The Production of American Religious Freedom 9781479823734

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The Production of American Religious Freedom

N o rt h A m e ri c a n Re l i g i o n s Series Editors: Tracy Fessenden (Religious Studies, Arizona State University), Laura Levitt (Religious Studies, Temple University), and David Harrington Watt (History, Temple University) In recent years a cadre of industrious, imaginative, and theoretically sophisticated scholars of religion have focused their attention on North America. As a result the field is far more subtle, expansive, and interdisciplinary than it was just two decades ago. The North American Religions series builds on this transformative momentum. Books in the series move among the discourses of ethnography, cultural analysis, and historical study to shed new light on a wide range of religious experiences, practices, and institutions. They explore topics such as lived religion, popular religious movements, religion and social power, religion and cultural reproduction, and the relationship between secular and religious institutions and practices. The series focus primarily, but not exclusively, on religion in the United States in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Books in the series: Ava Chamberlain, The Notorious Elizabeth Tuttle: Marriage, Murder, and Madness in the Family of Jonathan Edwards Terry Rey and Alex Stepick, Crossing the Water and Keeping the Faith: Haitian Religion in Miami Jodi Eichler-Levine, Suffer the Little Children: Uses of the Past in Jewish and African American Children’s Literature Isaac Weiner, Religion Out Loud: Religious Sound, Public Space, and American Pluralism Hillary Kaell, Walking Where Jesus Walked: American Christians and Holy Land Pilgrimage Brett Hendrickson, Border Medicine: A Transcultural History of Mexican American Curanderismo Annie Blazer, Playing for God: Evangelical Women and the Unintended Consequences of Sports Ministry Elizabeth Pérez, Religion in the Kitchen: Cooking, Talking, and the Making of Black Atlantic Traditions Kerry Mitchell, Spirituality and the State: Managing Nature and Experience in America’s National Parks Finbarr Curtis, The Production of American Religious Freedom

The Production of American Religious Freedom Finbarr Curtis

NEW YORK UNIVERSIT Y PRESS New York

NEW YORK UNIVERSIT Y PRESS New York www.nyupress.org © 2016 by New York University All rights reserved References to Internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor New York University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Curtis, Finbarr, 1973– author. Title: The production of American religious freedom / Finbarr Curtis. Description: New York : NYU Press, 2016. | Series: North American religions | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016010263| ISBN 9781479882113 (cl : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781479856763 (pb : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Freedom of religion—United States. | United States—Church history. | Religion and sociology—United States. | Liberty. | Selling. | Branding (Marketing)— United States. Classification: LCC BR516 .C945 2016 | DDC 323.44/20973—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016010263 New York University Press books are printed on acid-free paper, and their binding materials are chosen for strength and durability. We strive to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the greatest extent possible in publishing our books. Manufactured in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Also available as an ebook

For Cassius Gregory Curtis

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Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction

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1. You, and You, and You: Charles Grandison Finney and Democracy

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2. I’m Not Myself To-night. I Owe Money: Louisa May Alcott and Salvation

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3. Sentiment Rules the World: William Jennings Bryan and Populism

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4. The Helpless White Minority: D. W. Griffith and Violence

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5. The Fundamental Faith of Every True American: Al Smith and Loyalty

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6. Do You Hate Me? Malcolm X and the Truth

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7. Science in a Little Box: Intelligent Design and Secularity

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8. The Most Sacred of All Property: Corporations and Persons

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Epilogue: You, and You, and You

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Notes

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Bibliography

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Index

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About the Author

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Acknowledgments

This book was written in a lot of places. As a graduate student at two institutions followed by faculty positions at seven more, I benefited from conversations with so many friends and colleagues that an attempt to name them all would take up its own book. I extend my thanks to Richard Cohen, Scott Moore, Robin Rinehart, Ted Trost, Carol Wayne White, and Angela Zito, all of whom offered their time and support in a way that is not often extended to contingent faculty members. I especially thank Nicole Karapanagiotis and Hemchand Gossai for inviting me to join the religious studies program at Georgia Southern, and to David Dudley and Mary Villeponteaux who have helped me to find a home here. I thank the series editors, Tracy Fessenden, Laura Levitt, and David Harrington Watt, for their encouragement and Jennifer Hammer for her editorial guidance and patience as this project morphed into a broad study of American religious freedom. Thanks as well to the readers whose thoughtful comments I tried to address and who improved the arguments in these pages. To complete the research for this book I relied on financial support from the Capps Center for the Study of Ethics, Religion, and Public Life at the University of California, Santa Barbara; a fellowship from the Graduate Division of UCSB; a Frederick B. Artz Summer Research Grant at the Oberlin College Library; and a Short-Term Research Grant from the New York Public Library. I also benefitted from the research assistance of Ken Grossi at Oberlin as well as Carolyn Broomhead and Lyndsi Barnes at New York Public Library. I also extend my gratitude to Emanuelle Burton, whose editorial assistance helped to improve an earlier version of chapter 5 that appeared as “The Fundamental Faith of Every True American: Secularity and Institutional Loyalty in Al Smith’s 1928 Presidential Campaign,” Journal of Religion 91 (October 2011): 519–44; and to Joseph E. Davis and Emily Gum for their suggestions on chapter 7, which is a revised version of ix

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“The Secularity of Intelligent Design,” Hedgehog Review 13 (Summer 2011): 68–78. I also benefited from the comments of Charles Gelman and Wei Zhu, who helped to edit earlier sections of chapters 4 and 8 that appeared on the Immanent Frame blog. Many of the ideas in this book were formed through conversations with Roger Friedland, Giles Gunn, and Wade Clark Roof. I owe a special thank-you to Catherine L. Albanese, my graduate advisor, all-knowing sage of American religious history, and my writing’s most trenchant critic. An always rigorous reader who forced me to consider every line of my work, through her instruction I finally learned what a misplaced modifier was. I also thank Gillian Lindt and Randall Balmer for focusing my initial inquiries as an undergraduate in religious studies, and Jack Fitzmier and Dale Johnson for their guidance during my first incarnation as a graduate student at Vanderbilt. I also thank Jay Geller for my theoretical training and for almost two decades of his unparalleled wisdom about everything worth knowing in religious studies. Versions of these chapters have been bouncing around for years and have had more respondents than I can list. I appreciate the efforts of Anna R. Alexander, Sonia Hazard, Kerry Mitchell, and John Lardas Modern, who read and commented on recent drafts of these chapters. This book would not have become what it is without the insights and rigorous criticism of Cheryl Beaver. A partial list of conversation partners includes Anna Bigelow, Vince Biondo, Jason Bivins, Drew Bourn, Anthea Butler, Chip Callahan, Tom Carlson, Arianne Conty, Mark Elmore, Peter Gildenhuys, Taline Goorjian, Holly Grether, Richard Hecht, S. Brian Hood, Jacob Latham, Gabriel Levy, Katie Lofton, Reanna Mason, Sean McCloud, Russell McCutcheon, Ellen Posman, Nathaniel Rich, William Robert, Elijah Siegler, Michael Stephens, and Wendy Wiseman. Thanks to Nancy for inspiring whatever arguments have merit here through her many walks across my computer keyboards. I thank Barbara Wilson, my sixth-grade teacher at Taipei American School, who made us promise to acknowledge her when we wrote our first books. I am always indebted to my students, whose energy and curiosity have kept me going through many years of academic travels. Finally, I am grateful for the lifelong respect for learning and work instilled in me by my parents. I dedicate this book to my father, from whom I first learned to respect and criticize American freedom.

Introduction Freedom is hard to bear. —James Baldwin

Americans are a people captivated by freedom. Few agree, however, about what freedom means. At times, freedom challenges injustice. At other times, freedom justifies the way things are. Freedom fights for the laborer and defends corporations from regulation. Freedom protects the traditional family and protests against sexual restrictions. Freedom decries discrimination and insists that none exists. Freedom invites foreigners to American shores and restricts their entry. Freedom longs for a Christian nation and welcomes religious diversity. Freedom calls for more and less government. Freedom is cherished by sinners and saints, immigrants and nativists, slaves and slaveholders, corporations and employees. Many see in freedom the promise of liberation from rules and regulations, a protection of individual rights from state power. A free person is someone left alone by the state. Citizens who seek to be left alone also leave alone structural inequalities in American life. Those who defend individual rights accept persistent inequality as part of a free society. Wrestling with the vexed relationship between freedom and equality, those propagating liberal views of freedom broadened their interpretation over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to address the practical distribution of social, economic, and political power.1 This led to what John Dewey described as the “inner split” within liberalism.2 This inner split marked the fault line between proponents of limiting freedom to formal protection of rights and advocates for substantive equality who argued for more expansive conceptions of the public good.3 When it comes to religion, substantive critiques of inequality have been less visible. Popular and scholarly narratives have often imagined that American religious freedom protects individual choices in a mar1

2 | Introduction

ketplace. Writing in the nineteenth century, for example, the French tourist Alexis de Tocqueville attributed the persistent strength of religion in the United States to the principle of voluntarism resulting from the separation of church and state.4 Religiosity flourished when citizens were free to choose their own religious loyalties. While not always sharing Tocqueville’s political views, scholars of religion in America often take as axiomatic that religious freedom is a good thing and welcome the range of spiritual choices made possible by secular liberal institutions. This book argues that there is no such thing as religious freedom, or at least no one thing. Religious freedom is a malleable rhetoric employed for a variety of purposes. Part of the reason for this malleability is that religious identities are themselves produced in response to social and political contests. Without conflict among political actors, there would be no need to define a discreet area of social life called religion and then insist that it should be protected.5 Conflict is not what happens when already formed religions bump into each other in public life; conflict makes religions. One response to social contests is to make religion into a form of private property possessed by an interior self that requires protection. Interior religiosity focuses attention on individual freedom to deflect attention from the distribution of power among persons, families, legislatures, courts, corporations, and religious organizations.6 Appeals to the sanctity of private property, for example, have been ubiquitous in everything from defenses of slavery to protests against regulations of corporations. In the fluid relationship between property and persons, corporate personhood has often found legal protections that have eluded human beings. The centrality of individual voluntarism is also in tension with the practical role played by regional, racial, ethnic, class, and sexual identities in shaping religious adherence. This is not to say that these diverse forms of identification are any less malleable than religion.7 It is to say that the rhetoric of freedom often produces persons loyal to groups pursuing imagined collective interests. These groups have supported and opposed social inequality. At times, religious commitments have fueled public engagement with movements that worked to fight perceived social injustices. At other times, religious freedom advocates have attacked public institutions as enemies of individual liberty and have strengthened private forms of institutional power.

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That religion is an interior, individual concern in need of political and legal safeguards is part of American common sense. This book argues that logic of the commonsensical equation between religion and privacy is itself a product of a political economy. By “economy,” I have in mind something broader than financial transactions. Expanding on the classical sense of economy as household administration, this book analyzes governance in a self-governing nation.8 An economy of religious freedom addresses institutional forces that define, produce, and distribute contested social resources in American life. This economy does not provide options for already formed citizens; it produces persons who make choices about how to govern themselves. The peculiar features of self-government encompass regulatory forces as well as resistance to dominant forms of governance. An economic analysis measures this push and pull, the contests over the production and distribution of power. Considering the work it takes to produce religious freedom requires a different analysis from measuring how consumer demands are met by ever expanding free markets. The tendency to equate economic production with limitless expansion and growth testifies to the role that capitalism has played in defining the American economic imagination. This is especially evident when free markets are portrayed as politically neutral institutions. As Lisa Duggan explains, “The most successful ruse of neoliberal dominance in both global and domestic affairs is the definition of economic policy as primarily a matter of neutral, technical expertise. This expertise is then separated from politics and culture, and not properly subject to specifically political accountability or cultural critique.”9 To understand contests over the production of religious freedom within political institutions, the book begins in the nineteenth century with the famed revivalist Charles Grandison Finney. Stressing human agency in promoting revivals, Finney appears as a skilled religious entrepreneur willing to meet consumer demands. Far from giving people what they wanted, however, Finney used emotional and social pressure to discipline subjects who would form a Christian society. Images of a sentimental Christian order also informed the economic visions of the novelist Louisa May Alcott and the populist crusader William Jennings Bryan, both of whom saw capitalist wage labor as an alienating force that eroded social bonds between human beings. While Alcott and Bryan

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believed that better working conditions could foster solidarity, they disagreed about who would be included in their idealized social worlds. Alcott labored to overcome social divisions, whereas Bryan yearned for a white Christian nation. Like Bryan, the filmmaker D. W. Griffith drew on white populism to craft a religiously and racially exclusive body politic. Unlike Bryan, Griffith saw violence as the necessary means to protect Christian freedom. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Christian nation ideals met challenges from religious minorities. Al Smith, the New York governor and 1928 Democratic presidential nominee, used a populist language to fight for American workers, but he did so as the spokesman for immigrant, urban, ethnically diverse, and often Catholic and Jewish masses who were gaining political power in the early twentieth century. Smith’s defense of religious freedom protected hyphenated identities and institutional loyalties in ways that challenged proponents of a Protestant Christian nation. Later in the twentieth century, the Nation of Islam spokesman Malcolm X articulated a radical vision of racial solidarity that refused liberal inclusion altogether. Rejecting liberal discourses of freedom and tolerance, he insisted that inequality was at the center of American history. Malcolm X taught that American promises of freedom were based on distorted views of social reality, and that freedom required revolutionary change. This book also examines how privatization in the current political climate has countered attempts made by religious, racial, and ethnic minorities to expand American freedom. Hearkening back to Griffith’s nostalgic embrace of Confederate ideals of state’s rights, limited government, and the sanctity of property, antistatist populists reject the expansion of democratic institutions and turn instead to libertarian privacy. Arguments made for intelligent design emphasize private choices and invoke liberal virtues of tolerance in order to attack the scientific establishment as representative of public institutions that pose tyrannical threats to liberty. Recently, decrying tyranny has manifested itself as nostalgia for a lost nation as the grounds for abandoning political loyalty to the state. Antigovernment sentiment of groups like the Tea Party is only one example of a broader trend toward privatization in which attacks on a leviathan state serve to expand private forms of institutional power. As we will see in this book’s analysis of attempts to grant to religious cor-

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porations the status of persons entitled to First Amendment rights, this defense of corporate rights sanctifies property. Evangelical corporations like Hobby Lobby have found common cause with the Catholic Church to argue that in order to protect sacred property rights, they should not have to not provide health care coverage for forms of contraception that offend their consciences. This usage of religious privacy does not protect individual choices, but empowers a private sphere that contains institutions (such as churches, schools, hospitals, or other corporate bodies) that seek regulatory power over human bodies. The rhetoric of religious freedom expands the power of private institutions acting outside of democratic deliberation and accountability. This model of privacy derives its persuasive force from a defense of individual liberty, but in practice supports the interests of large corporations. This evacuation of public life is consistent with Patricia J. Williams’s observation that fears of government power have justified legislative restraint that has eroded public institutions in favor of private power. Speaking of increasing monopolization of public space by private interests, she notes, “There is today precious little ‘public’ left, just the tyranny of what we call the private.”10 The rhetoric of religious freedom has played a central role in empowering private tyranny. While the chapters of this book address varied subject matter, they by no means tell the whole story of American religious freedom.11 The selected case studies do not offer a balanced, exhaustive, or inclusive coverage of American history; I chose them to highlight different conceptual problems in the study of religion. The goal is not to propose any one explanation for how religious freedom works but to highlight how freedom has been contested, challenged, and transformed. Different chapters illuminate competing visions of the proper relationship between public and private life. If there is any single common theme, it is that while religious freedom often promises individual liberation from social constraints, this is the one thing freedom does not do. There is no such thing as unconditioned freedom that exists outside of social life. As the economy of religious freedom produces, distributes, and challenges different social arrangements, it addresses contradictions between formal promises of religious liberty and the practical exercise of freedom. To this end, this book draws on recent scholarship that investigates internal tensions within American religious freedom, especially in the role

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that Protestantism plays in shaping supposedly religiously neutral secular institutions.12 Both Tracy Fessenden and John Lardas Modern, for example, suggest that Protestant forms of freedom and subjectivity have become so ingrained in American common sense as to be invisible to critical analysis.13 Others, like Steven D. Smith, agree that Protestant religious commitments have shaped religious freedom, but draw different conclusions about what this means. In Smith’s view, because American religious freedom was based upon Christian theological commitments, it is imperative to protect Christian influence in public life.14 While I accept that public Protestantism has shaped American democracy, I am also interested in how people fight about this. Whereas Modern looks for an underlying epistemic unity, I see religious freedom as something fragmented, in tension, and under duress. This is not to say that I reject discursive analysis in order to recover the agency of subjects. Instead of addressing anxieties about whether people are able to make choices, this book examines how freedom can force people to make choices or allow them to avoid making choices. Following James Baldwin’s observation that freedom is hard to bear, I grapple with how people respond when freedom makes them uncomfortable. What is common to all of the chapters of this book is that they study citizens who are not fully formed persons otherwise constrained by social forces. In practice, the production of religious freedom creates divided selves. Rather than study free people, then, this book examines the social processes that produce a variety of persons, whether they be sinners, laborers, victims, voters, revolutionaries, scientists, embryos, or corporations.

1

You, and You, and You Charles Grandison Finney and Democracy All states of society, all forms of government, all inveterate habits and prejudices, from the iron Roman, the polite and philosophic Greek, to the most debased Sandwich Islanders, have been overcome and subdued alike by the Gospel, and always in the form of revivals of religion, and substantially by the use of the same instrumentalities which    .  .  . have been so long, so widely, and so successfully used in the United States. —Charles Grandison Finney

Charles Grandison Finney was no modest man. Reflecting on the revivals of his early ministry in upstate New York in the 1820s and 1830s, he remarked, “I have never seen, read, or heard of, revivals in any age of the church, more pure, powerful, and in every way desirable, than those of that period.”1 For Finney, a big revival was a good revival. Evangelists sought to save as many souls as possible. However, Finney’s emphasis on counting souls revealed an underlying tension between social and individual aspects of conversion. On one hand, sinners were individuals with free will. As he explained, “They are free moral agents, of course; rational, accountable.”2 On the other hand, a revival used social pressure to produce as many Christians as possible. If sinners were free to make their own choices, what was social pressure doing exactly? Finney’s ideas about revivalism call us to consider the relationship between social pressure and individual freedom. While he argued for a greater role for human free will in Protestant revivalism than did his Calvinist predecessors, Finney was not interested in freedom for freedom’s sake. He wanted to understand how human volition worked in order to help individuals conform to social norms and theological truth. 7

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People were most free when they made the same choices as their Christian neighbors. This was not a simple matter of social control. External coercion was incapable of producing genuine conversions. Instead, the task of the revivalist was to affect the interior life of sinners so that they willingly chose Christ. Finney studied the psychology of will to consider how social norms and discipline governed choices. By producing free individuals within a population of free people, Finney’s revivals drew on distinctly democratic techniques of surveillance. The revivalist observed popular behavior in order to shape it.

The Language of the Common People Finney was celebrated and denounced for his use of “new measures” to promote revivals. His measures included an anxious bench on which potential converts would sit in full view of the congregation, protracted meetings that lasted for hours and even days, extemporaneous preaching with plain language, an increased role for women, personalized addresses that refused to let those in the pews remain anonymous spectators, and a heightened emotional appeal that challenged a more reserved sense of Christian propriety.3 Taken together, these methods placed sinners under intense public scrutiny. The technique of anxious bench, for example, encouraged people to sit in a row reserved for sinners concerned over the state of their souls, thereby inviting additional pressure from the preacher and other congregants. Many, particularly in Finney’s own Presbyterian and later Congregationalist denominations, questioned whether such means were worth the ends. As biographer Charles Hambrick Stowe described the attitude of Finney’s opponents, “[They] did not differ from him so much on theological grounds. It was the style and tone—the bad manners—of the revivals to which they objected. ‘Doing the thing,’ as H. H. Kellogg in Clinton called it, seemed to them religious vulgarity.”4 Finney’s critics felt he damaged the dignity of the ministerial profession and undermined the decorum of church services. He offered no apologies: “Dignity indeed! Just the language of the devil. He rejoices in it. Why, the object of an illustration is to make people see the truth, not to bolster up pulpit dignity.”5 Finney responded to calls for pulpit dignity by asking how many Christians had been converted by ministers who maintained this devil-

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ish decorum. Scholars have viewed his rejection of propriety as evidence for a democratization of American Christianity in the nineteenth century. According to this interpretation, those who denounced Finney’s “vulgar” style were motivated by a class-based anxiety over the erosion of traditional authority. Ministers trained at Harvard and Yale resisted increasingly popular forms of religious expression. As historian Nathan Hatch explains, “This shift [to democratization] involved new faith in public opinion as the arbiter of truth.”6 Revivalists flourished because they met the demands of the masses. An assertive version of the democratization thesis is proposed by rational choice sociologists Roger Finke and Rodney Stark, who celebrate an American free market of religion that rewarded preachers who embraced their roles as religious entrepreneurs and adapted to consumer demands.7 Unlike Finke and Stark, Hatch has mixed feelings about the religious marketplace. According to Hatch, the revivalist style simplified theology and encouraged antiintellectualism in American life.8 As he laments, “These new ground rules measured theology by its acceptance in the marketplace. It flattened out uncomfortable complexity and often resolved issues by simple choice of alternatives.”9 While Hatch has reservations about the actual choices of religious consumers, he does agree with Finke and Stark that the choices of Americans were free. Revivalism was popular because it met the demands of American Christians. Finney proudly adapted his preaching to his audience. As he stated, “Among farmers and mechanics, and other classes of men, I borrowed my illustrations from their various occupations. I tried also to use such language as they would understand. I addressed them in the language of the common people.”10 But Finney’s attack on the preaching style of his contemporaries did not always make him so popular. Recounting his reception in one town, he noted, “I learned in the course of the day that the people were threatening me—to ride me on a rail, to tar and feather me, and to give me a walking paper, as they said.”11 This reception adds a wrinkle to the portrayal of Finney as the preacher who gave the people what they wanted. He did not care if the masses liked him. Finney was confrontational and stressed the importance of “melting down” or “breaking down” sinners: “This committed state is moral depravity, the fountain of sin within them, from which flow by a natural law all their sinful ways. This committed voluntary state is their ‘wicked heart.’ This

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it is that needs a radical change.”12 Left alone, sinners would not choose what was good for them. In representing revivalists like Finney as democratizing figures who gave the people what they wanted, historians like Hatch and sociologists like Finke and Stark portray revivalism as the natural extension of the people’s will. In doing this, they deflect attention from the work required to produce the will of the people. By depicting Finney’s revivals as protests of the masses against the classes, democratization theories elevate religious freedom in ways that divert attention from other forms of social and political power such as pressure and shame. According to historian Amanda Porterfield, Hatch ignores an authoritarian strand within American evangelicalism. As she argues, “Misrepresenting evangelicalism as antiauthoritarian and disregarding the connection between the growth of evangelicalism and the growth of slavery and the invasion of Indian lands, Hatch did as much to mask the developing relationship between religion and politics as to reveal it.”13 Porterfield’s analysis brings a welcome attention to social power. However, Hatch’s depiction of Finney’s antiauthoritarianism might not be a misrepresentation. I agree with Hatch that revivalism was a force for democratization in the sense that revivalists hoped to produce populations of self-governing people. Finney’s ministry mounted a popular challenge to existing institutional authority and social norms. This is not to say, however, that institutional authority and social norms vanished. Revivalism is best understood not as one side of a binary between authoritarianism and antiauthoritarianism, or between social control and popular sovereignty. Rather, the popularity of revivals depends upon institutional arrangements and distributions of power that make democracy possible. Instead of a process in which individuals became free, democratization might be better understood as a shift toward democratic forms of governance. A revivalist used social forces to gain the people’s consent to be governed. As social events designed to produce individual conversions, revivals are a resource for thinking about the relationship between public opinion and private decisions in a democracy. This is especially true if revivals are illustrations of both democratization and market forces. Democracy does not just give people what they want; democracy requires institutions that measure, regulate, and implement democratic choices.

