin and others. The professionalization of American higher education replaced theologians and clergymen with secular degree‐holders as university faculty and administrators. In law itself, the legal realists rejected theologically resonant natural law as the source of optimal legal rules, looking instead to pragmatic reasoning and empirical investigation. A number of intellectuals elaborated a “secularization hypothesis,” which posited that religion would progressively lose all of its public influence.
However, religion has retained strong influence in the lives of millions of individuals, many of whom—whether they are “conservative” or “liberal” theologically—continue to insist that religion is relevant to society and public life. Religious activism in the civil rights movement of the 1960s, largely by liberals, served as precedent for religious activism by conservatives and liberals on issues such as abortion and homosexuality. If government had a strictly limited scope, many disputed religious‐moral issues could be confined to cultural debates and would not implicate government action and the First Amendment. But at least since the New Deal, government has grown to affect most areas of life, from education to family to economic relations, by regulating various activities and by subsidizing them. The welfare state complicates the task of keeping government out of religious matters without privatizing religion to a degree that itself violates religious liberty.
Many of these cross‐cutting influences are visible in Everson, the Supreme Court's first modern Establishment Clause decision. The question was whether a township could pay for the bus transportation of children to parochial as well as to public schools. The Court first gave an account of the history behind the First Amendment, concluding that the framers meant to eliminate the civil discord and violent persecution that had accompanied the establishment of a sect in both the Old World and the New. The majority relied heavily on the 1785 episode in which Virginia rejected taxes to support clergy. Citing the arguments of Madison and Jefferson in that debate, the Court stated that the Establishment Clause broadly prohibited the government from aiding not only one denomination or religion over another, but also religion over nonreligion. Quoting Thomas Jefferson's 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptists, the majority said that the Establishment Clause “was intended to erect a ‘wall of separation’ between church and state.”
The above language signaled that the de facto establishment would be abandoned as a guide to church‐state relations. The de facto establishment called for government neutrality among different Protestant sects, but not between Christianity and other faiths, or religion and nonreligion. The de facto establishment affirmed the institutional separation of church and state, but not the more decisive division implied by the “wall of separation” metaphor. Indeed, the far‐reaching language of separation and “no aid” indicated that the bus reimbursements would be forbidden.
The majority, however, turned around in the last half of the opinion and approved the reimbursements. The Court emphasized that denying religious believers the benefits of general welfare legislation would “handicap” them and make the state their “adversary” rather than “a neutral” (pp. 16, 18). Everson dramatized that in the context of welfare‐state programs, church‐state separation, if understood as “no aid” of any sort, could conflict with neutrality if the latter is understood as equal treatment between religious and nonreligious activities. Differing conceptions of separation and neutrality continue to underlie Religion Clause disputes.
General Establishment Clause Standards
For more than twenty years after Everson, the Supreme Court held that to satisfy the Establishment Clause, governmental action must have first a secular purpose and second a secular primary impact, that is, one that did not advance or inhibit religion. In Lemon v. Kurtzman (1971), the Court added a third criterion, whether the action created an excessive entanglement between government and religion.
The Court has been widely criticized for its decisions under the three‐part Lemon test. Ideological and political opponents who disagree on everything else have united in criticizing the contradictory and arbitrary results. The problem has at least two causes. First, Lemon, like most constitutional tests, is not fully determinate; it can yield different results on similar facts, depending on whether it is applied with particular rigor or with more deference. Second, the Lemon test did not specify the baseline from which to measure whether a government action “was neutral” or “advanced” religion. If a wholly secular government is the neutral baseline, then any aid that flows to religion is an impermissible advancement. But if religious and secular approaches are considered as competing alternatives, then neutrality merely entails aiding religion no more than its secular counterparts. The Court has vacillated between these two baselines, sometimes with little or no explanation.
Since the mid‐1980s, the Court has sometimes employed alternatives to the Lemon test but has never discarded it. One refinement, first proposed by Justice Sandra Day O'Connor in Lynch v. Donnelly (1984), would focus on whether government action endorses religion, thereby sending a message that citizens with dissenting views are “outsiders, not full members of the political community” (p. 688). Another, more permissive alternative would allow government actions endorsing religion but forbid the government from coercing anyone to agree with or participate in such activities. The no‐coercion approach would limit establishment concerns to the preservation of individual religious liberty, while the no‐endorsement approach preserves Lemon’s additional concern with keeping government structurally separate from religious doctrines, institutions, and debates.
The appointment of several conservative justices in the 1980s and 1990s led some observers to predict that the Court would overrule Lemon as well as the broad establishment decisions of the 1960s and 1970s that had struck down practices such as public school prayers. But that has not happened. The Rehnquist Court has continued to invalidate government‐sponsored religious activities in public schools. For example, the Court in Santa Fe Independent School District v. Doe (2000) struck down a practice of officially sponsored prayers at high school football games, using all three tests: Lemon, nonendorsement, and noncoercion. The major change in establishment case law has occurred in cases involving financial aid to religious institutions.
Financial Aid to Religion
Because direct financial support of churches and clergy by government was characteristic of the Anglican establishment, government grants of financial or other tangible aid to churches or other religious organizations have always raised significant constitutional issues. Virginia's defeat of clergy assessments was, according to the Everson Court, central to the meaning of the Establishment Clause. Modern establishment disputes have most often involved state assistance to religiously affiliated schools, whether at the elementary, secondary, or college level. Although aid to such schools could similarly be said to promote their religious mission and entangle government with religious institutions, the aid also has the secular purpose and effect of promoting educational quality and, arguably, equalizing their treatment with that of secular schools that receive government aid.
Aid to Religious Elementary and Secondary Schools.
Returning to the subject two decades after Everson, the Burger Court in the 1970s struck down a number of programs providing financial aid to religious elementary and secondary education (grades K‐12). The decisions relied on two separate arguments, one applying the effect prong of Lemon and the other the entanglement prong. The first argument was that religious K‐12 schools are “pervasively sectarian”: they seek throughout their programs to inculcate their students with the doctrines of the sponsoring religion. Thus, state aid given directly to the school's educational programs has the primary effect of advancing religion.
In response to this argument, many states tailored their financial grants so that they could not be used directly to teach religious values. In Lemon, for example, the state provided supplements to the salaries of private‐school teachers but required that they not teach religion in their classes. But the Court found that these controls themselves created excessive entanglement between church and state, in violation of the third prong of the test. The restrictions impeded the religious schools’ ability to carry out their mission of inculcating religious values. They also required state authorities regularly to monitor how schools spent their funds.
The Court's application of the effect and entanglement prongs ensnared religious K‐12 schools in a constitutional trap. If the grants were unrestricted, the Court found a primary effect that advanced religion. If strings were attached to prevent this effect, the Court found that they created unacceptable entanglement in the religious school's affairs. This “Catch 22,” as one decision put it, doomed every program of direct financial or other tangible assistance to religious K‐12 schools for a more than a decade.
By contrast, the Court has been far more lenient toward state aid given to individual students and families who then choose whether to use it at religious schools, public schools, or secular private schools. A lengthy series of decisions approves such programs of “true private choice.” The first, Mueller v. Allen (1983) upheld a state law permitting taxpayers to deduct from their income the cost of tuition and other expenses for educating their children. Parents of public and private school children were equally eligible for the deduction. However, because tuition was the largest part of the available deduction, and public school families paid no tuition, the bulk of the tax benefit assisted families using private schools, 95 percent of which were religiously sponsored. The challengers therefore argued that the primary effect of the deduction was religious.
The Court, however, found the statistical evidence unimportant, holding that the program's primary effect was permissible because the benefit was neutral between religious schools and other schools, and the decision of where the benefit went was “controlled by the private choices of individual parents” and was not attributable to the state. Accordingly, the state did not need to disqualify pervasively sectarian schools, or engage in any entangling surveillance to ensure that the uses of aid were properly restricted.
Subsequent decisions extended Mueller from tax deductions to affirmative government aid, and the “private choice” rationale culminated in Zelman v. Simmons‐Harris (2002). Zelman approved the inclusion of religious schools in a program offering vouchers to families of children in Cleveland's failing public schools. The vouchers could be used at a range of private schools, religious or secular, and at participating suburban public schools; but more than 80 percent of the private schools were religious, and the suburban districts chose not to participate. The Court held, 5 to 4, that the program satisfied Lemon’s effect prong because its terms were neutral toward religion, it left to individual families the choice to use the voucher at a religious or secular school, and there were “genuine secular options” available to parents. The secular options included secular private schools and magnet schools, charter schools, and supplemental tutoring in the Cleveland public system. Because parents’ choices included these public alternatives, the majority found it irrelevant that the vouchers themselves were used mostly at religious schools. Because the percentage of vouchers used at religious schools was similar to the percentage of Ohio private schools that were religious, the Court again found the religious uses attributable to private choices by families, not to any skewing or incentives created by state rules.
Programs of direct aid to religious schools still are analyzed differently than private‐choice programs such as vouchers. Mitchell v. Helms (2000) upheld the federal government's provision of computers and other instructional equipment directly to religious schools, but five justices also reaffirmed that the equipment could not be used for religious purposes. By contrast, when aid flows through the choices of individuals, the Court requires no restrictions on its use. Mitchell upheld the equipment assistance only because two justices, O'Connor and Stephen G. Breyer, who forbid religious uses of direct aid, found that the federal program had sufficient safeguards against such uses. On this narrow basis, the two cast the deciding votes in Mitchell to overrule 1970s decisions that had forbidden the provision of instructional materials. Similarly, Agostini v. Felton (1997) overruled a 1985 decision barring the use of public‐school teachers to teach remedial classes in secular subjects in religious schools. Thus, controls on the use of direct aid are still required, but they no longer necessarily create forbidden entanglement between the state and the religious school.
The distinction between direct aid and private‐choice programs may not deserve the weight it has. Only two justices see it as important, and even they are more willing than their predecessors to uphold direct‐aid programs. More fundamentally, the two lines of decisions rest on the two different understandings of government neutrality. The 1970s decisions striking down direct aid defined the neutral baseline in terms of secular education—especially education in the public schools, which in theory neither explicitly teaches religious values nor explicitly denigrates them. In this view, aid for religious education constitutes a special subsidy to religious‐school parents “in addition to the right that they have to send their children to public schools totally at state expense” (PEARL v. Nyquist, 1973 (p. 782). By contrast, the more recent private‐choice decisions treat secular education, including public education, as an alternative to religious education, which means that the provision of equal aid for religious and secular schools is neutral and permissible. Thus Zelman emphasized that the analysis of whether parents had genuine choice should count “all options Ohio provides Cleveland schoolchildren” (p. 656), including public magnet and charter schools and tutoring.
The shift in baselines corresponds to a shift in the dominant value in financial‐aid cases. The 1970s decisions promoted strong church‐state separation, both in forbidding the use of aid for religious teaching and in ruling that controls on the use of the aid created unconstitutional church‐state entanglement. The recent decisions place more emphasis on equality between religious and nonreligious schools in the program's formal terms, and on whether citizens have a reasonable choice among religious and secular alternatives.
Other Contexts: Higher Education and Social Services.
Outside the context of religious K‐12 schools, the Court was always more willing to uphold aid. Even the 1970s Court upheld several programs of direct financial grants to religiously sponsored colleges and universities. The Court assumed that, in contrast to K‐12 schools, religious colleges and universities seek to teach critical thinking skills in addition to (if not instead of) inculcating religious values. Moreover, college students are more mature than their younger counterparts and are less likely to be pressured into conforming to particular religious beliefs and practices. The Court therefore found the primary effect of grants to religious colleges was to support secular education.
Because the Court viewed the colleges as at least partly secularized, the approval of direct aid may still have rested on an assumption that secular education was the neutral baseline. The Court has never addressed a statute providing direct grants to a college where religious teaching pervades the curriculum and campus. Benefits to such a college might be constitutionally limited to assistance, such as federal Pell grants, that is provided to the students who choose to attend there. A unanimous Court in Witters v. Department of Services for the Blind (1986) confirmed that the Establishment Clause did not bar the provision of state aid to a student who chose to use it for pastoral studies at a pervasively religious Bible college.
The Court's one decision concerning religious social services, Bowen v. Kendrick (1988), was also more lenient toward aid. The Adolescent Family Life Act of 1982 gave grants to social service organizations, including religiously affiliated ones, that conducted programs aimed at reducing teenage pregnancy. In an opinion that echoed its analysis of aid to colleges, the Court held that giving grants directly to religious social service organizations did not violate the Establishment Clause so long as the recipients were not pervasively sectarian. The Court may soon revisit the issue of aid to social services because of the recent federal initiative to include “faith‐based” services on an equal footing in aid programs. The Court seems likely to follow the same analytical distinction between direct‐aid and private‐choice programs that it has followed concerning education.
Constitutional Rights to Equal Aid.
As Establishment Clause limits on aid have receded, the question has arisen whether the equal inclusion of religious recipients in aid programs is not just constitutionally permitted, but constitutionally required. Aid proponents argued that to single out religious education for exclusion from benefit programs discriminates against religious activity and unconstitutionally requires families or schools to forego religious exercise as a condition of receiving educational benefits. The issue pits the Rehnquist Court's increasing tilt toward equal treatment of religion and nonreligion against its concern to preserve states’ discretion in how to allocate funds.
Rosenberger v. Rector and Visitors of University of Virginia (1995) held that when a state university paid printing and other expenses for a wide range of student publications, it could not refuse to do the same for a student magazine written from an evangelical Christian perspective. The refusal to assist the magazine unconstitutionally discriminated against its religious viewpoint by excluding it from a “limited public forum” (see Freedom of Speech). But recently, in Locke v. Davey (2004), the Court held that a state that provided scholarships to college students based on grades and family income could exclude an otherwise qualified student because he was majoring in theology “from a devotional perspective” in preparation for the ministry.
Locke limited Rosenberger’s holding to cases of funding solely to facilitate student speech activities as opposed to funding for educational programs. Locke also treated the training of clergy as a “distinct category of instruction” from subjects such as literature or math. Much of the opinion indicates that the Court will defer to the constitutional provisions in many states that explicitly forbid aid to support “sectarian” schools or instruction—although several passages suggest that the training of ministers is a special case where the state's interest in denying aid is especially strong. A broad reading of Locke, combined with other recent decisions, would mean that states usually may include religious schools in aid programs but are not required to do so.
Nonfinancial Sponsorship of Religion
American government has long taken steps to promote or recognize religion in ways not involving financial aid: prayers in public schools and in legislatures, official Thanksgiving proclamations, and so forth. Such actions were pervasive in the de facto establishment, and the Court did not begin to scrutinize them until after Everson’s articulation of neutrality and separation principles. By that time, most of the overtly coercive practices had ceased, and relatively few cases of rank coercion have reached the Court. The more common argument against nonfinancial support of religion is that such actions depart from neutrality and officially endorse one religious position over another, or religion over nonreligion. As noted earlier, such endorsement is assertedly wrong not because it directly deprives anyone of liberty, but because—no matter how nondenominational and generic it is intended to be—it creates unwarranted discord and alienates those citizens with views on religion different from the government's.
At the same time, even in today's pluralistic and secular context, many citizens believe that eliminating all these practices would artificially and unwisely secularize American public life. That such sentiments are widespread became apparent in the angry reaction to Newdow v. U.S. Congress (Ninth Circuit, 2002), the court of appeals decision that invalidated the words “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance, as recited in a public school. The Supreme Court ultimately overturned this ruling, in Elk Grove Unified School District v. Newdow (2004), on the ground that the noncustodial parent challenging the Pledge lacked standing to sue to raise the challenge. And three concurring justices wrote that they would have upheld the “under God” phrase on the merits, showing their discomfort with removing all religious elements from official school activities.
Another countervailing concern is to ensure that, even if all government‐sponsored religious activity is eliminated under the Establishment Clause, religious activity by private individuals and groups in public settings retains protection under the Free Speech and Free Exercise clauses.
Government‐Sponsored Religion in Public Schools.
As with financial aid to religion, a principal battleground concerning official religious activities has been the public schools. Since the early 1960s, the Court has consistently found a violation of the Establishment Clause when public elementary or secondary schools have institutionally sponsored or favored a religious activity, including organized classroom prayers and Bible readings, prayers at commencement or other school exercises, mandatory moments of silence in the classroom to encourage personal prayers, posting religious texts like the Ten Commandments, and teaching religious doctrines such as the Biblical creation account (see School Prayer and Bible Reading). As noted above, “under God” remains in the Pledge of Allegiance as recited in schools because the majority in Newdow rejected the plaintiff's standing to sue, not because it upheld the practice on the merits.
The decisions striking down school‐sponsored religion rest on broad concerns about endorsement of religion—the alienation of dissenting students and families from the school they support with their taxes and their energy. But the Court has also mentioned that dangers of actual coercion are significant in K‐12 schools, whose young students are most vulnerable to overt or subtle pressures. In Lee v. Weisman (1992), the Rehnquist Court, to the surprise of many, held that a school violated the Establishment Clause by inviting a clergyman to give a brief prayer at graduation exercises. Far from overruling the earlier school prayer decisions, Weisman extended their principles from the classroom to other school events. The majority opinion avoided the nonendorsement test and instead employed the noncoercion principle, which many observers expected would lead to upholding school‐sponsored prayer so long as no one was formally required to join in it. But Weisman’s concept of coercion was quite broad: dissenters did not have to join in the prayer, but were coerced simply by having to stand silently during it. Eventually, the Rehnquist Court majority explicitly embraced the stiffer non‐endorsement test in its 2000 decision invalidating officially sponsored prayers at football games.
The only decision approving on the merits a program in which public schools arguably engaged in official promotion of religion was Zorach v. Clauson (1952), which upheld the practice of releasing students from their normal classes once a week to travel to religious instruction classes held off campus (see Released Time). Just four years earlier, the Court in Illinois ex rel. McCollum v. Board of Education (1948) had found a violation of the Establishment Clause in a program under which priests, ministers, and rabbis came into school classrooms to give religious instruction to students affiliated with their respective congregations. The Court found that formal integration of on‐campus religious instruction into the public school curriculum gave unconstitutional aid to religion.
The Court distinguished the two cases based on the on‐ versus off‐campus location of the instruction, but that distinction has been widely criticized. A more promising approach might be to note that in McCollum students had to act affirmatively to be excused from the religious classes, whereas in Zorach students had to act affirmatively in order to attend them. Thus in McCollum the school was implicated directly in the effort to provide religious instruction, whereas in Zorach it merely responded to the independent choices of students and parents to receive religious instruction.
The decisions invalidating school‐sponsored religion rest on a baseline in which secular education is viewed as neutral; the Court has repeatedly rejected contentions that a public education devoid of religious exercises establishes a “religion of secularism”(Abington School District v. Schempp, 1963, p. 225). The case of “under God” in the pledge may test how staunchly the Court believes that removing references to religion in public exercises is the neutral course. In any event, it is noteworthy that the Rehnquist Court has retained, indeed strengthened, the secular‐education baseline in cases of official religious exercises, even as it has departed from that baseline in cases involving aid to individuals attending private religious schools (see previous section). The difference can be explained by the fact that, while aid programs leave it to individuals to choose whatever school (religious or secular) they prefer, officially sponsored religion must always express a limited view or set of views, most likely the views favored by the majority.
Voluntary Religious Activity in Public Schools.
By contrast, when religious activity in public schools results from choices by students, parents, or other private individuals, the Court has repeatedly held that the activity can or even must be permitted. The progression began with Widmar v. Vincent (1981), which held by an 8‐to‐1 vote that religiously oriented student organizations at a state university were entitled to the same access to meeting rooms as were secular student groups. This rule was effectively applied to high school students in Board of Education v. Mergens (1990), which held that the Establishment Clause did not require a school to keep a student prayer group from meeting in classrooms during an after‐class “activity period” on the same terms as other student clubs. Mergens therefore upheld the constitutionality of the Equal Access Act of 1984, which gave student groups a statutory right to meet. The sessions were student initiated; faculty members took no active part and attended only as safety monitors; and many other clubs met during the activity period, including intramural sports, music, academic, and social clubs. Based on these facts, the Court held that any advancement or endorsement of religion came from the individual students, not from the school.
Later decisions applied the equal access principle to increasingly controversial situations, including the provision of affirmative funds (not just facilities) for religious groups at a state university (Rosenberger), and the meeting of a religious club for elementary school students as part of a “limited public forum” of clubs immediately after school (Good News Club v. Milford Central School, 2001). The Court repeatedly held that exclusion of religious clubs was discrimination by viewpoint, the clearest category of free speech violation, and that religious worship and instruction could not be treated worse in this context than speech addressing moral issues in nonreligious terms. Thus, in cases about access to facilities, the Court treats religious and secular viewpoints as alternatives, and equal access for religion as the neutral course—not merely permitted, but required.
Nonschool Contexts.
Outside of public schools, the Court has been considerably more lenient in permitting actions that endorse religion so long as the actions suggest no denominational preference. In Lynch v. Donnelly (1984), the Court upheld a city's display of a nativity scene on city property near a display of Santa and his reindeer. In Allegheny County v. American Civil Liberties Union (1989), a majority held that a menorah displayed next to a large Christmas tree outside a county office building was constitutional—although a different majority struck down the placement of a Christmas creche alone in a prominent place in the county courthouse because, without any nearby displays representing other religions or secular images, the creche conveyed an endorsement of Christianity.
The principle of equal access for privately initiated speech and symbols applies outside the public schools as well. In Capitol Square Review and Advisory Board v. Pinette (1995), a divided Court held that the Ku Klux Klan had the right to display a large, freestanding cross in front of the state capitol, in a square used for speech by other groups.
Free Exercise of Religion
It has long been widely accepted that religious freedom prohibits the government from directly punishing or regulating religious beliefs. Moreover, as the previous section shows, speech with religious content or motivation receives strong protection under the Free Speech as well as the Free Exercise clauses. And although conduct may be regulated more than belief, the government unquestionably may not single out religiously motivated conduct for punishment. For example, Church of Lukumi Babalu Aye v. City of Hialeah (1993) unanimously struck down a series of ordinances that criminalized killing animals only as part of a ritual sacrifice engaged in by Santeria worshipers.
Mandated Exemptions for Religious Conduct.
Litigation under the Free Exercise Clause, therefore, has largely concerned whether the government must exempt religiously motivated conduct from the application of a general law that conflicts with religious conscience. The question is whether the clause guarantees believers or churches the right to refuse to perform a legally required act that violates their religious beliefs (for example, employing women clergy on a nondiscriminatory basis) or the right to perform a legally prohibited act required by their beliefs (for example, ingesting an illegal drug as a sacrament). If such a guarantee exists, it cannot be absolute—consider the case of ritual human sacrifice—and thus the precise scope of mandated exemptions poses challenging questions.
Reynolds, the 1879 decision on Mormon polygamy, rejected a constitutionally compelled exemption and explicitly limited free exercise protection to beliefs alone. But the belief‐conduct distinction was overridden in two modern decisions. In Sherbert v. Verner (1963) the Court ordered a state to pay unemployment benefits to a Seventh‐Day Adventist even though she would not accept an available job, as the unemployment compensation law required, because it included work on Saturday, her Sabbath. The state asserted a compelling interest in protecting the integrity of the compensation fund against depletion by those not truly looking for work. But the Court held that government could burden a fundamental right like the free exercise of religion only if it was protecting a compelling interest by the least restrictive means possible, and it found that the state had not met this burden. Several later decisions have affirmed this holding concerning unemployment benefits.
