What is the history of religious pluralism in America? Over time, and not without occasionally serious conflict, American society as a whole comes to accept minority religious groups that it initially finds quite threatening: Quakers, Catholics, Mormons, and others. These groups insist on their legal rights, and in the end, America lives up to its commitments to religious freedom and civic equality. The result is a more tolerant and peaceful society, a true achievement in a world where brutal religious persecution still exists.
That’s the conventional story, and it’s told very well in a new documentary, “Free Exercise: America’s Story of Religious Liberty,” which I review on the Law & Liberty website. But, in my opinion, there is also another explanation. Religious peace is the result of moderation on both sides. Society as a whole is increasingly accepting of religious difference, but minority religions themselves often morph in ways that make them more like everyone else.
Let’s take Catholics for example. Catholics once posed a grave threat to mainstream America, in part because the Catholic Church opposed America’s liberal commitments, including religious freedom, as dangerous heresies. But the Church’s position on “Americanism” has 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 America’s core commitments. In the 1928 campaign, The Atlantic published an open letter questioning whether a Catholic like Smith could serve as president, citing the Program and other papal statements on Church and State.
One hundred years later, however, and largely thanks to the efforts of American Catholics like Fr. John Courtney Murray, adopted the Second Vatican Council Human dignity, a document that specifically supports religious freedom as a civil right. Catholic scholars support it Human dignity and the Syllabus of Errors can be interpreted consistently with each other and that, from a theological perspective, there has been no change. However theologians understand the situation, however, later Human dignity, something had actually changed on a practical level. One of the major points of tension between the Catholic Church and American culture had disappeared, largely due to American influence.
The Mormon Church offers another example. Mormons posed a profound threat to 19th century America, largely because of polygamy. But, once again, things have changed:
In 1890, however, the Mormon Church officially ended this practice, allowing Utah to be admitted as a state six years later. In practice, Mormonism changed in a way that made it much less threatening to the broader American public. Mormons conformed to social conventions, and relations between the Mormon Church and other Americans have been better ever since.
In short, in America, over time, minority religions have tended to move toward the mean and become, in important ways, more or less like all the others. (There are exceptions, of course, such as neo-traditionalists in many religious communities who consciously distinguish themselves from broader society.) What explains this dynamic? It is hard to say. Perhaps the Lockean commitments that underlie our First Amendment lead to religious moderation over time. Perhaps the explanation lies in Americans’ tendency to conform to social expectations, an underappreciated fact that Tocqueville noted 200 years ago. Whatever the explanation, the pattern seems very clear. Minority religions change America, but America also changes minority religions.