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There is a great deal at stake in making the marketplace the arbiter of democratic sovereignty. After all, markets do not just respond to consumer demands; they create consumer demands. Part of why market forces are effective is they conceal this work of creation. When portrayed as the vehicle for expanding religious freedom, the marketplace appears to be driven by the choices of religious actors acting upon internal desires that were otherwise constrained by external forces. By celebrating the agency of religious consumers, the equation of free markets with democratization naturalizes capitalist freedom. Instead of examining institutional conditions that produced a Protestant hegemony in public life, democratization theories present revivalism as the fulfillment of the popular will. Following this logic, if free markets meet innate consumer demands, and popular evangelicalism flourishes under free markets, then one can presume that the kind of evangelicalism that thrived in the nineteenth century was what people wanted. Scholarship that equates freedom with evangelical salvation supports Catherine L. Albanese’s observation that American “public Protestantism” has functioned in tandem with a celebration of pluralism and multiplicity.14 Religious freedom goes hand in hand with the commonsensical equation of Protestantism, voluntarism, and religious freedom in the United States. According to historian David Sehat, celebrations of religious freedom serve as a civic myth that conceals the practical exercise of power through what he calls a “moral establishment.” As he states, “The invocation of religious liberty should not be confused with the actual distribution of power and the formation of political institutions.”15 John Lardas Modern describes how evangelical forms of agency became part of American common sense. According to Modern, evangelicals cited their particular genius for adapting to a secular political order that liberated Americans from institutional control. Evangelical freedom coincided with democratic freedom in that both deflected attention from institutional power by attributing authority to the unmediated will of the people. In this secular milieu, “the ‘State’ was an energy that operated within human history, a non-mediating medium that would allow individuals to act voluntarily, on their own terms, as a people. As a control variable for both ‘religion’ and the organization of the population, this energy made the evolution of evangelicalism and social order part of the same horizon of possibility. Moreover, this energy secured the

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meaning of evangelicalism as emancipation from the fetters of artificial, and therefore unreasonable, authority.”16 To understand how the rhetoric of emancipation worked in tandem with the organization of the population, Modern draws on the critical theories of Michel Foucault, who tried to understand how individual choices in the modern liberal state are produced. According to Foucault, social power did not repress individual subjects but constituted individuals within networks of power so that individuals more effectively reproduced the conditions that make the modern state possible. As he stated, The individual is not to be conceived as a sort of elementary nucleus, a primitive atom, a multiple and inert material on which power comes to fasten or against which it happens to strike, and in so doing subdues or crushes individuals. In fact, it is already one of the prime effects of power that certain bodies, certain gestures, certain discourses, certain desires, come to be identified and constituted as individuals. The individual, that is, is not the vis-à-vis of power; it is, I believe one of its prime effects.17

Examining the individual as an effect of power can explain how Finney’s new measures worked to produce liberal subjects. Revivals did not depend upon external institutional coercion. Rather, a revival was a social event that produced free individuals. In Foucault’s later work, his focus on the discipline of an individual subject was supplemented by attention to what he called “security.” Security measured and normalized individual behavior in the context of some population. A certain amount of variation, or multiplicity, was permissible as long as it was possible to maintain public norms. In other words, it was not necessary to discipline each person in the same way within a democratic polity; what mattered was measurable, quantifiable behavior.18 This tension between discipline and security can help to explain the relationship between the social event of a revival and the project of individual conversion. Finney’s revivals did not simply gather a collection of consumers; they produced environments in which social norms and public standards prescribed a limited variety of acceptable forms of individual discipline. A social norm does not require that everyone’s behavior be the same. Democratic governments are not like totalitarian states that seek to

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control people’s behavior. Rather, liberal democracies survey and manage people within a population. For this to work, individuals choose whether to conform to social norms. What matters is not that all private behavior is identical, but that some norm maintains public influence. Rather than rely on top-down control of all people, democratic security surveys and measures a range of behavior in territory inhabited by free subjects. As Foucault explains, “Freedom is nothing else but the correlative of the deployment of the apparatuses of security. An apparatus of security, in any case the one I have spoken about, cannot operate well except on the condition that it is given freedom in the modern sense [the word] acquires in the eighteenth century: no longer the exemptions and privileges attached to a person, but the possibility of movement, change of place, and processes of circulation of both people and things.”19 The work of security accounts for natural desires and behaviors across a population to allow for effective government. Foucault’s ideas about security can help to clarify the production of religious freedom in the early republic. In the same way that democratic citizens were members of a population, sinners were members of an audience. To reach the greatest number of people within his prospective audience, Finney developed a science of revivals that studied how people made choices. He was especially interested in developing techniques of measurement and regulation to observe how social pressures could impact individual decisions. Before breaking down individual resistance, he needed to understand how human nature worked in order to develop measures appropriate to his audience of “common people.” He wanted to know how to shape a social environment that would influence free people to make decisions for Christ. Individual religious freedom, then, was not in a private space removed from public life but was the focus of surveillance, discipline, and security. Finney knew that not every sinner would accept Christ. When looked at from the perspective of a population, this was not necessarily a problem. A revival’s success was measured by its ability to convert the greatest number of people. For such measurement to be possible, conversions needed to be standardized, countable events. If producing the greatest number of converts was the purpose of a revival, conversions should be widely accessible. This market logic repulsed Finney’s critics who saw something vulgar about his willingness to discard any norms of public

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behavior that seemed to get in the way of his single-minded focus on the quantity of converts. As Presbyterian critic Albert B. Dod lamented, “How is the temple of God dishonored by this alleged necessity for a continual shifting of its services, like the scenes of some raree-show, to attract the vulgar gaze! How is the Gospel degraded by being thus made dependent for its effect upon a kind of jugglery which shall be studiously adapted to surprise and startle beholders, and thus ‘attract their attention!’”20 Opponents of Finney’s ministry were working with a religious economy that included qualitative measures like theological sophistication and pulpit dignity. In the eyes of these elite critics, a religious marketplace lacked any sense of propriety. Finney’s impact was felt not only in the number of people he converted, but in his ability to make it obvious that the success of Christian ministry was measured quantitatively and that anything else was the work of the devil. The market logic of revivalism meant that conversion became a standardized product that measured its success by the quantity of souls brought to Christ. When democratization theories use quantitative measures of religion, they take Finney’s side by equating popularity with democratic freedom.

Freedom of the Will Another feature of Foucault’s concept of security that is relevant to revivalism is its attention to human nature. Modern liberal freedom is conventionally understood as the liberation of natural desire from artificial constraints. Finney thought a lot about nature. He insisted that his new measures employed natural means: “A revival is not a miracle according to another definition of the term ‘miracle’—something above the powers of nature. There is nothing in religion beyond the ordinary powers of nature. It consists entirely in the right exercise of the powers of nature.”21 Finney’s faith in the right exercise of natural powers departed from theology that held that revivals could only be a surprising work of a sovereign God. His study of human nature was motivated by his confidence that he could change human beings once he understood how their choices worked. This is consistent with Foucault’s observation that naturalness is accessible to techniques of transformation: “The naturalness identified in the fact of population is constantly accessible to agents and techniques of transformation, on condition that these agents

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and techniques are at once enlightened, reflected, analytical, calculated, and calculating.”22 Importantly, measurable norms make it possible to describe human nature even while such norms might not describe everyone’s behavior. Instead of equating nature with universal features in every person, security requires only that certain behaviors are statistically probable. Finney’s new measures depended upon understanding how human nature worked in order to free people from sin. Confidence in human agency distinguished Finney from earlier proponents of revivalism. Freedom was the revival’s means as well as its ends. As Mark Noll observes, “In 1740 ‘freedom’ was something about which to reason, a quality of human life as a whole to be considered in relation to other aspects of the self, and a positive value that nevertheless needed to be fenced in by other weightier considerations. In 1840 it had become axiomatic, the fundamental defining trait of human morality, and a value than which nothing was greater.”23 One measure of the difference between 1740 and 1840 was the looming figure of Jonathan Edwards.24 Edwards, a Calvinist proponent of the First Great Awakening, insisted that revivals were the surprising work of God and could not be controlled by the minister. However, Finney saw himself in continuity with Edwards and almost always spoke of his predecessor with respect. Finney explained their different theories about election and human agency as only a matter of emphasis due to changing historical circumstances. For example, although he claimed that the doctrine of election had harmed revivalism in his day, the revivalists of the previous century faced a different set of challenges: It was not so in the days when President Edwards and Whitefield labored. Then, the Churches in New England had enjoyed little else than Arminian preaching, and were all resting in themselves and their own strength. These bold and devoted servants of God came out and declared those particular doctrines of grace, Divine Sovereignty and Election, and they were greatly blessed. They did not dwell on these doctrines exclusively, but they preached them very fully. The consequence was that because in those circumstances revivals followed from such preaching, the ministers who followed continued to preach these doctrines almost exclusively.25

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Finney was hesitant to criticize any revivalist who got results. Despite Finney’s deference to his predecessors, there were some differences between his and Edwards’s views of free will and human agency. Finney was correct, however, in the sense that the theological differences were relatively slight and that, on most questions, the revivalists were in substantial agreement. First, Edwards technically accepted that persons were free in the sense that their actions were not determined by external forces.26 The question for Edwards was not whether individuals were free to make moral choices. They were. The question was how the will was formed. Second, although Finney placed greater emphasis on individual choices, he did not see sinners as likely to make correct decisions to ensure their salvation. It was on the formation of the will that Edwards and Finney were in subtle disagreement, although the subtlety of the disagreement had not-so-subtle effects. Edwards, like Finney, argued that it made no sense to contend that people believed one thing and did another. According to Edwards, people always acted as they chose: “For ’tis absurd, to suppose the same individual will to oppose itself, in its present act; or the present choice to be opposite to, and resisting present choice: as absurd as it is to talk of two contrary motions, in the same moving body, at the same time.”27 If people willed one thing and did another, this begged the question of what agency chose to take the action. There were some limits to what individuals could choose to do. Natural necessity placed limits on human agency. One could not jump fifty feet in the air just because one chose to do so. However, there were no such external limits placed on moral necessity. Natural forces did not prohibit people from making moral choices. But while people were free to do as they willed, this still left the epistemological question of how they came to will the things they willed in the first place. The assertion that people were free to do good or evil did not answer the question of what compelled some people to choose to do good while others chose evil. Identifying the will as free did not explain where it came from. On this point Edwards and Finney proved to be in significant disagreement. According to Edwards, while the will was free, individuals were not free to determine the nature of the will itself. Edwards characterizes the Arminian embrace of free will as self-contradictory: “Which brings us directly to a contradiction: for it supposes an act of the will preceding the

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first act in the whole train, directing and determining the rest; or a free act of the will, before the first free act of the will.”28 The basic problem was that one could not will the will as any act of will would presuppose that there was already a will in place. The will, whether regenerate or unregenerate, had to be determined by God. The will was still free because God did not instruct people to make good or bad choices. Rather, God endowed humans with the perceptual apparatus to understand the difference between good and evil as simple ideas. Drawing on the philosophy of John Locke, Edwards described a simple idea as elemental and therefore not reducible to constituent logical parts. A simple idea was irrational in the technical sense that it was indivisible. Simple ideas were accepted whole. They were either grasped or not. Something like the sweetness of honey could not be explained; it had to be experienced. Good was like the taste of honey. It could not be communicated but could be experienced only through taste. If one lacked the sense of taste, one could never understand what honey tasted like. In the same way, good people made good choices because they perceived them to be good. Furthermore, because human beings were innately depraved, they would lack the sense of the good unless they were saved by grace. God’s election regenerated the human senses. Whereas Edwards tied free will to perception, Finney argued for a tripartite conception of moral agency divided into intellect, sensibility, and free will. According to Finney, “Intellect includes  . . . reason, conscience, and self-consciousness.”29 Intellect contained the capacity to reason, as in the ability to develop a rational understanding of the doctrine of Hell. Finney defined sensibility as the emotional, sensual aspects of the human self: “This is the faculty or susceptibility of feeling. All sensation, desire, emotion, passion, pain, pleasure, and, in short, every kind of degree of feeling, as the term feeling is commonly used, is a phenomenon of this faculty.”30 In other words, sensibility enabled one to feel and experience what Hell would be like. Apart from intellect and sensibility, free will had the status of an entirely different faculty: “Free-will implies the power of originating and deciding our own choices—of deciding or choosing in conformity with duty or otherwise in all cases of moral obligation.  . . . Man’s causality, his whole power of causality to perform or do anything, lies in the will.”31 Finney’s tripartite understanding of moral agency uncoupled sensibility from volition. While volition was

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still closely intertwined with sense perception, it was not the same thing. For example, it was possible to imagine a revival’s impacting sinners in such a way as to drive them to conviction, but the ultimate decision to renounce their sins and become Christians was still theirs to make. One effect of the uncoupling of will and sensibility was that it allowed Finney to make sensibility a natural as opposed to supernatural category. For Edwards, Christian sensibility was a gracious gift of God. For Finney, entirely natural measures could be expected to impress upon sinners as well as Christians the truth of the Christian message. Thus, natural measures could work with the Holy Spirit to convert Christians: “The Spirit of God, by the truth, influences the sinner to change, and in this sense is the efficient Cause of the change. But the sinner actually changes, and is therefore himself, in the most proper sense, the author of the change.”32 Yet the problem of how to influence the sinner remained. After all, if sinners could choose to sin or not, how did the minister convince them to change the way they made decisions? Finney’s answer lay in the different ways in which volition interacted with intellect and sensibility. While there was sometimes a passive quality to intellect (as when conversations or events in one’s environment compelled one to have certain thoughts), one could often choose how one reasons. However, it was much more difficult to control one’s sensibility. On a limited level, one could choose to feel things, but emotions and affections were largely states of the body that were outside of one’s direct control. As Finney explained, “No man can make himself feel in this way, merely by trying to feel. The feelings of the mind are not directly under our control. We cannot by willing, or by direct volition, call forth religious feelings.  . . . They are purely involuntary states of mind. They naturally and necessarily exist in the mind under certain circumstances calculated to excite them. But they can be controlled indirectly.”33 While the faculty of the free will was at liberty to make whatever choices it wanted, it still relied on the intellect and sensibility to know what to choose. But because there was an involuntary urgency and intensity to the feelings that impacted sensibility, it was more likely to have an impact on the actions of the will. In other words, people chose to react to fear however they wanted, but they were more likely to react to the feeling of fear than to the idea of fear. Thus, sensibility was useful to the minister as it could indirectly influence the will.

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You, and You, and You A successful revivalist sought to understand the will of the sinner in order to exert public pressure on private choices. Emotion was a better resource than intellectual persuasion because the existing agency of sinners was part of the problem. Thus, the profession of belief as a matter of rational choice was insufficient to meet the criteria for authentic conversion. Intellectual commitments often convinced people that they were already Christian. As Finney explained, “Nothing is more common, than for a sinner, when told to believe the Gospel, to say: ‘I do believe it.’ The fact is, he has been brought up to admit the fact that the Gospel is true, but he does not believe it: he knows nothing about the evidence of it, and all his faith is a mere admission without evidence.  . . . Yet it is often quite difficult to convince them that they do not believe.”34 Finney, therefore, was less concerned about introducing and explaining novel beliefs than he was about disrupting sinners’ senses of what they thought they believed. Intellectual belief might be a product of the socially respectable habits that often prevented conversion. There was more at stake in Finney’s use of heightened states of emotion than a popular appeal to the lower classes. Finney challenged social propriety because he wanted his auditors to feel uncomfortable. To do this, he needed to challenge and unsettle existing social norms. Christian preaching could not allow sinners to be comfortable: “[The minister], on his part, is expected to preach good, sound, comfortable doctrine, to bolster them up, and make them feel comfortable. So, they expect to go to heaven. I tell you they will go to hell if this is their religion!”35 Finney wanted to break down the social habits that allow for Christian hypocrisy. One set of social habits he hoped to transform were the familiar ways in which people went to church, especially the manner in which churchgoers passively listened to sermons. Directing his preaching to individual auditors, Finney refused to let anyone hide. As he explained, “What is personal preaching? No individual is ever benefited by preaching until he is made to feel that in benefits him. Such preaching is always personal. It often appears so personal to wicked men that they feel as if they were just going to be called out by name before the congregation.”36 One tactic for personalizing sermons was the repeated use of the second person to address those who attended revivals. Finney wanted those in

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the pews to understand that they were themselves going to Hell if they did not convert: “Do you believe the things I have been preaching are true, or are they the ravings of a disturbed mind? If they are true, do you recognize that they have reference to you? You say, perhaps: ‘I wish some of the rich Churches could hear it!’ But I am not preaching to them; I am preaching to you.’”37 Addressing a sinner directly in front of the other members of the sinner’s community was intended to cause discomfort. While Finney spoke directly to individuals, he did not do so as if he were addressing rational agents who would patiently examine his ideas. Social pressure calculated to effect individual conversions was best manufactured by personal address, but preachers failed at this when they worried about offending their congregants: “They preach about the Gospel instead of preaching the Gospel. They often preach about sinners instead of preaching to them. They studiously avoid being personal, in the sense of making the impression on any one present that he is the man. Now I have thought it my duty to pursue a different course; and I always have pursued a different course. I have often said, ‘Do not think I am talking about anybody else; but I mean you, and you, and you.’”38 Although Finney addressed people in the second person, he did not give them what they wanted. Public scrutiny forced people to make choices they might otherwise avoid. This is what was so improper about this manner of address. For Finney’s contemporary critics, public shaming was another example of revivalism’s vulgarity: “However strange it must seem to Mr. Finney, there can be no doubt that there is such a thing as diffidence, which has its origin in modesty rather than pride. There are those, and they form a much larger class than he supposes, whose minds shrink from everything like a parade, or public display of feeling.”39 Impropriety involved a kind of exposure, one that placed private emotions and sentiments in plain public view. As critical theorist Michael Warner points out, this was scandalous because it forced people to confess in front of strangers.40 Through thunderous indictments of “you,” however, Finney addressed strangers intimately. He talked to strangers as if he knew their intimate thoughts and feelings, as if he understood their souls better than they did. This mode of address blurred familiar and habitual boundaries between public and private, unsettling the sense that things have their proper place. In his study of revivalism, Paul Johnson

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remarks that Finney’s revivals fed on humiliation: “Conversion had always ended in prayer and humiliation before God. But ministers had explained the terms of salvation and left terrified sinners to wrestle with it alone. Prayer was transacted in private between a man and his God, and most middle-class Protestants were uncomfortable with public displays of humiliation.  . . . More than their theological implications, Finney’s revival techniques aroused controversy because they transformed a conversion from a private to a public and intensely social event.”41 Finney embraced this social event as the best way to melt down sinners. Making individual behavior the object of public observation, new measures broke down norms of public and private propriety and replaced them with an unrelenting emphasis on addressing the individual as a potential convert within a population of saved and unsaved souls. As Finney saw it, privacy was a mark of shame, a refusal by Christians to acknowledge their religious convictions. Narrating his own conversion, for example, Finney discussed his early reluctance to display his Christian sentiments: When I prayed I would only whisper my prayer, after having stopped the key-hold to the door, lest some one should discover that I was engaged in prayer. Before that time I had my Bible lying on the table with the lawbooks; and it never had occurred to me to be ashamed of being found reading it, any more than I should be ashamed of being found reading any of my other books. But after I had addressed myself in earnest to the subject of my own salvation, I kept my Bible, as much as I could, out of sight. If I was reading it when anybody came in, I would throw my lawbooks upon it, to create the impression that I had not had it in my hand.42

While this sense of shame was an obstacle for conversion, it could be useful as well. Shame was an obstacle when it prevented public expression of convictions but could be useful because people kept their emotions private. Breaking down this sense of privacy granted access to a raw emotional state that allowed the skilled minister to indirectly influence the sinner. If sinners did not publicly repent, Finney could use their own sense of propriety against them. When one early revival was met with silence, for example, Finney lambasted his audience’s lack of Christian fervor: “After looking around upon them for a few moments, I said,

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‘Then you are committed. You have taken your stand. You have rejected Christ and his Gospel; and ye are witnesses one against the other, and God is witness against you all. This I make explicit, and you may remember as long as you live, that you have thus publicly committed yourselves against the Saviour.’”43 By forcing private sentiments into the public, Finney attempted to uncover and expose any refuge of comfort.