The second case, Wisconsin v. Yoder (1972), held that Amish parents were not required to send their children to school past the eighth grade in violation of their religious beliefs because the state failed to show that its compelling interests in education—ensuring self‐sufficiency and training for citizenship—would be significantly undermined by granting the Amish an exemption from compulsory attendance laws. Yoder reasoned that the state must offer a compelling reason not just for the law in question, but also for denying an exemption to the particular religious objector. This substantially raised the government's burden of justifying any law that incidentally burdened religious exercise.
The Sherbert‐Yoder doctrine of exemptions can be said to protect the value of liberty or private choice in religious matters, since even a nondiscriminatory law can inflict serious burdens on religion in application. Exemption also arguably comports more with strong church‐state separation by blocking government regulation of religion. The implications of equality for religious exemptions are more ambiguous. Mandatory exemptions can serve to equalize religions in practice, since minority religions are more likely to conflict with general legal norms than are majority or acculturated faiths. But if equality means how a law on its face treats religious versus nonreligious activities—what law professor Douglas Laycock calls “formal” equality—then exemptions limited to religiously motivated conduct are not required and may even be improper.
After Yoder, the justices soon began retreating from a strong exemptions position, partly because some were attracted to formal equality, partly because of practical challenges that the Sherbert‐Yoder doctrine posed when combined with other holdings of the Court. Religious objectors usually constitute a small minority whose disobedience of general legislation would rarely undermine its general effectiveness. Moreover, United States v. Ballard (1944) effectively foreclosed judicial inquiry into the sincerity or reasonableness of religious beliefs. Thus, when read with Ballard, Sherbert and Yoder appeared to require that an exemption from law be granted to nearly any religious objector who asked for one— a scope of freedom that many justices began to find too broad.
Constitutionally mandated exemptions pose less of a difficulty when the benefit to be gained from exemption is something few people would want, such as freedom to keep children home from school. In United States v. Lee (1982), however, the Amish asked for a free exercise exemption from paying social security taxes. Perhaps fearing a tidal wave of exemption lawsuits by people claiming that their religious beliefs forbade paying various taxes, the Court found the government's interest in denying the exemption to be compelling. Lee was just the first step away from exemptions. In quick succession, the Court denied the claims of a Native American who objected to his daughter receiving a social security number, an Orthodox Jew who sought to wear a yarmulke in violation of Air Force uniform regulations, and a Native American tribe that objected to construction of a federal highway that would prevent them from worshiping on lands they viewed as sacred. These three decisions refused to find a constitutionally relevant burden on religion in the first place, so that government need offer no compelling reason for its action.
In Employment Division v. Smith (1990), the Court did away with mandatory exemptions in a wide range of cases. Two members of the Native American Church were denied unemployment compensation after they were dismissed from their jobs for ingesting the drug peyote at a church ritual. The state argued that because the use of peyote was criminal under state law, the Native Americans had committed “work‐related misconduct” and could be denied benefits. The Native Americans argued that the Free Exercise Clause as interpreted in Sherbert prevented the state from applying the misconduct standard to their religious practice. But the Court held that the denial of compensation was constitutional simply because it rested on a “neutral law of general applicability,” the criminal prohibition against peyote use. Under this rule, the importance of the state's interest or the degree of imposition on religious practice were irrelevant.
The majority opinion by Justice Antonin Scalia emphasized primarily that judges could not draw principled lines for balancing religious practices against competing governmental interests. In dealing with precedent, Smith recast Yoder as a case involving a “hybrid” of free exercise combined with substantive due process rights of parental and family autonomy. Sherbert was distinguished on the ground that it involved not an across‐the‐board prohibition, but the general standard of “good cause” that allowed refusals of work for some secular reasons and therefore must recognize religious reasons as well. If taken broadly, Smith makes the Free Exercise Clause essentially redundant to other constitutional rights such as free speech.
The terms of free exercise law are now set by reactions to and interpretations of Smith. Congress reacted negatively by passing the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 (RFRA), which reinstituted the Sherbert‐Yoder “compelling interest” test as a statutory protection against “substantial burdens” on religious exercise. However, in City of Boerne v. Flores (1997) the Court struck down RFRA as applied to state and local actions on the ground that it exceeded Congress's powers to enforce Fourteenth Amendment rights. Congress, the Court said, could not legislate based on a broader understanding of free exercise than the Court had enunciated in Smith.
Boerne leaves open several questions about the governing test. RFRA may remain valid as applied to actions of the federal government, and several states have passed their own versions of RFRA. A newer statute, the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act of 2000 (RLUIPA), imposes strict judicial scrutiny on state and local laws concerning zoning, architectural preservation, and prison conditions. All of these statutes have been challenged on the ground that exemptions limited to religious conduct, without exemptions for comparable secular conduct, violate the Establishment Clause. The Court granted certiorari in Cutter v. Wilkinson in 2004 to address the Establishment Clause challenge to RLUIPA in the prison context. The case may also raise questions about congressional authority to pass the statute under the Commerce Power and the Spending Power.
Meanwhile, constitutional free exercise claims themselves continue to be governed by Employment Division v. Smith. Interpretation of Smith’s rule has centered on what makes a law “neutral and generally applicable.” Although most lower courts have read the rule to eliminate exemptions, some have held that when a law makes exceptions for secular conduct, it is not generally applicable and religious practice must be exempt as well. Since most laws include some exceptions, this approach would strip Smith of much of its effect. The Court likely will have to resolve this question soon.
Smith also approved the legislature's ability to write religious exemptions into laws, a practice that the Court had upheld against an Establishment Clause challenge in Corporation of Presiding Bishop v. Amos (1987). Discretion for legislative exemptions when combined with the elimination of constitutionally mandated exemptions may mean that politically powerful religions will be able to lobby successfully for protection while smaller or powerless faiths will be dependent on the goodwill of political majorities. Sometimes legislatures protect minority practices—sacramental peyote use is exempted in many states—but other times they do not, as the relentless federal campaign against Mormon polygamy showed.
A final area of free exercise doctrine relates to adjudication by secular courts of disputes within a religious organization. Situations include contests between factions in a church over who controls the property or offices of the church and claims by individual employees or members that the church has discriminated against them or otherwise treated them illegally. The Court has suggested two approaches to such cases. Under the first, enunciated in Watson v. Jones (1872), the court defers to the resolution of the matter by the church's governing authority, whether that is a hierarchical tribunal or the majority of the individual congregation. Under the second approach, approved in Jones v. Wolf (1979), the court may apply secular legal principles even if these override the church authority's decision as long as the secular principles involve no interpretation of religious doctrine. If doctrine must be interpreted, the court must defer to the interpretation by the church's governing structure.
State courts resolving church property disputes may choose either of these approaches, and many now apply principles of secular property and trust law. By contrast, in disputes directly involving clergy, the Court, and lower courts even after Employment Division v. Smith, have deferred to church authorities rather than apply secular employment laws. The reasoning is that judicial intervention would place the court on one side of a religious controversy and would likely require the court to resolve theological questions such as whether a clergyman performed his job competently. But as to less central religious positions, church autonomy is less likely to prevail over secular laws, unless the case requires determinations of religious doctrine.
Bibliography
Christopher L. Eisgruber and Lawrence G. Sager, Congressional Power and Religious Liberty afterCity of Boerne v. Flores, Supreme Court Review (1997): 79–139.
Frederick M. Gedicks, The Rhetoric of Church and State: A Critical Analysis of Religion Clause Jurisprudence (1995).
Philip A. Hamburger, A Constitutional Right of Religious Exemption: An Historical Analysis, George Washington Law Review60 (1992): 915–948.
John C. Jeffries, Jr., and James E. Ryan, A Political History of the Establishment Clause, Michigan Law Review100 (2001): 279–370.
Douglas Laycock, Formal, Substantive, and Disaggregated Neutrality Toward Religion, DePaul Law Review39 (1990): 993–1022.
Ira C. Lupu, Government Messages and Government Money: Santa Fe, Mitchell v. Helms, and the Arc of the Establishment Clause, William and Mary Law Review42 (2001): 771–822.
Michael W. McConnell, Religious Freedom at a Crossroads, University of Chicago Law Review59 (1992): 115–194.
Michael W. McConnell, The Origins and Historical Understanding of Free Exercise of Religion, Harvard Law Review103 (1990): 1409–1517.
Steven D. Smith, Foreordained Failure: The Quest for a Constitutional Principle of Religious Freedom (1995).
John Witte, Jr., The Essential Rights and Liberties of Religion in the American Constitutional Experiment, Notre Dame Law Review71 (1996): 371–445
Relation of human beings to God or the gods or to whatever they consider sacred or, in some cases, merely supernatural. Archaeological evidence suggests that religious beliefs have existed since the first human communities. They are generally shared by a community, and they express the communal culture and values through myth, doctrine, and ritual. Worship is probably the most basic element of religion, but moral conduct, right belief, and participation in religious institutions also constitute elements of the religious life. Religions attempt to answer basic questions intrinsic to the human condition (Why do we suffer? Why is there evil in the world? What happens to us when we die?) through the relationship to the sacred or supernatural or (e.g., in the case of Buddhism) through perception of the true nature of reality. Broadly speaking, some religions (e.g., Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) are outwardly focused, and others (e.g., Jainism, Buddhism) are inwardly focused.
"Upon my arrival in the United States," Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in 1835, "the religious aspect of the country was the first thing that struck my attention." Throughout American history visitors have remarked on the religious character of the United States. G. K. Chesterton, for instance, concluded that America thought of itself in religious terms and that the United States was "a nation with the soul of a church."
Indeed, the statistics are staggering. Gallup poll data tell us that 94 percent of Americans believe in God or a universal spirit, as compared with 76 percent of the British, 62 percent of the French, and 52 percent of the Swedes. In addition, 65 percent of Americans claim membership in a church or synagogue, and 42 percent attend religious services in any given week.
Thus, Americans are undeniably a religious people. To a remarkable degree, many seek to fashion their conduct around religious principles, and their religious communities very often define their social networks. Extolling the unique religious character of the United States has become a staple of political discourse. Throughout their history Americans have believed that their country occupies a special place in the divine plan. When Thomas Prince sat down early in the eighteenth century to write his history of New England, he felt compelled to begin his narrative with the Genesis account of creation, so confident was he of America's special place in providential history. The Puritans saw themselves as the New Israel, fleeing the Egypt of England for the Promised Land of Massachusetts. Even Benjamin Franklin, so much a man of the Enlightenment, proposed that the seal of the United States depict Moses leading the children of Israel across the Red Sea.
In addition to historical identifications with ancient Israel, millennial notions have also shaped American self-identity and its hopes for the future. No less a thinker than Jonathan Edwards believed that the millennium would begin in Northampton, Massachusetts. Joseph Smith taught his followers that the center stake of Zion would be in Jackson County, Missouri. Countless religious visionaries have decided that America would provide the most fertile soil for constructing one sort of utopia or another. America's sense of destiny has also filtered into political rhetoric. One has only to chart the political slogans through the centuries--John Winthrop's "Citty upon a Hill" in the seventeenth century, "the sacred cause of liberty" during the revolutionary era, "manifest destiny" in the nineteenth century, "making the world safe for democracy" in the twentieth--to get a sense of America's belief in its divine mission.
Undeniably, the hyperbole of political rhetoric notwithstanding, religion has played an important role in America's history. Spanish conquistadors bore the standard of Christianity to the New World, although they were clearly not averse to filling the king's coffers and lining their own pockets with booty. The Pilgrims, exiled from England and uneasy with their new lives in the Netherlands, sought religious refuge across the Atlantic. The Puritans, who followed a decade later, had a more ambitious agenda --to demonstrate to the world the workings of a true church purified of all vestiges of Roman Catholicism--but by the close of the seventeenth century their quest for profits had unmistakably compromised their professions of piety. The religious motivations of other settlers--the Dutch, the Swedes, the Scots-Irish, the Anglicans--are considerably less obvious, although it is clear that the Huguenots fled religious persecution in France after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. Roger Williams, Lord Baltimore, and William Penn all envisioned havens of religious toleration in the New World.
The religious pluralism that characterized colonial America demanded some kind of unique accommodation in the polity of the new nation. Indeed, religious establishment--the designation of a particular religious group or denomination as favored by civil authorities and therefore eligible to receive public revenues--had proved impractical in most of the colonies outside of New England. Protestant leaders such as Isaac Backus and William Livingston joined Thomas Jefferson and Enlightenment deists in an unlikely alliance to ensure religious toleration and disestablishment. Far from crippling religious expression, as the Congregationalists of New England had feared, disestablishment instead created a salubrious religious climate in America. The First Amendment, with its proscription against religious establishment and its guarantee of religious freedom, has set up a kind of free market of religion in America, where religious "entrepreneurs" of all stripes--Joseph Smith, Ellen Gould White, Mary Baker Eddy, Elijah Muhammad, Jimmy Swaggart, Robert Schuller--have competed for popular followings in the marketplace of ideas.
This playing to popular tastes has doubtlessly compromised religious orthodoxy and rigor. Indeed, another peculiar characteristic about religion in America is its latitudinarianism. With the exception of Jonathan Edwards and Reinhold Niebuhr, Americans have rarely distinguished themselves as theologians; they tend to be rather eclectic in their beliefs, with little regard for consistency. But what you believe is less important than belief itself, or at least the trappings of spirituality. One has only to glance in the direction of the vitiated religious establishments in other Western nations to understand the contrast. Whereas other peoples become passionate about politics, Americans are passionate about religion, and in any priority of personal disclosure most Americans would divulge their religious views before their political affiliations.
No era of American history better demonstrates the influence of religion on public life than the nineteenth century, particularly the antebellum period. The revival fires of the Second Great Awakening unleashed an unprecedented reforming impulse in the new nation, much of it directed toward the establishment of a millennial kingdom in America. Americans were so steeped in optimism about the perfectibility of individuals and the amelioration of society that they organized benevolent and reform societies--temperance reform, abolitionism, female suffrage, prison reform--with a zealotry unmatched in American history. Religious sensibilities pervaded American culture, often mixing with nationalism and xenophobia--witness the nativist sentiment directed against non-Protestant immigrants, as well as McGuffey's Reader of the nineteenth century, with its unabashed celebration of Protestantism and patriotism.
But if Protestantism's influence on American culture has been pervasive, its hold has never been hegemonic. Indeed, Americans' religious imagination has been limitless, giving rise to all manner of permutations and innovations--restorationism, Mormonism, Christian Science, transcendentalism, Jehovah's Witnesses, the Moorish Science Temple, Jewish Reconstructionism, the Nation of Islam, and countless others. All are indigenous American religions, and all have won a place--and at least a measure of respectability--in the marketplace of ideas. Indeed, the challenge facing Americans over the last century has been the accommodation of the nation's religious pluralism, a concession that some of the more conservative Protestants have been reluctant to grant, especially to non-Christian traditions such as Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam.
Religious sensibilities have shaped American culture beyond the realm of politics. Sunday blue laws persisted well into the twentieth century, and the Methodist township of Ocean Grove, New Jersey, managed to ban automobiles from its streets every Sunday until a court decision in 1979 declared the law unconstitutional. United States coins and currency bear the inscription, "In God We Trust." Sunday schools began in the late eighteenth century to provide a rudimentary education for children of the working poor, but as common schools grew in popularity during the succeeding decades, Sunday schools provided religious instruction and served as a significant means of recruitment for Protestant churches. Public schools, however, shed their Protestant biases only slowly, and this reluctance prompted the great school wars in New York and Philadelphia over what amounted, Roman Catholics charged, to Protestant catechetical instruction in the public schools. At the Third Plenary Council in 1884, Catholics responded with an ambitious program of parochial schooling to educate and socialize Catholic children in the faith. The "school wars" of the twentieth century placed conservative Protestants on the defensive. Ever since the Supreme Court's 1963 decision banning prayer in public schools, fundamentalists have urged a reversal of that decision, and they have launched desultory efforts either to ban the teaching of evolutionary theory or, once that battle was lost, to insist that public schools teach the Genesis account of creation alongside of Darwinism.
Historically, religion has shaped higher education in America as well. A large portion of the nation's most prestigious universities trace their origins to confessional or sectarian motivations: Harvard, Yale, and Dartmouth (Congregational); the College of William and Mary and Columbia (Anglican); Princeton (Presbyterian); Brown (Baptist); Georgetown (Jesuit). Although many of these institutions have slipped their religious moorings, others--Notre Dame, Southern Methodist, Brigham Young--have remained rather more faithful to their origins. In addition, hundreds of colleges throughout the country were begun by religious groups in an effort to expand their influence on American culture--Colby (Baptist), Connecticut Wesleyan (Methodist), Davidson (Presbyterian), Gettysburg (Lutheran), Kenyon (Episcopal), to name only a few.
Indeed, the aggregate influence of religion upon American culture is so great as to be incalculable, but the reverse is true as well: religion in America bears a distinctive cultural stamp. More than anything else it is marked by a disregard for tradition and precedent. The New World attracted adventurers, people disenchanted in one way or another with the existing order, many of whom fled the institutional constraints of the Old World. They brought with them a willingness to experiment and even a passion for novelty. The United States was the first modern, Western nation founded by Protestants, not Catholics. Protestantism, which by its very definition defies tradition, did not have to overcome the ossified European institutions of churches and universities; instead, the New World allowed Protestants to start anew.
The other peculiar characteristic of religion in America derives from its populist character. Lacking confessional boundaries and institutional constraints, religious groups very often coalesce around a charismatic individual who defines the faith, beliefs, and practices of his or her followers. In the twentieth century, the media have allowed a number of religious figures to exploit that circumstance to their advantage and build large empires of radio and television stations, colleges, seminaries, and even, however briefly, an amusement park.
Religion in America has had oddly divergent influences on American life, in some cases challenging and in other cases defending the status quo. Northern Protestants of the antebellum period pushed a comprehensive agenda of social reform. The Social Gospel movement at the turn of the century sought to redress the ravages of urban life. Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement advocated workers' rights and even socialism. The "peace churches"--Quakers, Mennonites, and others--have faced censure, ridicule, and even the distraint of goods in times of war. Jews and Christians cooperated in the civil rights struggle against Jim Crow laws and against the mores of southern culture.
Religion, however, has generally exerted a conservative influence on American life--witness the unabashed celebration of patriotic values in McGuffey's Reader, the identification of capitalism with Christianity by powerful churchmen such as John D. Rockefeller, the fundamentalist political resurgence since 1975, and the fierce conservatism of the Mormons, despite their persecution at the hands of federal authorities in the nineteenth century. Religion in America rarely challenges the political or social order; when it does, it usually does so only to champion so-called traditional values or to evoke a halcyon past when America was purportedly even more religious. On such occasions it calls upon and thereby perpetuates the enduring mythology of America as a Christian nation and Americans as God's chosen people.
Twenty, fifty, and even a hundred years ago, the conventional wisdom of modernization and secularization theorists was that as any nation modernizes and industrializes, religion would be pushed to the periphery. America's persistent spirituality, however, has confounded those experts. In the United States, surely among the most modern and industrialized nations on earth, religion remains very much a part of both private life and public discourse.
Bibliography:
Sidney E. Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People (1972); Mark A. Noll, One Nation under God? Christian Faith and Political Action in America (1988).
Russia has been multireligious from its very inception. When Kiev Rus adopted Eastern Orthodoxy in 988, a gradual Christianization began, advancing slowly from urban elites to the lower classes and countryside. Pagan belief and practice persisted, however, and was sometimes incorporated into Orthodox ritual. Prerevolutionary historians termed the resulting syncretism "dual faith" (dvoyeveriye), emphasizing the survival of paganism and superficiality of the Orthodox veneer. While simplistic, that reductionist view of popular religion suggests the complexity of religious cultures, the institutional backwardness of the church, and the daunting geographic scale of the task it faced. Not until the eighteenth century did the church, in any real sense, construct the administrative tools needed to standardize and regulate popular Orthodoxy.
By that time the empire was exploding in size and religious diversity. Although medieval Russia had absorbed peoples of other faiths (such as the Muslim Tatars), religious pluralism became a predominant feature in the modern period. The state annexed vast new territories of Siberia and eastern Ukraine (in the seventeenth century) and then added an array of new lands and peoples in the eighteenth (Baltics, western Ukraine, Belarus) and nineteenth centuries (the Caucasus, Poland, Finland, and Central Asia). That expansion increased the size and complexity of the non-Orthodox population exponentially. Although, according to the census of 1897, the population remained predominantly Eastern Orthodox (69.3%), the empire had substantial numbers of non-Orthodox believers (often concentrated in geographic areas): Muslims (11.1%), Catholics (9.1%), Jews (4.2%), Lutherans (2.7%), Old Believers (1.8%), and various other Christian and non-Christian groups. Indeed, the figures on the non-Orthodox side are understated: the census failed to record adherents of persecuted movements seeking to evade legal trouble.
This waxing religious pluralism posed a serious problem for a regime once imbued with a messianic identity as the Third Rome. Although the process of accommodation commenced in the seventeenth century, it sharply accelerated in the eighteenth, as the regime sought to recruit foreign mercenaries, specialists, and colonists. To reaffirm the precedence of the Russian Orthodox Church, the government adopted the principle of static religious identity: each subject was to retain the original faith (the sole permissible form of conversion being to Orthodoxy, with conversion from Orthodoxy criminalized as apotasy). For state officials devoted to raison d'état what mattered most was stability, not salvation - much to the chagrin of Orthodox zealots. Indeed, that secularity prevailed in the imperial manifesto of April 17, 1905, which, in a futile attempt to quell the revolution of 1905, granted freedom of religious belief. After an interlude of broken promises and rising tensions, the February Revolution finally brought full religious freedom (including freedom of official religious affiliation and practice).
That freedom was short-lived: Once the Bolshevik regime came to power in October 1917, it persecuted religious groups, with the assumption that such superstition would promptly wither away. Dismayed by signs of a religious revival, in 1929 the party unleashed a massive assault on all religions, systematically closing houses of worship and subjecting not only clergy but also believers to repression. To no avail: The January 1937 census revealed that 55.3 percent of those over age 14 declared themselves believers. That impelled the regime to redouble its efforts. In 1937 - 1941, hundreds of thousands were arrested and large numbers executed.
Although World War II forced the Stalinist regime to tolerate the reestablishment of many religious organizations, these encountered growing pressure that continued past Stalin's death in 1953. The post-Stalinist regimes proved indefatigable in efforts to efface the remnants of superstition. They did achieve a reduction in organized religion: the number of religious organizations in the USSR declined by a third (from 22,698 in 1961 to 15,202 in 1985).
Even if religious organizations had dwindled, the government proved far less effective in combating religious observance. Indeed, data from the latter period of Soviet rule showed clear signs of religious revival. In the case of baptism, for example, even if the aggregate figures between 1979 and 1984 decreased (by 6.7%), authorities could not fail to notice increases in some non-Russian republics (19.9% in Georgia, for example) and even in the RSFSR (1.5%). Baptism rates, moreover, skyrocketed among non-Orthodox Christians, with increases of 43.6 percent among Lutherans, 33.3 percent among Methodists, and 52.1 percent among Mennonites. Data about monetary contributions - an increase of 17.8 percent between 1979 and 1984 - gave the regime further cause for worry. These funds allowed established religions to bolster their central administrations (45.9% of funds), expand support for clergy (14.3%), and spend more on religious artifacts and literature (17.4%).
Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika in the mid-1980s brought a significant improvement in the status and activism of religion. That, doubtless, was a key factor behind the stunning 36.6 percent increase in religious groups in the Soviet Union (from 12,438 in 1985 to 16,990 in 1990); in the RSFSR, the rate of growth was only slightly slower - 32.6 percent (from 3,003 in 1985 to 3,983 in 1990). The expansion of organized religion hardly abated after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991: In the Russian Federation, the number of registered religious organizations rose fivefold (to 20,200 on December 31, 2000).
That growth has been somewhat troubling for the Russian Orthodox Church. Although a majority of the citizens in the Russian Federation profess some vague allegiance to Orthodoxy, observants are relatively few (4.5%), and still fewer attend services on a regular basis. Still more alarming has been the exponential growth of non-Orthodox religious groups, especially Christian evangelical and Pentecostal movements. In an effort to contain cult movements, the law on religious organizations (October 1997) posed barriers to the registration of new religious groups, that is, those that had emerged within the last fifteen years, chiefly from foreign missions. Nevertheless, by the closing deadline for registration on December 31, 2000, Russian Orthodoxy claimed only a slight majority (10,913) of the 20,200 religious organizations in the Russian Federation; the rest consisted of Muslim (3,048), Evangelicals (1,323), Baptists (975), Evangelical Christians (612), Seventh-Day Adventists (563), Jehovah's Witnesses (330), Old Believers (278), Catholics (258), Lutherans (213), Jews (197), and various smaller groups.
Bibliography
Anderson, John. (1994). Religion, State, and Politics in the Soviet Union and Successor States. New York: St. Martin's Press.
Corley, Felix. (1996). Religion in the Soviet Union: An Archival Reader. New York: New York University Press.
Geraci, Robert P., and Khodarkovsky, Michael. (2001). Of Religion and Empire: Missions, Conversion, and Tolerance in Tsarist Russia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Hosking, Geoffrey A. (1991). Church, Nation, and State in Russia and Ukraine. New York: St. Martin's Press.
Lewis, David C. (1999). After Atheism: Religion and Ethnicity in Russia and Central Asia. New York: St. Martin's Press.
religion, a system of thought, feeling, and action that is shared by a group and that gives the members an object of devotion; a code of behavior by which individuals may judge the personal and social consequences of their actions; and a frame of reference by which individuals may relate to their group and their universe. Usually, religion concerns itself with that which transcends the known, the natural, or the expected; it is an acknowledgment of the extraordinary, the mysterious, and the supernatural. The religious consciousness generally recognizes a transcendent, sacred order and elaborates a technique to deal with the inexplicable or unpredictable elements of human experience in the world or beyond it.
Types of Religious Systems
The evolution of religion cannot be precisely determined owing to the lack of clearly distinguishable stages, but anthropological and historical studies of isolated cultures in various periods of development have suggested a typology but not a chronology. One type is found among some Australian aborigines who practice magic and fetishism (see fetish) but consider the powers therein to be not supernatural but an aspect of the natural world. Inability or refusal to divide real from preternatural and acceptance of the idea that inanimate objects may work human good or evil are sometimes said to mark a prereligious phase of thought. This is sometimes labeled naturism or animatism. It is characterized by a belief in a life force that itself has no definite characterization (see animism).
A second type of religion, represented by many Oceanic and African tribal beliefs, includes momentary deities (a tree suddenly falling on or in front of a person is malignant, although it was not considered “possessed” before or after the incident) and special deities (a particular tree is inhabited by a malignant spirit, or the spirits of dead villagers inhabit a certain grove or particular animals). In this category one must distinguish between natural and supernatural forces. This development is related to the emergence of objects of devotion, to rituals of propitiation, to priests and shamans, and to an individual sense of group participation in which the individual or the group is protected by, or against, supernatural beings and is expected to act singly or collectively in specific ways when in the presence of these forces (see ancestor worship; totem; spiritism).
In a third class of religion—usually heavily interlaced with fetishism—magic, momentary and special deities, nature gods, and deities personifying natural functions (such as the Egyptian solar god Ra, the Babylonian goddess of fertility Ishtar, the Greek sea-god Poseidon, and the Hindu goddess of death and destruction Kali) emerge and are incorporated into a system of mythology and ritual. Sometimes they take on distinctively human characteristics (see anthropomorphism).
Beyond these more elementary forms of religious expression there are what are commonly called the “higher religions.” Theologians and philosophers of religion agree that these religions embody a principle of transcendence, i.e., a concept, sometimes a godhead, that involves humans in an experience beyond their immediate personal and social needs, an experience known as “the sacred” or “the holy.”
In the comparative study of these religions certain classifications are used. The most frequent are polytheism (as in popular Hinduism and ancient Greek religion), in which there are many gods; dualism (as in Zoroastrianism and certain Gnostic sects), which conceives of equally powerful deities of good and of evil; monotheism (as in Christianity, Judaism, and Islam), in which there is a single god; supratheism (as in Hindu Vedanta and certain Buddhist sects), in which the devotee participates in the religion through a mystical union with the godhead; and pantheism, in which the universe is identified with God.
Another frequently used classification is based on the origins of the body of knowledge held by a certain religion: some religions are revealed, as in Judaism (where God revealed the Commandments to Moses), Christianity (where Christ, the Son of God, revealed the Word of the Father), and Islam (where the angel Gabriel revealed God's will to Muhammad). Some religions are nonrevealed, or “natural,” the result of human inquiry alone. Included among these and sometimes called philosophies of eternity are Buddhist sects (where Buddha is recognized not as a god but as an enlightened leader), Brahmanism, and Taoism and other Chinese metaphysical doctrines.
Bibliography
See J. Wach, Comparative Study of Religions (1951, repr. 1958); J. G. Frazer, The Golden Bough (3d ed., 13 vol., 1955; repr. 1966); V. T. A. Ferm, Encyclopedia of Religion (1959); J. Hick, The Philosophy of Religion (1963); J. de Vries, The Study of Religion (tr. 1967); G. Parrinder, ed., Man and His Gods (1971); M. Eliade, ed., Encyclopedia of Religion (16 vol., 1986); E. L. Queen 2d et al., ed., The Encyclopedia of American Religious History (1996).
"Christ deserves to be called the Prince of Peace because He has given us a measure of greatness which promotes peace….
"Christ has also led the way to peace by giving us a formula for the propagation of good. Not all of those who have really desired to do good have employed the Christian method—not all Christians even. In all the history of the human race but two methods have been employed. The first is the forcible method….
"The other is the Bible plan—be not overcome of evil but overcome evil with good. And there is no other way to overcome evil….
"In order that there might be no mistake about His plan of propagating good, Christ went into detail and laid emphasis on the value of example—'so live that others seeing your good works may be constrained to glorify your Father which is in Heaven.'… "It may be a slow process—this conversion of the world by the silent influence of a noble example, but it is the only sure one, and the doctrine applies to nations as well as to individuals. The Gospel of the Prince of Peace gives us the only hope that the world has—and it is an increasing hope—of the substitution of reason for the arbitrament of force in the settling of international disputes."
—William Jennings Bryan, "The Prince of Peace" (1908)—
For national leaders and specialists in the study of diplomacy alike, the notion that religion has affected United States foreign policy is familiar—too familiar. Whereas the Massachusetts Puritan John Winthrop's charge in 1630 to build an inspiring "city upon the hill" came to be quoted almost routinely by presidents as different as John F. Kennedy, James Earl Carter, and Ronald Reagan to sanctify one version or another of American mission, students of diplomacy rarely go beyond citing such rhetorical conventions to explore the complicated influence of religious ideas or denominational interests.
Thus, any discussion of religion and foreign relations must begin with an appreciation of the diversity of American faiths, their development over the centuries, and the problematical nature of their connection to international affairs. Contemporary liberals who celebrate a "Judeo-Christian tradition" and contemporary conservatives who conflate all "people of faith" both homogenize American religion, past and present. Not only have people of faith differed among themselves about domestic and foreign policy issues, but they have also often done so precisely because they took their respective faiths seriously. Nonetheless, even the most devout among them were also affected, usually without any sense of contradiction, by political, economic, strategic, racial, and ethnic considerations, as well as by personal feelings about worldly success, power, and glory. Furthermore, American foreign policy decisions, especially those relating to expansion, war, and peace, have affected religious life as well as the other way around.
Nor has a high level of religious commitment been constant throughout American history. Both the intensity of belief in the aggregate and the strength of particular religious groups have waxed and waned. So have interdenominational tolerance, competition, and cooperation. Religious groups have proliferated for reasons ranging from constitutional disestablishment to theological disagreement to mass immigration. In this context—and much to the consternation of clergy committed to one orthodoxy or another—individual Americans have always tended to create their own syncretic belief systems.
From European Settlement to Manifest Destiny
Few of the Europeans who settled North America in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and early eighteenth centuries held the contemporary liberal view that all faiths were essentially equal before God. On the contrary, divergent religious doctrines bolstered imperial rivalries. For the British subjects in North America, almost all of whom were heirs in some respect to Reformation-era Protestantism, Spain and France represented not only economic rivals and strategic threats, but also tyrannical "popery." During the French and Indian War, anti-Catholic sentiment rose and some of the colonies forbade "papists" to bear arms.
Although residents of the thirteen colonies that formed the United States in 1776 were over-whelmingly Protestant, the religious situation already showed signs of the complexity that would become an American perennial. Roughly half of the colonists were at least pro forma Anglicans, Congregationalists, and Presbyterians, but there were also large numbers of Baptists, Lutherans, Dutch Reformed Calvinists, Quakers, and German pietists. Differences among these Protestants may look insignificant to the contemporary secular eye, but they bulked large at a time when taxes were levied to support established churches in most of the states. In addition, the Great Awakening of the 1740s had left a legacy of division in several denominations between evangelical "new lights" and more stolid "old lights." There were also roughly 25,000 Catholics and 2,000 Jews. Equally important, by several criteria the era in which the United States was formed qualifies as the least religious period in the country's history. Fewer than 20 percent of Americans were church adherents. Many of the foremost Founders, including the first four presidents, were influenced to some extent by deism and viewed God as a distant force in human affairs.
Recent religious developments influenced the first and foremost event of American foreign policy: the decision to separate from Great Britain. These also affected the shape of the revolutionary coalition, the size of the country, and the form of the new government. While dividing denominations, the Great Awakening had fostered colonial unity as men and women saved by the same itinerant evangelists hundred of miles apart felt a common bond. To the British government, the Awakening provided further evidence that the colonists needed a resident Anglican bishop to limit their religious autonomy. None was named, but even colonial deists viewed such an appointment as part of the comprehensive British "conspiracy" to strangle American freedom, religious as well as political and economic. The Quebec Act of 1774, which granted civil rights to French Catholics and all but established the Roman Catholic Church in that province, underscored the threat of "ecclesiastical slavery." Now, many American Protestants concluded, British tyranny had allied with papal absolutism. On balance, religious forces and issues speeded the momentum toward independence.
Religious factors also influenced decisions to support the Revolution, remain loyal to King George III, or try to avoid the conflict altogether. Adherents to the Church of England frequently sided with the Crown but there were many notable exceptions, including George Washington. Evangelical heirs to the Great Awakening disproportionately joined the patriot cause; Scots-Irish Presbyterians were particularly zealous. New England Congregationalists, the clearest spiritual heirs of John Winthrop, frequently framed the cause as part of a divine mission. On the other hand, the Declaration of Independence reflected Enlightenment republicanism rather than evangelical Protestantism. Jews usually favored independence. In general, however, religious minorities feared the loss of royal protection. Catholics were wary of living in an overwhelmingly Protestant republic. Yet Charles Carroll, the only Catholic signer of the Declaration of Independence, expected—correctly, as matters turned out—that independence would foster disestablishment. Neither Carroll's diplomacy nor military force convinced Quebec Catholics to join the United States. French Canadian bishop Jean-Olivier Briand denounced the invading "Bostonians" and threatened to withhold sacraments from Catholics who aided them.
Decisions about the war were particularly difficult for adherents to what are usually called the historic peace churches. The Society of Friends (Quakers) and the predominantly German pietists—notably, the Mennonites, Moravians, and Dunkers—are best known for their repudiation of violence. But also, instead of building ever larger cities, states, or imperial republics "upon a hill," they hoped to change the world, if at all, through a separatist moral example. During the Revolution, as in all future wars, they struggled to determine the right mix of cooperation and resistance.
Members of all of the peace churches faced some degree of ostracism, seizure of property, loss of employment, and imprisonment when they refused to pay taxes or swear allegiance to the new government. The German pietists—predominantly rural, further from the political mainstream, and generally willing to pay fines in place of military service—suffered less than the Quakers. The Society of Friends contained some strong loyalists and was suspected of shielding many more. Other members were expelled for fighting in the Revolution; a prowar contingent seceded to form the Free Quakers. Quakers also began their practice of providing humanitarian assistance to all victims of the war
Just as religious affiliations influenced the Revolution, both the war and the ultimate victory decisively affected the religious scene. The departure of loyalist Anglican clergy left the successor Episcopal Church weakened. The alliance with France dampened fears of "popery," much to the benefit of American Catholics. The Constitution precluded religious tests for federal office and the First Amendment banned an "establishment of religion." Religious minorities, sometimes in alliance with Enlightenment deists, began a long but ultimately successful campaign for disestablishment in the states. Thus, although religious denominations would continue to influence foreign policy, they enjoyed no constitutional advantage over secular lobbies. A treaty with Tripoli in 1796 assured the Muslim ruler of that country that the government was "not in any sense founded on the Christian religion." The absence of a federal establishment prompted competition, which in turn encouraged both religious commitments and a proliferation of faiths as clergy from rival denominations competed to win adherents. Also, the grassroots egalitarianism nurtured by the Revolution provided a hospitable environment for the theologically and institutionally democratic Baptists and Methodists.
The victorious revolutionary coalition began to fall apart almost immediately. Disagreements about faith and foreign affairs shaped the development of acrimonious party politics starting in the 1790s. The Jeffersonian Republicans were religiously more diverse and tolerant than the Federalists. Looking abroad, the Republicans tilted toward revolutionary France, while the Federalists typically admired Great Britain—which they viewed as a bastion of Christianity rather than French infidelity. During the War of 1812, Federalist Congregationalists and Presbyterians reiterated their admiration of British Protestantism and characterized impressed seamen as runaway Irish Catholics unworthy of sympathy. Baptists and Methodists denounced the autocratic Church of England and hailed the Republican President James Madison as a friend of religious liberty.
Above and beyond these controversies was the broad consensus that the United States must expand its territory, trade, and power. Expansion often received but did not require a religious rationale. Thomas Jefferson, who held the least conventional religious beliefs of any president, arranged the Louisiana Purchase, the largest single land acquisition in American history. Even Protestant clergy who viewed expansion as part of a divine plan often supplemented Scripture with economic and geopolitical arguments.
John L. O'Sullivan, editor of the Democratic Review, captured the dominant expansionist theme of republican mission when he famously proclaimed the "manifest destiny" of the United States in 1845. The continent was destined to be American by a nonsectarian Providence for a great experiment in freedom and self-government.
Even so, religious controversies relating to foreign policy proliferated between the 1810s and the 1850s—partly because the United States was expanding its territory and international interests. Equally important, this era of manifest destiny coincided with another revival among Protestants that lasted at least through the 1830s and the first mass immigration of non-Protestants. By the 1850s the three largest religious groups were the Methodists, Baptists, and Catholics; the population also included 150,000 Jews, most of them recent immigrants from German states.
The second Great Awakening energized virtually every reform campaign of the first half of the nineteenth century. Two in particular intersected with the history of foreign policy: the creation of an organized peace movement and a systematic Protestant missionary effort.
Northern Congregationalists, Presbyterians, and Unitarians provided most of the leadership and rank-and-file strength of the peace movement. In 1815, David Low Dodge, a devout Presbyterian, founded the New York Peace Society, perhaps the first such organization in the world. There were many other local stirrings in the wake of the War of 1812. In 1828 the most important among them coalesced into the American Peace Society.
Historical accounts of Protestant missionaries typically begin with the creation of the first "foreign" mission board in 1810 and then trace evangelical activities in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. This perspective has a certain plausibility, not least because many missionaries viewed the story that way. Yet it obscures the essential fact that for several generations U.S. foreign policy also occurred on the North American continent. The Africans and Asians encountered overseas were no more alien to bourgeois Protestant missionaries than were the Native Americans whom their precursors had been trying to convert since the 1600s. Moreover, mission boards sent evangelists to American Indian "nations" well into the nineteenth century. As the historian Kenneth Scott Latourette observed in The Great Century in the United States of America (1941), the conquest of the American West was a "vast colonial expansion, nonetheless significant because it was not usually regarded as such."
Missionaries played three major roles in this continental colonialism. First, their glowing descriptions of the land drew settlers westward—sometimes to disputed territory. Oregon was such a case, where the U.S. advantage in population helped secure a peaceful division with Great Britain in 1846. Second, along with Methodist circuit riders and countless local revivalists, missionaries instilled bourgeois traits useful for developing and holding the frontier. Third, they worked to christianize the Indians as part of an effort to assimilate them. In 1819 the federal government began funding churches to inculcate the "habits and arts of civilization" among Native Americans. Missionary successes in this area did not save the Native Americans from the inexorable forces of expansion. The Cherokees in the southeastern United States accepted Christianity and their leader adopted the name Elias Boudinot, after the first president of the American Bible Society. Even so, they were forcibly removed beyond the Mississippi River in the 1830s.
Overseas missions ultimately became, as the historian John K. Fairbank wrote in The Missionary Enterprise in China and America (1974), the nation's "first large-scale transnational corporations." The institutional beginnings were modest. Spurred by the awakening at Williams College and Andover Seminary, Congregationalists took the lead in 1810 in founding the (temporarily) interdenominational American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM). Within a decade, missionaries were sent to India, Hawaii, and the Middle East. Although diverse denominations soon created their own boards, the ABCFM remained the leading sponsor of overseas missions for the next fifty years.
The fields of activity were determined by opportunity as well as theology. The ABCFM established missions in India and Ceylon because Great Britain barred their establishment in Burma. Not only did the Holy Land have an obvious appeal, but also the Ottoman Empire permitted missionaries to work with its Christian communities (although they were quite willing to offer Protestantism to Muslims and Jews as well as Coptics, Catholics, and Eastern Orthodox believers when those opportunities arose).
While rarely advocating racial equality, white religious leaders were nonetheless eager to send black missionaries to sub-Saharan Africa. According to prevailing medical theory, blacks were less susceptible than whites to tropical diseases. Whatever the motives of their (usually) white sponsors, black missionaries often felt a special calling to save Africa from paganism and Islam. In addition, thriving African Christian communities might serve as a refuge from persecution and show the world that blacks could build civilized societies.
The first missionaries concentrated on bringing individual men and women to Christ, perhaps as a prelude to his imminent Second Coming. Always few in number, they hoped to establish indigenous congregations to carry on the work. At first, too, they paid close attention to the quality of faith among aspiring converts. Missionaries and their sponsoring agencies frequently agonized over the question of how much they should modify indigenous cultures. Some evangelical Protestants thought a large measure of "civilization" necessary for Christianity to take hold. In theory, most wanted to change local ways of life as little as possible consistent with the demands of the gospel. In practice, both the prevailing definition of civilized morality and their own personal traits undermined missionary restraint. Inevitably, they fostered values esteemed by middle-class Protestants: hard work, efficiency, technological innovation, sexual propriety, and respect for "true womanhood." The missionaries were usually ignored, often opposed, and sometimes physically attacked. Even converts mixed Protestant precepts with aspects of their previous religious faiths. Missionaries learned to simplify Christianity and relax their requirements for spiritual rebirth.
Pre–Civil War missionaries did not see themselves as agents of American economic expansion. Frequently they set out for places where trade was negligible and unlikely to develop. They often assailed merchants for their chicanery, sale of alcohol, and promotion of prostitution. Yet Charles Denby, Jr., U.S. minister to China later in the nineteenth century, was correct to see missionaries as "pioneers of trade." Businessmen who contributed to missionary societies and provided free passage on ships agreed. In many cases missionaries were the only translators available to entrepreneurs trying to open foreign markets.
Government officials saw the missionary enterprise as a means to extend American political influence. Writing on behalf of the ABCFM to King Kamehameha of Hawaii, President John Quincy Adams declared that "a knowledge of letters and of the True Religion—the Religion of the Christian's Bible" were the only means to advance any people's happiness. Despite such endorsements, the U.S. government offered less direct help than overseas missionaries wanted.
The Middle East, which attracted the largest number of missionaries before the Civil War, provides a case in point. Commodore David Porter, the American chargé d'affaires in the Ottoman Empire from 1831 until 1843, urged Turkish officials at all levels to safeguard the missionaries, worked to establish consulates in places where they operated, and occasionally arranged visits by the navy as quiet demonstrations of American strength. At the same time, Porter repeatedly warned against offending Muslims. From the perspective of the Turkish government, missionaries were welcome as long as their activities were not disruptive. But their proselytizing inevitably offended not only Muslims, but also Greek and Armenian Orthodox Christians. Disruptive responses included riots, destruction of property, and occasional murders.
The missionaries in the Middle East and their patrons at home worked diligently to influence government policy and enjoyed mixed success. Missionaries themselves received consular or diplomatic appointments in Athens, Beirut, and Constantinople. Encouraged by an ABCFM lobbyist, Secretary of State Daniel Webster wrote Porter in 1842 that missionaries should be assisted "in the same manner" as merchants. Indeed, in the Middle East they seem to have received slightly more direct assistance than businessmen. Still, government action fell short of their hopes. Warships were dispatched only to "show the flag," not to fire their cannon in retribution for attacks on missionaries, and the Turkish-American treaty of 1862 contained no provision guaranteeing the right to evangelize.
The worldwide Christian missionary campaign was confined neither to Protestants nor to Americans. From the perspective of the Vatican, the United States itself remained a mission field under the supervision of the Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith until 1908. While this subordinate status should not obscure the American hierarchy's quest for influence and autonomy, Catholic bishops, priests, and nuns necessarily concentrated on preserving—or creating—faith among millions of immigrants and their children. Thus, few Americans participated in the Vatican's far-flung missionary efforts. Among Protestants, the largest number of overseas missionaries came from Great Britain until roughly 1900. Friendly contacts between Protestant and Catholic missionaries were rare in the early nineteenth century. More typical was the complaint by ABCFM representatives in the Middle East that agents of popery allied with Islamic infidels to thwart their efforts. On the other hand, American Protestant missionaries not only cooperated with their British counterparts, whose efforts predated their own by at least two decades, but also sought protection from British diplomats and warships. This cooperation was both a sign of and modest contribution to the rapprochement that proceeded fitfully between the two countries.
Although no more than two thousand American missionaries had been sent abroad by 1870, their impact on indigenous cultures was occasionally extraordinary. Nowhere was their influence more apparent than in the Hawaiian Islands. When the first missionaries, from the ABCFM, arrived in 1820, Hawaii was already enduring rapid—and usually destructive—change through contact with the outside world The missionaries were appalled by many Hawaiian practices, including polygamy, incest, and the "licentious" hula dance. To some Hawaiians, however, these evangelical Protestants seemed preferable to the merchants and sailors who had introduced alcohol, prostitution, and deadly diseases. The missionaries' shrewdest tactic was to cultivate Hawaiian royalty. By 1840 they had transformed the islands into a limited monarchy with a legislature, judiciary, and constitution barring laws "at variance with the Word of Lord Jehovah."
