March 21, 2005
On American Tolerance's Fractured Foundation: An Essay & Its Foreword
by Adam Volle in treatises at 10:57amDear Readers,
As of this writing, it’s been a while since Theocrats.com posted a new treatise. And it’s definitely been a while since I myself have posted one.
That makes sense. A lot more thought and work goes into constructing one of our typical “Hot Sheets” (topical, informal commentary; think of an opinion column) than a “Treatise” (our proper essays). Bringing that home is that we’ve thus far we’ve written forty-six of the former and only five of the latter, less if you care to get picky.
Well, here’s a brand-new one, the first Theocrat essay of 2005. The subject is the United States of America’s penchant for religious tolerance and how exactly it came about, what contributed to the atmosphere of social acceptance, etc. I argue that the foundation for America’s unique contribution of each-to-his-own-god is the product of political and economical happenstance more than rugged idealism.
Your Theocrat,
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On American Tolerance’s Fractured Foundation: An Essay – by [$]
The whitewashed and oversimplified notion many Americans presently have concerning the origins of their famed concern for religious freedom is easily understandable. It’s a well-charted phenomenon that history sheds its uglier details over generations and, in new (idealized) form, morphs into the canon of the pseudo-religion that is the nationalism of every state. Still, while Americans can justly take pride in their country’s birthing of a unique atmosphere of tolerance, the formative years of America’s spiritual melting pot were not years in which idealist populations, somehow hardly removed from their modern descendants in thinking, flooded into a new world with the express intent of founding the ACLU. Liberal principles were in too short supply at the time to provide the cover under which diversity (relatively speaking) flourished. A careful study of the historical foundation of the United States’ religious autonomy reveals instead that credit for the development of what Albanese calls America’s seemingly paradoxical “oneness and manynessâ€? is in reality essentially owed to two basic factors: an abundance of physical space and simple political expediency.
This is not to claim that no proponents of religious freedoms existed in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Lenience for the blasphemer was no popular continental fashion, sure, but it also couldn’t have immortalized itself as an American principle in the future without obtaining a measure of popular support, and the first fraction of that support was carved out by several of its champions in this period. Founder of Rhode Island Roger Williams declared God capable of using any person as a medium and was promptly exiled from Massachusetts, which soon tossed fellow troublemaker Anne Hutchinson after him (Albanese 115). The distinctive Society of Friends, more commonly known as “Quakersâ€?, announced their own colony of Pennsylvania from the outset to be a haven for the persecuted, and the effect of their commitment to this “holy experimentâ€? on world history, let alone American history, is scarcely calculable; among other things, their continued benevolence to separated brethren would later endear their settlement to Benjamin Franklin, another man offended by-who else?-the Puritans of his native Massachusetts. The Quakers even applied their policy of fair, non-coercive treatment to Native Americans.
Yet these were only two states out of thirteen motivated by the spiritual conviction of their leaders. Far from a purely morality-driven development of diverse society, the masters of Rhode Island and Pennsylvania’s respective neighbors more often simply enforced a ceasefire between their churches as a means of diplomacy; indeed, the rights of Lord Baltimore’s Maryland’s citizens were probably facilitated by nothing more noble than a Mexican standoff. The threatening presence of surrounding Protestant colonies necessitated generous treatment of those rivals’ adherents by the Catholics in power. The Lutheran English likewise instituted compassion towards non-Protestants on the theory that, as the Dutch settlers there had long enjoyed a nonjudgmental eye to their personal activities, revocation of their freedoms would complicate an already complicated transfer of power. Thus the Dutch Reformed were embraced, to the point where for several administrations after New Amsterdam’s conquering, it was even subsidized.
Strengthening this unwillingness in colonial times to ignite religious passions was probably an inability, should they spark, to effectively act on them. Albanese states that:
“[T]he Pilgrims, by landing outside the jurisdiction of Virginia, and the Massachusetts Bay Puritans, by taking their charter to North America with them, both managed to carve out virtually independent republics for themselves in the early years.â€? (113)
Implicit in the ability of such groups to achieve the level of autonomy Albanese describes is a vision of colonies that, while perhaps “perfecting their own ordered communities with proper civil and churchly governanceâ€? (Albanese 113), are unlikely interested in warfare with neighbors. What’s more, “freedom from direct English interferenceâ€? (Albanese 113) hardly meant carte blanche; the colonies ultimately remained answerable to royalty across the Atlantic for all of their actions.
Beyond the prevalence of pragmatism’s influence on various governors lay the inherent advantage of North America’s geography: there was a lot of it. Prior to the European discovery of the New World, Anglicans, Catholics, and those unfortunate enough to be caught between the Anglicans and the Catholics contended for control of a very limited amount of real estate; the steady increase in demand for “elbow roomâ€? could not be met with an increase in supply, as new land could not simply be created. “And so by the fifteenth century… the Europeans were looking for a new place to try to get to, and they came up with a new concept: the West.â€? (Barry 22) European discovery of the New World suddenly, tremendously, almost miraculously increased that inelastic supply, allowing unparalleled opportunities for separate European peoples’ expansion with comparably little competition against each other. The employment of violence remained necessary to secure these new opportunities, but even here fortunes were greatly improved; the settlers’ new competition had no cannon.
Though it falls outside this paper’s main historical focus, it’s worth noting that of all religions present within North America, arguable no sect has so successfully availed itself of the continent’s ample breathing space as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Joseph Smith’s new religion found it remarkably difficult to relate with its neighbors, wherever it settled; its followers migrated under Smith’s leadership four times over a period of fourteen years (1830-1844) and failed every time to establish a peaceful coexistence with their surroundings. In 1844, hostilities resulted in the death of Joseph Smith himself. What finally allowed the Mormons enough respite from such clashes to cement themselves as a major religion in America was a push westward into modern Utah, where troublesome interaction with rival religions was negligible. “Under Brigham Young (1801-1877), the main body of the Mormons set out on a journey that brought them at last to the Great Salt Lake.â€? (Albanese 224) Such an extreme retreat into the frontier excellently illustrates the pacifying capability of available resources.
Having achieved a stalemate through the utilization of those resources, Lutherans, Catholics, Puritans, Pilgrims, Quakers, and other religions’ adherents settled into a deadlock, a state many of them probably thought temporary at the time, not reckoning on the ocean-forged rift between their New World congregations and Old World headquarters and the syncretism of secular issues gluing them together. An order perpetuates itself, just as any physical object at rest tends to remain at rest; once religious tolerance became the norm, its political reasons for existing gradually lost importance and the tentacles of the sub-religions-national loyalty, personal comfort-began groundwork for the America known today.
Perhaps what threatens those enamored with the concept of a far more idealistic set of colonists is what the alternative explanation given in this paper suggests about themselves. Today, religious toleration is extolled as almost an absolute virtue. The thought that such an unchallengeable moral could derive from matters considered far more crass today robs it of its romance, and perhaps the self-flattery by association accompanying that romance.
WORKS CITED