Endless Diversity Finney taught preachers to diagnose and address the particular problems of sinners. Thus, the revivalist had to study the habits of sinners before commencing the work of conversion: “To do this with effect requires great skill. It requires a thorough knowledge of the human heart, a clear understanding of the plan of salvation, and a precise and definite idea of the very thing that a sinner must do in order to be saved.”44 Even though Finney could prescribe what sinners must do to be saved, he rejected external force as a mechanism to achieve this goal. He sought to break down unchristian behavior in such a way that enlisted the sinner’s own will. Because he was attempting to convert the greatest number of souls within a population, Finney had to account for a variety of sinful behaviors. A revivalist appealing to free subjects contended with a diverse population. As Finney explained, “The characters of individuals afford an endless diversity. What is to be done with each one, and how he is to be converted, depends on his particular errors. It is necessary to ascertain his errors; to find out what he understands, and what he needs to be taught more perfectly; to see what points the Spirit of God is pressing upon his conscience, and to press the same things, and thus bring him to Christ.”45 Freedom meant that sin took diverse forms. Variety was a fact of life in free societies. By recognizing the tie between freedom and diversity, Finney was not celebrating American pluralism as an end in itself. Diversity posed a problem to be solved. The revivalist had to account for diverse patterns of sinful behavior in order to make the greatest number of converts. The genius of liberty was that, with the minister’s guidance, individuals could understand and hopefully correct their own errors. Even after the revival, a diversity of opinion would persist in public life. This was not necessarily a sign of failure. What mattered was the

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number of people who did convert. Therefore, Finney took great pride in the sheer quantity of the numbers converted by his revivals. Recalling the year 1831, Finney spoke in grandiose terms about the extent of the Christian fervor: “It has been estimated that in one year, since the revival commenced, one hundred thousand souls were converted to God in the United States. This is undoubtedly the greatest number that were ever converted in one year, since the world began.”46 By measuring the revival’s success by its quantifiable effects on a population, diversity was contained by the statistical triumph of Christianity. To this end, the science of revivals needed data to first understand the population that existed and then to document the work of social transformation. As Modern notes, the focus on data collection was a pervasive feature of evangelical organization in the nineteenth century: “The use of information—compiling data, processing information, charting aggregate patterns, and acting on those perceived patterns—secured the validity of that information not in essence but as semiotic leverage for advancing their cause at the level of the population.”47 Another way to put this is that democratization was spread through techniques designed to govern a diverse population. To be clear, govern was not the same as control because government depended upon free individuals who willingly adapted to social norms. As a technique of government, a democratic economy of religious freedom shaped the way in which Finney imagined politics. Much like the work of promoting a revival, political reform responded to social sin through the management of voluntary decisions. While politicians, like ministers, could not directly control individuals, they could take steps to influence them. Effective democracy depended on the proper governance of individual choices. The voluntary quality of these choices was necessary for productive politics. When Finney attacked corrupt institutions like the Freemasons, for example, he saved his most vigorous denunciations for the secretive nature of Masonic oaths for the same reasons that he attacked attempts to conceal sin from public view. Private concealment was antithetical to democracy. As he explained, “All governmental proceedings, all institutions of learning, all benevolent societies, and indeed everything else in the world may be discussed, and criticized, and held up for public examination; but Masonry, forsooth, must not be touched. It must work in the dark.”48

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Discussion, criticism, and examination are familiar ideals of public discourse in democratic societies. This is another reason why it makes sense to see Finney as representative of democratizing forces. But it is also important to our understanding of democracy to note that Finney emphasized public discussion not because he wanted to allow people to express themselves. He wanted to expose diverse views to public criticism because sin hid in private. It was necessary to bring social evils into public view for the same reason Finney addressed sinners in the second person. All forms of sin must be brought out into the open. For this reason, ministers had a public responsibility to criticize social evil in the same way that they melted down sinners. As Finney warned, “If Satan rules in our halls of legislation, the pulpit is responsible for it. If our politics become so corrupt that the very foundations of our government are ready to fall away, the pulpit is responsible for it. Let us not ignore this fact, my dear brethren; but let us lay it to heart, and be thoroughly awake to our responsibility in respect to the morals of this nation.”49 Because political reform was moral reform, ministers had a responsibility to be actively involved in democratic governance. According to Finney, American democracy needed virtuous people to perfect society: “And what shall we do, to live up the standard, to move this entire nation and turn all these great people to the Lord? We must d o right. We must all have a better spirit, we must get down in the dust, we must act unitedly, we must take hold of this great work with all our hearts, and then God will bless us, and the work will go on.”50 Finney’s call to move the entire nation confirms Sehat’s observation that evangelicalism sought more than conversions. Rather, evangelicals used their public influence to shape a Christian polity: “Many have claimed that evangelical religion was individualist and apolitical— concerned primarily with saving souls. But here was actually widespread agreement among evangelicals that God had given them a mandate for societal transformation.”51 Finney’s later involvement in social reform, particularly in the abolition of slavery, reflected his conviction that social transformation would follow the model of the individual transformation that took place in conversion. In Finney’s model of religious freedom, the church served as a moral conscience in the affairs of state. He did not understand religious activism in political affairs as coercive, however, for the same reason he did

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not understand his ministry as coercive. He could advocate for public Christian norms while insisting that he was not advocating for a Christian party in politics: The Church must take the right ground in regard to politics. Do not suppose that I am going to preach a political sermon, or that I wash to have you join in getting up a Christian party in politics.  . . . But the time has come that Christians must vote for honest men, and take consistent ground in politics. They must let the world see that the Church will uphold no man in office who is known to be a knave, or an adulterer, or a Sabbath-breaker, or a gambler, or a drunkard.  . . . Politics are a part of a religion in such a country as this, and Christians must do their duty to the country as a part of their duty to God.52

Finney imagined democratic reform as an accumulation of voluntary decisions, but this did not preclude attempts to perfect political institutions as part of a Christian’s duty to God. Practically speaking, this meant that while politicians, like ministers, could not control individuals, they could take steps to influence them: “What do politicians do? They get up meetings, circulate handbills and pamphlets, blaze away in the newspapers, send ships about the streets on wheels with flags and sailors, send conveyances all over the town, with handbills, to bring people up to the polls—all to gain attention to their cause, and elect their candidate. All these are their ‘measures’ and for their end they are wisely calculated. The object is to get up an excitement and bring the people out.”53 If politicians or ministers wanted to mobilize people to support a political or religious agenda, they had to understand how individuals made choices. Like the revivalist, the politician could hope to influence the people through techniques of transformation that employed emotion and excitement to shape the decisions of democratic subjects. As with Finney’s insistence that freedom played an essential role in revivalism, free will was necessary for political reform. He warned of the dangers posed by deterministic theories of human nature like phrenology: The error that lies at the foundation of this decay of individual and public conscience originates, no doubt, in the pulpit. The proper guardians of

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the public conscience, have, I fear, very much neglected to expound and insist upon obedience to the moral law. It is plain that some of our most popular preachers are phrenologists. Phrenology has no organ of free will. Hence, it has no moral agency, no moral law and moral obligation in any proper sense of these terms. A consistent phrenologist can have no proper ideas of moral obligation, of moral guilt, blameworthiness, and retribution.54

As with conversion, political action depended upon moral obligation. Citizens had to feel guilty, to be ashamed about their sinful actions and their lack of concern for the public welfare. Without the ability to challenge the political sin of the citizenry, political reform would be impossible. Democracy did not give citizens what they wanted. It made moral demands that made them uncomfortable. Revivalists like Finney did not cater to the previously existing desires of individual consumers. Rather, revivals helped to produce a social environment designed to convert individuals as members of a population. On one hand, social norms were tied to habits of respectability that inhibited Christian conversion. On the other hand, those same norms could be manipulated to exert social pressure on individual choices. All of this is consistent with democracy. It is important not to underestimate the role that democratic political and religious institutions played in the formation of a social environment that disciplined the sensibility of citizens. Anticipating the emphasis on sentiment in Louisa May Alcott and William Jennings Bryan, Finney’s liberalism produced freedom in social environments where people were bound by a shared sensibility. Democratic institutions do not simply expand individual freedom but seek to govern a population. To this end, revivals produced social norms that served as models of religious conversion and political citizenship. Finney’s new measures represented a new economy of religious freedom, a way of accounting for Christian conversion in the context of free movement, circulation, and multiplicity within a population. Finney was confident in his abilities to influence the choices of his audience not because he sought to exert coercive institutional control but because he understood how emotional and social pressures acted on the individual will to produce conversions. Revivals produced persons not through coercion but by freeing people from themselves.

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I’m Not Myself To-night. I Owe Money Louisa May Alcott and Salvation Is there a feeling which sometimes checks you in plucking and trampling flowers, in cutting trees, in destroying any beautiful things? Or is it humane to destroy? But what else is there that makes up the kingdom of God, beside this sentiment of humanity? —A. Bronson Alcott

At a pivotal moment in Louisa May Alcott’s 1873 novel Work, Christie Devon stares into a river and contemplates jumping in and taking her own life. After failing to achieve personal fulfillment and financial independence in the working world, she wondered, “Why should I work and suffer any longer for myself alone?”1 Before jumping, she has an ominous vision of herself floating in the water: “So plainly did she see it, so peaceful was the white face, so full of rest the folded hands, so strangely like, and yet unlike, herself, that she seemed to lose her identity, and wondered which was the real and which the imaginary Christie.”2 Christie’s reaction to her floating self is not fear, but puzzlement. Instead of dismissing the vision as fantasy, she entertains the thought that it might be the real her. Christie’s inability to distinguish the real from the imaginary imperiled her sense of identity. She stands divided between herself and her specter. As Christie draws closer to the river and is about to fall in, a hand catches her from behind and saves her life. After blacking out for a moment, she regains her bearings and finds herself sitting on a pile of lumber and thinking “she was herself again.”3 Christie then discovers that the hand that saved her belonged to her friend Rachel. Explaining why she almost took her own life, Christie confesses, “I have been ill; I worked too hard; I’m not myself to-night. I owe money.”4 Rachel agrees 27

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that the suicide attempt was committed by something or someone other than the real Christie: “it was not you that meant to do it, but the weakness and trouble that bewildered you.”5 Within the logic of the novel, the improbable coincidence of Rachel’s appearance at the exact moment of Christie’s near drowning is no accident but a providential reward for Christie’s past kindness. Not long before, Christie’s and Rachel’s roles had been reversed. When Rachel was fired from her job as a seamstress after her employer learned that she had previously worked as a prostitute, Christie had come to her defense. At the time, Rachel promised “some day I’ll come back and show you that I’ve not forgotten how you loved and helped and trusted me, when all the others cast me off.”6 Christie had earlier redeemed Rachel from despair with a “baptism of tender tears.” Such cleansing was necessary in a fallen world. As Alcott described the scene, “Then Christie, remembering that they were two loving women, alone in a world of sin and sorrow, took Rachel in her arms, kissed and cried over her with sisterly affection, and watched her prayerfully, as she went away to begin her hard task anew, with nothing but the touch of innocent lips upon her cheek, the baptism of tender tears upon her forehead to keep her from despair.”7 Sisterly affection, with its ethic of cooperation, saved human beings. At the river, Rachel repaid her debt to Christie in a way that alleviated Christie’s own debts. Their friendship was a refuge from the sinful system of wage labor under which they both struggled. Christie had come a long way from the confident woman at the beginning of the novel. When announcing her intentions to go out into the world and make her fortune, she had asserted, “You say I am discontented, proud and ambitious; that’s true, and I’m glad of it.”8 In some ways, writing Work was a personal act of independence for Alcott. Its themes of suicide, prostitution, abolition, and economic struggle signaled her intent to write a novel unlike the children’s fiction of Little Women and Flower Fables.9 In the character of Christie, Alcott addresses a problem for herself as well as for American liberalism. Christie has to learn to reconcile her desire for individual independence with social dependence. Similarly, she has to determine how to challenge the constraints of gender norms without surrendering solidarity with other women.10 In Work, Alcott tried to affirm the values of both dependence and independence, of collectivity and individuality, of private domes-

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ticity and public activism. To reconcile these divisions, Christie works to heal herself within an economy of salvation that rejects the system of wage labor that rewards individuals who seek independence by accumulating private property. In Work, people learn to be themselves by producing the right kinds of dependence. Christie labors to transform her social and natural environments so that dependence becomes fulfilling and sustainable.

I’ll Do Anything You Tell Me Over the course of Work, Christie’s quest for self-sufficiency leads her to the ironic conclusion that she is not herself. Her pursuit of autonomy created a fragmented and disconnected person at the mercy of economic forces beyond her control. For the remainder of the book after the night at the river, Christie no longer desires financial independence. When deciding where to stay for the evening, Christie tells Rachel, “I’ll do anything you tell me. I’m past thinking for myself tonight, and only want to be taken care of till I find the strength and courage to stand alone.”11 Through Rachel’s saving act, Christie learns to accept the help of others to be able to stand alone. By allowing people to care for her, she is saved. Like Rachel’s earlier baptism by tears, the immersion of Christie’s likeness and her subsequent salvation served as a baptismal cleansing that signaled her rebirth. When Christie had defended Rachel against an uncaring employer, they both lost their jobs. Nevertheless, Christie’s actions transformed Rachel’s life. Furthermore, Christie’s defiance not only helped save Rachel but initiated a series of salvations. After having seen Christie’s faith in her, Rachel told her story to others who “could believe in salvation, for I was saved; they did not feel so outcast and forlorn when I told them you had taken me into your innocent arms, and loved me like a sister.”12 Reciprocal salvations promised an alternative society in which sisterly love welcomed outcasts whose lives were otherwise judged to be moral and financial failures. Christie’s abandonment of financial independence can be read as a failure of nerve. According to literary critic Jean Fagan Yellin, it is possible to see Alcott’s decision to save Christie from suicide as a betrayal of Work’s potential for radical social criticism and a failure to preserve

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the integrity of the book: “On the basis of internal evidence, it is easy to hypothesize that Alcott, when a neophyte writer, had lost control of her materials and, finding her heroine swept inevitably toward the river, had shelved her book; that a decade later, after some hard bargaining on price, she resurrected her story of a woman’s failed efforts at self realization, pieced in a tale of her successful self-denial, and patched on a conclusion.”13 While Alcott took a relatively long time to write Work and the twists and turns in the story likely reflect later additions, it is worth considering what is at stake in the suggestion that the book was compromised when the main character abandoned the pursuit of financial success. Equating feminism and economic self-reliance assumes that individual autonomy is the goal of freedom.14 Drawn to the ideal of financial independence only to reject it in favor of sisterly affection, Christie could appear to be conceding that women could not make it in the rough-and-tumble world of capitalist competition. Examined in the light of Alcott’s beliefs about salvation, however, both Christie’s downward path to the river and her subsequent successes and hardships are less an abandonment of self-realization than an argument for a different understanding of the relationship between freedom and selfhood.15 It is true that Christie’s initial goals are thwarted and compromised, but Alcott’s characters routinely learn moral lessons by coming to terms with failed ambitions. These failures dramatize social inequity.16 Rather than free themselves from social forces, characters like Christie realize that their attempts to achieve freedom from social constraints are misplaced. Faced with harsh realities, they reframe their personal goals in terms of moral responsibility to change an unjust world. As Elizabeth Lennox Keyser explains in her study of Alcott’s fiction, “Were Alcott’s feminism represented solely or even primarily by her radical or reforming characters, each of whom is compromised, we would be justified in seeing it as tepid or confused.  . . . Instead, her characters’ susceptibility to influence—the ease with which they are swayed by or tempted to sway others—conveys their need for other sources of power. Alcott’s moderately progressive program, then, is a kind of smoke screen as well as a conductor of more incendiary ideas.”17 Failure is necessary because success stories that celebrate individual talent and perseverance also celebrate economic institutions that reward talent and perseverance. In other words, if you decide that Christie is a failure you also accept the

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verdict of the marketplace. By working hard and failing anyway, Christie discovers that the dream of financial independence was a false promise that led struggling laborers to blame themselves instead of the unjust economy that exploited them.

Nature’s Law By accepting dependence, Christie did not become powerless. Alcott’s thinking about dependence fit with ideas of spiritual power in nineteenth-century Unitarian and Transcendental theology. A similar tension between nonconformity and social responsibility pervaded the writing of Unitarians such as Theodore Parker, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Alcott’s own father, Bronson. Tracking the influence of Unitarian thinking on Louisa May Alcott can account for strains of liberalism tied to romantic visions that aligned bodies, nature, and spirit. In Alcott’s novels, spiritual freedom embraced aesthetic creativity while criticizing economic autonomy. While she believed that artists should be free to express themselves, the pursuit of unconstrained financial independence led to a dispiriting social order sapped of vital resources of sentiment and sympathy. As a child in Concord, Massachusetts, Alcott was in frequent conversation with Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Emerson was convinced that Bronson Alcott was a misunderstood genius and tried to help his family when they faced economic difficulties.18 Bronson shared many of Emerson’s ideas about the importance of spiritual communion with nature, and he passed these convictions along to his daughter.19 Emerson located a common divinity within human beings and nature. This is not to say that there were no gaps between heaven and earth, but it was possible to bridge these distances through immersion in the natural world. As he explained, “The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood. His intercourse with heaven and earth becomes part of his daily food.”20 Although Emerson prized nonconformity and self-reliance, his instruction to adjust inward and outward senses meant that individuality could not exist outside of nature and society. While many readers have focused on the interior and experiential qualities of Emerson’s inter-

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course with heaven and earth, the prophetic pragmatist Cornel West has drawn out the social economic implications of the “Emersonian theodicy.” In his comparison between Emerson and Karl Marx, West notes, “Similar to Marx, Emerson focuses on the pressing concerns unleashed by the American, French, and Industrial revolutions: the scope of human powers and the contingency of human societies. These concerns are addressed by highlighting the willful self (or selves) up against and overcoming antecedent circumstances, or to put it in the language of social science, the relation between purposeful subjects and prevailing structures, conscious human agents and social constraints.”21 For transcendentalists like Emerson or Alcott, there would be a significant difference between ignoring social constraints and becoming a purposeful self by overcoming social constraints. In West’s terms, Christie, in her quest to become a conscious human agent, had to wrestle with the prevailing structures of alienating labor in nineteenth-century America. Parker, Emerson’s contemporary and fellow Unitarian minister, also stressed the theological importance of dependence. He was particularly influential in Alcott’s life when she was a working woman like Christie. During this time, Alcott attended a sermon by Parker devoted to the subject of working women, which helped to raise her spirits.22 Parker is fictionalized in Work in the character of Mr. Power. In explaining kindness to Christie, Power claims, “That is what we were put into the world for, to help one another. You can pass on kindness by serving my good friends who, in return, will do their best for you.”23 Parker’s emphasis on the social life of salvation is evident when he criticizes the fantasy of a self-contained individual: “We are not sufficient for ourselves; not selforiginated; not self-sustained.  . . . We have but small control over things around us; are limited and hemmed in on all sides. Our schemes fail. Our plans miscarry. One after another, our lights go out. Our realities prove dreams. Our hopes waste away.”24 While independent living was bound to fail, this was not cause for despair. According to Parker, the core of religious sentiment was “a sense of dependence.”25 Cultivating dependence took effort. One way to foster this sensibility was by working with nature. Nature held more than scenic landscapes. Natural laws were divine revelations of the harmonious quality of everything: “Our confidence in the uniformity of Nature’s law is complete, in other words, in the fact that God is always the same; his modes of

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action always the same. This is true of the inorganic, the vegetable, the animal world. Each thing keeps its law with no attempt at violation of it. From this obedience comes the regularity and order apparent in Nature. Obeying the Law of God, his omnipotence is on its side. To oppose a law of Nature, therefore, is to oppose the Deity.”26 As a model for inorganic, vegetable, and animal worlds, Parker’s nature folded everything into a single whole following universal laws. These laws prescribed forms of order and regularity that could serve as models for social institutions. For Parker, forming a relationship with nature was a divine obligation. Nature could not simply be appreciated but had to be studied and worked with: “To study the laws of Nature, therefore, is to study the modes of God’s action. Science becomes sacred, and passes into a sort of devotion.”27 Unitarians like Parker turned nature into church. As Catherine L. Albanese notes, nature’s fluidity and apparent authenticity worked as a devotional substitute for Unitarians who rejected dry liturgical formalism.28 Nature was coursing with spiritual energies that promised a refuge from conventional forms of religious and social life. Throughout Work, moments of greatest helplessness anticipated epiphanies in which characters recognized their disconnection from nature and themselves. Striving to gain independence, then, contradicted the social purposes of work by seeking to free people from their social and natural environments. Through the “saving power of work” Christie learned to produce the nurturing environment that heals herself and others in return.29 Parker’s and Alcott’s shared concerns about redeeming divided selves led them to imagine labor in nature as a form of healing. As Albanese explains, natural beauty was the antidote to the aesthetic impoverishment of bad work: “Through its beauty, nature applied a restorative to the human perspective: it brought a just proportion back to a body or mind ‘cramped by noxious work or company.’”30

The Sanitary Virtues of Dirt In Alcott’s fiction, flowers exemplified the natural bridge between aesthetic and economic flourishing. In her first collection of children’s stories, Flower Fables, working with flowers helped children learn “that labor brings true happiness.”31 Horticulture was an idealized economy in which work shaped natural environments in productive ways.32

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According to the literary critic Susan Garland Mann, while the relationship between horticulture and domesticity in nineteenth-century America followed a patriarchal logic, women often claimed domestic spaces for their own purposes so that “autonomy and self-knowledge, and sometimes even artistry, can be achieved in those spaces women historically occupy—even if that space is as restricted or limited as home or yard.”33 Horticultural work produced life within natural limits. Looking for fulfillment through gardening can be read as a concession, a passive acceptance of restrictions while others are free, but it might also be read as a rebuttal to the unnatural character of the aspiration to limitless freedom.34 Part of the gendered logic of horticulture was that it was an appropriate outlet for women with free time. Anxieties about the productive use of women’s leisure arose in the context of changing conditions of domestic economy.35 In a sermon on “the public function” of women, Parker speculated that the material conditions of industrialism were altering gender roles so as to make women less constrained by domesticity. Women who could afford to employ domestic labor or purchase goods formerly made within the home now had time to engage in political and intellectual life. Parker painted a picture in which women, freed from domestic responsibilities, were becoming better educated, more civic minded, and harder working than dull, apathetic, lazy, and morally dissolute men. He had ambivalent feelings about these developments. Parker welcomed changes in the economic structure of the institution of marriage: “Practically speaking, to this class of women the domestic function is very little; to some of them, it is nothing at all.  . . . Womankind was advancing from that period when every woman was a slave, and marriage of some sort was guaranteed to every woman, because she was dependent on man; I say, woman is advancing from that, to a state of independence, where woman shall not be subordinated to man, but the two coordinated together.”36 But while he welcomed women’s greater public participation, he worried about the allure of independence. After all, spiritual fulfillment was gained through dependence. Independence was acceptable only as a stage on the way to a more fulfilling coordination between men and women.37 When the value of domesticity declined, women risked losing their affective, emotional, and sympathetic influence. As a consequence, men’s intellects and work ethic

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atrophied. This also degraded the quality of domestic labor by farming it out to “dangerous classes” of women, especially Irish women, who lacked feminine decorum and experienced little spiritual fulfillment from work. Domesticity was in danger when defined by class instead of gender. Alcott shared Parker’s suspicion of the Irish. When looking for a new home, for example, Christie “knew very well that she would never live with Irish mates.”38 Irish women were incapable of salvation through sisterly affection; they were themselves negative illustrations of the consequences of alienating work. Work moves in the direction of Parker’s prescriptions for a “coordinated” marriage, but the book ultimately rejects this complementary arrangement. The novel seems to follow Parker’s marital prescriptions when Christie begins a healing process under Power’s guidance. To recover her bodily and spiritual health after her nearly fatal collapse, Christie moved to the country. Power routinely sent women who were suffering in urban society to a home on the outskirts of town. It is there that she met her future husband, a florist. David Sterling was someone “who has learned the healing miracles of Nature and how near she is to God.”39 David was modeled on Thoreau, and shared his interests in nature and literature.40 Among literary masterpieces in David’s library like Shakespeare, Augustine, Milton, Montaigne, Browning, Keats, and Coleridge, Alcott places a flower: “In the middle of this fine society, slender and transparent as the spirit of a shape, stood a little vase holding one half-opened rose, fresh and fragrant as if just gathered.”41 Almost immediately after Christie’s arrival, it was clear that the plan was working. After a day in the Sterling home, Christie “felt as if she had left the troublous world behind her, and shutting out want, solitude, and despair, had come into some safe, secluded spot full of flowers and sunshine, kind hearts, and charitable deeds.”42 When Power asked Christie how she liked her new home, she described not only her personal salvation but also her apocalyptic experience of a world suffused with divinity: “I felt as if I had been born again; as if this was a new heaven and a new earth, and everything was as it should be.”43 A greenhouse domesticates nature. It is not wild, vast, and untamed. Christie worked to produce patterns of growth within an enclosed environment. Flowers, like people, were dependent on methodical, repetitious, and careful cultivation, and this required close study and