Although the ABCFM initially cited Hawaii as an example to emulate, success there was neither problem-free nor permanent. Many pro forma converts lapsed into what the missionaries considered sin. Despite zealous efforts to exclude religious rivals, advocates of Catholic and Mormon "idolatry" established footholds. Even Hawaiian Christians prayed for relief from white "mission rule." The ABCFM reprimanded its representatives for going beyond their charge to bring the gospel. Yet the political and social changes were irreversible. By the 1850s former missionaries, their children, and protégés had established themselves as Hawaii's elite.
No field offered less promise than China in the early nineteenth century. The population was indifferent. The Manchu dynasty barely tolerated missionaries (often disguised as businessmen) along with other foreign "barbarians" in an enclave near Canton. In 1858 the Reverend Samuel Wells Williams judged the Chinese "among the most craven of people, cruel and selfish as heathenism can make men." Thus, the gospel must be "backed by force if we wish them to listen to reason."
Force came primarily in the shape of the British navy. American missionaries enthusiastically backed Britain's frequent assaults and regretted only that U.S. warships rarely joined the fray. The Opium War that began in 1839 was a turning point for China and the missionaries there. With few exceptions they cheered the British victory, even though it meant continuation of an illegal narcotics trade the Chinese were trying to suppress. Perhaps, they reflected, God was using naval bombardments to open China to the gospel.
The Sino-British agreement that ended the Opium War in 1842 and established five treaty ports was the first of many "unequal treaties" that provoked Chinese resentment. In 1844 the Treaty of Wanghia granted the United States access to these ports and most-favored-nation status. The pact was largely the work of three missionaries, one of whom, Dr. Peter Parker, became U.S. commissioner in China a decade later.
The Taiping Rebellion, led by Hung Hsiuchuan, again showed that evangelism could be a catalyst for extraordinary and wholly unanticipated consequences. After living briefly in the house of a missionary, Hung baptized himself and created a religious movement combining elements of Christianity, Confucianism, his own mystical visions, and a reformist social program. In 1851 he led an uprising against the Manchu dynasty; by the time he was defeated, at least twenty million Chinese had been killed.
Although missionary influence certainly did not cause the Taiping Rebellion, and both Protestants and Catholics repudiated Hung's syncretic faith after an initial show of interest, the revolt made the Manchu court more wary than ever of Western religion. At the same time, the revolt rendered China less able to resist Western power. After further British bombardment, in a few instances aided by the U.S. Navy, China agreed in the late 1850s to new and increasingly unequal treaties with the West. Thus, unlike their colleagues in the Middle East, missionaries in China were guaranteed the right to spread the gospel.
A second Great Awakening at a time of mass non-Protestant immigration energized prejudice as well as domestic reform and missionary activity. Slurs against Jews routinely included the charge that their ancestors had crucified Christ. Nonetheless, Jews seemed less threatening than the more numerous and raucous Catholic immigrants. Neither the nativists who burned convents nor the Catholics who fought back with equal vigor were moved by the fine points of theology. Even so, well-publicized attacks on "popery" by prominent clergy hardly served the cause of tolerance. No clergyman was more prominent than Congregationalist Lyman Beecher. In A Plea for the West (1835), Beecher accused the Vatican of flooding the frontier with ignorant immigrants who were easily manipulated by priests. Unlike anti-Semitism, hostility to Catholics affected national politics. In the mid-1850s the nativist American Party, popularly called the Know-Nothings, became a powerful force in Congress.
As the population grew more diverse during the first half of the nineteenth century, so too did diplomatic personnel and political controversies involving religion and foreign policy. Starting with the Jeffersonian Republicans, Jews served as diplomatic and commercial representatives abroad, notably in Scotland and the Caribbean. The first major post went to Mordecai Noah, appointed consul at Tunis in 1813. Removing Noah two years later, Secretary of State James Monroe claimed that his Judaism had been an "obstacle" to performance of his duties. It seems doubtful that the Muslim ruler of Tunis was discomfited by Noah's religion. Indeed, Noah's appointment continued a diplomatic tradition in which Jews often served as mediators between Christians and Muslims. Responding to inquiries by Noah's political backers of various faiths, Secretary Monroe backtracked to say that his religion, "so far as related to this government," played no part in the recall. Many Jews remained unconvinced.
In 1840 the persecution of Jews in parts of the Ottoman Empire attracted widespread attention. Officials in Damascus charged Syrian Jews with killing a Catholic monk and his servant in order to use their blood in Passover services, arrested dozens of Jews, and tortured some of them to secure spurious confessions. Both the "blood libel" charge and attacks upon Jews quickly spread to other parts of the empire. French diplomats apparently encouraged the persecution in order to maximize their own country's influence. Great Britain led the international protests and the United States joined in. American diplomats were instructed to use their good offices "with discretion" to aid Jewish victims of persecution. According to Secretary of State John Forsyth's instructions, the United States was acting as a friendly power, whose institutions placed "upon the same footing, the worshipers of God of every faith."
Public meetings by Christians and Jews alike encouraged government action. Some Jewish leaders hesitated to rally behind their Eastern coreligionists; others doubted the prudence or propriety of seeking government action. Ultimately, however, the Damascus affair brought American Jews closer together and legitimated demonstrations against anti-Semitism abroad. Six years later they organized protests against the persecution of Russian Jews. During the 1850s, along with such Christian allies as Senators Henry Clay and Lewis Cass, they denounced a treaty that recognized the right of Swiss cantons to discriminate against Jews. The administration of President Millard Fillmore negotiated cosmetic changes in the agreement.
Foreign policy issues prompted animosity as well as cooperation among religious faiths. Many Protestants supported Jewish protests not only because they valued the republican principle of equal treatment of all white citizens, but also because they wanted to set a precedent for receiving equal treatment in Catholic countries. John England, the Catholic archbishop of Charleston, attended a mass meeting condemning the Ottoman persecution of Jews in 1840. Conversely, Jews and Catholics were bitterly divided over the Mortara affair in the 1850s. Edgardo Mortara, a Jewish child in Bologna, Italy, was secretly baptized by a servant and then removed from his family by the church. Caught between Catholic and Jewish constituencies, President James Buchanan claimed that he could not intervene in the affairs of another state.
The Mexican War was the most controversial foreign policy event between the War of 1812 and World War I. Although sectarian religious arguments were not absent, rival interpretations of the nation's nonsectarian republican mission predominated among proponents and opponents alike. According to opponents, President James K. Polk had provoked an illegitimate war with a fellow Christian republic. According to proponents, not only did the United States need to defend itself in an undemocratic world, but also the corrupt Mexican state resembled European autocracies rather than a true republic. Therefore, an American triumph would help to purify Mexico and inspire the forces of liberty everywhere. Instead of fostering freedom, opponents countered, such a victory would increase the territory open to slavery.
In this complicated ideological context, the major denominations took no official stand on the war. The Disciples of Christ, which had just begun to emerge during the awakening, called it a crime. Presbyterian leaders showed the most enthusiasm, especially about the prospect of saving Mexico from Catholic "idolatry." Congregationalists, Unitarians, and Quakers, the strongest foes of slavery, were also the most ardent opponents of the war.
The issue of Catholic loyalty to the United States engaged American nativists, Mexican military strategists, and the Polk administration. Circulating lurid tales of seductions by Mexican nuns, nativists feared that the Catholic troops, roughly 1,100 in number, would spy for or defect to the enemy. The Mexicans hoped so. Despite their propaganda efforts, only a few Irish-American soldiers switched sides to join the Battalion of Saint Patrick.
As president and leader of the Democratic Party, which received a disproportionate share of the Catholic vote, Polk declined to make the war an anti-Catholic crusade. Emissaries to the Mexican Catholic hierarchy emphasized that their church was not endangered by the U.S. invasion. Polk asked the American bishops to recommend Catholic chaplains for the army. In addition, Moses Beach, Catholic editor of the New York Sun, served as one of Polk's numerous agents seeking to secure a peace treaty. Many American soldiers accepted the ready-made stereotype that Catholicism had corrupted the Mexican government and rendered the population docile, yet some found the priests surprisingly amiable and enjoyed the romance of billeting in monasteries.
From the Civil War to World War I
The Civil War era affected the American religious life in important ways. What some scholars consider a third Great Awakening began in the 1850s and continued during the war itself. Indeed, the conflict looked much more like an evangelical Protestant war than had the Revolution, the War of 1812, or the Mexican War. Union and Confederate clergy called upon God to aid their respective causes, military camps hosted revival meetings, and soldiers sometimes marched into battle singing hymns. Thoughtful supporters of the Union from President Abraham Lincoln on down framed the war as a time of testing. For many northerners, victory in 1865 proved that the test had been passed and that God truly blessed America and its mission in the world.
The consequences for Catholics were mixed. On the one hand, service for the North and South brought new legitimacy; on the other hand, erstwhile Know-Nothings found a home in the Republican Party. Although Jews served disproportionately in both the Union and Confederate armies, rising evangelical fervor combined with venerable stereotypes about Jewish profiteering to provoke notable anti-Semitic incidents and accusations. Finally, except for the historic peace churches, the war decimated the organized antiwar movement as even fervent pacifists were tempted to acquiesce in violence to end slavery.
Important as these developments were, the Civil War affected the religious scene much less than the powerful trends of the following four decades. Starting in the 1880s, millions of poor Catholic and Jewish immigrants began to arrive from eastern and southern Europe. Although the population remained predominantly Protestant and the elite institutions overwhelmingly so, politics and popular culture were soon affected. For the Catholic and Jewish minorities, the problem of defining and defending their Americanness acquired fresh urgency. Moreover, the "new immigration" coincided with a rapid industrialization rivaled only by that of Germany. Both the benefits and liabilities were obvious. On the one hand, unprecedented wealth was available to a few Americans and upward mobility possible for many. On the other hand, the gap widened between the rich and poor, frequent economic busts interrupted the long-term boom, and violent social conflict escalated. Perhaps God was once again testing rather than blessing America.
Worse yet, perhaps God did not exist at all—or at least His mode of governing the universe may have differed from what Christians had taken for granted since the ebbing of the Enlightenment. Amid the social turmoil, Protestants in particular faced serious intellectual challenges. The Darwinian theory of evolution undermined the Genesis account of creation. Modern science raised doubts about all biblical miracles. Less known to the praying public but especially distressing to educated clergy, archaeological discoveries and "higher criticism" of the Bible suggested that Scripture was in no simple sense the word of God.
The religious responses to this social and intellectual turmoil included insular bigotry and cosmopolitan reflection, apocalyptic foreboding and millennial optimism, intellectual adaptation and retrenchment, withdrawal from the world and expanded efforts to perfect it. The choices made by individual men and women involved anguish, ambivalence, and inconsistency. In the aggregate, their decisions transformed American religious life.
By the 1890s Protestantism was entering a fourth Great Awakening, which, like its predecessors, was marked by heightened emotions, stresses and splits within existing denominations, and the founding of new faiths. Among believers in new faiths were the followers of former Congregationalist Charles Taze Russell (known since 1931 as Jehovah's Witnesses), whose teachings required separation from a world ruled by Satan. Other spiritual searchers, convinced that God's grace brought a second blessing with such signs as the gift of speaking in tongues, formed their own Pentecostal churches. Doctrinal differences strained relations within the major denominations. Theological liberals, who often called themselves modernists, viewed the Bible as a valuable but not necessarily infallible book, emphasized Jesus's humanity and moral example, and aspired to build God's kingdom on earth. Theological conservatives, most of whom called themselves fundamentalists after World War I, championed the "inerrancy" of the Bible, the divinity of Jesus, and the expectation that God's kingdom would be established only after His miraculous return. While staunch modernists and conservatives occasionally confronted each other in heresy trials, moderates from both camps usually continued to work together until World War I.
Although theological conservatives were not necessarily politically conservative, they emphasized that the church as an institution must above all else save souls. While modernists stressed the church's role in improving this world, their earthly version of God's kingdom fell far short of twenty-first-century political liberalism. Indeed, sophisticated religious ideas coexisted in the typical theological liberal's worldview with routine affirmations of laissez-faire economics. A few theological liberals preached an explicitly "social gospel" in support of workers' rights, a regulatory state, and (occasionally) moderate socialism. Yet even social gospelers were susceptible to anti Semitism, anti-Catholic nativism, and ostensibly scientific theories of "Anglo-Saxon" superiority.
By the 1880s affluent and assimilated American Jews experienced growing social discrimination. By that point, too, anti-Catholic activism was again on the rise. The American Protective Association (APA), founded in 1887, attracted 100,000 members who pledged not to hire or join strikes with Catholics. In countless tracts, efficient, fair, and democratic Anglo-Saxon Protestants were celebrated at the expense of tricky Jews, drunken Irish, sullen Poles, and impulsive Italians. Despite this emphasis on racial or cultural superiority, religious motifs were not absent from this latest form of nativism. Jewish chicanery came naturally, many Christians believed, because Jews had crucified Jesus. Ignorant Catholic peasants from eastern or southern Europe, like the Mexicans defeated in the 1840s, looked dangerously susceptible to clerical manipulation. The affirmation of papal infallibility at the First Vatican Council in 1869 and 1870, the increasingly insular papacy of Pope Leo XIII, and the Holy See's suspicion of the American Catholic Church suggested that Protestant fears were not entirely fanciful.
The behavior of Jews and Catholics was much more complicated than even tolerant Protestants supposed. On the one hand, many immigrants were rapidly acculturated and their native-born children considered themselves Americans. On the other hand, rivalry among "nationalities" within the same religious community was commonplace. Sephardic and German Reform Jews viewed Judaism as a religion akin to liberal Protestantism; for the Orthodox eastern European Jews who outnumbered them by the early twentieth century, Judaism was central to cultural identity. Catholic bishops disagreed among themselves about their religion's place in a democracy devoid of a state church but nonetheless dominated by an informal Protestant establishment. Nationalists like Cardinal James Gibbons and Archbishop John Ireland expected Catholicism to thrive in such circumstances. They warned, however, that strict Vatican control would only fuel Protestant animosity.
All of these developments not only affected the immediate relationship between faith and foreign policy, but also left a long legacy of beliefs and institutions. Most obviously, sermons, articles, and books by mainstream clergy put a religious imprimatur on post–Civil War expansion. In 1885 the Reverend Josiah Strong's Our Country, the most widely read of these tracts, was published. The book itself was a mixture of nativist themes, popularized Darwinism, apocalyptic fore-boding, and millennial hope. Our Country also reflected Strong's participation in both the home and overseas mission movements. Strong believed that authoritarian religions threatened the political freedom and "pure spiritual Christianity" that Anglo-Saxons had nurtured in the United States. Echoing Lyman Beecher's earlier "plea for the West," he considered the heartland particularly vulnerable. Not only were ignorant European Catholics settling there, but the Mormon heresy was also firmly established.
If the peril was great, so were the opportunities. Despite his ethnocentrism, Strong did not consider eastern and southern European Catholics inherently inferior. If converted to Protestantism and Americanized in the public schools, these ersatz Anglo-Saxons would make the country stronger than ever. "Our country" could then fulfill its destiny. As the fittest nation in the international struggle, the United States would easily impress its institutions on the world.
Beyond tracts and sermons, the fourth Great Awakening sparked a resurgence of overseas missions, which had been suffering from a lack of recruits. In 1886 the cause struck a nerve among hundreds of young people attending a conference under the auspices of Dwight L. Moody, the fore-most evangelist of the day. The next year some of those present took the lead in founding the Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions (SVM). The Reverend Arthur Pierson, a theological conservative who expected an imminent Second Coming, gave the group a millenarian motto: "The evangelization of the world in this generation." John R. Mott, a Methodist layman, became SVM executive secretary and master organizer. Mott recruited educated missionaries, built a network of supporters on college campuses, and fostered interdenominational and international cooperation. Ties to Canadian Protestants were particularly strong.
The SVM was only the most striking manifestation of growing interest. Once again, diverse religious groups founded mission boards, auxiliary societies, and umbrella organizations. Between 1890 and 1915 the number of overseas missionaries rose from roughly one thousand to nine thousand. This was the largest group of Americans living abroad on a long-term basis. By 1920 Americans and Canadians together made up half of the Protestant missionary force worldwide. Equally important, the campaign to "evangelize the world" became a vivid presence in thousands of congregations. Many Americans first learned something about life in Asia, Africa, or the Middle East, however ethnocentric the perspective, from a returned missionary's Sunday sermon.
The expanding movement reflected general social and cultural trends. Appropriating the military analogies that abounded for two generations after the Civil War, missionaries framed their task as a religious "war of conquest." In an era of scientific racial theories, legal segregation, and disfranchisement of African Americans, denominations led by whites ceased sending black missionaries to Africa. As middle-class women sought to bring the benefits of "social housekeeping" to a corrupt and sinful world, some found careers—as well as adventure and fulfillment—in missionary work. By 1890, 60 percent of overseas missionaries were women. Confined to working within their own gender, they focused on such "female" issues as seeking to end the crippling binding of women's feet in China.
The expanding movement also reflected prevailing religious animosities. Isolated Westerners in alien lands, American Protestant and European Catholic missionaries now occasionally fell into ad hoc cooperation during medical or military emergencies, but suspicion continued to characterize their relations in calmer times. The international missionary war of conquest led to increased cooperation among Protestants in other areas. At the same time, the doctrinal differences spreading within most major denominations produced disputes about what exactly overseas missionaries were supposed to do. Theological liberals, especially those with a social gospel bent, emphasized the improvement of living standards both as an ethical imperative and an effective evangelical strategy. According to theological conservatives, preaching of the unadorned gospel was both a Christian duty and a better way to attract sincere converts. Ironically, the cosmopolitan modernists usually sanctioned greater intrusion on indigenous ways of life. A few of them, however, edged toward the position long held by Quakers and Unitarians that no people should be evangelized into surrendering their historic religion.
Indigenous peoples were not passive recipients of the missionary message. In many cases, missionary activity responded to local demands for medical care and education. As early as 1885, eight colleges had been founded in the Ottoman Empire; by the 1910s a majority of missionaries in China were no longer involved in directly spreading the gospel. Moreover, Western learning was sometimes seen as a way to resist further Western encroachments.
As was the case before the Civil War, missionaries sometimes significantly influenced the countries in which they served. A few did so by switching from religious to diplomatic careers. No one followed this path with greater success than Horace N. Allen, who arrived in Korea as a Presbyterian medical missionary in 1884. After tending to a wounded prince, Allen became the royal family's favorite physician and began giving a wide range of advice to the king and queen. After representing Korean interests in the United States, Allen served as secretary to the American legation and then as minister to Seoul from 1897 until 1905. Often evading State Department instructions against meddling in Korean affairs, he secured mining and lumbering concessions for American investors as well as contracts to install trolley, electric, and telephone lines. And while warning missionaries against offending Koreans' sensibilities, Allen used his influence at court to protect them.
Allen's career underscores a major development in late-nineteenth-century foreign policy: an intensified interest in Asia by merchants and missionaries alike. Indeed, religious leaders now frequently stressed the confluence of conversion and capitalism. Lecturing on the "Christian Conquest of Asia" at Union Theological Seminary in 1898, the Reverend J. H. Barrows, president of Oberlin College, envisioned the Pacific Ocean as the "chief highway of the world's commerce." By the 1890s missionaries in the Far East outnumbered those sent to the Middle East for the first time.
The convergence of evangelism, commerce, and politics should be no surprise. Much as merchants sought foreign markets to relieve economic stagnation, and as political leaders thought expansionism an antidote to real class conflict or alleged cultural decline, Protestants looked overseas to solve their particular domestic problems. Indeed, well-publicized missionary campaigns did reinvigorate the churches at home.
Symbolic of an era marked by strong religious hopes, fears, and tensions, the two major political parties in 1896 nominated the most devout pair of presidential candidates in American history: Methodist Republican William McKinley and Presbyterian Democrat William Jennings Bryan. Two years later, McKinley, the winning nominee, ushered in a new phase of "manifest destiny" (a term then still in common use) when he reluctantly led the United States to war against Spain.
As the United States moved toward war, religious leaders followed the general trajectory of opinion with two notable variations. They worried less than businessmen about the domestic side effects and kept a watchful eye on the interests of their respective creeds. Even after the USS Maine exploded in Havana harbor, most urged caution, though some Protestant editors could not resist openly coveting Spanish colonies as mission fields. Catholics felt special misgivings because Pope Leo XIII was actively seeking a peaceful settlement. The church hierarchy and press found Protestants altogether too bloodthirsty. Despite his devout Methodism and opportunistic flirtation with the American Protective Association, McKinley was no more eager than Polk had been to start an anti-Catholic crusade. He made at least a show of pursuing papal mediation. Archbishop Ireland, McKinley's emissary to the Vatican, believed that patient diplomacy could have preserved the peace. Pressed by Republican hawks, however, the president decided on war in April 1898 and told Conegress that intervention in Cuba was the duty of a "Christian, peace loving people."
Clergy and laymen outside of the peace churches joined in the patriotic surge. As had been the case with Mexico five decades earlier, Protestants frequently framed the war as a symbolic battle against the Spanish Inquisition and a few warned of treacherous Catholic soldiers. Catholics once again rallied to the flag, urged on by bishops who kept doubts to themselves. In the end, many citizens joined McKinley in viewing the quick victory with few casualties as a gift from God.
Nationalists in the Catholic hierarchy thought they saw a silver lining in the war clouds: now that the United States had clearly emerged as a world power, the American church would have to be respected by the Vatican and allowed to adapt to its special situation. The reaction in Rome was just the opposite. The U.S. military victory provided an additional reason, if any were necessary, for the Vatican to curb these bishops before their tolerance of democracy and religious pluralism spread to Europe. In 1899 Pope Leo XIII condemned an incipient "Americanist" heresy that challenged Vatican authority. Although the Pope did not explicitly accuse any churchmen of "Americanism," his encyclical signaled a turn toward tighter control over Catholic institutions and intellectual life in the United States.
With varying degrees of enthusiasm, the major Protestant denominations supported the wartime annexation of Hawaii and acquisition of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines via the peace treaty. Except among white southerners, qualms about ruling nonwhites deemed unfit for citizenship were generally overshadowed by a sense of missionary duty. Congregationalists and Presbyterians expressed the fewest reservations; Methodists tended to trust their coreligionist in the White House on this issue.
Religious adversaries quickly exported their conflicts to the Philippines, the most Christian land in Asia. While Protestants viewed the over-whelmingly Catholic population as potential converts, Catholic editors asked with sarcasm if they planned to replicate the Hawaiian pattern of bringing disease and disruption. Catholics credited priests with protecting the indigenous population; Protestants portrayed "greedy friars" clinging to their estates. This controversy subsided after the McKinley administration negotiated with the Vatican to purchase the land. Another followed when the superintendent of the new public school system hesitated to hire Catholics. On other fronts, Protestants assailed the army for distributing liquor, sanctioning prostitution, and acquiescing in polygamy among the Muslim minority.
These struggles for religious influence paled beside the squalid little war to defeat the Filipinos seeking independence. Yet only a handful of prominent clergy joined the antiwar movement. The Reverend Leighton Parks, a noted Episcopalian, repeatedly denounced atrocities committed by the American military. Although the Catholic hierarchy sought primarily to evade this controversy lest its church appear unpatriotic, Bishop John Spalding broke ranks to address an antiwar meeting. Protestant expansionists considered suppression of the insurrection a necessary evil on the way to spreading Christian civilization to Asia. The Philippines looked like an ideal base for capturing the great China market in souls.
