How America Moderates Religion

A pattern over time

What is the story of religious pluralism in America? Over time, and not without occasionally serious conflict, the wider American society comes to accept minority religious groups it initially finds quite threatening: Quakers, Catholics, Mormons, and others. These groups insist on their legal rights and, eventually, America lives up to its commitments to religious freedom and civic equality. A more tolerant, peaceful society results, a real achievement in a world in which brutal religious persecution still exists.

That is the conventional story, and it is told very well in a new documentary, "Free Exercise: America's Story of Religious Liberty," which I review at the Law & Liberty site. But, to my mind, there is another explanation as well. Religious peace has resulted from moderation on both sides. The wider society becomes more accepting of religious difference, but minority religions themselves often transform in ways that make them more like everybody else.

Take Catholics, for example. Catholics were once deeply threatening to mainstream America, not least because the Catholic Church opposed America's liberal commitments, including religious freedom, as dangerous heresies. But the Church's position on "Americanism" changed over time, and largely as a result of American influence. As I write in my review:

The nineteenth-century Church was the Church of the Syllabus of Errors (1864), a papal document that condemned freedom of conscience and the separation of church and state as dangerous heresies. America's Protestant majority saw this document and the values it espoused as hostile to fundamental American commitments. In the 1928 campaign, The Atlantic published an open letter questioning whether a Catholic like Smith could serve as president, citing the Syllabus and other papal pronouncements on church and state.

A hundred years later, though, and largely through the efforts of American Catholics like Fr. John Courtney Murray, the Second Vatican Council adopted Dignitatis Humanae, a document that specifically endorses religious liberty as a civil right. Catholic scholars have argued that Dignitatis Humanae and the Syllabus of Errors can be interpreted consistently with one another and that, from a theological perspective, there was no change. However theologians understand the situation, though, after Dignitatis Humanae, something had indeed changed as a practical matter. A major point of tension between the Catholic Church and American culture had disappeared, largely because of American influence.

The LDS Church offers another example. Mormons were deeply threatening to 19th century America, mostly because of polygamy. But, again, that changed:

In 1890, however, the LDS Church officially ended the practice—making it possible for Utah to be admitted as a state six years later. Practically speaking, Mormonism changed in a way that made it much less threatening to the wider American public. Mormons conformed to social convention, and relations between the LDS Church and other Americans have been better ever since.

In short, in America, minority religions have tended to move to the mean over time and become, in important ways, more or less like everyone else. (There are exceptions, of course, like the neo-traditionalists in many religious communities who self-consciously set themselves apart from the wider society). What explains this dynamic? It's hard to say. Perhaps the Lockean commitments that underpin our First Amendment lead over time to religious moderation. Perhaps the explanation lies in Americans' tendency to conform to social expectations, an under-appreciated fact about us that Tocqueville noticed 200 years ago. Whatever the explanation, the pattern seems very clear. Minority religions change America, but America changes minority religions, too.