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observation. But horticultural education, the study of nature called for by Parker, was not like reading a text. David admitted that he “can grow the flowers, but not read them.”44 The therapeutic power of flowers lay not in passive observation, but in the activity it took to produce them. Although the greenhouse buffered her from alienating labor in industrializing America, Christie’s healing did not come through rest and relaxation. Work did not follow the equation of leisure and nature that often characterizes natural imagery in the environmental imagination.45 Laboring with flowers taught Christie the “sanitary virtues of dirt.”46 The work of producing harmony among people, nature, and society was consistent with Parker’s view that God’s mode of action did not differ whether it concerned the growth of a flower, an economic system, or the salvation of a human being. One way of reading Alcott’s turn to flowers as an antidote to economic struggle is to see her fiction as a retreat to a sentimental domestic sphere. While not specifically addressing Work, James Baldwin criticized sentimental novels like Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Alcott’s Little Women as falling into a trap he described as “theological terror.” The sentimental protest novel recognized that something was bad, but called for a new society in a way that evaded persistent inequalities. As Baldwin argued, “Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel; the wet eyes of the sentimentalist betray his aversion to experience, his fear of life, his arid heart; and it is always, therefore, the signal of secret and violent humanity, the mask of cruelty.”47 There is a great deal of force in Baldwin’s critique in that Alcott’s sentimental solution to wage labor depended upon a greenhouse in the country and a kindly minister whose personal connections helped Christie to leave the city. Work addressed urban inequality by leaving it for domestic bliss among beautiful flowers. Alcott would likely concede, however, that Christie’s redemption depended upon the fortuitous help of others. The greenhouse was an admittedly unrealistic response to the harsh realities of the marketplace. In this lack of realism, Alcott imagined an alternative economy unlike the marketplace found in nineteenth-century America.48 Readers such as Glenn Hendler, for example, have argued that Alcott’s sentimental novels envision a counterpublic.49 As he explains, “Where Work differs from earlier examples of the sentimental

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genre  . . . is in its effort to reimagine sentimental literature’s domestic utopia’s as institutions of the public sphere.”50 By modeling social life on the cultivation of flowers in a greenhouse, Alcott described a domestic economy that could contain the wild, vast, and untamed marketplace. This offered a different model of work, one not rewarded by wage labor. The counterrealistic space of the greenhouse was a place for a ritual performance that produced the spiritual life of flowers. It provided the idealized setting that historian of religion Jonathan Z. Smith suggests is indicative of ritual’s attempt to regulate a “controlled environment.” As Smith explains, “Ritual is a means of performing the way things ought to be in conscious tension to the way things are in such a way that this ritualized perfection is recollected in the ordinary, uncontrolled, course of things.”51 As a form of ritualized perfection, horticulture promised a kind of healing that was unavailable in the ordinary world.

Don’t Mourn, Dear Heart, but Work In the same way that the novel portrays an idealized social setting in the greenhouse, it highlights the counterrealistic quality of Christie’s marriage. At one point in the novel, Christie wonders whether her life is too good to be true. As she worries, “Something will happen: such perfect happiness is not possible in this world.”52 Christie’s sense of foreboding was justified. Just when it seemed as if Work would tell a happily-everafter story of domestic bliss, David died. In killing the florist, Alcott appeared to recognize that the search for independence took an unsatisfying turn when Christie found happy dependence in the domestic paradise of flowers and matrimony. With David’s death, Alcott rejects Parker’s hope that independent women would find personal satisfaction in a coordinated marriage. Christie would have to find fulfilling dependence somewhere else. In the postmarriage stage of her life, Christie does not fall into despair but is born yet again. Just before he dies, David prescribes work in place of mourning: “Don’t mourn, dear heart, but work; and by and by you will be comforted.”53 Recommending comfort through labor, David hopes that Christie will be able to work through her loss. Facing a new life alone, Christie found herself at a crossroads. One possible

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path would be to pursue self-sufficiency in a way resembling Thoreau’s quest in Walden. Like Christie, Thoreau left the city to work with nature in pursuit of an alternative economy of living. As he stated, “Even the poor student studies and is taught only political economy, while that economy of living which is synonymous with philosophy is not even sincerely professed in our colleges.”54 Unlike Thoreau, however, Christie does not move to nature for solitude. Rather than finally achieve her independence, in the final section of Work Christie comes to engage in new forms of political activism in which she fosters bonds of solidarity with other women. In this community, women engaged in public life without diminishing the value of experience within the domestic sphere. While seeking a political voice, the women in Work did not mimic existing forms of public discourse: “There were speeches of course, and of the most unparliamentary sort, for the meeting was composed almost entirely of women, each eager to tell her special grievance or theory.”55 A sentimental counterpublic based upon sisterly affection, this parliament hoped to use domesticity to heal the world. It is telling that Alcott contrasts women’s habits of voicing special grievances with the conventions of parliamentary speech making. Instead of abstract theorizing, Christie draws on personal experiences to express sympathy with the plight of the oppressed. The counterpublic of Work provided a refuge from the depersonalizing individualism of nineteenth-century political and financial economies. In cultivating a new self through sisterly affection and natural work, Christie’s foray into activism embodies what Lauren Berlant calls intimate publicity. As Berlant explains, “The political tradition of sentimentality ultimately equates the vernacular with the human: in its imaginary, crises of the heart and of the body’s dignity produce events that can topple great nations and other patriarchal institutions if an effective and redemptive linkage can be constructed between the privileged and the socially abject. The vehicle for this is intimate publicity.”56 The intimate publicity in Alcott’s novel worked differently from Finney’s attempt to force sinners’ intimate sentiments into public view. While Finney wanted to break sinners down, Alcott wanted to make them whole. The intimate public of Work was a space protected from anxiety, stress, pressure, and shame. An assertive intimate public extended domesticity to encompass political life. In a way, this hearkened back to classical conceptions of economy

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as household administration. As Parker noted, “Government is political economy—national housekeeping.”57 In this case, political economy was produced with materials drawn from nineteenth-century domesticity. Christie encouraged women to tell stories of suffering to create sympathy among the privileged for the socially abject. The exemplary case of suffering was slavery. Both David and Christie had earlier volunteered for the northern cause in the Civil War, and this led to David’s untimely death.58 Hoping to extend friendship across racial lines, Christie wanted sisterly affection to repay “the great debt which the white race owes the black.”59 Unlike the financial failure in the early part of the book, the political activist Christie now occupied the position of a woman of relative privilege. Christie’s need to repay debts might also address a problem for Alcott, who by the time she completed Work had ironically succeeded in the way Christie set out to succeed. A wild success in the literary marketplace, Little Women had turned its author into an independent, unmarried, financially successful woman.60 Furthermore, her financial fortunes were the result of her ability to tell stories of sisterly affection. Identifying with the struggling Christie, however, reminded people that this success had not come easily. Answering a letter inquiring how to achieve literary success, Alcott noted, “I worked for twenty years poorly paid, little known, & quite without any ambition but to eke out a living, as I chose to support myself & began to do it at sixteen.”61 By identifying with Christie, a successful woman like Alcott could cite her humbler origins in order to sympathize with the socially abject. When listening to stories of the suffering of others became a prerequisite for political activism, the capacity for sympathy could become its own moral badge. In one of Parker’s sermons, he congratulated New Englanders on their proficiency in sympathy: “Our hearts bleed for the starving thousands of Ireland, whom we only read of; for the downtrodden Slave, though of another race and dyed by Heaven with another hue; yes, for the Savage and the suffering everywhere. The hand of our charity goes though every land. If there is one quality for which the men of New England may be proud of it is this—their sympathy with suffering Man.”62 The demand that the privileged suffer reinforced social privileges at the same time it tried to overcome them. It was one thing for one’s heart to bleed for the starving Irish, for example, it was another matter to encounter them as Boston’s urban working class. When ap-

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plying for her first position, Christie’s future employer asked whether she would be willing to work with her African American cook. When she replied that she had no objection to color, her employer explained that the reason for her question was that “the black cook had been an insurmountable obstacle to all the Irish ladies who had applied.”63 Lacking sympathy for others, the Irish working class was excluded from the sentimental counterpublic. The working Irish posed the social reality that persistently vexes liberalism. Alcott did not know how to include those who did not share the value of inclusion. At the same time it was used to overcome social divisions, sympathy fixed the limits of a sentimental counterpublic.

The New Earth In the end, Alcott could never really come to terms with the city and its unsympathetic working class. But sympathy was not part of the existing industrial order. Christie’s public was a vision of a new earth that would erase troubling social tensions. As an inversion of the order of things, intimate publicity took on an apocalyptic quality in Work. The apocalypse promised was not the cataclysmic end of the world, but a social vision that fulfilled the technical sense of apocalyptic as an unveiling, a direct revelation of truth to be experienced in a way that would seem impossible within the ordinary mediating structures of place and time. Work’s millennialism takes aim at conventional divisions between public and private as well as between heaven and earth. This domestic utopia departs from Parker’s vision of a complementary relationship between the sexes. Christie is finally saved by the millennial promise of a world with no men. A few months after David’s death, Christie finds new life to cultivate as she gives birth to their daughter Ruth. As a mother, Christie hopes to teach Ruth “to labor heartily and see no degradation in it.”64 In addition to imparting the value of domestic labor, Christie wants her child to embrace her newfound public activism. The final scene heralds a utopian public in which women affirm sympathetic communion that Hendler describes as “a kind of sentimental vanguard of a millenialist [sic] feminism.”65 In this new earth, Christie calls on everyone present to join “a loving league of sisters, old and young, black and white, rich and poor, each ready to do her part to hasten the coming of the happy end.”66

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The final attempt to heal the many divisions Christie faced in the working world is affirmed when her daughter voices a desire to join the league of sisters: “‘Me too!’ cried little Ruth, and spread her chubby hand above the rest: a hopeful omen, seeming to promise that the coming generation of women will not only receive but deserve their liberty, by learning that the greatest of God’s gifts to us is the privilege of sharing His great work.”67 By concluding with the millennial promise of a divine economy of sharing, Work contrasts freedom with independence. The characters in the novel become themselves when they produce nurturing environments that produce the fruits of salvation. In working with flowers and people, Christie’s debts are forgiven. Beginning with a quest to find independence, Christie finds failures that lead her to religious freedom in satisfying relationships that produce a new person. Rather than independent, she becomes dependent on herself: “Then, when no help seemed possible, she found it where she least expected it, in herself. Searching for religion, she had found love: now seeking to follow love she found religion.”68

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Sentiment Rules the World William Jennings Bryan and Populism We need more Elijahs in the pulpit to-day—more men who will dare to upbraid an Ahab and defy Jezebel. It is possible, aye, probable, that even now, as of old, persecutions would follow such boldness of speech, but he who consecrates himself to religion must smite evil wherever he finds it, although in smiting it he may risk his salary and his social position. It is easy enough to denounce the petty thief and the backalley gambler; it is easy enough to condemn the friendless rogue and the penniless wrong-doer, but what about the rich tax-dodger, the big lawbreaker, and the corrupter of government? The soul that is warmed by divine fire will be satisfied with nothing less than the complete performance of duty; it must cry aloud and spare not, to the end that the creed of Christ may be exemplified in the life of the nation. —William Jennings Bryan

William Jennings Bryan can appear to be two distinct people in history. In his first incarnation as a three-time presidential candidate in 1896, 1900, and 1908, he was a famed orator from Nebraska who fought for the agrarian and laboring masses against the elites of industry and finance. The second Bryan is cast, incongruously, as a quintessential reactionary. This Bryan of the 1920s was the tireless foe of evolution and the defender of biblical authority against modernism. This apparent dichotomy has posed a problem for those trying to place Bryan in historical context. Was he a modernist or antimodernist, progressive or reactionary, liberal or conservative? The historian Edward J. Larson describes this disparity between the two Bryans: “Political historians covering a broad sweep of modern American history faced a dilemma: Bryan stood at the center 42

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of two supposedly watershed events in American history—the populist revolt of the 1890s and the Scopes trial of the 1920s—but he had shifted sides. The same historians who deified the young Bryan of the nineties demonized the elderly Bryan of the twenties.”1 With the quasi-fictional portrayal of Bryan as Matthew Harrison Brady, the 1950s play Inherit the Wind accounted for this supposed switch by portraying Bryan as a man whose former glory was dissipated by religious fanaticism. As Henry Drummond (based on Clarence Darrow) states, “A giant once lived in that body. But Matt Brady got lost. Because he was looking for God too high up and too far away.”2 The play teaches that Bryan was a political giant who crusaded on behalf of economic justice for farmers before his later focus on religion distracted him from politics. This presumes a distinction, however, between political and religious issues that Bryan would have seen as antiprogressive. As Bryan biographer Lawrence Levine explained, For those who prefer to keep their reformism pure it is pleasant to dismiss the Bryan of the Twenties as an apostate, as an ex-progressive, but we can do this only at the price of neglecting the complex and ambiguous nature of the American reform tradition. It was based upon a set of values and aspirations which included economic and political reform but also included the maintenance of a way of life based upon a familiar and traditional model. The two did not merely live side by side, they were inextricably bound together.3

Levine’s caution against separating the two Bryans was addressed to political analysts who limited populism to economic protest. In his classic work The Age of Reform, Richard Hofstadter divided populist rhetoric into “hard” and “soft” sides. Bryan’s emotional rhetoric epitomized the soft side of populism. While his spellbinding oratory stirred up fervor among the people, it contained little substantive economic analysis. According to Hofstadter, populism’s hard side would later take over when legislators shifted focus from rhetorical excess to practical action. The hard side, based “upon the commercial realities of agriculture,” pursued its policies through legislation in the progressive era through an alliance with reformers from the urban middle class.4

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The distinction between hard and soft populisms typifies political commentary that laments the irrationality of an American electorate that fails to recognize its own interests.5 Many blame emotions, sentiments, and passions for distracting citizens who might otherwise know what is good for them. Instead of voting in their own interests, citizens have been taken in by visceral appeals that excite regional, racial, ethnic, and religious forms of identification. Theories about hard populism depend upon peculiarly depersonalized persons. They often accept capitalist assumptions that people are driven by concerns for material well-being, and these concerns compel participation in an abstract marketplace whose workings are measured by statistical aggregates of financial activity. These statistics are understood to be real, thereby making unreal human desires that cannot be easily measured. In particular, measures of rational behavior exclude sentimental attachments among people. Bryan’s populism was grounded in sympathy among farmers and workers. Without sentimental bonds shaped by a pervasively Christian environment, social deterioration and degeneration were inevitable. As he stated, “Christ has been called a sentimentalist. Let it be admitted; it is no reproach. He is the inexhaustible source of sentiment, and sentiment rules the world.”6 Calling for Christian sentiment to guide the production and distribution of material life, Bryan deliberately confused conventionally religious and political languages. In the closing lines of his 1896 “Cross of Gold” speech, he described how capital (in this case, those people who supported the gold standard) crucified mankind: “Having behind us the producing masses of this nation and the world, supported by the commercial interests, the laboring interests, and the toilers everywhere, we will answer their demand for a gold standard by saying to them: You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns; you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.”7 Bryan did not just use a Christian language to answer financial questions. His critique of the gold standard suggested that monetary analysis alone could not define what was valuable. The distinction between hard and soft populisms hides the historical contingency of the production of state, religion, economy, and science as autonomous spheres of social life. By seeking protection not only from the encroachments of religion but also from politics, free markets gener-

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ate their own sources of authority and measures of analysis. According to free market ideals, the state should not meddle with the economy’s natural operation. Designating some issues, concerns, and modes of analysis as properly economic creates an economy as a discreet, autonomous thing. This can be found in contemporary discussions about something called “the economy,” which then makes possible statements like “the economy grew 3.4 percent last year.” Summarizing the entirety of a nation’s production, distribution, and consumption of material goods in a single number requires considerable discursive work. Whatever the pragmatic merits of such numbers, it is not self-evident to imagine economic institutions in this way. In his study of “economentality,” Timothy Mitchell argues that contemporary usages of “the economy” did not come into existence until the mid-twentieth century. As he explains, In everyday usage, the term [economy] referred to an act of economizing, of making prudent use of limited resources. The US Economy Act of 1933, for example, was not a law to regulate the economy. It was an act of economy, of economizing, intended to reduce the federal deficit by reducing the pay of government workers. In a wider sense, the word economy had often meant government itself. As in the phrase political economy, it referred to forms of administration and knowhow concerned with the efficient management of human lives and material resources.8

The rhetoric of economic freedom deflects questions about what constitutes an economy in the first place as well as what kinds of “goods” are classified as valuable. As sociologists Roger Friedland and Robert Alford point out, “A market  . . . is not simply an allocative mechanism but also an institutionally specific cultural system for generating and measuring value.”9 The distinction between hard and soft populisms reveals that even progressive critics who lauded Bryan’s populist program still did not see capitalism as a cultural system that generates value. Rather, the distinction between rational economic discourse and sentimental rhetoric naturalized the desire for personal property and denaturalized sympathetic attachments among human beings. Whatever the merits of Bryan’s economic arguments, his career illustrates an alternative economy in which quantitative abstractions were given less weight than sympathy among laboring bodies. Bryan’s populism criticized

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the capitalist ideal of an individual desiring body freed from collective commitments in order to pursue rational self-interest. This complicates assumptions that Protestant biases in secular models of religious and economic freedom necessarily valued individual freedom. Bryan’s Protestant convictions led him to reject excessive individualism. Wary of selfishness, Bryan believed human bodies should be cultivated and produced within Christian environments that strengthened collective bonds of religion, nation, and race. To be clear, I am not myself arguing for the merits of Bryan’s sympathetic economy. I seek only to show that Bryan’s vision was persuasive because it animated collective attachments. Bryan’s antievolution crusade, his support for Prohibition, or his racism cannot be neatly separated from his progressive economic reform because they fit within a sympathetic body politic.

The People’s Standard Bearer Efforts to explain populism have often puzzled over the strength of collective sentiments. Writing during and after the apex of the populist movement, Frederick Jackson Turner thought the disappearance of the frontier explained populist collectivism.10 According to Turner, Americans had expressed discontent with their feet. If they were unhappy, they could move and begin a new life. But the disappearance of free land forced them to think about limits. The pioneer spirit gave way to the need to conserve and make existing arrangements more equitable. As Turner explained, “The economic resources are no longer limitless and free;  . . . Mr. Bryan’s Democracy, Mr. Debs’ Socialism, and Mr. Roosevelt’s Republicanism all had in common the emphasis upon the need of governmental regulation of industrial tendencies in the interest of the common man.”11 An economy of limits challenged the ethos fostered by limitless growth with inexhaustible resources, creating new doubts about individual freedom: “The Western radical became convinced that he must sacrifice his ideal of individualism and free competition in order to maintain his ideal of democracy.”12 Turner believed that the freewheeling frontier would give way to an activist state that could distribute resources in a more just and efficient manner. Populism, with its demands for increased state action, contradicted the image of the rugged individualist on the frontier. The allure of free

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land, while promising independence, had actually created a debtor class whose fate was tied to currency fluctuation and global commodity markets. The deflationary trends of the 1890s, believed by populists to have been caused by the federal government’s strict adherence to the gold standard, caused the debts of farmers to increase in value while reducing the prices of their crops. Until the 1890s most Democrats and Republicans had supported the gold standard, and this steered some rural support toward third parties such as the Greenback Party and the People’s Party that advocated new monetary policies ranging from fiat currency (government-issued greenbacks with no intrinsic value) to bimetallism (silver and gold coined at a ratio of sixteen to one). In the early 1890s, bimetallism made inroads into Republican and Democratic parties, often following sectional rather than party lines. Democratic president Grover Cleveland remained a staunch goldbug in the face of a severe economic depression. Because of his unwavering commitment to gold, Cleveland faced a challenge in his own party that led to Bryan’s nomination for the presidency in 1896. Bryan’s advocacy of vigorous federal regulation was unprecedented for a politician of his stature.13 His nomination by a major party captured the imagination of voters who might have otherwise been drawn to more radical third parties. The People’s Party, whose 1892 presidential candidate James Weaver had received over 8 percent of the popular vote, nominated Bryan on a fusion ticket. Another example of Bryan’s ability to bring potential radicals into the Democratic fold was his support from Eugene V. Debs, who would later become the most successful socialist candidate for president in American history. As Debs wrote in a letter to Bryan, “With millions of others of your countrymen I congratulate you most heartily upon being the People’s standard bearer in the great uprising of the masses against the classes. You are at this hour the hope of the Republic—the central figure of the civilized world.  . . . The people love and trust you—they believe in you as you believe in them, and under your administration the rule of the money power will be broken and the gold barons of Europe will no longer run the American government.”14 Bryan shared this sense of his unique destiny. In a letter to his wife written before giving a major congressional speech in support of silver, Bryan wrote of the providential significance of his political work: “I never felt more deeply the gravity of a question. I believe

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our prosperity depends upon its right solution and I pray that I may be the instrument in the hands of Providence.”15 Debs’s language of the “masses against the classes” had a close affinity with Bryan’s conviction that the economic well-being of laboring producers was undermined by financiers who skimmed money from the labor of others. But Bryan was no socialist. He defended private property and, at least in rhetoric, never departed from the Jeffersonian principle that the government that governed least governed best. Bryan’s understanding of this principle, however, did not always lead to support for small government. He advocated for more government intervention as a means to curb the power of banks, railroads, and other monopolies that transformed independent citizens into dependent debtors. If democratic institutions embodied the will of the people, then using state power to promote the public interest at the expense of some private interests posed no threat to popular independence. Some have argued that Bryan was not a central figure in the populist movement, however. Lawrence Goodwyn asserted that the hard side of populism was present in the movement’s origins but was distorted by Bryan’s co-opting the populist cause.16 According to Goodwyn, members of the Farmer’s Alliance rejected the silver standard without the adoption of fiat currency. They believed that the silver issue was a red herring in that the silver standard, while possibly augmenting the deflationary effects of the gold standard, still assumed that money had intrinsic value. Thus, the money supply could not be expanded or contracted in order to meet the needs of farmers. According to Goodwyn, progressive economic analysis intersected with cultural factors that both strengthened and weakened the populist movement. Populist strength was found in a “counter-hegemonic” culture in which a network of lecturers educated farmers about the causes of their material distress and available courses of political action. The work of producing a counterhegemonic discourse, however, was weakened by sectional, racial, ethnic, and religious loyalties that impeded populists’ ability to form a unified movement. For Goodwyn, the refusal of rural laborers in the South and West to see past their prejudices led to bad monetary analysis as well as their failure to develop solidarity with their true brethren: the members of the working class. Thus, Goodwyn saw the People’s Party endorsement of Bryan in 1896 as the death knell of the movement: “The

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democratic agenda embedded in the Omaha Platform had shrunk to the candidacy of a Democrat named Bryan. The cause of free silver was intact. The agrarian revolt was over.”17 Like Goodwyn, Charles Postel thinks Bryan contributed to the downfall of populism. Postel views Bryan’s language of a Christian nation as at odds with agrarian reformers’ rational vision of economic and scientific progress. According to Postel, historians have overstated the connection between populism and conservative Protestantism.18 To make his case, he restricts his analysis of populism to the supporters of the People’s Party. Both Goodwyn and Postel isolate a vanguard of pure populism committed to a rational vision of secular, progressive modernity. Populism was co-opted by the regional, racial, and religious prejudices of Bryanism.19 The critique of soft populism leaves unexplained populism’s broad appeal. Bryan was, after all, the most visible proponent of the populist cause. Populism in practice cultivated sympathetic habits that would encourage participation in collective life. To be clear, my point here is not to argue for Bryan’s brand of populism over and against the rationality of hard populism. Instead I consider aspects of populist rhetoric and practice that remain unexplained in the hard and soft populism dichotomy. In the next four sections of this chapter I analyze attributes of Bryan’s populism that have contributed to his image as a reactionary and trace the connections among his emphasis on a social environment tied to a Christian nation, his support for Prohibition, his crusade against evolution, and his racism. What ties these issues together is how Bryan’s idealization of a white laboring body cultivated in a Christian environment informed his critique of the selfish animal celebrated by the capitalist marketplace.