During the late nineteenth century Christian missionaries, including the substantial American contingent, became the largest group of foreigners in China. Increasingly, too, they were subject to attack as flesh-and-blood symbols of Western intrusion. In 1900 the secret society of Boxers rose up to kill hundreds of missionaries and thousands of Chinese converts. An attack on the legation compound in Peking followed. A combined Western and Japanese military expedition marched to the rescue, engaging in murder, rape, and looting en route. A few missionaries joined in the looting; most at a minimum justified the brutality with the familiar contention that the Chinese only understood force.
The use or threat of force became commonplace during the administrations of Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft. Indeed, both presidents illustrate that the American pursuit of world power required no evangelical Protestant motivation. Roosevelt was a pro forma member of the Dutch Reformed Church who may have doubted the existence of God and an afterlife. Yet no president sounded more fervent calls to enforce "righteousness." His endorsement of overseas missionaries was grounded in what he considered practicality. For example, he believed, mistakenly, that missionaries brought stability to China. Taft's Unitarian rejection of the Trinity elicited criticism from grassroots theological conservatives, but he felt none of his denomination's doubts about forcing American ways on others.
Taft's administration was marked by one of the most successful instances of religious activism in the history of American foreign relations: the campaign by Jews and their gentile allies to abrogate a Russian-American trade agreement that had been on the books since 1832. The State Department often investigated and sometimes politely complained about the anti-Semitic acts that increased abroad in the late nineteenth century. The motives behind these diplomatic initiatives were mixed: humanitarian concern; protection of American citizens; responsiveness to Jewish voters; and fears that victims of persecution would immigrate to the United States. The results were mixed, too. Benjamin Peixotto, a Jewish consul appointed to Bucharest in the 1870s, negotiated a temporary remission in Romanian anti-Semitism. The Russian situation grew steadily worse. In 1903 a pogrom in Kishinev left dozens of Jews dead while police stood aside. Similar outbreaks followed elsewhere. Still, the Russian government blandly rebuffed Roosevelt administration inquiries and refused to receive a petition of protest forwarded by Secretary of State John Hay. Nor would Russia guarantee the safety of visiting American Jews.
After discrete lobbying failed to secure action by Taft to revise or abrogate the commercial treaty, the American Jewish Committee (AJC) led an effective public mobilization. As had been the case with the Damascus blood libel persecution in 1840, anti-Semitism abroad inspired cooperation among American Jews, who were now more diverse in national background than ever before. The AJC stressed the "sacred American principle of freedom of religion." Amid widespread hostility to czarist autocracy, thousands of gentiles in civic organizations, state legislatures, and Congress joined the call for abrogation. In December 1912 the Taft administration informed the Russians that the treaty would be allowed to expire the next year.
During the two decades before World War I, religious leaders helped to build a new peace movement—a peace movement adapted to an era in which the United States assumed the right to enforce righteousness. Almost all participants in the proliferating peace groups shunned pacifism, a term just coming into general use, often as a slur; many celebrated American and Christian expansion as the best ways to assure global amity in the long run. They typically emphasized prevention of war between "civilized" countries through arbitration and international law. Although a handful of noted Catholics and Jews joined secular peace societies, the religious wing of the movement was overwhelmingly Protestant and disproportionately modernist. For instance, the Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America (FCCCA), formed in 1908 by thirty-three liberal-leaning denominations, sponsored both the Commission on Peace and Arbitration and the Church Peace Union.
The notion that religion influenced the actions of President Woodrow Wilson and his first secretary of state, fellow Presbyterian William Jennings Bryan, is familiar to students of American diplomacy—too familiar. Standard accounts stress their respective religious styles, often in caricature, at the expense of substance. In fact, their lives illustrate the divergent responses to the Protestant intellectual crisis of their time. Equally important, their disagreement about World War I underscores the peril of tracing an unambiguous American conception of mission from John Winthrop's "city upon a hill" to the early twentieth century and beyond.
Both Wilson and Bryan felt some religious skepticism during their college years. Wilson's father, a modernist Presbyterian minister, urged him to cease worrying about doctrine and simply love Jesus. Thereafter, Wilson lived comfortably as a religious liberal, sometimes poking fun at orthodox assaults on Darwinism and at visions of hellfire. Along with other liberal Protestants, he saw the world improving under the amorphous guidance of "Divine Providence." With few exceptions—notably, his own election as president—he rarely credited God with direct intervention. As the "people's book of revelation," the Bible inspired human action to achieve high personal and social standards but contained little practical advice. Among the actors Wilson lauded were "my missionaries." Unlike Roosevelt, he sensed their role as agents of change rather than stability. China, a republic after the revolution of 1911, had been "cried awake by the voice of Christ," Wilson said.
Although Bryan followed the theologically conservative path, he was initially undogmatic on many doctrinal issues. For example, he corresponded with Leo Tolstoy, whose heterodox Christianity he thought compatible with his own conception of Jesus as the Prince of Peace. Like many of his fellow citizens, Bryan was torn between peace and world power. As secretary of state he both negotiated "cooling-off" treaties with two dozen countries and supported military intervention in the Mexican Revolution. Bryan resigned in 1915 because he considered Wilson's strictures on German submarine warfare a lapse from neutrality. Yet Bryan went beyond the secular crisis at hand to affirm a restrained sense of American mission at least as old as the president's internationalist activism. Rather than descending into European-style power politics, the United States should "implant hope in the breast of humanity and substitute higher ideals for the ideals which have led nations into armed conflict."
After Congress declared war in 1917, religious leaders supported the cause at least as strongly as did other elites. With customary flamboyance, conservative evangelist Billy Sunday declared that Christian pacifists should be left to the lynch mob and the coroner. Although usually less blunt, liberal Protestants maintained that German militarism must be destroyed as a prerequisite for international peace. With customary prudence the Catholic hierarchy stepped carefully from neutrality to "preparedness" to patriotic cooperation. Cardinal Gibbons dutifully forwarded Pope Benedict XV's peace proposals to the White House, fended off plausible allegations of a papal tilt toward the Central Powers, and headed an interfaith League for National Unity. All of the major denominations mobilized to offer religious and social services to their men in uniform. Churches and synagogues conducted war bond drives and disseminated propaganda for the Committee on Public Information. Few discouraged the zealous rhetoric that sometimes did lead to the lynch mob and the coroner.
Grassroots skepticism was greater than might be inferred from the behavior of mainstream clergy and congregations. Pentecostals, still on the fringe of theologically conservative Protestantism, were especially unenthusiastic. Roughly 65,000 draftees claimed conscientious objector status; overwhelmingly, these men came from the peace churches. In the Selective Service System and in the courts, Jehovah's Witnesses fared worse than the less strident and more familiar Quakers and Mennonites.
From Versailles to Pearl Harbor
Missionaries, representatives of the Federal Council of Churches, and delegates from the newly formed American Jewish Congress converged on the Versailles peace conference in 1919. Like their secular counterparts, religious interest groups discovered that a humane international order was more easily promised than attained. The fate of Armenians in the disintegrating Ottoman Empire provided a brutal case in point. Protestant missionaries had tried unsuccessfully in 1894 and 1895 to secure Western military action to halt Turkish pogroms. They pressed their case again after the Ottoman government orchestrated the killing of hundreds of thousands of Armenians during World War I. Wilson rejected armed intervention but would accept Armenia as a U.S. mandate under the League of Nations mandate. Congress quickly dismissed this proposal.
No event associated with religion during World War I proved more consequential for U.S. foreign policy than the British promise in the Balfour Declaration to establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine. The question divided Zionists and non-Zionists within Judaism. Reform Jews in particular thought a full-fledged state might prejudice their status as U.S. citizens. Protestant missionaries were adamantly opposed because they expected a hostile Arab reaction that would, in turn, disrupt their own efforts. According to Secretary of State Robert Lansing, Christians would resent control of the Holy Land by the "race credited with the death of Christ." Nonetheless, Wilson gave early and repeated support to the Zionist cause.
Ultimately, World War I changed American religion much more than religious beliefs or activities affected the conduct of the war or the shape of the peace. There were noteworthy organizational consequences. The Federal Council of Churches asserted itself as the premier voice of the de facto Protestant establishment. More convinced than ever of human sinfulness and Jesus's imminent return, theological conservatives founded the World's Christian Fundamentals Association (WCFA) in 1917. The National Catholic War Council, renamed the National Catholic Welfare Council (NCWC), remained in operation after the armistice. So did the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) and the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), which had been a haven for conscientious objectors and pacifist social gospelers.
Even more important, the emotional charge of the war and its offspring, the Red Scare of 1919 and 1920, fueled religious anxieties and animosities. The main clashes involved domestic issues, especially Prohibition, looser sexual mores, and the possibility of a Catholic president. Yet several domestic developments intersected with foreign policy. In 1924 the prevailing nativist zeitgeist eased passage of the Johnson-Reed Act, which sharply curtailed immigration. Amid a nationwide surge of anti-Semitism, the Foreign Service joined other elite institutions in rejecting Jewish applicants on the basis of their religion.
Except for strongly separatist sects, clergy and churchgoers still paid attention at least to some portion of the outside world. Although bitterly disappointed by the defeat of the Treaty of Versailles, liberal Protestants persisted in urging American affiliation with the League of Nations. A handful of social gospelers expressed cautious interest in the "Soviet experiment." Catholic clergy used their pulpits to denounce Mexican anticlericalism as well as atheistic communism. Influenced by a form of Bible prophecy called premillennial dispensationalism, fundamentalists became avid if unconventional students of foreign affairs. They found in Zionism fulfillment of the prophecy that the Jews would regather in the Holy Land shortly before Jesus's return and speculated that the Antichrist might be on earth already in the person of Benito Mussolini.
The evident decline of the Protestant missionary movement during the 1920s looks in retrospect like a pause and an adaptation to domestic and international trends. Few now thought that the world could be converted within a generation and some doubted the right to convert anybody. A Chinese student movement directed specifically against Christianity left many missionaries disheartened; others responded to rising Chinese nationalism by urging renegotiation of the "unequal treaties" granting special privileges to westerners. The modernist philosopher William Ernest Hocking, head of a layman's inquiry into missions that was completed in 1932, recommended against attacking "non-Christian systems" of thought. Theological conservatives in the major Protestant denominations felt no such qualms. Nor did Mormons, Seventh Day Adventists, and Jehovah's Witnesses, all of whom hoped to save at least some portion of humanity. Moreover, in 1912 the American Catholic Church finally authorized an overseas mission society, popularly known as the Maryknolls.
Thus, in religion as in commerce, the United States was not isolated from the rest of the world during the interwar era. What is usually misconstrued as isolationism is the pervasive belief that the United States must keep out of any future European war. This sentiment needed little encouragement to flourish, but no group encouraged it more actively than the Protestant clergy. Of 19,372 ministers polled by a pacifist magazine in 1931, 12,076 said they would never sanction a war. Few of these ministers were absolute pacifists themselves. Rather, most were making symbolic amends for their martial ardor in 1917 and 1918.
The coalition Franklin D. Roosevelt created during his presidency was as complex in its religious dimensions as in its explicitly political aspects—and foreign policy was central to the complications. Roosevelt himself was an Episcopalian with an uncomplicated faith in God and a genuine commitment to religious tolerance. His supporters included a large majority of Catholics and Jews, southern theological conservatives still loyal to the Democrats as the party of segregation, and a small but vocal minority of Protestant modernists attracted to the Soviet Union and the Popular Front. Opponents included a distinctive religious right. These Protestant and Catholic theological conservatives viewed the Roosevelt administration as a subversive conspiracy and some of them considered it the American arm of an international Jewish plot.
Roosevelt's strongly anticommunist Catholic constituency required constant attention. The hierarchy and press in particular opposed the president's recognition of the Soviet Union in 1933. The Good Neighbor Policy appealed as an entrée for the American church in Latin America, but complications soon arose. The administration seemed too neighborly to the Mexican revolutionary government, whose anticlericalism sometimes turned into outright persecution. Moved by ten thousand letters, a probable congressional investigation, and the approaching 1936 election, Roosevelt quietly urged Mexico to curb its anti-Catholicism.
When the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, Americans overwhelmingly favored neutrality and legislation banning arms sales to either side. The Catholic clergy pointedly preferred a victory by the insurgent general, Francisco Franco, despite his alliance with Nazi Germany and fascist Italy. Lay opinion was less monolithic. According to a Gallup poll in 1938, 42 percent of Catholics sided with the Spanish republic. Nonetheless, wariness of Catholic political power reinforced Roosevelt's decision in 1938 not to seek an end to the arms embargo, an action that would have benefited the loyalists. Meanwhile, liberal Protestants criticized Catholic priests for tilting toward Franco and far right fundamentalists discerned hitherto unobserved merit in the Roman church. Similarly, religious appeals, loyalties, and animosities affected the tone of the debate about American participation in World War II. In urging aid to the Allies in the 1939–1941 period, Roosevelt said—and perhaps half believed—that Germany planned to abolish all religions and create an international Nazi church. Even clergy, however, typically framed the argument in terms of geopolitics and general morality rather than religious ideas or interests. Protestant ministers who had recently vowed to stay aloof from any European war now endorsed administration policies that undermined neutrality. Nor was there a clear correlation between theology and foreign policy positions. For instance, the anti-Semitic radio priest Charles Coughlin, numerous far right fundamentalists, and the social gospelers at Christian Century magazine all chastised Roosevelt as he moved from efforts to repeal neutrality legislation in 1939 to undeclared naval warfare against German submarines in late 1941. After Pearl Harbor, the major denominations rallied to the flag. They did so with fewer rhetorical excesses than during 1917 and 1918, however, and some prominent mainstream Protestants remained pacifists.
As had been the case with the Spanish-American War and World War I, Catholics trod a distinctive path to the same patriotic destination. They feared from the outset that the European war would promote communist expansion; most also initially rejected aid to the Soviets after Germany invaded in June 1941. Here, too, clergy were less flexible than their parishioners. Responding with varying degrees of finesse, Roosevelt urged Joseph Stalin to ease restrictions on religion, professed to see signs of religious freedom in the Soviet Union, and tried to convince Pope Pius XII to soften his strictures against communism. Some bishops came around to the position that the Soviet people, as opposed to the regime, deserved help in their resistance to nazism. In striking contrast to the prudence of the World War I years, the hierarchy displayed its divisions in public. One bishop spoke under the auspices of the noninterventionist America First Committee, another joined the interventionist Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies, and several sniped incessantly at the president.
In December 1939, Roosevelt named Myron Taylor, an Episcopalian, as his personal representative to the Vatican. Roosevelt hoped simultaneously to court Catholic voters, establish a listening post in Rome, and influence papal pronouncements on the war. Taylor's mission had no significant impact on the pope but did reveal—and probably exacerbated—domestic religious tensions. Only a few Protestant leaders managed to express grudging acquiescence. On the whole, Roosevelt was accused of religious favoritism and chided for violating the First Amendment; theological conservatives discerned a capitulation to satanic popery.
No foreign policy question associated with religion has elicited greater controversy than whether or not more European Jews could have been saved from the Holocaust. American Jews denounced Adolf Hitler's regime from 1933 onward. Once again they found gentile allies—but not enough of them. The level of American anti Semitism reached a peak during the interwar years. Limits on immigration were strictly enforced, often at the behest of anti-Semites in the State Department and the foreign service. Reports that the Nazis had begun to exterminate European Jewry were readily available by late 1942. The president was urged to bomb the death camps, announce plans to punish genocide, and extricate Jews from such inconstant Axis satellites as Romania and Bulgaria. The latter two tactics showed the most promise. Nonetheless, Roosevelt took no effective action until he created the War Refugee Board in January 1944. In short, even after the United States entered the war, greater effort could have saved hundreds of thousands of lives.
The Cold War and the Fifth Great Awakening
World War II catalyzed the revival evangelical Christians had been praying for since the 1920s. Like its four predecessors, this fifth Great Awakening reshaped religious life in unanticipated ways and influenced the relationship between faith and foreign affairs. Three aspects of the revival stand out. First, while modernist churches stagnated, theologically conservative Protestantism flourished, with Billy Graham leading one branch of the movement from fundamentalism toward a less separatist and less strident "evangelicalism." Second, Catholics grew more assertive and (especially after the Second Vatican Council from 1962 to 1965) more cosmopolitan. Third, the bulk of the awakening coincided with the Cold War, which officials from the White House on down described as a spiritual battle against "godless communism."
The relationship between Cold War faith and foreign policy is often misconstrued in ways comparable to clichés about the Wilson era. Once again, standard accounts render the religious beliefs of policymakers in caricature and postulate an unambiguous sense of mission from John Winthrop to John Foster Dulles. Despite his image as a Puritan avenger, Dulles himself was a theologically liberal Presbyterian who began in the 1930s to use the Federal Council of Churches as a convenient forum for publicizing his foreign policy prescriptions. Insofar as he became a dogmatic cold warrior by the time he was named secretary of state in 1953, Dulles was moved by Republican partisanship rather than religious doctrine.
Unlike Dulles, Reinhold Niebuhr applied serious religious ideas to foreign policy. Yet Niebuhr's image as the premier theologian of the Cold War needs refinement. In Niebuhr's view, because human beings are fallible and sinful (at least in a metaphorical sense), even their best actions fall short of altruism and yield ironic results. This "neo-orthodox" worldview is consistent with any number of conflicting positions on foreign policy. Indeed, without changing his theology, Niebuhr had moved from the pacifist Fellowship of Reconciliation to the interventionist Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies. In The Irony of American History (1952), he sounded more reflective than the typical Cold War ideologist. Applying neo-orthodox premises, he warned the United States against international arrogance and described communism and American capitalism as arising from the same "ethos" of egotism. Niebuhr was less dispassionate in dayto-day polemics against those whose skepticism about the Cold War exceeded his own. Moreover, valued for his intellectual reputation rather than his ideas, Niebuhr had no discernible impact while serving as a State Department consultant.
Religious interest groups, rather than serious religious ideas, did affect foreign policy. Yet here, too, we must beware of exaggerating their influence or their uniformity. For instance, while many in the missionary movement lobbied on behalf of Chiang Kai-shek during the Chinese civil war, others initially hoped to arrange a modus vivendi with the communists. Although a remarkable mobilization by American Jews nudged President Harry S. Truman toward quick recognition of Israel in 1948, prominent Reform Jews organized the American Council for Judaism to lobby against a full-fledged Jewish state.
The Catholic role in the Cold War especially needs to be extricated from folklore. Certainly priests, nuns, and lay leaders mobilized against international communism, particularly after Soviet satellites suppressed Catholicism in Eastern Europe. Yet, following a long tradition, non-Catholics overstated the church's power and understated the autonomy of its adherents. When Catholics joined in urging Italians to vote against communism in 1948, they were advancing Truman administration policy rather than vice versa. And contrary to legend, Cardinal Francis Spellman was not responsible for Ngo Dinh Diem's appointment as prime minister of the Republic of Vietnam.
On balance, international events between Pearl Harbor and the mid-1960s fostered increased tolerance as well as surface religious consensus. Partly as a reaction against Nazi genocide, anti-Semitism began a steady decline in the late 1940s. Ubiquitous invocations of the "Judeo-Christian tradition" not only legitimated Judaism, but also minimized differences within Christianity. Nonetheless, division and animosity persisted beneath the rhetorical conventions. The National Council of Churches, which superseded the Federal Council in 1950, appeared to be the authoritative voice of Protestantism, yet its leaders barely noticed the extraordinary revival among theological conservatives.
The tension between Catholics and Protestants was harder to ignore. Most clashes concerned such domestic questions as birth control and federal aid to education, but foreign policy was involved too. Yielding to Protestant complaints, Truman in 1951 abandoned his attempt to establish formal diplomatic relations with the Vatican. Senator Joseph McCarthy, the country's best-known Catholic politician during the early 1950s, provoked even greater controversy. Although their attitudes ranged from pride to disgust, Catholics disproportionately considered McCarthy an admirable anticommunist. His zeal furthered the rapprochement between the Catholic and Protestant political right begun during the 1930s. Conversely, prominent liberal Protestants considered McCarthy the latest personification of Catholic authoritarianism; some chided the church for failing to condemn him. Ironically, such attacks reinforced defensiveness among Catholics struggling to break out of their insularity. In 1960, John F. Kennedy proved that a cosmopolitan Catholic could be elected president. Equally important to his victory, however, Kennedy combined secular urbanity with wartime heroism and public commitment to winning the Cold War.
The next two decades revealed both the fragility of Cold War orthodoxy and the superficiality of the domestic religious consensus. Indeed, the collapse of the former during the Vietnam War hastened the deterioration of the latter. American escalation in 1965 not only reinvigorated the pacifist remnant that had survived World War II; in addition, between 1965 and 1970 roughly 170,000 draft registrants applied for conscientious objector status. In contrast to the Korean "police action," mainstream religious figures opposed the war. In 1966 prominent liberal Protestants and Jews took the lead in founding Clergy and Layman Concerned About Vietnam (CALCAV), a nondenominational coalition whose arguments against escalation usually echoed those of secular doves. Members ranged from chastened cold warrior Reinhold Niebuhr to African-American social gospeler Martin Luther King, Jr. Ultimately, the Vietnam conflict widened the split between Protestant theological liberals and conservatives. Most evangelicals and fundamentalists either stood aloof from this worldly issue or supported American policy.
For the first time, numerous Catholics remained part of a peace movement after the United States entered a war. Indeed, the radical priests Daniel and Philip Berrigan became vivid symbols of nonviolent resistance for doves and hawks of all faiths. In 1968, when Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy sought the Democratic presidential nomination as antiwar candidates, only strict fundamentalists worried about their Catholicism. In 1971 the bishops reversed their earlier endorsement of the war to advocate a "speedy" peace.
The Catholic left remained active following the war. By 1970 roughly half of all American Catholic missionaries served in Latin America, where many joined local clergy in opposing brutal dictatorships. Some of these priests and nuns—along with a few bishops—became proponents of "liberation theology," whose advocates adapted Marxist analysis and urged the church to champion the Third World poor.
Clearly, many Catholic liberals now felt sufficiently secure to risk accusations of disloyalty. Yet ironies abounded. These allegations often came from within their own church. Reversing the historical pattern, working-class Catholics pushed rightward by the turmoil of the 1960s often thought their priests too liberal. Liberals themselves came face to face with questions that had perplexed Protestants earlier in the century—for example, whether anyone should be converted from an ancestral religion. Finally, Catholics looked increasingly American to the rest of the country because they, too, were obviously divided among themselves.
In 1976 the two major political parties nominated the most devout pair of presidential candidates since McKinley and Bryan. Both Episcopalian Gerald Ford and Baptist Jimmy Carter considered themselves "born again" Christians. A competent lay theologian, Carter stands out as the only modern president whose foreign policy was affected by serious religious ideas. Simply put, he took to heart Niebuhr's warning against national egotism. Thus, within limits set by prevailing Cold War assumptions, Carter was distinctive in his calls for national humility, wariness of military intervention, and respect for poor and nonwhite countries. For a growing number of his constituents, stunned by the lost Vietnam War and wary of Soviet exploitation of détente, humility seemed a source of the country's diplomatic problems.
Many of Carter's harshest critics were moved by religious concerns. After helping him defeat Ford, evangelical voters discovered that Carter was theologically, culturally, and politically more liberal than they had thought. By 1979 clergy were organizing a militant minority of theological conservatives into a "new Christian right." Interested primarily in domestic issues, they routinely adopted the foreign policy prescriptions of staunch Republican cold warriors, with one important twist: the strong belief that Israel deserved special protection because it fulfilled the Biblical prophecy that Jews would regather in the Holy Land on the eve of Jesus's return. This philo-Semitic interpretation of Scripture was one aspect of the new Christian right that actually was new.