Nursery of the State as Well as of the Church Bryan loved love: “Love makes money-grabbing seem contemptible; love makes class prejudice impossible; love makes selfish ambition a thing to be despised; love converts enemies into friends.”20 A loving self strove to overcome selfishness in favor of a humble recognition of relationships with others. In telling the story of his life, Bryan tried to erase the differences between himself and his neighbors: “I trust that with the two purposes in view I may be able so to shift the accent from ‘I’ to ‘they’ as

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to purge my Memoirs of every trace of egotism or self-assertion. I shall relate my own connection with individuals, measures, and events, but I shall endeavor so to interweave the actions of others with my own acts as to make the results appear as the result of a joint effort in which I have played but a part, and often but an inconsequential part.”21 Privileging the collective self over the individual self, Bryan had little patience for the narratives of hard work and diligent self-advancement that enshrined capitalist opportunity: “I sometimes meet a man who calls himself ‘self-made,’ and I always want to cross-examine him. I would ask him when he began to make himself, and how he laid the foundations of his greatness. As a matter of fact, we inherit more than we ourselves can add.”22 Without nurturing political and religious institutions, selfishness would leave in their place a heartless, empty, mechanistic marketplace. Like Alcott, Bryan envisioned economic and religious freedom produced by an environment that shaped individual virtue. A starting point for individual cultivation was the nurturing Christian home idealized by nineteenth-century theological liberals like Horace Bushnell. One of the most influential thinkers of the nineteenth century, Bushnell helped to popularize romantic ideas about feeling and sentiment. In his 1847 book Christian Nurture, he argued that Christian parents should mold the sensibilities of children from birth so that they would never remember a time when they did not know Christ. According to Bushnell, child rearing should foster organic connections between individuals and their social environments: “All society is organic—the church, the state, the school, the family; and there is a spirit in each of these organisms, peculiar to itself and more or less hostile, more or less favorable to religious character, and to some extent, at least, sovereign over the individual man.  . . . A pure, separate, individual man, living wholly within and from himself, is a mere fiction.”23 Bushnell’s model of conversion did not involve a singular moment in which a sinner suddenly cast off bad habits for an entirely new self. Bryan’s description of his own conversion experience matches Bushnell on this point: “At the age of fourteen I reached one of the turning points of my life. I attended a revival that was being conducted in a Presbyterian church and was converted. Having been brought up in a Christian home, conversion did not mean a change in my habits of life or habits of thought. I do not know of a virtue that came into my life as a result

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of my joining the Church, because all the virtues had been taught me by my parents.”24 Because a pervasively Christian environment cultivated moral sensibility and because morality ensured the health of the state, religion was not a purely private matter that could be separated from social progress. Christian nurture was a public practice that inculcated habits of citizenship: “The Christian home is the nursery of the State as well as of the Church. Loyalty to God and loyalty to government are easily learned by those who from infancy are taught obedience to those who have the right to instruct and direct.”25 Loyalty to God and government required more than intellectual agreement among citizens. One point of continuity between liberal arguments for Christian nurture and Calvinist conceptions of human depravity was that individual sinners, if left to their own devices, were powerless to lead virtuous lives and, therefore, needed the saving power of the Holy Spirit. Bushnell’s theological liberalism was markedly different from enlightenment thought that grounded liberal ideals in an autonomous reasoning individual.26 The spiritual quality of social and individual regeneration meant that the authenticity of Christian conversion lay in the experience of a transformed heart. This emphasis on sentiment was a common theme in both liberal and Calvinist currents in American theology. According to Jonathan Edwards, the Gospel message was incomprehensible to anyone lacking what he called the “spiritual sense.”27 For both an eighteenth-century Calvinist like Edwards and a nineteenth-century liberal like Bushnell, spiritual regeneration transformed perception so as to endow human beings with a Christian sensibility. The difference between Edwards and Bushnell lay in the extent to which they believed it was possible to manipulate human sensibility in order to inculcate Christian habits and virtues. Bushnell’s liberalism had confidence in social institutions like the family to discipline a Christian body so as to be organically tied to a homogenous Christian environment. Bryan’s rhetoric of the Christian home as the “nursery of the State” demonstrated that the body politic was tied together by a shared sensibility that required the careful cultivation and discipline of individual bodies in order to bring them into collective harmony. Bryan’s liberal sympathy contrasted sharply with the emphasis on natural competition extolled by proponents of free markets. For the Gilded Age capitalist, tradition had to give way to innovation, and constant

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change and growth meant that concerns about the possible suffering and pain of workers could be dismissed as a well-meaning naïveté that failed to understand the mechanics of markets. As the industrialist Andrew Carnegie argued, economic suffering had to be understood in the context of the larger picture of the law of development: “But, whether the law be benign or not, we must say of it, as we say of the change in the conditions of men to which we have referred: It is here; we cannot evade it; no substitutes have been found; and while the law may be sometimes hard for the individual, it is best for the race, because it insures the survival of the fittest in every department.”28 Carnegie’s assertion about what was “best for the race” depended upon a universal theory of human nature. Gilded Age capitalists did not argue that free markets worked best only under the conditions of modern industrialism; modern markets best matched the natural instincts of the human species. People at all times in all places were selfish animals who desired property. Capitalism, according to this implicit anthropology, liberated the natural acquisitive instincts of human beings. Furthermore, this nature could not be changed. Any reform based on transforming the economic habits of human beings was doomed to inevitable failure. Bryan challenged biological definitions of humanity. As he explained in a critique of evolution that also reflected his sentiments about economy, “The difference between the Christian theory and the materialistic theory is that the Christian begins with God, while the materialist begins with dull, inanimate matter.”29 From Bryan’s perspective, Carnegie’s assertion of the naturalness of market competition removed both church and state. Bryan’s vision of a sympathetic economy can be interpreted as a response to sociological processes of secularization that fostered increasing institutional differentiation between social spheres. Rather than differentiate economic activity from other aspects of social life, Bryan wanted to more thoroughly integrate labor into human relationships. Labor cultivated a virtuous and productive body in a way that mirrored the civic role played by the institutions of church and state. Citing his friend Leo Tolstoy, Bryan looked to labor to create social solidarity: The great need of society is sympathy—Tolstoy placed so high an estimate upon this virtue that he advocated what is known as “bread labor”

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as a means of establishing a bond of sympathy with all mankind. He said that it is not sufficient that men may have labored in their earlier days; that labor must be continuous in order that people may understand each other.  . . . Public sentiment will not be what it should be until the badge of disgrace is put upon the idle rather than upon those who toil, whether with hand or heart.30

Those whose physical labor produced wealth were robbed by corporations that manipulated markets in order to stockpile property. As historian Robert McMath, Jr., explains, the sense that producers were robbed “was based on the simple idea that the producer deserves the fruits of his or her work. Put another way, labor creates value. Or expressed biblically (and believers in producerism often expressed it biblically), ‘the laborer is worthy of his hire.’”31 Producers were distinct from nonproducers like bankers, stockbrokers, or other financiers who relied on the labor of others to make property useful. If labor cultivated sympathy, the physical work of producing the material conditions of life shaped the spiritual health of the nation. Sympathetic bonds, by blurring the boundaries between bodies, produced a body politic. Predatory capitalism, however, stripped economic and political institutions of human sentiment. Treating workers as cogs in a machine or fleecing farmers for profit sapped social energy that fostered the bonds of love between people that made progress possible. Industrialists who privileged quantifiable abstractions and formulas over the sentimental attachments shared by laboring bodies performed a suspicious alchemy that despiritualized human experience. This is not to say that Bryan’s discomfort with divisions among religion, politics, and the economy was caused by the disappearance of a nineteenth-century America in which economic exchanges were suffused with charitable concerns for human well-being. While he did romanticize the cooperative spirit of the American people, Bryan saw hope for a sentimental economy in the future, as the product of modern progress. He contrasted his own progressivism with the forces of predatory capital that would abandon social reform in favor of selfish competition. In place of Bryan’s optimism for a Christian society with equitable solutions to social and economic problems, the robber barons offered a predatory market in which helplessly selfish human beings would be trapped in endless exploitation.

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Prohibition Bryan’s support of Prohibition has frustrated many historians who would otherwise place the Great Commoner in the pantheon of the American left. His crusade against alcohol appears to be a reactionary slippage caused by a failure to discern between economic and religious regulation. According to Hofstadter, “Prohibition was a pseudo-reform, a pinched, parochial substitute for reform which had a widespread appeal to a certain type of crusading mind. It was linked not merely to an aversion to drunkenness and the evils that accompanied it, but to the immigrant drinking masses, to the pleasures and amenities of city life, and to the well-to-do classes and cultivated men. It was carried about America by the rural-evangelical virus.”32 In this view, Prohibition exemplified the raw exercise of state power motivated by rural resentment of people in the cities who might have been enjoying themselves. Furthermore, because people in the country liked to drink as much as those in the cities, it was merely a symbol of rural Protestant hegemony. As part of his ongoing diatribe against the audacity of “yokels” to ruin civilized urban life, the journalist H. L. Mencken thundered, “The South, of course, was never wetter than it is today, but whoever believes that the great geysers of bad booze now spouting down there indicate that the low-caste Confederates have lost their enthusiasm for Prohibition is surely an unpracticed student of the Methodist-Baptist, or Ku Klux mind.”33 The Eighteenth Amendment was a curious addition to the Constitution. Unlike guarantees of free speech or restrictions against search and seizure and cruel and unusual punishment, it did not define limits for state encroachment upon the private body but instead proscribed a particular mode of private behavior. By incorporating sobriety into the Constitution, Prohibition dictated a normative public decorum to which private bodies were compelled to conform. From the perspective of a Prohibitionist like Bryan, bodily regulation was a public good. Bryan remained true to liberal Protestant visions of a Christian home. Hoping to maintain a virtuous sensory environment, Prohibitionists saw their movement as part of a progressive vanguard to perfect democratic institutions. Bryan was by all accounts a consistent teetotaler for his entire life. Before Prohibition became law, he instituted a policy of dry social oc-

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casions at the State Department when he was secretary of state. There was little question in his mind that alcohol undermined the public good. Consequently, asserting that drinking was a private choice that should be protected from state interference placed private interests above the public welfare. Bryan thought that the kind of moral decadence fostered by intoxication was so damaging to the public interest that defending the right to drink was analogous to protecting the right to steal or murder: Personal liberty is often curbed for a greater good. Laws are made to protect society against burglary, which run counter to a man’s right to enjoy a burglar’s kit and a dark lantern; laws against arson deprive the citizen of the right to strike a match and burn his neighbor’s house. A drunken chauffeur has a right to drive a car, but when he kills people on the highway, he becomes a public menace and must be arrested, and his personal liberty is bounded by the local jail. How willingly should the people give up the right to drink when they can, by that act, reclaim thousands of men and bring comfort to countless miserable homes. I am sure the nation will do this when it understands. It is sound at heart.34

An institution like the saloon, which compelled people to lose their jobs, destroy their homes, commit crimes, and disturb the public peace, could not be defended on the grounds of individual freedom. No drinker was free. The saloon and liquor interests manipulated private pleasures for publicly destructive ends. Intoxication held people in bondage akin to slavery.35 In the same way that laissez-faire capitalism created dependence in the guise of protecting personal freedom and private property, the liquor trade trapped its consumers in a predatory system from which they could not escape. Under the influence of alcohol, people neglected the spiritual health and welfare of themselves or the people they loved. An intoxicated body was a profanation of God’s image. Rather than cultivating sympathy and civic virtue through productive labor, intoxication reduced human beings to desiring animals who sought immediate sensual pleasure through nonproductive consumption. The saloon was the antithesis of the nurturing environment idealized by Bryan. The saloon took time and devotion away from the home.36 Destroying the home environment for the purpose of respecting individual freedom went to the heart of the false individualism symptomatic of predatory

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capitalism. Because individuals were products of their environments, the saloon would produce citizens incapable of reform.

In His Image Prohibition and evolution occupied Bryan’s attention in the 1920s because he believed they destroyed persons. Throughout the evolution controversy, Bryan replied to scientists who explained that biology dealt with an impersonal, mechanistic nature that could not be expected to conform to the dictates of human regulation and discipline. This reasoning, however, resembled why Gilded Age capitalists dismissed progressive economic reform. Darwinism undermined popular activism by teaching that progress was inevitable and would be achieved by purely natural means: “Evolutionists try to trace evolution in everything, whether physical, mental, or moral, but there is no proof that man advances toward perfection by any fixed law of nature. There is no natural law that insures an improved physical development.”37 Bryan’s concerns about evolution lay in more than his desire to protect the literal language of Genesis. Certainly, Bryan was concerned that Darwinian theory would reduce the Bible to a mere “scrap of paper.” But Darwinism was also the ideology of an elite, condescending group of scientists who dismissed the religion of the masses; it substituted a law of hate for the law of love by rewarding those individuals who dominated other members of society; it argued that the authority of scientific inquiry was independent of the popular will; and most important, it undermined the noble ancestry of human beings who, instead of being made in God’s image, were now little more than brutes. According to Bryan, “Darwin devotes nearly all his time to man’s body and to the points at which the human frame approaches in structure—though vastly different from—the brute; the Bible emphasizes man’s godlike qualities and the virtues which reflect the goodness of the Heavenly Father.”38 In Bryan’s correspondence during the evolution crusade, he almost always singled out the damage wrought by blurring the line between human and animal. Bryan worried that evolutionists “insist on connecting all mankind with the jungle. We have a right to protect our family tree.”39 According to him, the divide between human beings and

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animals involved a fundamental distinction between creatures who did and did not have souls. Darwinism taught that human beings evolved gradually, thus making it impossible that there could have been a singular Adam who was created in God’s image or a Christ who saved people from Original Sin: “Evolution teaches that man has been rising all the time, and that, therefore, there was never any need of a Saviour, but only a continuity of natural law.”40 To defend the family tree, Bryan insisted that human beings did not evolve through a primordial struggle. Evolution seemed to champion the cause of the strong to oppress the weak. This is not that farfetched considering that this position was advocated by many of those who supported teaching evolution. As Larson points out, “Many Americans associated Darwinian natural selection, as it applied to people, with a survival-of-the-fittest mentality that justified laissez-faire capitalism, imperialism, and militarism. Decades before the crusade, for example, Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, Sr., claimed this as justification for their cutthroat business practices.”41 Theories of eugenics and social Darwinist defenses for predatory capitalism seemed to argue that Christian charity and love thwarted progress by allowing the weak to survive. One example from eugenic theory that Bryan seized on was that vaccination was problematic because “it has preserved thousands who might otherwise have succumbed (for the benefit of the race?). Can you imagine anything more brutal?”42 Bryan could not accept that the perceived brutality of natural selection was a basic law of human nature: “Darwinism enthrones selfishness; the Bible crowns love as the greatest force in the world.”43 When Bryan asserted that love was stronger than selfishness, he did not imply that people were innately good. On the contrary, it was their unique capacity for sin that made human beings morally accountable but also the source of possible social reform: All created things below man live up to their physical possibilities. They have no moral sense and cannot sin. Man was made by a separate act, as a part of God’s plan and placed here for a purpose. He was given freedom to sin, in order that he might develop character and display virtue by voluntarily choosing good and withstanding temptation to do evil.  . . . God might have made it impossible for men to sin, in which case it would have

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been impossible for him to be a free moral agent as he is today, capable of worshipping, praising and obeying God and serving his fellow men.44

Reducing human beings to their biological instincts would make animal selfishness the master of human destiny. From Bryan’s perspective, casting selfishness as an immutable law of human nature made social reform impossible. If human beings were merely animals, it would make no sense to hold robber barons accountable for their greed as they were merely following an unalterable human nature. By insisting that human beings were distinct from animals in their sinful capacity, Bryan held that social evils could be reformed because of the possibility of spiritual regeneration. Human beings were unique in their ability to rein in their instincts to be in harmony with the dictates of Christian love. Darwinism posed a threat not only because it undermined Christian theology, but because it taught that the work of building nurturing social institutions was unnecessary in a free marketplace driven by selfish biological desire.

Greatest of All Races If human beings were not autonomous individuals ruled by the accumulation of private property but instead the producers and products of social environments, this left open the question of how to identify and demarcate the environment that constituted the body politic. This is a problem that scholars of nationalism have noted in the constitution of the nation-state. That is, democratic institutions depend upon an already constituted people that democratic processes cannot themselves bring into existence.45 While populists call for restoring power to the people, there is no stable group of people that exists prior to political discourse. As Francisco Panizza points out, potential criticism of economic injustice has to identify who is suffering: “The notion of unmet demands presupposes an already existing political identity—however precarious and incomplete this may be—upon which the demands can be predicated, as their holders need to know who they are in order to know what they want that cannot be provided by the system.”46 For populist appeals to be effective, they had to resonate with some sense of shared participation within an American nation. Therefore,

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much of populist rhetoric was geared toward identifying the American people. This meant that although populist sympathy blurred the spiritual and corporeal boundaries between individual human beings, it often intensified the social boundaries that divided collective subjects from each other. For populists from the South and West, race offered an especially potent means of identification both because of the existing structure of American society and because of the emphasis on an idealized social environment that regulated biological and spiritual life. As a harmonious Christian nation was tied to the development and maintenance of pure, sober, and virtuous bodies, many populists used physical characteristics to imagine the people. For Bryan, race was one more example of how he was a social product rather than an autonomous individual. In listing some of the fortunate accidents of his birth, Bryan gave thanks for his race, his nationality, and his familial upbringing: I was born a member of the greatest of all the races—the Caucasian Race, and had mingled in my veins the blood of English, Irish, and Scotch.  . . . I was born a citizen of the greatest of all lands. So far as my power to prevent was concerned, I might have been born in the darkest of the continents and among the most backward of the earth’s peoples. It was a gift of priceless value to see the light in beloved America, and to live under the greatest of the republics in history. And I was equally fortunate, as I shall show, in my family environment. I cannot trace my ancestry beyond the fourth generation and there is not among them, so far as I know, one of great wealth or great political or social prominence, but so far as I have been able to learn, they were honest, industrious, Christian, moral, religious people—not a black sheep in the flock, not a drunkard, not one for whose life I would have to utter an apology. The environment in which my youth was spent was as ideal as any that I know.47

Sandwiching America between race and family, Bryan’s racism underscored his conviction that a healthy nation depended upon virtuous citizens nurtured by loving religious, social, and biological environments. He emphasized his debt to biological ancestry to debunk the claim that human beings were individuals with incorrigibly selfish impulses. “Good blood” was an attribute of a decent person: “Ancestry counts. We inherit more than we ourselves can add. It means much to

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be borne of a race with centuries of civilization back of it. Blood, if it be good, inspires one to great effort—if it be bad it may paralyze ambition and fix the boundary to one’s possibilities.”48 Bryan’s interest in ancestry echoed nationalist rhetoric that tied national health to social homogeneity. As Josiah Strong stated in his popular 1891 treatise Our Country, threats to social and racial unity fostered moral anarchy: “No man is held upright simply by the strength of his own roots; his branches interlock with those of other men, and thus society is formed, with all its laws and customs and force of public opinion. Few men appreciate the extent to which they are indebted to their surroundings for the strength with which they resist, or do, or suffer.”49 Creating a harmonious whole without divisions between rich and poor was tied to the exclusion of those who threatened to introduce social tension and heterogeneity. Bryan’s identification of white, laboring bodies as the basis for a spiritually and biologically homogenous body politic limited his sympathy across racial divides. In late 1922, for example, he received a letter from Montana Senator Thomas J. Walsh expressing concern about the Ku Klux Klan. As a dry Catholic from a largely rural western state, Walsh was a favorite of Prohibitionists because, by supporting him, they could undercut the charge that Prohibition was motivated by anti-Catholic prejudice. But Walsh was no stooge for anti-Catholic nativists, as his letter to Bryan made clear: I take this occasion to say to you that the darkest spot on our political horizon is that cast by the Ku Klux Klan.  . . . Unless this harpy organization is openly denounced by the public men of the South; unless they clearly disclose that it does not represent the intelligence or enlightenment and liberality of that section; that those who speak for it are neither sympathetic with it nor fearful of its wrath, there will not be votes enough north of the Mason and Dixon Line two years hence to justify obsequies over the Democratic Party.50

Walsh identified a growing electoral problem that would shape the fortunes of the Democratic Party; namely, that the nativism personified by the Klan threatened to alienate Catholics and Jews who were becoming the party’s base in the North. Walsh knew that although Bryan was in

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the twilight of his political career, he remained the most beloved politician in the former Confederacy and had always been more popular in the South than in his native West. A condemnation from Bryan would hurt the Klan. Bryan’s response to Walsh is instructive for both what it said and did not say. While racist, anti-Catholic, and anti-Semitic invective was a common staple of the agrarian populist tradition, Bryan’s own rhetoric stressed peace and human goodwill and avoided the overt racial demagoguery that typified the oratory of well-known southern populists like “Pitchfork” Ben Tillman of South Carolina or Tom Watson of Georgia. Therefore, it was possible for Walsh to imagine that Bryan might have been an ally in this cause. Bryan seemed to agree with Walsh’s concerns about the Klan’s predilection for prejudice and hatred: I note what you say about the Ku Klux Klan and agree with you that it is likely to have some influence on the next election. I am satisfied that the organization will be temporary as similar organizations have been, but it will disturb politics for a while as the A.P.A. [American Protective Association] did many years ago. This organization combines about all the race prejudices we have in this country. In the south it rests largely upon the doctrine of white supremacy, a doctrine absolutely essential to the welfare of the south, but I do not know of any place in the south where white supremacy is menaced or where the matter cannot be very well cared for by law. Ford’s paper has recently accentuated the anti-Jewish prejudice. It is unfortunate that we should have any organization built upon prejudice against any group, and superlatively unfortunate to have an organization built upon all the prejudices combined.51

Even when expressing his displeasure with “prejudice,” Bryan revealed a great deal about his attitude toward race. For Bryan, the problem with the Klan’s overt racial animosity was not so much its racism as its redundancy in a place where white supremacy reigned. His assertion that the issue could be “cared for by law” also ignored the role that extralegal violence perpetrated by the Klan and others played in maintaining racial subjugation. The response to Walsh raises the question of whether Bryan shared the Klan’s views. There is a great deal of evidence that, at least on the

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issue of religious prejudice, Bryan did not subscribe to the Klan’s overt animosity toward religious minorities. In defense of a Florida law that proposed to include religious education in the public schools, he argued that Jews and Catholics were entitled to their own classes.52 In addition, Bryan maintained personal friendships with Catholics and Jews (in a way he did not with African Americans) and was under the impression that he had broad Catholic and Jewish support for his antievolution campaign. While Bryan was not willing to go so far as to put all religions on equal footing, his views were not those of an unrepentant Klansman. Levine summarized the case that Bryan may have been honest when he expressed concern over the Klan’s extreme religious prejudice: At no time  . . . did Bryan share the Klan’s extreme xenophobia or its militant anti-Jewish or anti-Catholic feelings. During these years Bryan served on the General Committee of the American Committee on the Rights of Religious Minorities, and he frequently spoke out in behalf of Catholics and Jews. In 1916 he lent warm support to Wilson’s appointment of Louis Brandeis to the Supreme Court. During the war he urged Secretary Baker to appoint Catholic and Jewish Chaplains. In 1920 he denounced the Protocols of the Elders of Zion as a “libel” upon “one of the greatest races in history,” and subsequently refused to support Henry Ford’s Presidential aspirations because of his anti-Semitic sentiments.53

However, Bryan was oblivious to how latent religious prejudices animated his own rhetoric. He may have intended his famous image of mankind crucified upon a cross of gold to conflate the goldbugs with the Romans. Many populists, however, were likely to hear these words as a slight against the international money power of the Jews. This would also be the case in some of Bryan’s early speeches on the silver question, in which he warned of the nefarious power of foreign banking interests and cited anti-Semitic passages from Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice. As Bryan stated in one congressional debate about gold bonds, “It was decided that Shylock’s bond, while it called for a pound of flesh, did not include any blood. The difference between the construction placed upon the bond and the construction which this House is asked to place upon the contract before us is that we are asked to make the construction so liberal as to include the blood with the flesh.”54 While the speech

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does not explicitly equate Shylock with all Jews and Bryan’s invocation of Shakespeare was characteristic of his rhetorical style, this kind of imagery resonated with existing currents among those populists who had been weaned on more overt anti-Semitism. Although Bryan may not have intended to attack the Jews, much of his early speeches on monetary policy or his later pronouncements on a Christian nation had an anti-Semitic effect. Many religious minorities were frustrated with Bryan’s refusal to combat bigotry with the same force that he had condemned economic injustice.55 While Bryan may not have espoused overt anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic sentiments, he did not launch a moral crusade to combat them. On this issue, Bryan’s sentiments uncharacteristically reflected the luxury of power. As he was speaking for the majority for whom Klan violence was not an immediate threat, Bryan ignored the direct victims of bigotry and intimidation. Instead, he saw prejudice in terms of the imperfections of Protestants. Christian virtue should have taught tolerance of other religions, but this was an abstraction that lacked the urgency of the material and moral decay of Christian civilization. Ironically, Bryan’s cautious expectation that gradual enlightenment would temper religious hostility was strikingly similar to the industrialist’s professed hope that the material conditions of workers would improve over time. The Great Commoner’s passivity in the face of racial and religious prejudice essentially endorsed the status quo of white, Protestant supremacy. Whatever his approach to religious prejudice may have been, there was a notable difference in Bryan’s attitude toward racial matters. After all, his letter to Walsh asserted that white supremacy was “absolutely essential to the welfare of the South.” Bryan’s views on race were one of the few issues on which he tended to keep relatively quiet. Early in his political career, many African Americans hoped that Bryan could be a political ally, and W. E. B. Du Bois even offered a lukewarm endorsement of his candidacy in 1908. One African American supporter believed that Bryan’s work on behalf of the poor and oppressed would logically extend to some of the poorest and most oppressed members of society: “When I supported you in 1896 and 1900 I had a firm belief that you would, if elected, tell the American people that lynch law must be stopped, and I believe it would have been done had you been elected and said so. But the wealth of the corporations carried the elections against you.”56

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By the 1920s, however, it became clear that Bryan would do little to stop lynching. Consistent with his refusal to denounce the Klan, he opposed the passage of a federal antilynching law in Congress. As his biographer Michael Kazin noted, “Bryan’s passion for democracy had always cooled at the color line. He made an exception for the Japanese, whom he considered quaint but virtual equals, and regarded Mexicans and other Latinos with the eye of an amiable paternalist. But he spurned the idea of wooing any sizeable group of black voters away from the GOP.”57 The hypocrisy of his posture as a peace-loving Christian who refused to condemn racial violence was not lost on W. Thomas Soders, an African American lawyer who wrote, You call yourself a Christian, a believer in God, and yet you do not believe that the Black man as a race is equally as good as the White man as a race. Pray tell me what kind of Christianity is this you profess? Do you conceive God a discriminating God?  . . . Were the Black man given a square deal in America for what he has done for America he would now be holding Congressional Representation in Congress, but in lieu of fair play and justice you democrats and Southern hypocrites, robbed him of justice and the ballot in the South land.58

The difference between Bryan’s respective responses to Walsh and Soders is striking. Rather than counsel patience, Bryan attacked the lawyer’s character.59 Soders had crossed the line. It was one thing to be criticized by a fellow white American, but African Americans had no place in political discourse. Bryan was aware that this created a tension between democratic ideals and racial realities, particularly in terms of his denunciation of American imperialism and his impassioned defense of the sovereignty of Cubans, Filipinos, and anyone who had to bear an imperial yoke. But he still found ways to defend the racial status quo. It would be less remarkable if the analogy between the colonial subject and the African American in the South had never occurred to him, but Bryan thought about and rationalized his way around the problem. He claimed that imperialism was a threat to democracy because those who made laws did not have to live by them, whereas the people in the South passed their own legislation: “So with the colored man of the South who does not vote, the laws which he must obey must by obeyed by those who

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do vote, and the taxes which he pays must be paid by those who enjoy the franchise.”60 Along with southern populists, Bryan believed that the disenfranchisement of African Americans strengthened democratic government. He saw his defense of white supremacy as consistent with his critique of imperialism. Bryan’s call for an independent Philippines did not imply that he saw Filipinos as the equals of people of European descent. Rather, Filipinos should rule the Philippines, and Americans should govern the United States. Voters should represent the national character. In Bryan’s view, therefore, white supremacy was a means to preserve American national identity. While African Americans could be granted legal rights, he insisted that they had no place in determining the function of government: “No one denied that the blacks were entitled to equal protection in their rights. The question is which race shall control the Government and make the laws under which both shall live?”61 Of course, Bryan’s assertion that “no one denied” equal protection to African Americans was clearly false. But his distinction between legal rights and full participation in government illuminates his views on popular sovereignty. Only racially pure democratic institutions could reflect the will of the people. Where Bryan’s views on between race and religion intersected was that he saw no conflict between preserving the power of a white and Christian majority and maintaining the supposed racial and religious neutrality of civic institutions as long as they tolerated the rights of religious or racial minorities to exist.

Locating the People Bryan believed that the people could labor to produce a white, Christian nation that could serve as the basis for a progressive state. One obvious appeal of hard populism to later interpreters like Hofstadter, then, is that Bryan’s body politic fostered a divisive identity politics. Hard populism promised reasoned, inclusive approaches to solving problems. Hard populism, however, had no substitute for Bryan’s rhetorical ability to inspire interest. This is why Bryan could channel the agrarian revolt into support for the Democratic Party. As Ernesto Laclau argues in his study of populist reason, emotional persuasion is part of what draws people into the political arena in the first place: “So far from these devices being mere rhetoric, they are inherent in the logics presiding over the

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constitution and dissolution of any political space.”62 Tying issues like anti-Darwinism, Prohibition, and race to progressive political reform, Bryan tried to define what counted as political questions. He protested against the institutionalization of predatory capitalism that equated economy and free markets. Bryan’s body politic cultivated interests that included emotional, affective, and sentimental appeals. Freedom did not liberate individual bodies to pursue their natural acquisitive instincts in a free market. Rather, economic justice was possible only through democratic institutions that were produced by nurturing environments. His conviction that Protestant Christianity cultivated collective attachments demonstrates that not all Protestants valued autonomous individual subjects. Bryan criticized marketplaces that enshrined consumers free from collective attachments. In proposing his vision of equitable relationships between human beings and their physical and social environments, Bryan’s sympathetic economy animated collective attachments between people. Technocratic liberal appeals to rational economic analysis have left a vacuum when disinterested politics has failed to inspire interest. This vacuum, in turn, has been filled by different forms of populist identity politics. According to McMath, for example, one of the failures of twentieth-century liberalism was its underestimation of the importance of identity to the American electorate: “It is as much a critique of twentieth-century liberalism as of Populism itself that a century after the movement flourished, its name is more readily associated with those who view the liberal welfare state as an irritating repository of ‘special privilege’ than as a bulwark of ‘equal rights,’ specifically with a tradition of ‘conservative’ Populism stretching from Wallace and Barry Goldwater to Ronald Reagan and David Duke, a tradition that has gained force during the economic upheavals of the past two decades.”63 As with the malleability of religious freedom, the ambiguity of the identity of the people has been part of populism’s rhetorical potency. As political theorist Margaret Canovan explains, “The vagueness of ‘the people’ is a mark of its political usefulness; captured at different times by many different political causes, it has been stretched to fit their different shapes. But to dismiss it as empty rhetoric of populist politicians would be a mistake.”64 The vagueness of the American people allowed for mul-

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tiple groups and constituencies to identify with an imagined or idealized nation. Even while “the people” did not encompass a stable membership or set of interests, it provided a rhetorical framework for an emotive and affective style that animated political participation. Populism is a style and rhetorical tradition that can be employed for a variety of economic or political programs. As Kazin argues, “The notion that a democratic politics must concern itself with the enforcement of ethical standards, both public and private, was integral to the appeal of populism. Near the end of another century, we know how explosive that conviction can be, how difficult to confine its targets to one end of the ideological spectrum.”65 Economic and cultural discontent does necessarily yield a leftist politics. The malleability of populist rhetoric also means, however, that there is no necessary connection between populism and a white Christian nation. In the following chapters, for example, people like Al Smith and Malcolm X combined identity politics with a fight against the plutocracy in a way that contested Bryan’s racial and religious politics.

4

The Helpless White Minority D. W. Griffith and Violence One could not find the sufferings of our family and our friends—the dreadful poverty and hardships during the war and for many years after—in the Yankee-written histories we read in school. From all this was born a burning determination to tell some day our side of the story to the world. —D. W. Griffith

D. W. Griffith’s 1915 film The Birth of a Nation begins and ends with calls for peace. The movie starts with a denunciation of the horrors of war and a proclamation of hope that human beings will someday be able to live without senseless violence. The film’s penultimate scene portrays a towering Christ offering hope to a war-stricken world. Pleas for peace are ironic in a film that glorifies the violent origins of the Ku Klux Klan. What is especially perplexing is that despite calling for an end to violence, Griffith makes no effort to moderate the horrific actions of the film’s heroes. Birth of a Nation employs a number of visual cues to portray Klan violence as especially ominous, sinister, and terrifying. The film weaves together the stories of two families, the Camerons and the Stonemans, to tell a story set largely in South Carolina from the Civil War through Reconstruction. Attempting to find common ground between white northerners and southerners, the film portrays the families as trapped in historical events beyond their control. The source of the problem is slavery, which the film depicts as an unfortunate historical event. The institution’s worst feature is not the terror inflicted on slaves but the way in which slavery introduces people of African descent into an otherwise harmonious nation. With the encouragement of the elder Stoneman (modeled after the abolitionist Thaddeus 68

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Stevens), newly enfranchised African Americans elect what the film’s southern white characters take to be an illegitimate government. The Ku Klux Klan takes shape as a response to this political crisis, to restore the political rights of white manhood and protect the sexual purity of white womanhood. In a climactic scene, the Klansmen avenge sexual violence through a graphically depicted lynching. This raises the question of what makes it possible for the film to both lament and endorse spectacular violence. It represents violence as both tragic and liberating because it follows a sacrificial logic. Understood as sacrifice, the terrifying actions of Klansmen take on a tragic quality in which extralegal violence is deemed necessary to resist profane political authority. The intensity of the terror testifies to the heroism of the characters willing to take on this sacrificial duty. As moral victims of the very violence that they themselves enact, the protagonists of the film ask for the audience’s sympathy for the terrible deeds they must perform in order to ensure their freedom. For those who share the protagonists’ sense of victimization, the film serves as an aesthetically satisfying narrative for Americans who feel that their liberty is threatened by the federal government.

White Victims In response to critics who condemned the film’s sympathetic depiction of violence, Griffith defended himself by citing principles of free speech and tolerance.1 He argued that freedom of expression in film was particularly vital because the new medium promised to educate a mass audience about history. Telling the truth promoted peace even when it offended some sensibilities. As he explained, “The truths of history today are restricted to the limited few attending our colleges and universities; the motion picture can carry these truths to the entire world without cost. As tolerance would thus be compelled to give way before knowledge and as the deadly monotony of the cheerless existence of millions would be brightened by this new art, two of the chief causes of war would be removed.”2 To underscore his commitment to tolerance, Griffith’s next film, Intolerance (1916), told four interweaving stories in which hatred was locked in a timeless struggle against love and charity. Intolerance portrays wealthy, powerful people as jealous, sanctimonious, and judgmental. The villains abuse social and political authority to ruin

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the lives of ordinary men and women. Intolerance was not a recantation or apology for Birth of a Nation’s racial violence. From Griffith’s perspective, the film further demonstrated his allegiance to the oppressed over and against sanctimonious and judgmental authority figures. In his view, Birth of a Nation and Intolerance both told stories in which persecuted characters yearned for freedom. The Klan, in Griffith’s understanding, was the last hope of a powerless and defeated people. The title of this chapter, “The Helpless White Minority,” is taken from an intertitle that introduced the South Carolina legislature during Reconstruction when African Americans were allowed to vote. In the scene following the card, the film shows an African American legislative majority using its power to crush white resistance. Griffith employed a familiar rhetoric that attacks African Americans while simultaneously repudiating overt racial animosity. White characters in Griffith’s films saw themselves not as powerful but as victims of the illegitimate exercise of authority. While William Jennings Bryan’s populist economy invoked solidarity among a white laboring body politic, his progressive populism hoped to use the state to serve the people. The malleability of populist rhetoric has also made it a prominent source of antigovernment fervor. While Bryan had faith in the government, he shared with other populists the conviction that the legitimacy of American democracy rested on a white Christian nation. For populists, the “demos” in democracy was not the statistical majority of people who happened to live in a given place. The people were an organically unified body politic who should rightly exercise democratic rule. When populist rhetoric saw the breech between nation and state as irreparable, then, it retreated to a tragic populism that defended the people from tyranny. Rather than use democratic institutions to advance the will of the people, antistatist populism seeks freedom from a government taken over by alien forces that threaten the nation. Having given up on the law, groups like the Klan use extralegal violence as the only recourse for otherwise law-abiding Americans who must protect the integrity of their household from the state. The legacy of the American Confederacy has served as a prominent symbol of populist resistance to tyranny. With its principles of states’ rights, limited government, white supremacy, sacred property rights, and armed revolt by private householders, Confederate heritage persists as an imagined source of democratic resistance. The Birth of a Nation shows that even

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though the union prevailed in the Civil War, groups like the Klan kept alive the spirit of the Confederacy within the new nation. White victimization has long been a staple of American populism. Rather than present the disenfranchisement of a large section of the population as a tool of entrenched power, much populist rhetoric has reconciled racism and antielitism by casting African Americans as an unproductive minority that demanded special privileges. As Michael Kazin explains in reference to populist Democrats like Bryan, “Updating and hardening Jefferson’s anti-elitist suspicions, Democrats accused their political enemies of shedding tears for unworthy blacks but sneering at the language and manners of the productive white majority.”3 The Reconstruction era was taken to be the height of power for unworthy African Americans at the expense of the southern white majority. In the story told in history books and retold in Birth of a Nation, radical Republicans used newly emancipated African Americans as pawns to disenfranchise and humiliate white southerners as retribution for the Civil War. As Eric Foner recounts in his study of Reconstruction, “The childlike blacks, these scholars insisted, were unprepared for freedom and incapable of properly exercising the political rights Northerners had thrust upon them.”4 As white southerners interpreted the events of Reconstruction as evidence that their racial inferiors were a proxy for northern Republicans, populists could continue to demonize the plutocracy while subordinating the most exploited segments of society. As Bryan stated, “It is only in those Southern States where the blacks are the most numerous that the whites have, as a matter of self-preservation, imposed restrictions. They may have been spurred to do this by a recollection of their experience under carpet bag Government when a few designing white men used black suffrage to exploit helpless whites, as they would today if they could.”5

The People as a Floating Signifier An underlying tension in populist rhetoric is revealed when American people see themselves the victims of the abuse of power by illegitimate interlopers (a designation that can include everything from Jews to immigrants to powerful corporate interests). As the political theorist Giorgio Agamben argues, “Any interpretation of the political meaning

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of the term people ought to start from the peculiar fact that in modern European languages this term always indicates also the poor, the underprivileged, and the excluded. The same term names the constitutive political subject as well as the class that is excluded—de facto, if not de jure—from politics.”6 Populist rhetoric solidifies bonds between people by appealing to shared experiences of material suffering. Political and economic elites cannot identify with this suffering and are therefore antidemocratic. When populists imagine the people, then, they do not include all citizens. The populist practice of identification through exclusion creates confusion about who the people are. Ernesto Laclau has addressed this semantic confusion by arguing that the people should be understood as a floating signifier. As a label with a contested definition, a term like “American people” does not name an already existing group in the world. Rather, creating a people makes choices about which stories will narrate the nation’s past. This work of naming and narration helps to form a group of people who identify collective demands. In other words, populism does not develop just because people are poor and oppressed. People must be persuaded that others share their oppression and can work together to seek freedom. When a collection of otherwise discrete material demands coalesces around common points of identification, the identity of a people takes shape. According to Laclau, populist identify formation employs emotional forms of persuasion that focus as much on intensifying the bonds between people as on the rationale behind political demands themselves. Regardless of the rationality of a group’s material interests, however, the appeal of emotional and affective forms of populist identification remains something of a mystery. As Laclau notes, “The different signifying operations  . . . can explain the forms the investment takes, but not the force in which the investment consists. It is clear, however, that if an entity becomes the object of an investment—as in being in love, or in hatred—the investment belongs necessarily to the order of affect.”7 To account for the force of affect, Laclau turns to Lacanian psychoanalytic theory. While this approach makes sense, the floating quality of signifiers allows for other explanations. Birth of a Nation provides a case study in affect’s aesthetic production. Griffith used the medium of film to appeal to visceral, intuitive feelings of populist victimization in order

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to convey the urgency of protecting white Christian nationhood. To do this, Griffith insisted on the exercise of aesthetic freedom. As an artist in complete control of his work, a filmmaker had to be free to create a work of art not bound by ordinary ethical rules. The artist’s willingness to offend was a tribute to his aesthetic authenticity and freedom. This was all the more necessary for graphic images of lynching that might offend the sensibilities of those who objected to Klan violence. Invoking his right to tell a violent but aesthetically potent story, Griffith’s refusal to be constrained by ordinary rules of civil discourse mirrored the Klansmen who employed extralegal violence that also violated ethical and legal norms. Like extralegal violence, the film’s aesthetic force drew on the affective, emotional, and visceral associations that reinforced an intuitive sense of participation within a people.8 Political philosopher William Connolly’s thinking about “resonance” can help to understand why the violence in Griffith’s films invoked sympathy from his audience. Like Laclau, Connolly thinks that collective identities do not refer to bounded communities tied together by stable values; rather, identities are themselves products of attempts to draw boundaries and form associations that align sets of issues and interests with imagined communities: “Identities are composed in a mixture of faith, doctrine, and sensibility, with each element entering to some degree into the fabric of the others. The affect-imbued ideas that compose them are installed in the soft tissues of affect, emotion, habit, and posture, as well as the upper reaches of the intellect. Once installed, these sensibilities trigger preliminary responses to new events, even before the respondents think consciously about the events.”9 Another way to put this is that Griffith’s films provoked a gut reaction from the audience. There was something about the violence in Birth of a Nation that felt right, that animated some sense of identification in a way that made terrifying imagery aesthetically moving. Gut reactions were intuitive, visceral responses that shaped popular reactions to heroic violence.10 Sympathy inspired by visceral reactions to lynching did not simply represent racial prejudice; rather, by fostering a collective feeling, violent imagery worked to produce the white racial subject. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation draws on aesthetic manipulation of gut reactions in two ways. The first is a physiognomy of an imagined whiteness, represented by the idealized purity of the white female characters.11

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White purity is juxtaposed to the blackness of the newly uniformed African American soldiers whose undisciplined sensuality threatens the health of the body politic. Second, Griffith imagines national birth within a tragic narrative of the formation of Aryan identity that unifies North and South. This ultimate unification must overcome the violent crisis of sovereignty and citizenship created by the Civil War and its aftermath. The alignment of nation and state is eventually established by the tragic sacrificial violence of a lynching by the nonstate actors of the Klan. The film simultaneously makes a gut appeal to the spectacle of bloody violence while disavowing political responsibility by casting such violence as the tragic and unfortunate result of white victimization.