A Jewish political right began to form at roughly the same time, with deep concerns about foreign policy. As early as 1967, some Jews had begun to reconsider their political alliances when Protestant and Catholic liberals sharply criticized Israel's attack on Egypt. Then, Soviet limits on the emigration of Jews seemed to illustrate the failure of détente. Despite initial misgivings, Jewish groups rallied behind the Jackson-Vanik Amendment, which in 1974 denied most-favored-nation trade status to communist countries restricting emigration. Carter not only continued détente, but also pushed Israel harder than Egypt during the peace negotiations of 1978 and 1979. By that point, prominent Jewish intellectuals were helping to formulate an influential "neoconservative" critique of détente in general and Carter's diplomacy in particular. Losing to Ronald Reagan in 1980, Carter received only 45 percent of the Jewish vote.
Reagan never wavered in his conviction that God blessed America. Nor did he doubt the nation's mission—or his own—to end the Cold War by bringing down the Soviet "evil empire." A Protestant with a Catholic father and eclectic religious interests, he was well suited to manage a religious coalition as complex as Franklin Roosevelt's. In addition to moderate Protestants, the Republican base since the 1850s, his backers included Jewish neoconservatives as well as evangelicals and fundamentalists on the right. Furthermore, Reagan was the first Republican to win the Catholic vote twice.
Despite Reagan's frequent denunciations of communist evil before evangelical audiences, Catholics played a larger role in his Cold War diplomacy. No Catholic was more important in this respect than Pope John Paul II. The pope and the president coordinated efforts to weaken communism in Eastern Europe; their tactics ranged from public denunciations to covert Central Intelligence Agency funding of the anticommunist underground via the Vatican. When Reagan established full diplomatic relations with the papacy in 1984, Protestant theological conservatives in his coalition barely complained.
Cooperation across denominational lines also marked the opposition to Reagan's foreign policy. The grassroots movement to hold nuclear arsenals at their current levels—the "nuclear freeze"—became a powerful symbolic challenge to the administration's military buildup during the early 1980s. Advocates of the freeze included veteran pacifists in FOR and AFSC, theological liberals in Clergy and Laity Concerned (as CALCAV was renamed after the Vietnam War), and half of the Catholic bishops. Catholics were particularly active in providing humanitarian aid and opposing military intervention in Central America. Victims of rightist "death squads" in the El Salvador civil war included missionary nuns. While the U.S. Catholic Conference urged peace talks between the Salvadoran government and leftist rebels, numerous parishes assisted refugees who reached the United States. These actions were particularly impressive because Pope John Paul II gave de facto support to Reagan's anticommunist intervention in Central America.
By the 1990s the Cold War had ended but the effects of the fifth Great Awakening continued to be felt. In numbers, evangelicals, fundamentalists, and charismatics (as Pentecostals increasingly called themselves) constituted the religious mainstream. To an unprecedented degree, theological liberalism and conservatism correlated respectively with political liberalism and conservatism. Conservatives especially sponsored a resurgence of overseas missions; fifty thousand Americans lived abroad as missionaries or representatives of faith-based humanitarian organizations, often working closely with strong indigenous churches. To some extent the dream of the earliest missionaries had come true. At the end of the 1990s, there were 258 million Christians in Africa and 317 million in Asia.
Although references to the Judeo-Christian tradition lingered, use of this phrase to describe American religious life was even more problematic than during the 1950s. Significant numbers of Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists came to the United States after immigration law was liberalized in 1965. Astute political leaders took notice. President Carter denied any animosity toward Islam during the Iran hostage crisis of 1979 and 1980; President George H. W. Bush stressed the same point during the war against Iraq in 1991. Moreover, the appearance of yet another "new immigration" reinforced the American identity of those Catholics and Jews descended from earlier immigrants.
As Israel became both more secure and less central to their own identity, American Jews no longer felt obliged to defend all Israeli foreign policy. From the time President Carter negotiated the Camp David Accords of 1978 and the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty of 1979, the United States served as primary mediator in what was called (with undue optimism) the Middle East "peace process." The Oslo Accords signed at the White House in 1993 established a quasi-independent Palestinian National Authority in territory contested by Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization. As with Protestants and Catholics, Jewish approaches to foreign policy increasingly correlated with their religious beliefs. While Conservative and Reform Jews overwhelmingly endorsed negotiations in general and the Oslo agreements in particular, Orthodox Jews were skeptical or hostile. In 1998, President William Jefferson Clinton prodded the Israelis at the Wye River negotiations to surrender more disputed territory to the Palestine Authority. Once again, Conservative and Reform Jews responded favorably while Orthodox Jews joined Israeli hawks in opposition. Like Protestants and Catholics, Jews were now openly divided on a foreign policy issue.
The expansion of missionary activity overseas may have stirred increased persecution of Christian minorities around the world. Religious conservatives had no doubts about it and sought legislation mandating a diplomatic response. Humanitarian motives aside, these activists hoped to keep evangelicals and fundamentalists politically involved in the post–Cold War era. Furthermore, recalling the impact of the Jackson-Vanik Amendment, they thought religious freedom could be used to undermine Chinese communism. Still wary of imposing Christianity on non-Christian cultures, liberals hesitated to join the campaign. Even so, in 1997 and 1998, 100,000 Protestant and Catholic congregations sponsored annual days of prayer to "shatter the silence" about persecution. Ultimately, a broad coalition extending beyond the ranks of Christians and Jews supported the International Religious Freedom Act (IRFA), which passed Congress unanimously in 1998. The IRFA established an Office of International Religious Freedom in the State Department, a comparable position in the National Security Council, and an independent commission to monitor persecution.
Both the breadth of the coalition and the constitutional ban on preferential treatment of any religion required officials to concern themselves with small sects as well as large denominations, and with minor harassment as well as with serious violations of human rights. For instance, the commission's reports criticized European democracies for treating Seventh Day Adventists, Jehovah's Witnesses, and Scientologists (products respectively of the second, fourth, and fifth Great Awakenings) as second-class faiths. The chief concern, however, was the arrest, torture, or killing of believers, usually Christians but sometimes Muslims, too, in communist states and Islamic republics. American government responses ranged from public denunciations to behind-the-scenes diplomacy. No country attracted greater attention than the People's Republic of China, which persecuted both the Falun Gong, an indigenous mystical religion, and Christian churches unwilling to register with the government. Religious activists, including some Protestant liberals and the Catholic bishops, joined the unsuccessful campaign to deny China permanent normal trade relations status. Indeed, despite the passage of the IRFA, American policy toward religious persecution abroad in the early twenty-first century resembled that of the early nineteenth century: a mixture of popular protest and diplomatic inquiries without direct economic or military intervention.
Conclusion
Five generalizations can be made about the history of religion and foreign policy. First, notwithstanding the frequent, formulaic references to John Winthrop's "city upon a hill," the impact of Reformation era Protestantism is typically over-simplified and exaggerated. Appeals to an amorphous Providence and Enlightenment republicanism rather than invocations of a Puritan mission were the main motifs of nineteenth-century manifest destiny. Similarly, Presidents Thomas Jefferson and Theodore Roosevelt needed no Christian doctrine to bless their efforts to extend American power. Even those devout Protestants who tried to apply religious beliefs to foreign affairs not only disagreed about specifics, but also disputed the overall nature of the national mission. Although less often acknowledged than international Wilsonian activism, a visceral Bryanism—the sense that the United States should lead the world by separatist moral example—has been and remains a powerful force.
Second, religious beliefs and interests did not change the outcome of any first-rank foreign policy decision—for example, whether or not to declare independence, expand westward, develop an "informal empire" abroad, or fight a war. These factors, however, have affected the ways in which Americans framed and debated such major questions.
Third, religious concerns have influenced the outcome of some second-level foreign policy decisions. Abrogation of the Russian-American commercial treaty in 1912 and passage of the Jackson-Vanik Amendment in 1974 serve as cases in point. Awakenings and immigration have rendered "people of faith" increasingly diverse. In this pluralist context, religious interest groups have been most effective when they found allies outside of their own communities and invoked widely held American values.
Fourth, the role of missionaries merits special attention. As has been the case with businessmen and soldiers, a relatively small number of Americans were able to exert great influence—for good or ill—in a few distant lands. Missionaries not only facilitated political and economic expansion, either deliberately or inadvertently, but also inspired, educated, and infuriated foreign elites.
Fifth, major foreign policy decisions have affected domestic religious life more than the other way around. Often the effects were unanticipated. For instance, the revolutionary war with France undermined fears of "popery"; World War I exacerbated the multisided conflict among Catholics, Jews, Protestant modernists, and theological conservatives; and World War II sparked a religious revival that defied cosmopolitan predictions of secularization. These five general trends will probably persist for the foreseeable future, though with no diminution of ironic results.
Bibliography
Abrams, Elliott, ed. The Influence of Faith: Religious Groups and U. S. Foreign Policy. Lanham, Md., 2001. Essays on the contemporary situation by authors from diverse ideological perspectives.
Ahlstrom, Sydney E. A Religious History of the American People. New Haven, Conn., 1972. Still the best one-volume survey.
Chatfield, Charles. The American Peace Movement: Ideals and Activism. New York, 1992. Historical survey from a sociological perspective.
Ehrman, John. The Rise of Neoconservatism: Intellectuals and Foreign Affairs, 1945–1994. New Haven, Conn., 1995. The best study of the neoconservatives and foreign policy.
Fairbank, John K., ed. The Missionary Enterprise in China and America. Cambridge, Mass., 1974. Excellent collection of essays with implications beyond China.
Feingold, Henry L. The Politics of Rescue: The Roosevelt Administration and the Holocaust, 1938–1945. New Brunswick, N.J., 1970. Still the most insightful study of Roosevelt's policy.
Field, James A., Jr. America and the Mediterranean World, 1776–1882. Princeton, N.J., 1969. Much material on missionaries.
Flynn, George Q. Roosevelt and Romanism: Catholics and American Diplomacy, 1937–1945. Westport, Conn., 1976. The standard work on the subject.
Fogarty, Gerald P. The Vatican and the American Hierarchy from 1870 to 1965. Stuttgart, Germany, 1982. Good coverage of the hierarchy's role in American politics and foreign policy.
Gribbin, William. The Churches Militant: The War of 1812 and American Religion. New Haven, Conn., 1973. The standard work on the subject.
Hall, Mitchell K. Because of Their Faith: CALCAV and Religious Opposition to the Vietnam War. New York, 1990. Standard account of the main religious group opposing the war.
Harrington, Fred Harvey. God, Mammon, and the Japanese: Dr. Horace N. Allen and Korean American Relations, 1884–1908. Madison, Wis., 1994. Biography of an important missionary and diplomat.
Hennesey, James. American Catholics: A History of the Roman Catholic Community in the United States. New York, 1981. Still the best one-volume synthesis.
Hero, Alfred O., Jr. American Religious Groups View Foreign Policy: Trends in Rank-and-File Opinion, 1937–1969. Durham, N.C., 1973. Good use of survey data.
Hunter, Jane. The Gospel of Gentility: American Women Missionaries in Turn of the Century China. New Haven, Conn., 1984. Fine social history with implications beyond China.
Jacobs, Sylvia M., ed. Black Americans and the Missionary Movement in Africa. Westport, Conn., 1982. An anthology that approaches the subject from varied angles.
Johannsen, Robert W. To the Halls of the Montezumas: The Mexican War in the American Imagination. New York, 1985. Places the religious response in broad cultural context.
Latourette, Kenneth Scott. The Great Century in the United States of America A.D. 1800–A.D. 1914. Volume 4 of The Expansion of Christianity. New York, 1941. Insightful pioneering work.
Marchand, C. Roland. The American Peace Movement and Social Reform, 1898–1918. Princeton, N.J., 1972. The best treatment of the Progressive-era religious peace movement is in chapter 9.
May, Ernest R. Imperial Democracy: The Emergence of America As a Great Power. New York, 1961. New edition, Chicago, 1991. Good on religious aspects of 1898 diplomacy.
Merk, Frederick. Manifest Destiny and Mission in American History: A Reinterpretation. New York, 1963. An astute essay on the varied conceptions of American mission in the nineteenth century.
Pierard, Richard V., and Robert D. Linder. Civil Religion and the Presidency. Grand Rapids, Mich., 1988. The best single account of the subject.
Piper, John F., Jr. The American Churches and World War I. Athens, Ohio, 1985. The standard work on the subject.
Pratt, Julius W. Expansionists of 1898: The Acquisition of Hawaii and the Spanish Islands. Baltimore, 1936. Chapter 8 is still a valuable analysis of religious opinion.
Ribuffo, Leo P. "God and Jimmy Carter." In his Right Center Left: Essays in American History. New Brunswick, N.J., 1992. The connection between Carter's Niebuhrian beliefs and his foreign policy.
Rosenthal, Steven T. Irreconcilable Differences: The Waning of the American Jewish Love Affair with Israel. Hanover, N.H., 2001. Thorough treatment of American Jewish attitudes toward Israel.
Sachar, Howard M. A History of the Jews in America. New York, 1992. Comprehensive survey.
Sarna, Jonathan. Jacksonian Jew: The Two Worlds of Mordecai Noah. New York, 1981. Biography of an important early diplomat and politician.
Silk, Mark. Spiritual Politics: Religion and America Since World War II. New York, 1988. Insightful essay on religion and politics.
Toulouse, Mark G. The Transformation of John Foster Dulles: From Prophet of Realism to Prophet of Nationalism. Macon, Ga., 1985. The fullest examination of Dulles and religion.
Welch, Richard E., Jr. Response to Imperialism: The United States and the Philippine-American War, 1899–1902. Chapel Hill, N.C., 1979. Good account of religious opinion and conflicts in chapter 6.
Wyman, David S. The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust, 1941–1945. New York, 1984. A broad look at American attitudes.
This entry contains information applicable to United States law only.
The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution provides that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." The first part of this provision is known as the Establishment Clause, and the second part is known as the Free Exercise Clause. Although the First Amendment only refers to Congress, the U.S. Supreme Court has held that the Fourteenth Amendment makes the Free Exercise and Establishment Clauses also binding on states (Cantwell v. Connecticut, 310 U.S. 296, 60 S. Ct. 900, 84 L. Ed. 1213 [1940], and Everson v. Board of Education, 330 U.S. 1, 67 S. Ct. 504, 91 L. Ed. 711 [1947], respectively). Since that incorporation, an extensive body of law has developed in the United States around both the Establishment Clause and the Free Exercise Clause.
To determine whether an action of the federal or state government infringes upon a person's right to freedom of religion, the court must decide what qualifies as religion or religious activities for purposes of the First Amendment. The Supreme Court has interpreted religion to mean a sincere and meaningful belief that occupies in the life of its possessor a place parallel to the place held by God in the lives of other persons. The religion or religious concept need not include belief in the existence of God or a supreme being to be within the scope of the First Amendment.
As the case of United States v. Ballard, 322 U.S. 78, 64 S. Ct. 882, 88 L. Ed. 1148 (1944), demonstrates, the Supreme Court must look to the sincerity of a person's beliefs to help decide if those beliefs constitute a religion that deserves constitutional protection. The Ballard case involved the conviction of organizers of the I Am movement on grounds that they defrauded people by falsely representing that their members had supernatural powers to heal people with incurable illnesses. The Supreme Court held that the jury, in determining the line between the free exercise of religion and the punishable offense of obtaining property under false pretenses, should not decide whether the claims of the I Am members were actually true, only whether the members honestly believed them to be true, thus qualifying the group as a religion under the Supreme Court's broad definition.
In addition, a belief does not need to be stated in traditional terms to fall within First Amendment protection. For example, Scientology — a system of beliefs that a human being is essentially a free and immortal spirit who merely inhabits a body — does not propound the existence of a supreme being, but it qualifies as a religion under the broad definition propounded by the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court has deliberately avoided establishing an exact or a narrow definition of religion because freedom of religion is a dynamic guarantee that was written in a manner to ensure flexibility and responsiveness to the passage of time and the development of the United States. Thus, religion is not limited to traditional denominations.
The First Amendment guarantee of freedom of religion has deeply rooted historical significance. Many of the colonists who founded the United States came to this continent to escape religious persecution and government oppression. This country's founders advocated religious freedom and sought to prevent any one religion or group of religious organizations from dominating the government or imposing its will or beliefs on society as a whole. The revolutionary philosophy encompassed the principle that the interests of society are best served if individuals are free to form their own opinions and beliefs.
When the colonies and states were first established, however, most declared a particular religion to be the religion of that region. But by the end of the American Revolution, most state-supported churches had been disestablished, with the exceptions of the state churches of Connecticut and Massachusetts, which were disestablished in 1818 and 1833, respectively. Still, religion was undoubtedly an important element in the lives of the American colonists, and U.S. culture remains greatly influenced by religion.
Establishment Clause
The Establishment Clause prohibits the government from interfering with individual religious beliefs. The government cannot enact laws aiding any religion or establishing an official state religion. The courts have interpreted the Establishment Clause to accomplish the separation of church and state on both the national and state levels of government.
The authors of the First Amendment drafted the Establishment Clause to address the problem of government sponsorship and support of religious activity. The Supreme Court has defined the meaning of the Establishment Clause in cases dealing with public financial assistance to church-related institutions, primarily parochial schools, and religious practices in the public schools. The Court has developed a three-pronged test to determine whether a statute violates the Establishment Clause. According to that test, a statute is valid as long as it has a secular purpose; its primary effect neither advances nor inhibits religion; and it is not excessively entangled with religion. Because this three-pronged test was established in Lemon v. Kurtzman, 403 U.S. 602, 91 S. Ct. 2105, 29 L. Ed. 2d 745 (1971), it has come to be known as the Lemon test. Although the Supreme Court adhered to the Lemon test for several decades, since the 1990s it has been slowly moving away from that test, without having expressly rejected it.
The Court has stated that the Establishment Clause means that neither a state nor the federal government can organize a church. The government cannot enact legislation that aids one religion, aids all religions, or prefers one religion over another. It cannot force or influence a person to participate in, or avoid, religion or force a person to profess a particular religious belief. No tax in any amount can be levied to support any religious activities or organizations. Neither a state nor the federal government can participate, whether openly or secretly, in the affairs of any religious groups.
Federal and state governments have accepted and implemented the doctrine of the separation of church and state by minimizing contact with religious institutions. Although the government cannot aid religions, it can acknowledge their role as a stabilizing force in society. For example, religious institutions, along with other charitable or nonprofit organizations, have traditionally been given tax exemptions. This practice, even when applied to religious organizations, has been deemed constitutional because the legislative aim of a property tax exemption is not to advance religion but to ensure that the activities of groups that enhance the moral and mental attitudes of the community will not be inhibited by taxation. The organizations lose the tax exemption if they undertake activities that do not serve the beneficial interests of society. Thus, in 1983 the Supreme Court decided in Bob Jones University v. United States, 461 U.S. 574, 103 S. Ct. 2017, 76 L. Ed. 2d 157, that nonprofit private schools that discriminated against their students or prospective students on the basis of race could not claim tax-exempt status as a charitable organization for the purposes of federal tax laws.
It is also believed that the elimination of such tax exemptions would lead the government into excessive entanglements with religious institutions. The exemption, therefore, is believed to create only a minimal and remote involvement between church and state — less than would result from taxation. The restricted fiscal relationship, therefore, enhances the desired separation.
Religion and Education
The many situations where religion and education overlap are a source of great controversy. In the early nineteenth century, the vast majority of Americans were Protestant, and Protestant-based religious exercises were common in the public schools. Legal challenges to these practices began in the state courts when a substantial number of Roman Catholics arrived in the United States. Until 1962 when the U.S. Supreme Court began to directly address some of these issues, most states upheld the constitutionality of prayer and Bible reading in the public schools.
In the 1962 case of Engel v. Vitale, 370 U.S. 421, 82 S. Ct. 1261, 8 L. Ed. 2d 601, the Supreme Court struck down as unconstitutional a prayer that was a recommended part of the public school curriculum in the state of New York. The prayer had been approved by Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish leaders in the state. Although the prayer was nondenominational and student participation in it was strictly voluntary, it was struck down as violative of the Establishment Clause.
In 1963 the Supreme Court heard the related issues of whether voluntary Bible readings or recitation of the Lord's Prayer were constitutionally appropriate exercises in the public schools (Abington School District v. Schempp, 374 U.S. 203, 83 S. Ct. 1560, 10 L. Ed. 2d 844). It was in these cases that the Supreme Court first formulated the three-pronged test for constitutionality. In applying the new test, the Court concluded that the exercises did not pass the first prong of the test: they were not secular in nature, but religious, and thus they violated the Establishment Clause because they violated state neutrality requirements.
Although students in public schools are not permitted to recite prayers, the practice of a state legislature opening its sessions with a nondenominational prayer recited by a chaplain receiving public funds has withstood constitutional challenge. In Marsh v. Chambers, 463 U.S. 783, 103 S. Ct. 3330, 77 L. Ed. 2d 1019 (1983), the Supreme Court ruled that such a practice did not violate the Establishment Clause. In making its decision, the Court noted that this was a customary practice and that the proponents of the Bill of Rights also approved of the government appointment of paid chaplains.
The Supreme Court has also held that a religious invocation, instituted by school officials, at a public school graduation violates the Establishment Clause (Lee v. Weisman, 505 U.S. 577, 112 S. Ct. 2649, 120 L. Ed. 2d 467 [1992]).
In 1980 the Supreme Court overturned a Kentucky statute requiring the posting of the Ten Commandments, copies of which were purchased with private contributions, in every public school classroom (Stone v. Graham, 449 U.S. 39, 101 S. Ct. 192, 66 L. Ed. 2d 199). Although the state argued that the postings served a secular purpose, the Court held that they were plainly religious. Four of the Supreme Court's nine justices dissented from the Court's opinion and were prepared to conclude that the postings were proper based on their secular purpose.
Because the Establishment Clause calls for government neutrality in matters involving religion, the government need not be hostile or unfriendly toward religions because such an approach would favor those who do not believe in religion over those who do. In addition, if the government denies religious speakers the ability to speak or punishes them for their speech, it violates the First Amendment's right to freedom of speech. The Supreme Court held in 1981 that it was unconstitutional for a state university to prohibit a religious group from using its facilities when the facilities were open for use by organizations of all other kinds (Widmar v. Vincent, 454 U.S. 263, 102 S. Ct. 269, 70 L. Ed. 2d 440). The principles established in Widmar were unanimously reaffirmed by the Supreme Court in Lamb's Chapel v. Center Moriches Union Free School District, 508 U.S. 384, 113 S. Ct. 2141, 124 L. Ed. 2d 352 (1993). In 1995 the Supreme Court held that a state university violates the Free Speech Clause when it refuses to pay for a religious organization's publication under a program in which it pays for other student organization publications (Rosenberger v. Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia, 515 U.S. 819, 115 S. Ct. 2510, 132 L. Ed. 2d 700).
Facing another education and religion issue, the Supreme Court declared in McCollum v. Board of Education, 333 U.S. 203, 68 S. Ct. 461, 92 L. Ed. 649 (1948), that public school buildings could not be used for a program that allowed pupils to leave classes early to receive religious instruction. The Court found that this program violated the Establishment Clause because the tax-supported public school buildings were being used for the teaching of religious doctrines, which constituted direct government assistance to religion.
However, the Court held that a release-time program that took place outside the public school buildings was constitutional because it involved neither religious instruction in public school classrooms nor the expenditure of public funds (Zorach v. Clauson, 343 U.S. 306, 72 S. Ct. 679, 96 L. Ed. 954 [1952]). All costs in that case were paid by the religious organization conducting the program.
The U.S. Supreme Court has also held that states may not restrict the teaching of ideas on the grounds that they conflict with religious teachings where those ideas are part of normal classroom subjects. In Epperson v. Arkansas, 393 U.S. 97, 89 S. Ct. 266, 21 L. Ed. 2d 228 (1968), the Court struck down a state statute that forbade the teaching of evolutionary theory in public schools. The Court held that the statute violated the Establishment Clause because its purpose was to protect religious theories of creationism from inconsistent secular theories.
In a 1993 case, the Supreme Court held that the Establishment Clause did not prevent a public school from providing a sign language interpreter for a deaf student who attended a religiously affiliated school within the school district (Zobrest v. Catalina Foothills School District, 509 U.S. 1, 113 S. Ct. 2462, 125 L. Ed. 2d 1). Commentators have noted that this case demonstrates the Court's willingness to uphold religiously neutral government aid to all school children, regardless of whether they attend a religiously affiliated school, where the aid is designed to help the children overcome a physical or learning disability. It is not clear, however, whether the Court will extend this holding to more general forms of aid to children in religious and public schools alike.
Government and Religion
The closing of government offices on particular religious holidays is unconstitutional if no secular purpose is served (Mandel v. Hodges, 54 Cal. App. 3d 596, 127 Cal. Rptr. 244 [1976]). But if employees won the closing through collective bargaining, it is permissible even without a secular purpose (Americans United for Separation of Church and State v. Kent County, 97 Mich. App. 72, 293 N.W.2d 723 [1980]).
Government display of symbols with religious significance raises Establishment Clause issues. In the 1984 case of Lynch v. Donnelly, 465 U.S. 668, 104 S. Ct. 1355, 79 L. Ed. 2d 604, the Supreme Court upheld the right of a city to erect in a park a Christmas display that included colored lights, reindeer, candy canes, a Santa's house, a Christmas tree, a "SEASONS GREETINGS" banner, and a nativity scene. The Court decided the inclusion of the nativity scene along with traditional secular Christmas symbols did not promote religion to an extent prohibited by the First Amendment.
Free Exercise Clause
The Free Exercise Clause guarantees a person the right to practice a religion and propagate it without government interference. This right is a liberty interest that cannot be deprived without due process of law. Although the government cannot restrict a person's religious beliefs, it can limit the practice of faith when a substantial and compelling state interest exists. The courts have found that a substantial and compelling state interest exists where the religious practice poses a threat to the health, safety, or welfare of the public. For example, the government could legitimately outlaw the practice of polygamy that was formerly mandated by the doctrines of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons) but could not outlaw the religion or belief in Mormonism itself (Reynolds v. United States, 98 U.S. 145, 25 L. Ed. 244 [1878]). The Supreme Court has invalidated very few actions of the government on the basis of this clause.
Religious practices are not the only method by which a violation of the Free Exercise Clause can occur. In West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, 319 U.S. 624, 63 S. Ct. 1178, 87 L. Ed. 1628 (1943), the Supreme Court held that a public school could not expel children because they refused on religious grounds to comply with a requirement of saluting the U.S. flag and reciting the pledge of allegiance. In that case the children were Jehovah's Witnesses, and they believed that saluting the flag fell within the scope of the biblical command against worshipping false gods.
In Wisconsin v. Yoder, 406 U.S. 205, 92 S. Ct. 1526, 32 L. Ed. 2d 15 (1972), the Supreme Court held that state laws requiring children to receive education up to a certain age impinged upon the religious freedom of the Amish who refused to send their children to school beyond the eighth grade because they believed that it would impermissibly expose the children to worldly influences that conflicted with their religious beliefs.
In 1993 Congress passed the controversial Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), which provides that "[g]overnment shall not substantially burden a person's exercise of religion even if the burden results from a rule of general applicability," unless the government can demonstrate that the burden furthers a compelling governmental interest in the least restrictive way. This statute was enacted in response to the Supreme Court's 1990 decision in Employment Division v. Smith, 494 U.S. 872, 110 S. Ct. 1595, 108 L. Ed. 2d 876. The Smith case involved a state law that denied unemployment compensation benefits to anyone who had been fired from his or her job for job-related misconduct. This case involved two individuals who had been fired from their jobs for ingesting peyote, which was forbidden by state law. The individuals argued that their ingestion of peyote was related to a religious ceremony in which they participated. The Supreme Court ruled that the Free Exercise Clause did not require an exemption from the state law banning peyote use and that unemployment compensation could therefore lawfully be denied.
RFRA directly superseded the Smith decision. However, soon after it was enacted, many courts ruled that RFRA violated either the Establishment Clause or the separation of powers doctrine. In the 1997 case of City of Boerne v. P. F. Flores, 1997 WL 345322, the U.S. Supreme Court voted 6-3 to invalidate RFRA on the grounds that Congress had exceeded the scope of its enforcement power under section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment in enacting RFRA. Section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment permits Congress to enact legislation enforcing the Constitutional right to free exercise of religion. However, the Court held that this power is limited to only preventative or remedial measures. The court found that RFRA went beyond that and actually made substantive changes in the governing law. Because Congress exceeded its power under the Fourteenth Amendment in enacting RFRA, it contradicted vital principles necessary to maintain separation of powers and the federal-state balance, and thus was unconstitutional.
Although the Free Exercise Clause protects against government action, it does not restrict the conduct of private individuals. For example, the courts generally will uphold a testator's requirement that a beneficiary attend a specified church to receive a testamentary gift, because the courts refuse to question the religious views of a testator in the interest of public policy. Similarly, the Free Exercise Clause does not protect a person's religious beliefs from infringement by the actions of private corporations or businesses, although federal and state civil rights laws may make such private conduct unlawful.
The government cannot enact a statute that wholly denies the right to preach or to disseminate religious views, but a state can constitutionally regulate the time, place, and manner of soliciting upon the streets and of conducting meetings in order to safeguard the peace, order, and comfort of the community. It can also protect the public against frauds perpetrated under the cloak of religion, as long as the law does not use a process amounting to a prior restraint, which inhibits the free exercise of religion. In a 1951 case, the Supreme Court held that it was unconstitutional for a city to deny a Baptist preacher the renewal of a permit for evangelical street meetings, even though his previous meetings included attacks on Roman Catholicism and Judaism that led to disorder in the streets, because it constituted a prior restraint (Kunz v. New York, 340 U.S. 290, 71 S. Ct. 312, 95 L. Ed. 280).
State laws known as Sunday closing laws, which prohibit the sale of certain goods on Sundays, have been declared constitutional against the challenge of Orthodox Jews who claimed that the laws created an economic hardship for them because their faith requires them to close their businesses on Saturdays and who therefore wanted to do business on Sundays (Braunfield v. Brown, 366 U.S. 599, 81 S. Ct. 1144, 6 L. Ed. 2d 563 [1961]). The Supreme Court held that although the law imposed an indirect burden on religion, it did not make any religious practice itself unlawful.
In United States v. Lee, 455 U.S. 252, 102 S. Ct. 1051, 71 L. Ed. 2d 127 (1982), the Supreme Court upheld the requirement that Amish employers withhold Social Security and unemployment insurance contributions from their employees, despite the Amish argument that this violated their rights under the Free Exercise Clause. The Court found that compulsory contributions were necessary to accomplish the overriding government interest in the proper functioning of the Social Security and unemployment systems.
The Supreme Court has also upheld the assignment and use of Social Security numbers by the government to be a legitimate government action that does not violate the Free Exercise Clause (Bowen v. Roy, 476 U.S. 693, 106 S. Ct. 2147, 90 L. Ed. 2d 735 [1986]).
In the 1989 case of Hernandez v. Commissioner of Internal Revenue, 490 U.S. 680, 109 S. Ct. 2136, 104 L. Ed. 2d 766, the Supreme Court held that the government's denial of a taxpayer's deduction from gross income of "fixed donations" to the Church of Scientology for certain religious services was constitutional. These fees were paid for certain classes required by the Church of Scientology, and the Court held that they did not classify as charitable contributions because a good or service was received in exchange for the fee paid.
In Jimmy Swaggart Ministries v. Board of Equalization, 493 U.S. 378, 110 S. Ct. 688, 107 L. Ed. 2d 796 (1990), the Court ruled that a religious organization is not exempt from paying a state's general sales and use taxes on the sale of religious products and religious literature.
Similarly, the Court decided in Heffron v. International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON), 452 U.S. 640, 101 S. Ct. 2559, 69 L. Ed. 2d 298 (1981), that a state rule limiting the sale or distribution of merchandise to specific booths was lawful, even when applied to ISKCON members whose beliefs mandated them to distribute or sell religious literature and solicit donations in public places.
Military regulations have also been challenged under the Free Exercise Clause. In Goldman v. Weinberger, 475 U.S. 503, 106 S. Ct. 1310, 89 L. Ed. 2d 478 (1986), the Supreme Court held that the Free Exercise Clause did not require the Air Force to permit an Orthodox Jewish serviceman to wear his yarmulke while in uniform and on duty. The Court found that the military's interest in discipline was sufficiently important to outweigh the incidental burden the rule had on the serviceman's religious beliefs.
However, a law that places an indirect burden on the practice of religion so as to impede the observance of religion, or a law that discriminates between religions, is unconstitutional. Thus, the Supreme Court has held that the denial of unemployment compensation to a Seventh Day Adventist who was fired from her job and could not obtain any other work because of her refusal to work on Saturdays for religious reasons was unconstitutional (Sherbert v. Verner, 374 U.S. 398, 83 S. Ct. 1790, 10 L. Ed. 2d 965 [1963]). The Sherbert case was reaffirmed and applied in the 1987 case of Hobbie v. Unemployment Appeals Commission of Florida, 480 U.S. 136, 107 S. Ct. 1046, 94 L. Ed. 2d 190.
In the 1993 case of Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye, Inc. v. Hialeah, 508 U.S. 520, 113 S. Ct. 2217, 124 L. Ed. 2d 472, remanded on other grounds, the High Court overturned a city law that forbade animal slaughter insofar as the law banned the ritual animal slaughter by a particular religious sect. The Court found that the law was not a religiously neutral law of general applicability but was specifically designed to prevent a religious sect from carrying out its religious rituals.
In Cruz v. Beto, 405 U.S. 319, 92 S. Ct. 1079, 31 L. Ed. 2d 263 (1972), the Supreme Court affirmed that prisoners are entitled to their rights under the Free Exercise Clause, subject only to the requirements of prison security and discipline. Thus, the Court held that a Texas prison must permit a Buddhist prisoner to use the prison chapel and share his religious materials with other prisoners, just as any other prisoner would be permitted to so act.
States have been allowed to deny disability benefits, however, to applicants who refuse to submit to medical examinations for religious reasons. Courts have held that this is constitutional because the state has a compelling interest in verifying that the intended recipients of the tax-produced assistance are people who are legitimately entitled to receive the benefit. Likewise, states can regulate religious practices to protect the public health. Thus, state laws requiring the vaccination of all children before they are allowed to attend school are constitutional because the laws are designed to prevent the widespread epidemic of contagious diseases. Public health protection has been deemed to outweigh any competing interest in the exercise of religious beliefs that oppose any forms of medication or immunization.
A number of cases have involved the issue of whether there is a compelling state interest to require that a blood transfusion be given to a patient whose religion prohibits such treatment. In these cases the courts look to the specific facts of the case, such as whether the patient is a minor or a mentally incompetent individual, and whether the patient came to the hospital voluntarily seeking help. The courts have generally authorized the transfusions in cases of minors or mentally incompetent patients in recognition of the compelling government interest to protect the health and safety of people. However, the courts are divided as to whether they should order transfusions where the patient is a competent adult who steadfastly refuses to accept such treatment on religious grounds despite the understanding that her or his refusal could result in death. The Supreme Court has not ruled on this issue yet, and therefore there is no final judicial opinion on the propriety of such orders.
The use of secular courts to determine intra-church disputes has raised issues under both the Free Exercise Clause and the Establishment Clause. The Supreme Court decided in the 1871 case of Watson v. Jones, 80 U.S. 679, 20 L. Ed. 666, that judicial intervention in cases involving ownership and control of church assets necessarily had to be limited to determining and enforcing the decision of the highest judicatory body within the particular religious group. For congregational religious groups, such as Baptists and Jews, the majority of the congregation was considered the highest judicatory body. In hierarchical religions, such as the Roman Catholic Church and the Russian Orthodox Church, the diocesan bishop was considered the highest judicatory authority. The Supreme Court consistently applied that principle until its 1979 decision in Jones v. Wolf, 443 U.S. 595, 99 S. Ct. 3020, 61 L. Ed. 2d 775. In that case the Court held that the "neutral principles of law developed for use in all property disputes" could be constitutionally applied in intra-church litigation. Under this case courts can examine the language of the church charters, real and personal property deeds, and state statutes relating to the control of property generally.
Religious Oaths Prohibited
The Constitution also refers to religion in Article VI, Clause 3, where it provides, "No religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States." The provision is binding only on the federal government.
In early American history, individual states commonly required religious oaths for public officers. But after the Revolutionary War, most of these religious tests were eliminated. Today, the individual states, through their constitutions or statutes, have restrictions similar to that of the U.S. Constitution, on imposing a religious oath as a condition to holding a government position.
Freedom to express religious beliefs is entwined with the First Amendment guarantee of freedom of expression. The federal or state governments cannot require an individual to declare a belief in the existence of God as a qualification for holding office (Torcaso v. Watkins, 367 U.S. 488, 81 S. Ct. 1680, 6 L. Ed. 2d 982 [1961]).
"Of all possible sexual perversions, religion is the only one to have ever been scientifically systematized."
- Louis Aragon
"The true meaning of religion is thus, not simply morality, but morality touched by emotion."
- Matthew Arnold
"The first revolt is against the supreme tyranny of theology, of the phantom of God. As long as we have a master in heaven, we will be slaves on earth."
- Mikhail Bakunin
"Religion. A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable."
- Ambrose Bierce
The term "religion" refers to both the personal practices related to communal faith and to group rituals and communication stemming from shared conviction. "Religion" is sometimes used interchangeably with "faith" or "belief system,"[2] but it is more socially defined than personal convictions, and it entails specific behaviors, respectively.
In the frame of western religious thought,[3] religions present a common quality, the "hallmark of patriarchal religious thought": the division of the world in two comprehensive domains, one sacred, the other profane.[4] Religion is often described as a communal system for the coherence of belief focusing on a system of thought, unseen being, person, or object, that is considered to be supernatural, sacred, divine, or of the highest truth. Moral codes, practices, values, institutions, tradition, rituals, and scriptures are often traditionally associated with the core belief, and these may have some overlap with concepts in secularphilosophy. Religion is also often described as a "way of life" or a life stance.
The English word religion has been in use since the 13th century, loaned from Anglo-Frenchreligiun (11th century), ultimately from the Latinreligio, "reverence for God or the gods, careful pondering of divine things, piety, the res divinae".[5]
The ultimate origins of Latin religiō are obscure. It is usually accepted to derive from ligare "bind, connect"; probably from a prefixed re-ligare, i.e. re (again) + ligare or "to reconnect." This interpretation is favoured by modern scholars such as Tom Harpur and Joseph Campbell, but was made prominent by St. Augustine, following the interpretation of Lactantius. Another possibility is derivation from a reduplicated *le-ligare. A historical interpretation due to Cicero on the other hand connects lego "read", i.e. re (again) + lego in the sense of "choose", "go over again" or "consider carefully".[6]
Religious scholars generally agree that writing a single definition that applies to all religions is difficult or even impossible, because all people examine religion with some kind of critical eye, and the term is therefore fraught with ideological consequences for anyone who might want to construct a universal definition. Talal Asad writes that "there cannot be a universal definition of religion ... because that definition is itself the historical product of discursive processes"[7]; Thomas A. Tweed, while defending the idea of religion in general, writes that "it would be foolish to set up an abstract definition of religion's essence, and then proceed to defend that definition from all comers."[8]
The earliest definition of religion is from Johnson's Dictionary, which simply calls it "a system of faith and worship". Friedrich Schleiermacher in the late 18th century defined religion as das schlechthinnige Abhängigkeitsgefühl, commonly translated as "a feeling of absolute dependence".[9] His contemporary Hegel disagreed thoroughly, defining religion as "the Divine Spirit becoming conscious of Himself through the finite spirit."[10]Clifford Geertz's definition of religion as a "cultural system" was dominant for most of the 20th century and continues to be widely accepted today.
Sociologists and anthropologists tend to see religion as an abstract set of ideas, values, or experiences developed as part of a cultural matrix. For example, in Lindbeck's Nature of Doctrine, religion does not refer to belief in "God" or a transcendent Absolute. Instead, Lindbeck defines religion as, "a kind of cultural and/or linguistic framework or medium that shapes the entirety of life and thought… it is similar to an idiom that makes possible the description of realities, the formulation of beliefs, and the experiencing of inner attitudes, feelings, and sentiments.”[11] According to this definition, religion refers to one's primary worldview and how this dictates one's thoughts and actions. Thus religion is considered by some sources to extend to causes, principles, or activities believed in with zeal or conscientious devotion concerning points or matters of ethics or conscience, and not necessarily including belief in the supernatural.[12]
In the 19th and 20th centuries, the academic practice of comparative religion divided religious belief into philosophically-defined categories called "world religions." However, some recent scholarship has argued that not all types of religion are necessarily separated by mutually exclusive philosophies, and furthermore that the utility of ascribing a practice to a certain philosophy, or even calling a given practice religious, rather than cultural, political, or social in nature, is limited.[13][14][15] The list of religious movements given here is an attempt to summarize the most important regional and philosophical influences, but it is by no means a complete description of every religious community.
Abrahamic religions are practiced throughout the world. They share in common the Jewish patriarch Abraham and the Torah as an initial sacred text, although the degree to which the Torah is incorporated into religious beliefs varies between traditions.
Judaism accepts only the prophets of the Torah, but also relies on the authority of rabbis. It is practiced by the Jewish people, an ethnic group currently centered in Israel but also scattered throughout the Jewish diaspora. Today, Jews are outnumbered by Christians and Muslims.
Christianity is centered on the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth as presented in the Gospels and the writings of the apostle Paul (1st century CE). The Christian faith is essentially faith in Jesus as the Christ, the Son of God, and as Savior and Lord. As the religion of Western Europe during the time of colonization, Christianity has been propagated throughout the world. However, Christianity is not practiced as a single orthodoxy but as a mixture of Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, Oriental Orthodoxy, and many forms of Protestantism. In the United States, for example, African-Americans[16] and Korean-Americans[17] usually attend separate churches from Americans of European descent. Many European countries as well as Argentina have established a specific church as the state religion, but this is not the case in the United States nor in many other majority Christian areas.
Islam refers to the religion taught by the Islamic prophetMuhammad, a major political and religious figure of the 7th century CE. Islam is the dominant religion of northern Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia. As with Christianity, there is no single orthodoxy in Islam but a multitude of traditions which are generally categorized as Sunni and Shia, although there are other minor groups as well. Wahhabi Islam is the established religion of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. There are also several Islamic republics, including Iran which is run by a Shia Supreme Leader.
The Bahá'í Faith was founded in the 19th century in Iran and since then has spread worldwide. It teaches unity of all religious philosophies and accepts all of the prophets of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam as well as additional prophets including its founder Bahá'u'lláh.
Hinduism is a term introduced by British scholars to describe the similar philosophies of Vaishnavism, Shaivism, and related groups.[13] Today, proponents of Hindu nationalism sometimes include Buddhists, Jains, and Sikhs under the category of Hinduism, but the Dalit Buddhist movement is excluded because of their denial of the caste system.[18] Hinduism is not a monolithic religion in and of itself but a religious category containing dozens of separate philosophies.
Sikhism is a monotheistic religion founded on the teachings of Guru Nanak and ten successive Sikh Gurus in 15th century Punjab. Sikhs are found mostly in India.
Jainism, taught primarily by Parsva (9th century BCE) and Mahavira (6th century BCE), is an ancient Indian religion that prescribes a path of non-violence for all forms of living beings in this world. Jains are found mostly in India.
Theravada Buddhism, which is practiced mainly in Southeast Asia alongside folk religion, shares some characteristics of Indian religions. It is based in a large collection of texts called the Pali Canon.
Folk religion is a term applied loosely and vaguely to disorganized local practices. It is also called paganism, shamanism, animism, ancestor worship, and totemism, although not all of these elements are necessarily present in local belief systems. The category of "folk religion" can generally include anything that is not part of an organization. The modern neopagan movement draws on folk religion for inspiration.
Chinese folk religion, practiced by Chinese people around the world, is a primarily social practice including popular elements of Confucianism and Taoism, with some remnants of Mahayana Buddhism. Most Chinese do not identify as religious due to the strong Maoist influence on the country in recent history, but adherence to religious ceremonies remains common. New religious movements include Falun Gong and I-Kuan Tao.
Traditional Korean religion was a syncretic mixture of Mahayana Buddhism and Korean shamanism. Unlike Japanese Shinto, Korean shamanism was never codified and Buddhism was never made a social necessity. In some areas these traditions remain prevalent, but Korean-influenced Christianity is far more influential in society and politics.
Traditional Japanese religion is a mixture of Mahayana Buddhism and ancient indigenous practices which were codified as Shinto in the 19th century. Japanese people retain nominal attachment to both Buddhism and Shinto through social ceremonies, but irreligion is common.
A variety of new religious movements still practiced today have been founded in many other countries besides the United States and Japan, including Cao Đài in Vietnam.
Shinshūkyō is a general category for a wide variety of religious movements founded in Japan since the 19th century. These movements share almost nothing in common except the place of their founding. The largest religious movements centered in Japan include Soka Gakkai, Tenrikyo, and Seicho-No-Ie among hundreds of smaller groups.
Sociological classifications of religious movements suggest that within any given religious group, a community can resemble various types of structures, including "churches", "denominations", "sects", "cults", and "institutions".
While superstitions and magical thinking refer to nonscientific causal reasoning, applied to specific things or actions, a religion is a more complex system about general or ultimate things, involving morality, history and community. Because religions may include and exploit certain superstitions or make use of magical thinking, while mixing them with broader considerations, the division between superstition and religious faith is hard to specify and subjective. Religious believers have often seen other religions as superstition.[19] Likewise, some atheists, agnostics, deists, and skeptics regard religious belief as superstition. Religious practices are most likely to be labeled "superstitious" by outsiders when they include belief in extraordinary events (miracles), an afterlife, supernatural interventions, apparitions or the efficacy of prayer, charms, incantations, the meaningfulness of omens, and prognostications.
Greek and Roman pagans, who modeled their relations with the gods on political and social terms scorned the man who constantly trembled with fear at the thought of the gods, as a slave feared a cruel and capricious master. Such fear of the gods (deisidaimonia) was what the Romans meant by superstitio (Veyne 1987, p 211). Early Christianity was outlawed as a superstitio Iudaica, a "Jewish superstition", by Domitian in the 80s AD, and by AD 425, Theodosius II outlawed pagan traditions as superstitious.
The Roman Catholic Church considers superstition to be sinful in the sense that it denotes a lack of trust in the divine providence of God and, as such, is a violation of the first of the Ten Commandments. The Catechism of the Catholic Church states superstition "in some sense represents a perverse excess of religion" (para. #2110).