Citizenship and the Crisis of Sovereignty To understand why Reconstruction was such an evocative setting for national birth, it can be helpful to consider Agamben’s ideas about the “state of exception.” The state of exception, in which normal legal operations give way to unlimited sovereign power, could be invoked at moments when state security is in peril, but it also describes the sovereign authority upon which the state is founded. No state, including a democratic one, can be created by legislative processes. Similarly, the demos of a democracy must be formed outside of normal legal institutions. The birth of a nation lies in a state of exception.12 Working in the same theoretical tradition as Agamben, legal theorist Paul Kahn thinks about the state of the exception in the American context. According to Kahn, classical theories about the exception imagine the sovereign as a single person who makes decisions. An account of American sovereignty needs to “depersonalize the sovereign.” Kahn identifies the American sovereign as popular sovereignty. Popular sovereignty is not the same as democracy. It is a more elusive force, which Kahn locates in what he calls “the American political imaginary.” Kahn believes the people authorize the revolutionary violence that founds the state, and then speak through a constitutional legal framework that ensures that democratic institutions function only within the parameters set by an original sovereign decision outside of all ordinary law. According to Kahn, the self-referential authority of the Constitution depends upon “‘self-evident truths’ set forth in the name of ‘We the People.’”13

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For this reason, many in American history have looked to the founders of the revolutionary era as the embodiment of a lost vitality present at the moment of foundational violence. As Kahn states, “Americans— apart from the experience of the Confederacy—have not had to think much of capitulation, but they have never abandoned the idea of themselves as the inheritors of revolution. They intuitively understand that law is the product of revolution. Law and revolution together constitute the frame of our political imaginary.”14 One distinctive feature of revolutionary nostalgia is that the specter of the American Revolution has often been prominent in persistent hostility to the government. The Confederacy might be more than just an aberration from the norm, however. The ideals of the Confederacy make up a vigorous and persistent strain in American life that equates popular sovereignty with states’ rights, white supremacy, and the threat of armed insurrection against a tyrannical state. This is not just a matter of southern regional identity. Reserving the right to overthrow the government by force of arms draws on an implicit view of sovereignty whereby each householder decides on the state of exception. When contemporary Tea Party Patriots warn of “Second Amendment remedies” against an overreaching government, for example, they insist that the final decision on when to suspend the law is made not by the state, but by the armed American household. Threatening bloody violence against the state is seen not as treasonous, but as a hyperpatriotic defense of popular sovereignty and a direct link to the authentic revolutionary violence that founded the nation. Popular sovereignty refers not to democratic policy making, but to the right of the people—and not the government—to decide on the exception. It is important not to underestimate the persistent preparation for armed insurrection in American life, inasmuch as it is deeply ingrained in the national narrative. For example, Kahn notes, “Popular history is shaped by a narrative of the successful use of violent force against enemies, within and without the nation. Much of this past remains vivid in our political imaginations, endlessly reinforced by both popular media and scholarly work. Americans take their families to Valley Forge and Gettysburg, and even to Omaha Beach.”15 The message delivered at Gettysburg is decidedly different, however, from the one at Valley Forge and Omaha Beach. Civil War battlefield memorials do not demonize the enemy so much as tell a story of “brother against brother.” In this

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story of an internally divided household, one army was defeated on the battlefield, but both sides nevertheless lay claim to the American heritage. Birth of a Nation presents the period of Reconstruction as a crisis of democratic sovereignty in which a disenfranchised white minority protects this heritage by struggling against a government that fails to embody the principles of the nation’s founding. One of Agamben’s concerns is how crises produce states of emergency which become the justification for sovereign exceptions. Among other things, this can mean that rights of citizenship are suspended so that the state can act with no limit to its power so as to better ensure collective security. By removing any private space outside of state control, sovereign power rules over not just the political life of citizens, but all aspects of biological life and death. One example of the state of exception is Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, which was an executive order that bypassed normal legislative processes. But it is important to keep in mind that in the antebellum United States, African Americans had, as a rule, lived in the state of exception according to which, as the Dred Scott decision had made clear, they were denied formal legal rights. As Patricia J. Williams explains, “It must be remembered that from the experiential perspective of blacks, there was no such thing as a ‘slave law.’ The legal system did not provide blacks, even freed blacks, with structured expectations, promises, or reasonable reliances of any sort.”16 The context for the Emancipation Proclamation was a state of exception already continually in force for a large number of people. After emancipation, this antebellum legal exception for human slavery was now, by executive order, under threat. Reconstruction, with the passage of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution, represented the possibility of hope for redefining the basis of citizenship.17 This would have major ramifications for populism because newly emancipated slaves, as citizens, would have a persuasive claim to represent the poor, underprivileged, and excluded. In his book on race relations after the Civil War, Edward J. Blum notes that at least some Americans were reconsidering the relationship between race and nation: “The exigencies of the war and the heroism of African American soldiers, who demonstrated amazing patriotic allegiance to the Union, forced a reevaluation of the conflation of whiteness and American nationalism.”18 To show the threat that this freedom portended, Griffith’s

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film depicts multiple scenes in which African Americans had the audacity to believe that they should be treated as equals to whites. In one of the most famous scenes, the “mulatto” governor Silas Lynch attempts to shake hands with Ben Cameron, the film’s protagonist and idealized southern gentleman. Cameron dramatically rebuffs him, thus defending white dignity. Within the logic of white populism, emancipation posed a national crisis in which everyone, simply on the basis of their being human, could be granted the rights of citizenship. To counter this, the film draws on a physiognomy in which African American bodies, with their uncontrollable sensual energies, were represented as unconstrained biological life that required constant surveillance. The naïve effort to grant political rights to African Americans would unleash biological instincts that would lead inevitably to the rape of white women. Northerners in the film could be oblivious to this danger. Southerners were portrayed as wiser because they had dealt with the threat of violence from enslaved populations as well as the need to defend themselves from northern aggression. Northerners suffered from the war as well, especially by being divided against their true national brethren, white southerners. In naïvely aligning themselves with African Americans, radical Republicans were victims of their own well-intentioned but ultimately misplaced belief in the goodness of people. If Yankees could only understand what southerners already knew, they would recognize that their true enemies were not southern gentlemen like the Camerons but African Americans who threatened the nation. Much of the film is dedicated toward educating northerners about the realities of white victimization. In the film’s logic, the naïveté of northern abolitionists set in play the sequence of events that led to a lynching in retribution for assault on white womanhood. Extralegal violence was required to rectify the crisis of sovereignty brought about by Reconstruction. Within the logic of the film, lynching, as the product of aestheticized racial violence that exists in the state of exception apart from the normal legal order, performs the signifying work of constituting a national identity. Hoping to reestablish the tie between democratic institutions and whiteness, this violence drew its force from passions outside of the juridical legitimacy of the state. In his study of American violence, Richard Maxwell Brown argued that lynching protected official law from the demands made by unoffi-

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cial justice and acted as a part of a “dual system of legal and extralegal” justice. According to Brown, “Americans did not feel themselves any less public spirited when they participated in lynch law. Instead, they saw vigilante participation as an act of public spirit as important in its own way as the election of upright officials. Americans felt that there were certain functions in preserving public order that the legal authorities would not, could not, or should not be expected to perform. These functions the people themselves assumed as vigilantes.”19 The justice of the “people themselves” gratified visceral anger in a way that anonymous, bureaucratically administered legal punishments could not. The Klan, represented by Griffith as a voice of the disempowered, embodied Christian virtues of meekness and humility. The ubiquity of the cross in the imagery of the Klan symbolized this need for terrible, violent sacrifice while still signifying Christian humility.20 While the cross represented peace, it also recommended violence as a means to this end. In one scene, before avenging the death of a Flora Cameron, the southern woman who took her life rather than submit to the amorous advances of Gus (who is one of the newly uniformed African American soldiers), her brother Ben performs a sinister ritual involving a Confederate flag and a fiery cross. The title card that precedes the scene reads, “Brethren, this flag bears the red stain of a life of a southern woman, a priceless sacrifice on the altar of an outraged civilization.” After performing this ritual, the Klansmen capture and lynch the African American soldier. According to historian Donald Mathews, sacrifice had a purifying logic: “Blood sacrifice is the connection between the purpose of white supremacists, the purity signified in segregation, the magnificence of God’s wrath, and the permission granted the culture through the wrath of ‘justified’ Christians to sacrifice black men on the cross of white solidarity.”21 This bloody performance met the conditions for the religious, racial, and national harmony necessary for a new sovereign state committed to everlasting peace. Extralegal violence rectified the crisis of sovereignty brought about by Reconstruction. Within the logic of the film, lynching, as the exemplary form of aestheticized racial violence that exists apart from the normal legal order, gives birth to a new nation. Seeking to tie democratic institutions to a white citizenry, such violence drew its force from passions outside of the juridical legitimacy of the state. This was clearly demonstrated in The Clansman, the

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novel on which Birth of a Nation was based. Accused of murder, Ben Cameron replies he has simply executed the law of a civilized society. When asked under which authority, he exclaimed, “By authority of the sovereign people who created the State of South Carolina. The criminals who claim to be our officers are usurpers placed there by the subversion of law.”22 When the law lost its legitimacy, lynching allowed exercise of popular sovereignty in the face of ineffectual legal due process. The film used Christian sacrifice to tell a national story. As film historian Scott Simmon points out, “What one sees as Ben Cameron cradles his sister’s broken body at the foot of the rocks is not guilt  . . . but, rather, the first painful step toward redemption, though under the terms of the film, which would understand ‘redemption’ as the word signifying the achievement of Christian sacrifice and the word that white Southerners used to designate escape from Reconstruction laws.”23 Part of the work done by this tragic and redemptive quality of this narrative is that it invites the white audience to sympathize with the terrible things that Ben Cameron was forced to do. The bloody and terrifying quality of this violence, because it is so out of the normal character of white masculinity, only serves to illustrate the wound to the honor of white femininity. Under normal conditions in which a state of exception was not in force, white men like Cameron would never be driven to do such a terrible thing. As Amy Louise Wood explains, lynchings worked as a form of ritual purification that dramatized the ritual sacrifices that southerners were willing to make for moral purity: “As rituals infused with religious meaning, lynchings did more than create a secular image of white superiority; they also offered white southerners a vision of themselves as morally pure and spiritually redeemed.”24 The tragic necessity of this spectacular violence only further illustrates the national tragedy. In his study of the religion of the “Lost Cause,” Charles Reagan Wilson explains that tragedy and suffering were employed to transform military defeat into something ennobling, a test of character and honor for southern gentlemen.25 Film served as a powerful medium that could do more than merely tell the story of the nation’s birth. By drawing on sympathy for Cameron, the film’s representation of ritualized extralegal violence invigorated the sources of collective identity that gave nationalism its force. The experience of seeing a film intensified the sensual participation through which

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the bodies of white Americans could more strongly identify with a racially and religiously unified body politic. This visual work provided the affect that linked the signifier “American people” to a collective white subject. Once the Klan’s sacrificial work was done, the national state of exception as experienced by white Americans ended and was replaced with a restored white supremacy that took back the rights of African Americans. This visceral identification performed the symbolic work of fixing the floating signifier to a stable white signified, now unified between North and South against a common black other. If this appears to be antithetical to the ideals of democracy, it may be a relatively familiar function of the homology that Agamben notes between the floating signifier and the state of exception: Just as grammar, in producing a speech without denotation, has isolated something like a language from discourse, and law, in suspending the concrete custom and usage of individuals, has been able to isolate something like a norm, so the patient work of civilization proceeds in every domain by separating human praxis from its concrete exercise and thereby creating that excess of signification over denotation that Levi-Strauss was the first to recognize. The floating signifier  . . . corresponds to the state of exception, in which the norm is in force without being applied.26

In the aestheticized state of exception, the film performs the political work of signification that ordinary legal institutions cannot and thus constitutes the collective sensibility of a wounded people. This is one reason why film needed to be free: the audience vicariously participates in the emotional wounding of white femininity in a way that would not be possible if movie censors were able to restrict the spectacle of violence. In response to this spectacle of moral outrage, the film then offers the catharsis of a bloody sacrificial vengeance. Because these feelings shape the common bonds of sympathy that tie together a wounded white body politic, the film can then finally be the means to overcome the terrible and unnecessary divisions between North and South and, by extension, give birth to a unified American nation. Violence heals the wounds between North and South.

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Tragedy and Its Victims One irony is that film’s aesthetic qualities supposedly made it apolitical. In her study of racial melodrama, Linda Williams notes that Griffith’s critical acclaim has often separated his politics from his art: “There is a persistent tendency to attribute what is great and wonderful in Griffith to his position as godlike, autonomous originator positioned outside of time and history, and to attribute what is embarrassing and racist in him to his local, time-bound influences.”27 While Griffith was not embarrassed by his own racial politics, even he employed this division to respond to the film’s critics in 1915. To the charge that Birth endorsed extralegal violence that disenfranchised African Americans, the film’s defenders said that it had nothing to do with racism or politics, but was simply a movie. In response to criticism from the New York Globe, Griffith wrote, “This attack is an organized effort to suppress a production which was brought forth to reveal the beautiful possibilities of the art of motion pictures and to tell a story which is based upon truth in every vital detail.  . . . In our captions we reiterate that the events depicted upon the screen are not meant as a reflection upon any race or people of today.”28 The medium of film allowed Griffith to couple an official stated denial of racist intent with images of racial danger and menace. Officially, these images were not meant as a categorical description of all African Americans, but were merely telling a story in which some characters did regrettable things. As Cedric J. Robinson points out, “His rhetorical strategy of maintaining that his epic was ‘not meant to reflect on any race or people of today’ was cleverly employed to establish that even with the most delicately contrived fairness, history itself documented Black inferiority.”29 Griffith’s protest that he was simply making an honest attempt to tell the difficult truths of history made sense only if his racial imagery was true. In much the same way that Cameron’s actions were forced by events beyond his control, Griffith’s violence was a necessary response to the realities of black threats to a white nation. Like the anonymous nonstate actors in his film, Griffith disavowed official political action. He was merely being honest about the horrors of war and its aftermath. The disclaimer of racist intent allowed Griffith to ally himself with a racially neutral ideal of citizenship while simultane-

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ously appealing to the “gut” with a series of images that reinforced the intuitive association of wounded whiteness and political dispossession. He could then dismiss the ethical and political concerns of the NAACP as the Pollyannish anxieties of philistines. As Clyde Taylor points out, Birth serves as a prime example of the political work that can be accomplished by carving out an autonomous space for aesthetics: “These interests manage to keep the aesthetic in operation, very much like a politics against political clarity, a mystifying ideology of autonomous art. In denying the political resonance of cultural works, this discourse in effect throws protective skirts around all sort of political ideologies and nostrums couched within the representational form of ‘art,’ not simply because it loves them, but because it must protect them in order to protect its own authority. The Birth of a Nation is an arresting case in point.”30 As a case in point, Taylor’s description of a “politics against political clarity” might tell us something about why the image of white victimization continues to have such a hold on popular political discourse. To the extent that the white violence toward subjugated others is framed as a tragic and unfortunate necessity of an otherwise redemptive national story, and that this violence can now be safely removed to past history, the real story supposedly focuses on the trials and tribulations that have faced white Americans. The violence of lynching is removed from the national story, and is instead part of the prepolitical chaos resolved by the proper alignment of race, nation, and state. As Connolly points out, forgetting violence goes hand in hand with the work of identifying excluded others in the construction of the national imaginary: “The pursuit of national unity is founded on decisions of exclusion and punishment, whereas its achievement is predicated on the end of arbitrary violence. The forgetfulness of the nation, then, exists along at least two dimensions: forgetfulness of the past violence on which it is grounded and concealment of the constitutive lack always subsisting at its center by holding a set of devalued constituencies responsible for that lack.”31 What Birth of a Nation shows is there is a structural homology among three purportedly apolitical spaces that, in practice, do political work: (1) the floating signifier that constitutes the people, (2) the state of exception in which extralegal violence enforces a racialized vision of citizenship, and (3) the autonomous aesthetic expression of a work of art in

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which political choices are presented as fated responses to tragic events. Any attempt to hold people responsible for actions made in these three apolitical zones can be speedily rejected as unpatriotic or divisive or aesthetically impoverished. Griffith’s own stance as the persecuted artist sums this up perfectly. Not content to defend his work as art, Griffith upped the ante in the debate over racial representations in his film. He held up the characters of Mammy and Jake as examples of his ability to offer positive portrayals of African Americans. As he stated, “No characters in the story are applauded with greater fervor than the good Negroes whose devotion is so clearly shown. If prejudiced witnesses do not see the message in this portion of the entire drama we are not to blame.”32 The characterization of his critics as “prejudiced witnesses” is telling. Because his film was officially race-neutral, as demonstrated by its portrayal of some good African Americans, Griffith could then turn the tables on those who protested against the film. By injecting the question of race into an otherwise racially neutral medium, the protestors besmirched the reputations of white Americans and their black allies. Griffith could then perform the alchemy that Patricia J. Williams has identified as a familiar rhetorical strategy that frames protests against racism as morally equivalent to racism itself.33 Because the NAACP was making gross generalizations about white people, Griffith was himself the victim of racist intolerance. His autobiography reassured his readers that he had fond memories of the “innumerable darkies around our Kentucky home,” and told stories of that evidenced “the peculiarly close relationship between the whites and Negroes of the old regime.”34 Discourse about race could be deflected from the terrifying violence that enforced pervasive inequalities in American life and could focus instead on the hurt feelings of the helpless white minority. Griffith’s appeal to aesthetic freedom was suffused by the sense of wounded privilege that informs contemporary laments about political correctness, as in those that invoke the phrase “let’s be honest” to preface statements about the inferiority of racial, ethnic, or sexual minorities. Those making these calls for honesty complain that criticism of racist speech enforces a repressive public discourse that covers up people’s true feelings. This complaint makes sense only if racism accurately reflects real feelings. This is one reason why Griffith’s portrayal of violence felt

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so honest, courageous, and liberating to its white audience. Honest depictions of racial inferiority provide an aesthetically satisfying release for the sentiments of white Americans who feel oppressed by having to defer to the sensibilities of others. In this vein, the antiracism of the NAACP was felt as an attack against truth, an artificial politeness that ruled out telling things the way they really are. Griffith defended the grave responsibility of an artist to offend. As he explained, “Search your minds for any story worth telling, or any play that is worth seeing, that does not in some way show vice in some form. The policy of the generally accepted censorship is to approve of pictures which will offend no one. That is one way of saying ‘We will have nothing in the pictures but milk and water,’ ridiculous, insipid mediocrity that could not possibly interest anyone.”35 Would-be censors offended by Griffith’s sympathetic portrayal of lynching were cast as incapable of aesthetic seriousness and afraid of the truth.

Legacies As examples of the willingness of white householders to “take the law into their own hands,” lynching and armed revolt both suspend ordinary legal institutions for the sake of the direct exercise of popular sovereignty. In this sense, Birth of a Nation is symptomatic of a strain in American history that looks to the legacy of the Confederacy as an example of the recourse to force of arms outside the law as the only means of protecting the nation. A contemporary version of the desire to protect the household against the state can be found in the belief that the Second Amendment allows people to own guns as a check against tyranny. As Garry Wills points out, this interpretation ignores that in attempting to form a “more perfect union” the Constitution was a set of democratic guidelines and procedures that was adopted by an already existing polity in the interest of better governing itself.36 Regardless of the historical merits of this claim, it demonstrates how the vision espoused by current constitutional fundamentalists is far better articulated in the Articles of Confederation that the Constitution was meant to replace. One increasingly prominent method of resolving the problem is to read the Tenth Amendment in such a way as to make the Constitution an only slightly revised version of the Articles. Thus, the current

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Tea Party Constitutionalism notes the similarity between the Tenth Amendment and Article 2 of the Articles of Confederation, which states, “Each State retains its sovereignty, freedom, and independence, and every power, jurisdiction, and right, which is not by this confederation, expressly delegated to the United States, in Congress assembled.” This reading essentially argues that while the Constitution adopted a new set of procedures for democratic deliberation, it reaffirmed the same conception of sovereignty as enshrined in the Articles of Confederation. This then leads to the conclusion that any liberal jurisprudence that has ignored the Tenth Amendment has distorted the text of the Constitution. Following this reasoning, the Constitution prescribes the rules and framework for democratic institutions but restricts the decision-making scope of those same institutions to a narrow window of government action.37 All of this rests on a mythic project that attempts to recover the meaning of American political institutions by attempting to divine the spirit present at the nation’s origins.38 One obvious objection is that many who strongly endorse Second Amendment rights also deify the American military and, in this way, show their loyalty to the state. The state can demand the sacrifice of life. As Kahn notes, “The popular sovereign can always demand a life; it can demand of all citizens that they kill and be killed for the state. The fundamental character of the relationship of citizen to sovereign is not contract—as in the social contract—but sacrifice.”39 Birth of a Nation draws on a related imagery of sacrifice, but one performed against a tyrannical state on behalf of a wounded nation. Americans do not die for the state; they die for their fellow soldiers, their families, their communities, and their nation. Birth of a Nation helps us to understand this distinction between state and national forms of violence. To be clear, this is not to say that the national imaginary of this country has historically been uniformly antigovernment. At times, populist movements have sought to empower the people by expanding democratic institutions. However, such movements sometimes (although not always) imagine the people as an organically unified body politic and seek to shore up perceived sources of shared identity. Such populist sentiments, especially those that imagine America as a white, Christian nation, can quickly swell in the face of the perceived loss of national integrity perpetuated by liberal reform that

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extends the benefits of American citizenship beyond the scope of the white household. This in turn leads to nostalgia for a lost nation as the grounds for abandoning political loyalty to the state. The reason that the conceptual vocabulary of political theology might be helpful here is that such movements make extensive use of the language of popular sovereignty. Within the narrative of American political decadence and lost revolutionary vitality, the 2008 election only confirmed for many what they felt to be decades of wresting government from the hands of the authentic American people in favor of a tyrannical welfare state that reappropriates resources and distributes them to parasitic others by way of inefficient and decadent bureaucrats who despise Christian freedom. What liberals see as differences over policy that can, so they hope, be resolved through discussion, reason, negotiation, and compromise are felt by many Americans to express a crisis of sovereignty that calls for resistance to all practical measures of federal governance in favor of states’ rights and a protection of the sanctity of the home as the ultimate source of national legitimacy. In Griffith’s story, the legacy of the Confederacy did not end in 1865 but persists as a counternational story that continues to resonate in American political life.