Superstition is a deviation of religious feeling and of the practices this feeling imposes. It can even affect the worship we offer the true God, e.g., when one attributes an importance in some way magical to certain practices otherwise lawful or necessary. To attribute the efficacy of prayers or of sacramental signs to their mere external performance, apart from the interior dispositions that they demand is to fall into superstition. Cf. Matthew 23:16-22 (para. #2111)
Ideally, a history of religion could include all human religious practices, but archaeological study of religion is a relatively new and undeveloped field.[20] Therefore, the history of religion is largely limited to those practices which have been described in writing.
Like the definition of religion, the construction of religious history is a task fraught with ideological implications. Early studies of religions were often written to imply that the author's own religion was the most accurate. Even in a secular history, to imply that religion "progresses" towards better understanding of reality makes a value judgment about past religions; likewise, to consider religion an essentially social construction with no transcendent meaning denies the claims of every religious authority.
There is no time or place in human history where religious movements are not being founded, and religious practice is not merely a matter of founding prophets but also of local traditions and reforms. There is not even a single era when the Abrahamic religions were developed; the Jewish prophets lived some centuries before Jesus, Muhammad came six centuries after him, and Bahá'u'lláh founded the Bahá'í Faith over a millennium later.
The Middle Ages (800 AD-1500 AD) was a time of philosophical development for several major religions. As Christianity became the focus of scholarship throughout Europe, Buddhist missions were sent to East Asia, and Islam was spread throughout the Middle East, Central Asia, Southeast Asia, North Africa and parts of Europe and India. Meanwhile, the decline of Buddhism in India led to the flourishing of folk religion there.
European colonisation during the 15th to 19th centuries resulted in the spread of Christianity to Sub-Saharan Africa, the Americas, Australia and the Philippines. The 18th century saw the beginning of secularisation in Europe, rising to notability in the wake of the French Revolution. By the 20th century, religion was no longer the dominant ideological force behind international wars, but had generally been unseated by political ideals such as democracy and communism.
In the 20th century, the regimes of Communist Eastern Europe and Communist China were explicitly anti-religious. A great variety of new religious movements originated in the 20th century, many proposing syncretism of elements of established religions. Adherence to such new movements is limited, however, remaining below 2% worldwide in the 2000s. Adherents of the classical world religions account for more than 75% of the world's population, while self-reported alliegance to indigenous folk religions has fallen to 4%. As of 2005, an estimated 14% of the world's population identifies as nonreligious.
Religious belief usually relates to the existence, nature and worship of a deity or deities and divine involvement in the universe and human life. Alternately, it may also relate to values and practices transmitted by a spiritual leader. Unlike other belief systems, which may be passed on orally, religious belief tends to be codified in literate societies (religion in non-literate societies is still largely passed on orally[21]). In some religions, like the Abrahamic religions, it is held that most of the core beliefs have been divinely revealed.
Religious belief can also involve causes, principles or activities believed in with zeal or conscientious devotion concerning points or matters of ethics or conscience, not necessarily limited to organized religions.[22]
Religious knowledge, according to religious practitioners, may be gained from religious leaders, sacred texts (scriptures), and/or personal revelation. Some religions view such knowledge as unlimited in scope and suitable to answer any question; others see religious knowledge as playing a more restricted role, often as a complement to knowledge gained through physical observation. Some religious people maintain that religious knowledge obtained in this way is absolute and infallible (religious cosmology).
The scientific method gains knowledge by testing hypotheses to develop theories through elucidation of facts or evaluation by experiments and thus only answers cosmological questions about the physical universe. It develops theories of the world which best fit physically observed evidence. All scientific knowledge is subject to later refinement in the face of additional evidence. Scientific theories that have an overwhelming preponderance of favorable evidence are often treated as facts (such as the theories of gravity or evolution).
Many scientists have held strong religious beliefs (see List of Christian thinkers in science) and have worked to harmonize science and religion. Isaac Newton, for example, believed that gravity caused the planets to revolve about the Sun, and credited God with the design. In the concluding General Scholium to the Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, he wrote: "This most beautiful System of the Sun, Planets and Comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful being." Nevertheless, conflict has repeatedly arisen between religious organizations and individuals who propagated scientific theories that were deemed unacceptable by the organizations. The Roman Catholic Church, for example, has in the past[23] reserved to itself the right to decide which scientific theories were acceptable and which were unacceptable. In the 17th century, Galileo was tried and forced to recant the heliocentric theory based on the medieval church's stance that the Greek Hellenistic system of astronomy was the correct one.[24][25]
Many theories exist as to why religions sometimes seem to conflict with scientific knowledge. In the case of Christianity, a relevant factor may be that it was among Christians that science in the modern sense was developed. Unlike other religious groups, as early as the 17th century the Christian churches had to deal directly with this new way to investigate nature and seek truth.
The perceived conflict between science and Christianity may also be partially explained by a literal interpretation of the Bible adhered to by many Christians, both currently and historically. The Catholic Church has always held with Augustine of Hippo who explicitly opposed a literal interpretation of the Bible whenever the Bible conflicted with Science. The literal way to read the sacred texts became especially prevalent after the rise of the Protestant reformation, with its emphasis on the Bible as the only authoritative source concerning the ultimate reality.[26] This view is often shunned by both religious leaders (who regard literally believing it as petty and look for greater meaning instead) and scientists who regard it as an impossibility.
Some Christians have disagreed or are still disagreeing with scientists in areas such as the validity of Keplerian astronomy, the theory of evolution, the method of creation of the universe and the Earth, and the origins of life. On the other hand, scholars such as Stanley Jaki have suggested that Christianity and its particular worldview was a crucial factor for the emergence of modern science. In fact, most of today's historians are moving away from the view of the relationship between Christianity and science as one of "conflict" — a perspective commonly called the conflict thesis.[27][28] Gary Ferngren in his historical volume about Science & Religion states:
While some historians had always regarded the [conflict] thesis as oversimplifying and distorting a complex relationship, in the late twentieth century it underwent a more systematic reevaluation. The result is the growing recognition among historians of science that the relationship of religion and science has been much more positive than is sometimes thought. Although popular images of controversy continue to exemplify the supposed hostility of Christianity to new scientific theories, studies have shown that Christianity has often nurtured and encouraged scientific endeavour, while at other times the two have co-existed without either tension or attempts at harmonization. If Galileo and the Scopes trial come to mind as examples of conflict, they were the exceptions rather than the rule.[29]
In the Bahá'í Faith, the harmony of science and religion is a central tenet.[30] The principle states that that truth is one, and therefore true science and true religion must be in harmony, thus rejecting the view that science and religion are in conflict.[30]`Abdu'l-Bahá, the son of the founder of the religion, asserted that science and religion cannot be opposed because they are aspects of the same truth; he also affirmed that reasoning powers are required to understand the truths of religion and that religious teachings which are at variance with science should not be accepted; he explained that religion has to be reasonable since God endowed humankind with reason so that they can discover truth.[31]Shoghi Effendi, the Guardian of the Bahá'í Faith, described science and religion as "the two most potent forces in human life."[32]
Proponents of Hinduism claim that Hinduism is not afraid of scientific explorations, nor of the technological progress of mankind. According to them, there is a comprehensive scope and opportunity for Hinduism to mold itself according to the demands and aspirations of the modern world; it has the ability to align itself with both science and spiritualism. This religion uses some modern examples to explain its ancient theories and reinforce its own beliefs. For example, some Hindu thinkers have used the terminology of quantum physics to explain some basic concepts of Hinduism such as Maya or the illusory and impermanent nature of our existence.
The philosophical approach known as pragmatism, as propounded by the American philosopher and psychologistWilliam James, has been used to reconcile scientific with religious knowledge. Pragmatism, simplistically, holds that the truth of a set of beliefs can be indicated by its usefulness in helping people cope with a particular context of life. Thus, the fact that scientific beliefs are useful in predicting observations in the physical world can indicate a certain truth for scientific theories; the fact that religious beliefs can be useful in helping people cope with difficult emotions or moral decisions can indicate a certain truth for those beliefs. (For a similar postmodern view, see grand narrative).
Being both forms of belief system, religion and philosophy meet in several areas - notably in the study of metaphysics and cosmology. In particular, a distinct set of religious beliefs will often entail a specific metaphysics and cosmology. That is, a religion will generally have answers to metaphysical and cosmological questions about the nature of being, of the universe, humanity, and the divine.
Mysticism focuses on methods other than logic, but (in the case of esoteric mysticism) not necessarily excluding it, for gaining enlightenment. Rather, meditative and contemplative practices such as Vipassanā and yoga, physical disciplines such as stringent fasting and whirling (in the case of the Sufidervishes), or the use of psychoactive drugs such as LSD, lead to altered states of consciousness that logic can never hope to grasp. However, regarding the latter topic, mysticism prevalent in the 'great' religions (monotheisms, henotheisms, which are perhaps relatively recent, and which the word 'mysticism' is more recent than,) includes systems of discipline that forbid drugs that can damage the body, including the nervous system.
Mysticism (to initiate) is the pursuit of communion with, or conscious awareness of ultimate reality, the divine, spiritual truth, or Deity through direct, personal experience (intuition or insight) rather than rational thought. Mystics speak of the existence of realities behind external perception or intellectual apprehension that are central to being and directly accessible through personal experience. They say that such experience is a genuine and important source of knowledge.
Esotericism is often spiritual (thus religious) but can be non-religious/-spiritual, and it uses intellectual understanding and reasoning, intuition and inspiration (higher noetic and spiritual reasoning,) but not necessarily faith (except often as a virtue,) and it is philosophical in its emphasis on techniques of psycho-spiritual transformation (esoteric cosmology). Esotericism refers to "hidden" knowledge available only to the advanced, privileged, or initiated, as opposed to exoteric knowledge, which is public. All religions are probably somewhat exoteric, but most ones of ancient civilizations such as Yoga of India, and the mystery religions of ancient Egypt, Israel (Kabbalah,) and Greece are examples of ones that are also esoteric.
Members of an organized religion may not see any significant difference between religion and spirituality. Or they may see a distinction between the mundane, earthly aspects of their religion and its spiritual dimension.
Some individuals draw a strong distinction between religion and spirituality. They may see spirituality as a belief in ideas of religious significance (such as God, the Soul, or Heaven), but not feel bound to the bureaucratic structure and creeds of a particular organized religion. They choose the term spirituality rather than religion to describe their form of belief, perhaps reflecting a disillusionment with organized religion (see Major religious groups), and a movement towards a more "modern" — more tolerant, and more intuitive — form of religion. These individuals may reject organized religion because of historical acts by religious organizations, such as Christian Crusades and Islamic Jihad, the marginalisation and persecution of various minorities or the Spanish Inquisition. The basic precept of the ancient spiritual tradition of India, the Vedas, is the inner reality of existence, which is essentially a spiritual approach to being.
A traditional story of ostensibly historical events that serves to unfold part of the world view of a people or explain a practice, belief, or natural phenomenon;
A person or thing having only an imaginary or unverifiable existence; or
A metaphor for the spiritual potentiality in the human being.[33]
Ancient polytheistic religions, such as those of Greece, Rome, and Scandinavia, are usually categorized under the heading of mythology. Religions of pre-industrial peoples, or cultures in development, are similarly called "myths" in the anthropology of religion. The term "myth" can be used pejoratively by both religious and non-religious people. By defining another person's religious stories and beliefs as mythology, one implies that they are less real or true than one's own religious stories and beliefs. Joseph Campbell remarked, "Mythology is often thought of as other people's religions, and religion can be defined as mis-interpreted mythology."[34]
In sociology, however, the term myth has a non-pejorative meaning. There, myth is defined as a story that is important for the group whether or not it is objectively or provably true. Examples include the death and resurrection of Jesus, which, to Christians, explains the means by which they are freed from sin and is also ostensibly a historical event. But from a mythological outlook, whether or not the event actually occurred is unimportant. Instead, the symbolism of the death of an old "life" and the start of a new "life" is what is most significant. Religious believers may or may not accept such symbolic interpretations.
Humans have many different methods which attempt to answer fundamental questions about the nature of the universe and our place in it (cosmology). Religion is only one of the methods for trying to answer one or more of these questions. Other methods include philosophy, metaphysics, astrology, esotericism, mysticism, and forms of shamanism, such as the sacred consumption of ayahuasca among PeruvianAmazonia's Urarina. The Urarina have an elaborate animisticcosmological system,[35] which informs their mythology, religious orientation and daily existence. In many cases, the distinction between these means are not clear. For example, Buddhism and Taoism have been regarded as schools of philosophies as well as religions.
Given the generalized discontents with modernity, consumerism, over-consumption, violence and anomie, many people in the so-called industrial or post-industrialWest rely on a number of distinctive religious worldviews. This in turn has given rise to increased religious pluralism, as well as to what are commonly known in the academic literature as new religious movements, which are gaining ground across the globe.
The most widely known Western criticism of religious constructs and their social consequences has come from atheists and agnostics. Anti-Catholic/anti-Christian sentiment first gathered force during the 18th century European Enlightenment through pioneering critics such as Voltaire and his fellow Encyclopedists, who were for the most part deists. The French Revolution then instituted what later became known as secularism, a constitutional declaration of the separation of church and state. In addition to being adopted by the new French and United States republics, secularism soon came to be adopted by a number of nation states, both revolutionary and post-colonial. Marx famously declared religion to be the "opium of the people".[36] This conception was applied in the state atheism of social systems inspired by Marx's writings, most notably in the Soviet Union and China, and most notoriously in Cambodia, although Marx himself believed that religion would disappear by itself once the perceived social ills of capitalism were eliminated, therefore requiring no actual repression of religion.[36] Systematic criticism of the philosophical underpinnings of religion paralleled the upsurge of scientific discourse within industrial society. T.H. Huxley in 1869 coined the term "agnostic," a term subsequently adopted by such figures as Robert Ingersoll. Later, Bertrand Russell told the world Why I Am Not a Christian.
Many contemporary critics fault religion as being irrational.[37][38][39] Some assert that dogmatic religions are in effect morally deficient, elevating to moral status ancient, arbitrary, and ill-informed rules—taboos on eating pork, for example, as well as dress codes and sexual practices[40]—possibly designed for reasons of hygiene or even mere politics in a bygone era.
Although evolutionists had previously sought to understand and explain religion in terms of a cultural attribute which might conceivably confer biological advantages to its adherents, Richard Dawkins called for a re-analysis of religion in terms of the evolution of self-replicating ideas apart from any resulting biological advantages they might bestow. He argued that the role of key replicator in cultural evolution belongs not to genes, but to memes replicating thought from person to person by means of imitation. These replicators respond to selective pressures that may or may not affect biological reproduction or survival.[41]
In her book, The Meme Machine, Susan Blackmore regards religions as particularly tenacious memes. Many of the features common to the most widely practiced religions provide built-in advantages in an evolutionary context, she writes. For example, religions that preach of the value of faith-based belief over evidence from everyday experience or reason inoculate societies against many of the most basic tools people commonly use to evaluate their ideas. By linking altruism with religious affiliation, religious memes can proliferate more quickly because people perceive that they can reap societal as well as personal rewards. The longevity of religious memes improves with their documentation in revered religious texts.[42]
Aaron Lynch attributed the robustness of religious memes in human culture to the fact that they incorporate multiple modes of meme transmission. Religious memes pass down the generations from parent to child and across a single generation through proselytism. Most will hold the religion taught them by their parents throughout their life. Many religions feature adversarial elements, punishing apostasy, for instance, or demonizing infidels. In Thought Contagion Lynch identifies the memes of transmission in Christianity as especially powerful in scope. Believers view the conversion of non-believers both as a religious duty and as an act of altruism. The promise of eternity in heaven to believers or hell to non-believers provides a strong incentive to accept and retain Christian faith. Lynch asserts that belief in the crucifixion in Christianity amplifies each of its other replication advantages through the indebtedness believers have to their Savior for sacrifice on the cross. The image of the crucifixion recurs in religious sacraments, and the proliferation of symbols of the cross (itself a meme) in homes and churches potently reinforces the wide array of Christian memes.[43]
Criticism of the concept of "religion"
The Canadian scholar of comparative religion Wilfred Cantwell Smith argued that religion, rather than being a universally valid category as is generally supposed, is a peculiarly European concept of comparatively recent origin. His work has been enlarged upon by E.J. Sharpe, C.F. Keyes, and Timothy Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald especially notes in The Ideology of Religious Studies that the concept of religion as a study irreducible to sociology, history, etc., is a fallacy caused by a desire to protect the transcendent ideals of world cultures. He claims that writers cannot define a single concept called "religion" that applies to all cultures, because all definitions of religion have the dual effect of setting up an imaginary ideal onto which real practices are merely mapped, and serializing individual identity to include a separate aspect called "religion." In short, "there is no coherent non-theological theoretical basis for the study of religion as a separate academic discipline."[44] The implication of Smith's and Fitzgerald's work is that religion, rather than being a special category which can be criticized or praised as a group, is merely one type of ideology, alongside humanism, Marxism, nationalism and so forth.
^ While religion is difficult to define, the standard model of religion as used in religious studies was defined by Clifford Geertz (Religion as a Cultural System, 1973). For an influential critique of Geertz's model see Talal Asad's The Construction of Religion as an Anthropological Category (1982).
^ The words "belief system" may not necessarily refer to a religion, though a religion may be referred to as "belief system."
^ qui omnia, quae ad cultum deorum pertinerent, diligenter retractarent et tamquam relegerent, sunt dicti religiosi ex relegendo, ut elegantes ex elegendo, tamquam a diligendo diligentes, ex intellegendo intellegentes: his enim in verbis omnibus inest vis legendi eadem, quae in religioso, Cic. N. D. 2, 28, 72
^ Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion (Johns Hopkins University Press.)
^ Thomas A. Tweed. Crossing and Dwelling: A Theory of Religion. New York: Havard University Press, 2006. p.35.
^ Hueston A. Finlay. "‘Feeling of absolute dependence’ or ‘absolute feeling of dependence’? A question revisited". Religious Studies 41.1 (2005), pp.81-94.
^Max Müller. "Lectures on the origin and growth of religion."
^ George A. Lindbeck, Nature of Doctrine (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1984), 33.
^ Renfrew, C. 1994. "The Archaeology of Religion." In Renfrew, C. and Zubrow, E. (eds.) The Ancient Mind: Elements of Cognitive Archaeology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 47-54
^Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought, Pascal Boyer, Basic Books (2001)
^ Quotation: "The Second Vatican Council affirmed academic freedom for natural science and other secular disciplines". From the essay of Ted Peters about Science and Religion at "Lindsay Jones (editor in chief). Encyclopedia of Religion, Second Edition. Thomson Gale. 2005. p.8185"
^ By Dr Paul Murdin, Lesley Murdin Photographs by Paul New. Supernovae Astronomy Murdin Published 1985, Cambridge UniversityPress Science,256 pages,ISBN 052130038X page 18.
^ Godfrey-Smith, Peter. 2003. Theory and reality: an introduction to the philosophy of science. Science and its conceptual foundations. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Page 14.
^ Stanley Jaki. Bible and Science, Christendom Press, 1996 (pages 110-111)
^ Spitz, Lewis (1987). (The Rise of modern Europe) The protestant Reformation 1517-1559.. Harper Torchbooks. pp. 383. ISBN 0-06-132069-2 The historian of early modern Europe Lewis Spitz says "To set up a 'warfare of science and theology' is an exercise in futility and a reflection of a nineteenth century materialism now happily transcended".
^ Quotation: "The conflict thesis, at least in its simple form, is now widely perceived as a wholly inadequate intellectual framework within which to construct a sensible and realistic historiography of Western science." (p. 7), from the essay by Colin A. Russell "The Conflict Thesis" on "Gary Ferngren (editor). Science & Religion: A Historical Introduction. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. ISBN 0-8018-7038-0".
^ Gary Ferngren (editor). Science & Religion: A Historical Introduction. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. ISBN 0-8018-7038-0. (Introduction, p. ix)
^ Joseph Campbell, Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor. Ed. Eugene Kennedy. New World Library ISBN 1-57731-202-3.
^ Bartholomew Dean 1994 "The Poetics of Creation: Urarina Cosmology and Historical Consciousness." Latin American Indian Literatures Journal (10):22-45
^ abKarl Marx, 1844, Introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right: "Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people."English online edition; in German: "Die Religion ist der Seufzer der bedrängten Kreatur, das Gemüt einer herzlosen Welt, wie sie der Geist geistloser Zustände ist. Sie ist das Opium des Volks." MEW 1, p.378
^ Nobel Peace Laureate, Muslim and human rights activist Dr Shirin Ebadi has spoken out against undemocratic Islamic countries justifying "oppressive acts" in the name of Islam. Speaking at the Earth Dialogues 2006 conference in Brisbane, Dr Ebadi said her native Iran as well as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Yemen "among others" were guilty of human rights violations. "In these countries, Islamic rulers want to solve 21st century issues with laws belonging to 14 centuries ago," she said. "Their views of human rights are exactly the same as it was 1400 years ago."
^ Timothy Fitzgerald. The Ideology of Religious Studies. New York: Oxford University Press USA, 2000. p.1.
References
Saint Augustine; The Confessions of Saint Augustine (John K. Ryan translator); Image (1960), ISBN 0-385-02955-1.
Descartes, René; Meditations on First Philosophy; Bobbs-Merril (1960), ISBN 0-672-60191-5.
Barzilai, Gad; Law and Religion; The International Library of Essays in Law and Society; Ashgate (2007),ISBN 978-0-7546-2494-3
Durant, Will (& Ariel (uncredited)); Our Oriental Heritage; MJF Books (1997), ISBN 1-56731-012-5.
Durant, Will (& Ariel (uncredited)); Caesar and Christ; MJF Books (1994), ISBN 1-56731-014-1
Durant, Will (& Ariel (uncredited)); The Age of Faith; Simon & Schuster (1980), ISBN 0-671-01200-2.
Marija Gimbutas 1989. The Language of the Goddess. Thames and Hudson New York
Gonick, Larry; The Cartoon History of the Universe; Doubleday, vol. 1 (1978) ISBN 0-385-26520-4, vol. II (1994) ISBN#0-385-42093-5, W. W. Norton, vol. III (2002) ISBN 0-393-05184-6.
Haisch, Bernard The God Theory: Universes, Zero-point Fields, and What's Behind It All -- discussion of science vs. religion (Preface), Red Wheel/Weiser, 2006, ISBN 1-57863-374-5
Lao Tzu; Tao Te Ching (Victor H. Mair translator); Bantam (1998).
Marx, Karl; "Introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right", Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, (1844).
Saler, Benson; "Conceptualizing Religion: Immanent Anthropologists, Transcendent Natives, and Unbounded Categories" (1990), ISBN 1-57181-219-9
The Holy Bible, King James Version; New American Library (1974).
World Religions and Social Evolution of the Old World Oikumene Civilizations: A Cross-cultural Perspective by Andrey Korotayev, Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2004, ISBN 0-7734-6310-0.
Brodd, Jefferey (2003). World Religions. Winona, MN: Saint Mary's Press. ISBN 978-0-88489-725-5.
On religion definition:
The first major study: Durkheim, Emile (1976) The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. London: George Allen & Unwin (in French 1912, English translation 1915).
Wilfred Cantwell SmithThe Meaning and End of Religion (1962) notes that the concept of religion as an ideological community and system of doctrines, developed in the 15th and 16th centuries CE.