5

The Fundamental Faith of Every True American Al Smith and Loyalty A man who pays obedience to his church, who obeys the laws of the state and the ordinances of the city—that is my idea of a good citizen. And whether he can read or write makes very little difference, for he is just as good to this country as the man who takes great pride at some public gathering in pointing to a long and unbroken line of New England ancestry. —Al Smith

Al Smith, the New York governor and first Democratic Catholic nominee for president, has often been portrayed as a curious combination of progressive and antiprogressive elements. As Richard Hofstadter stated, “Smith was a paradox, for he was a Tammanyite and yet a Progressive, a product of an urban machine whose name was synonymous with corruption, and yet a political leader whose governorship gave ample evidence of a warm interest in popular welfare.”1 Hofstadter’s paradox worked on different levels. On a political level, Smith’s persistent allegiance to Tammany Hall cast him as the most prominent spokesperson for an organization that had been the bane of nineteenth- and twentieth-century progressive reformers. Smith, however, drew upon his skills as a machine politician to be a remarkably effective advocate of progressive economic policies. By the 1920s, he had convinced progressives of the need to deliver on promises by wielding real power. As one of Smith’s supporters argued, “We all know the futility of the silk-stocking reformer, who, on the rare occasion when he gets into power  . . . finds himself helpless in the midst of technical processes which he does not understand and at the mercy of a crew of professionals with whom he dare not dispense.  . . . The superiority of a man like Smith to the typical reformer is perfectly apparent.”2 87

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On the matter of his religion, Smith’s respect for organizational discipline and loyalty enhanced the apparently paradoxical quality of his progressivism. Progressives tended not to be guilty of the kind of overt anti-Catholic hostility that characterized nativist organizations like the Ku Klux Klan. However, many progressives did draw an analogy between the top-down hierarchical structure of the Catholic church and a political machine like Tammany Hall. Even Herbert Croly, cofounder of the New Republic and a supporter of Smith’s candidacy, repeated this point: “Al Smith, as a nursling both of Tammany and the Catholic Church, is accustomed to depend too much on authority. He can move around with perfect assurance and address within ascertained and permitted limits, but outside of those limits he does not know what to do with his fine intelligence.”3 In this view, Catholic obedience to clerical rule inculcated illiberal habits of passivity and deference to institutional authority. This could be exploited by machine bosses who prided themselves on organizational discipline and demanded unwavering loyalty from all Tammany members. According to William Allen White, “No Klansman in a boob legislature,  . . . cringing before a kleagle or a wizard, was more subservient to the crack of the whip than was Al Smith—ambitious and effective and smart as chain lightning—in the Legislature when it came to a vote to protect the saloon, to shield the tout and to help the scarlet woman of Babylon, whose tolls in those days always clinked regularly in the Tammany Hall.”4 Smith’s Catholicism raised suspicions because he did not appear to be making autonomous choices about religion. His religious commitments were not free; they were bound to an economy that valued institutional loyalties and collective commitments. Progressives who were critical of an unregulated free market in financial matters still presumed that religious freedom was exercised by individuals. Related to this suspicion of Catholic docility was the impression of Catholic loyalty to a foreign institution opposed to the separation of church and state. Unlike conservative Protestants who rejected Catholicism on theological grounds, some liberal critics expressed anxiety over the ability of any Catholic to be adequately secular. As one Smith critic stated, “The thorough secularist’s disinclination to vote for Gov. Smith is only an unwillingness to vote for a person who is reasonably suspected of a desire to promote a theocratic rule.”5 Because Protestants were sup-

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posedly loyal only to their consciences, they could make free political decisions in a way that Catholics could not.6 There is some merit to considering the relationship between Smith’s Catholicism and his loyalty to Tammany Hall, but not necessarily for the reasons offered by Croly and others. In the first place, it is not possible to demonstrate any causal relationship between Catholic influence and the development of machine politics.7 In the second place, the equation of Protestantism and secularism both overstates Protestant respect for religious freedom and understates Smith’s own commitment to secularity as a political principle. In some ways, secular suspicions of Smith’s 1928 candidacy illustrate the implicit Protestant bias that recent scholarship has seen in secular liberal models of a religiously neutral public sphere. Catholics like Smith were charged with a uniquely high burden to decry hypothetical ecclesiastical power even while Protestant institutions exercised actual religious hegemony in American politics. Because Protestantism represented a supposedly neutral standard of generic religiosity, many believed that a Christian nation in which civic institutions cultivated Protestant convictions was consistent with the separation of church and state. In her study of secular tropes in American literature, Tracy Fessenden focuses on this persistent tie between secular tolerance and Protestant hegemony: “In the United States, whose founding documents aimed to unite a presumptively (if discursively) Christian population under the mantle of religious tolerance, the rule of noninterference between religion and government, far from consigning all religions equally to the silent margins of the political, instead created the conditions for the dominance of an increasingly nonspecific Protestantism over nearly all aspects of American life, a dominance as pervasive as it is invisible for exceeding the domains we conventionally figure as religious.”8 In assessing the rhetoric that has connected religious neutrality, Protestant consensus, and American citizenship, Fessenden’s analysis contributes to a growing body of postcolonial scholarship that has sought to understand the discursive logic of secular models of religious freedom.9 According to Talal Asad, for example, the rhetoric of secularism not only prescribes religious neutrality but also participates in a normative politico-theological project that distinguishes between good and bad religiosity. This normative project is rarely acknowledged.

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Rather, secularism works to install historically contingent categories of religion and secular as self-evident bases for assessing religious neutrality and freedom. As he explains, “The point I would stress here is not merely that religion and the secular interpenetrate, but that (a) both are historically constituted, (b) this happens through accidental processes bringing together a variety of concepts, practices, and sensibilities, and (c) in modern society the law is crucially involved in defining and defending the distinctiveness of social spaces—especially the legitimate space for religion.”10 Smith’s secular politics affirms all three of these propositions.11 On the first point, the 1928 election was a contest over historically constituted definitions of religion and the secular in that while Smith and his critics all claimed to support the legal separation of church and state, they disagreed about how to define religious freedom. Furthermore, Smith’s arguments about religious freedom reflected historical developments in twentieth-century liberalism in which classical liberal conceptions of individual rights were revised in the face of practical concerns about institutional power and inequality. On the second point, Smith’s views about secular political institutions were shaped in distinctive ways by the ethnic, political, and religious sensibilities of New York’s Lower East Side. His defense of religious liberty overlapped with his defense of the ethnic identities and cultural habits of an immigrant, heterogeneous, urban working class. In terms of the law, the contingency of the religious and secular divide has both supported and undermined the equation of Protestantism and secularity. For example, Kevin M. Schultz has argued that Catholics and Jews in the 1950s drew on the rhetoric of the separation of church and state to challenge Protestant hegemony in the public schools.12 But the presence of Catholic support for secularism does not necessarily disprove the Protestant bias identified by postcolonial critics. It is possible that Catholics like Smith, while arguing for the separation of church and state on practical grounds, could still have been working with Protestant definitions of religion. The broader issue was whether official secularity was tied to a model of secular liberal citizenship that presumed that religious liberty was the exclusive province of self-owning, autonomous individuals. Following this logic, secularity not only demanded a religiously neutral public, but identified proper forms of private religiosity.

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I intend to show, however, that Smith was working with a concept of religious freedom that did not necessarily conform to Protestant assumptions and categories. Smith’s appropriation of the rhetoric of secularism was shaped in important ways by his experience as both a lay Catholic and active participant in machine politics. He reproduced the civic habits and assumptions of what the sociologist José Casanova describes as an “immigrant Catholic style”: “The immigrant Catholic style  . . . was based on the premise of the collective organization and mobilization of Catholics as a group—distinguishable from other groups by religion, class, and ethnicity—in order to advance their particular group interests.”13 Consistent with his social and religious experience, Smith’s religious freedom was not primarily about individual conscience. Rather, he saw religious identity in terms of institutional and communal loyalties.14 Thus, Smith’s arguments about the separation of church and state were shaped by a conception of religious identity at odds with classical liberal ideals that restrict freedom to individuals without consideration of the practical conditions under which freedom is exercised. Smith’s urban, working-class, Tammanyite, and Catholic sensibilities contributed to an argument for official legal separation that was suspicious of the equation of Protestant voluntarism and American citizenship. Smith saw such an equation as an un-American cover for religious bigotry and prejudice. In his practical assessment, arguments for individual freedom that excluded Catholic identity advanced the interests of a Protestant majority. To counter Protestant power, his argument for the separation of church and state held that secularism was not only a formal legal requirement for public institutions but also a personal ethos in which American citizens were expected to respect the religious identities of others. By condemning all religious criticism as bigotry that was unacceptable both in public and in private, Smith’s rhetoric rested on an identity politics that protected the collective loyalties of religious minorities. Smith’s brand of liberalism informed his characterization of religious bigotry as antithetical to American freedom.15 As governor, Smith had regulated the economy in a way consistent with John Dewey’s description of a liberal shift away from the absolute protection of property. As Dewey explained, “The economic and political changes for which [liberals] strove were so largely accomplished that they had become in turn

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the vested interest, and their doctrines, especially in the form of laissez faire liberalism, now provided the intellectual justification of the status quo.”16 To reform the status quo, the task of a reconstructed liberalism was to imagine social institutions with a commitment to substantive equality, and this, in turn, called for greater reflection on the historical contingency of existing ideological justifications for disparities of wealth and power. Smith’s critique of bigotry was an application of this critique to religious freedom. If bigotry was simply left alone, it threatened to produce social inequalities that restricted some citizens’ access to full participation in public life. While himself sympathetic to the third-party candidacy of Norman Thomas on the grounds that the Socialist Party could have done more for economic justice, Dewey still voted for Smith: “Mr. Smith’s record as Governor is proof of the fact that a humane and sympathetic spirit will at least color their treatment as far as his influence can extend.”17 A “humane and sympathetic spirit” indicated that Smith was willing to use government to advance the public good over and against powerful social and economic interests. Whatever the value of Smith’s secularism, it was informed by this liberal critique of entrenched power. Smith cited the separation of church and state to criticize the unequal status of Protestants and Catholics in public life in order to develop a pragmatic defense of the collective rights of minority religious communities. He claimed that his religious freedom was violated if American society contained unequal distributions of political power that favored certain religious groups. Thus, Smith’s experience as a Catholic did inflect his politics; but this was not because he was a docile pawn of the pope. Rather, his status as a member of a religious minority coupled with his advocacy of progressive liberal reform encouraged him to ask whether civic institutions were secular when overt bigotry or subtle prejudice excluded some citizens from active participation in public life. On this point, his practical political training affected his views on the relationship between religion and politics. Smith’s critics cited abstract matters of theological and ecclesiastical principle in which they argued that, hypothetically, the pope could make political demands on a Catholic president. Smith, as would be consistent with a Tammany politician, addressed the issue pragmatically. His question was not who could have power but who did have power. In Smith’s experience of twentieth-century America, Prot-

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estant anxieties that they would be excluded and marginalized on account of their religion seemed unrealistic and unfounded. Thus, he saw criticisms of Catholicism as part of a strategy to maintain the cultural and religious status quo. Rather than view Protestant individualism as a prerequisite for the separation of church and state, he saw disestablishment as a matter in which citizens were expected to maintain separate and nonconflicting institutional loyalties. Much like his paradoxical progressivism that combined machine politics and good government, Smith’s secularism managed to bring together communitarian religious and political loyalties with a progressive economy of religious freedom.

The Fundamental Faith of Every True American In a 1928 Oklahoma City campaign address, Smith responded to attacks on his Catholicism, stating that “nothing could be so out of line with the spirit of America. Nothing could be so foreign to the teachings of Jefferson. Nothing could be so contradictory of our whole history.”18 In Smith’s America, religion was a private matter in which the separation of church and state was “part of the fundamental faith of every true American.”19 Smith had complete confidence in the power of democracy in the hands of ordinary people. Thus, when confronted with the reality of popular anti-Catholic sentiment, he struggled to rationalize how the people could be misled to adopt such an un-American position. Reflecting on the 1928 campaign, his advisor Robert Moses explained, “Smith was curiously naïve about some things. He was quite unprepared for the burning crosses on the hillsides in the South and never got over them. He simply had not believed such things possible in his country.”20 From Smith’s perspective, religious freedom was woven into the “sacred heritage” of the American nation: “Let me remind the Democrats of this country that we belong to the party of that Thomas Jefferson whose proudest boast was that he was the author of the Virginia statute for religious freedom. Let me remind the citizens of every political faith that that statute of religious freedom has become a part of the sacred heritage of our land. The constitutional guaranty that there should be no religious test for public office is not a mere form of words. It represents the most vital principle that ever was given any people.”21 Smith’s invocation of the teachings of Jefferson in his Oklahoma City speech

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is ironic in light of Philip Hamburger’s argument that the rhetoric of separation was an outgrowth of anti-Catholicism: “Nativists and, more broadly, Protestants assumed that the separation of church and state limited Catholics in their relations with government but not Protestants, because whereas Catholics seemed to defer to their church and act on its behalf, Protestants presumably followed the dictates of their individual consciences and, in any case, belonged to diverse denominations.”22 Eventually, a secularist interpretation would extend the logic of the separation metaphor to call Protestant establishment into question, but this was a gradual process that was not fully realized until well into the twentieth century. In a brief aside, Hamburger tries to assimilate Smith to his thesis by arguing that the Catholic governor’s support for separation was a concession to nativist prejudice. In particular, Hamburger discusses a 1927 Atlantic Monthly article written by Charles C. Marshall. Marshall’s essay was not an overt work of religious bigotry but was framed as a scholarly study of canon law that focused on Catholic teachings about the ideal relationship between ecclesiastical and political institutions.23 Arguing that Catholic doctrine disparaged American principles of religious pluralism, Marshall asked Smith to clarify his relationship to papal authority. Hamburger states that “in accord with venerable Old World practices, these Protestants demanded that Smith renounce his allegiance to the pope. In the manner of the New World, they also required Smith to avow his faith in the tenets of Americanism, especially separation. Delicately avoiding a renunciation of the pope, Smith otherwise complied.”24 However, what Hamburger misses is that Smith would not have seen his defense of the separation of church and state as a concession to nativists because, in his experience, this was a principle that they did not follow. In his Oklahoma City speech, for example, Smith was clearly going on the offensive. According to Smith, the problem was that he believed in the separation of church and state whereas the Protestants of Middle America did not. What frustrated Smith was that so much of the electorate continued to look at the religious issue instead of at his exemplary record as fourterm governor of the nation’s largest state. To this end, he saw himself in common cause with other minorities who wanted the religious question removed from public debate. Therefore, it was natural that the Smith

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article that Hamburger cites was actually partially ghostwritten by Joseph Proskauer, one of the triumvirate of Smith’s Jewish advisors that included Belle Moskowitz and Robert Moses. In addition to working as a judge, Proskauer was active in organizations that fought anti-Semitism. The similarity between his arguments against anti-Catholicism and antiSemitism is compelling. In both cases, Proskauer, like Smith, believed that religious hatred was fundamentally at odds with democracy and American national virtue. As Proskauer stated when denouncing antiSemitism, “I plead here not merely or chiefly for the cause of the Jew—I plead the cause of America and civilization itself.”25 It should be noted that not everyone in Tammany Hall was happy with Smith’s choice of three middle- to upper-class Jews with Ivy League educations to serve as his closest advisors. As Robert A. Slayton explains, “This  . . . drove the old Irish pols of Tammany Hall batty, and they composed a revengeful ditty that ended with the nasty refrain, ‘And now the brains of Tammany Hall  . . . are Moskie and Proskie and Mo-ses [sic].’”26 Because Smith had paid his dues as a loyal member, however, he was now entitled to make the same demands as a powerful organization leader. Despite the composition of the ditty, there was little practical Tammany resistance to any decision Smith made in league with his progressive advisors. Ironically, loyalty and obedience, traits otherwise associated with a reactionary docility and intolerant Catholic provincialism, created the practical institutional conditions for forming alliances across religious and class lines.27 Originally, Smith had wanted to ignore Marshall’s article as a typical work of anti-Catholic bigotry that did not merit a response. Proskauer convinced Smith that, because of the erudite nature of Marshall’s piece and its placement in the Atlantic Monthly, a Catholic candidate for president would not be able to ignore it. Smith then wanted Proskauer to write and sign the response himself, to which Proskauer responded, “Well  . . . that would make a great hit—a Protestant lawyer challenges a Catholic candidate on an issue like this and the challenge is answered by a Jewish judge.”28 So Smith agreed to sign his name to the piece, and Proskauer wrote the work in consultation with Father Francis Duffy. Duffy was the famous chaplain of the “Fighting Sixty-Ninth,” also known as the “Irish Sixty-Ninth,” in World War I.29 Duffy’s fighting spirit and fierce patriotism were exemplified by an oft-quoted comment that he would take America’s side if the pope ever declared war against

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the United States. Like Smith, Duffy emphasized that his Irish Catholic identity only enhanced his patriotism and his tolerance for people of different religious and ethnic backgrounds: “I am a very Irish, very Catholic, very American person if anybody challenges my convictions. But normally, and left alone, I am just plain human. My appreciation of patriotism, or courage, or any other attractive human trait, is not limited in any degree by racial or religious or sectional prejudice.”30 Duffy saw no conflict between being “just plain human” and embracing collective ethnic, religious, or national loyalties. In describing his Irish, Catholic, and American identities as matters of “conviction,” he did not imply that he wanted others to share these convictions as much as he expected that everyone would have some analogous set of identities.31 When the essay, written by a Catholic modernist and a Jewish jurist, was finished, Proskauer approached Cardinal Patrick Hayes to see if it violated or misrepresented any tenets of Catholic doctrine. After Hayes gave his endorsement, Smith took a final look at the piece and added a few passages. Once published, the essay proved successful. While the arguments advanced in Smith’s name did little to change the mind of staunch nativists, they did convince many of the relatively liberal readers of the Atlantic Monthly that the religious issue in the 1928 campaign was primarily a matter of intolerance and bigotry. But while it is impossible to quantify how many people were persuaded by the article’s arguments, it is significant that Proskauer and Duffy framed the issue as a matter of social identity instead of theological conviction. Indeed, Marshall ended up defending himself against the charge that his theological criticisms were a polite cover for social prejudice. In some sense, Smith had always viewed anti-Catholicism as a symptom of social prejudice and bigotry. Throughout the 1920s, he had clashed with the mostly Protestant Women’s Christian Temperance Union and Anti-Saloon League over his criticism of Prohibition. One Presbyterian minister from Brooklyn made clear the connection between Prohibition and anti-Catholicism: “With a Roman Catholic President in power Rome will become the winner, and America will be run by Rome. This is the program. Rum and Romanism are leagued together to put this plan across.  . . . The good people must wake up and take united and energetic action at once or Prohibition and American democracy are doomed.”32 However, most criticism was more subtle and

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took the form of what Smith referred to as a “whispering campaign.” Instead of outright attacks on his Catholicism, mainstream discomfort with Smith’s candidacy often expressed itself in a concern over his lack of education and refinement, his Lower East Side mannerisms, or his affiliation with Tammany Hall. One of Smith’s supporters summarized this sentiment: There is a curious unholy alliance in this campaign between religious bigotry and social snobbery. Al Smith, it is said, is not a college graduate. He is provincial, his mental and political horizon being the borders of the state of New York. He is of humble origin and once worked in a fishmarket. His wife is not skilled in the social graces that are required of the “first lady of the land.”  . . . What has happened to the America which glorified in the progress of Jackson, Harrison, Lincoln and Garfield “from log cabin to White House”?  . . . The answer is obvious—the voters of this country  . . . are rationalizing their religious and social prejudices.33

Instead of a frontal attack on Catholicism, this implicit prejudice hinted at a number of markers of social identity that designated Smith as something different from the image that many had of an American president. Most notably, citing Smith’s purported fondness for alcohol in the age of Prohibition was a kind of code that voters used to identify Smith as foreign or irreligious without making the charge explicit. As Walter Lippmann explained, the focus on Smith’s wetness seemed out of proportion to the actual threat that a Smith presidency posed to the Eighteenth Amendment: “It is due  . . . I think, to a feeling among Governor Smith’s opponents that the rules of the game permit them to argue against Smith’s wetness with a freedom which is not possible in arguing about his religious associations. Prohibition is a legitimate public issue. The other objections to Governor Smith—his Catholicism, his immigrant origin, his personal variation from the traditional type of American presidents, his Tammany associations, his identification with New York—may have enormous weight with the voters, but cannot be discussed very much or very frankly.”34 In Smith’s view, Prohibition demonstrated how anti-Catholic prejudice could be enacted into law. It provided a respectable vehicle for attacking the cultural and political habits of Catholic immigrants without avowing religious bigotry. For

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example, as the New York superintendent of the Anti-Saloon League argued, “I am not attacking any Church as such  . . . or the religion of any sincere man or woman when I say that Tammany and the politicoecclesiastical combination that operates through Tammany will stop at nothing to do three things: first, make Al Smith President of the United States; second, overthrow Prohibition itself; and, third, destroy the civic influence of the churches responsible for Prohibition.”35 Smith had little patience for such disclaimers, especially when they attacked the “politico-ecclesiastical” organization of Tammany while trying to preserve the “civic influence” of the churches that sponsored Prohibition. In describing the opposition to his nomination at the 1924 Democratic convention, Smith stated, “The Klan and the anti-saloon forces in the convention were practically identical.”36 Thus, when Smith’s Oklahoma City speech brought the prejudices against him “out in the open,” he placed the religious issue at the center of the debates over Prohibition and his affiliation with Tammany Hall: “They know that this Tammany cry is an attempt to drag a red herring across the trail. I know what lies behind all this and I shall tell you. I specifically refer to the question of my religion.”37 To identify how subtle stereotypes and prejudices may have reflected anti-Catholic sentiment was one thing, but to couple this with a concern over religious freedom raised a more complex set of issues. By unmasking cultural snobbery as a red herring for anti-Catholic prejudice that violated American principles of the separation of church and state, Smith argued that an unacknowledged Protestant consensus that excluded religious minorities from active participation in public life amounted to an un-American religious establishment. Following this logic, coded cultural prejudice could itself contribute to a violation of religious liberty, even in cases in which there was no explicit attack on any one religion. Many political commentators and historians, while sympathizing with Smith as the target of religious bigotry, have wondered whether his classification of all criticism of the Catholic church as motivated by bigotry might have been unfair. As Donn C. Neal points out, Not everyone who raised these questions deserves the epithet of “bigot”; and not all criticism of the Catholic Church can be dismissed as misguided and intolerant. Many non-Catholics objected to a Catholic as

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president for what they regarded as political rather than religious reasons. The implications of the Church’s doctrines and policies for American secular society and certain incidents in the history of the Roman Catholic Church were genuinely disturbing to these critics of Catholicism. Among them were well-informed people whose criticism was reasoned and dignified and who preferred to seek assurances that would allay their misgivings about a Catholic presidential candidate rather than to proscribe one automatically.38

While Neal’s point makes sense, especially in light of contemporary attempts by the church hierarchy to influence Catholic politicians on issues like abortion, the question remains about what assurances Smith’s supposedly liberal and benign critics were demanding in 1928. The fact that the superintendent of the Anti-Saloon League saw no contradiction in his concern over the religious encroachments of Catholics in political life and his own conviction that the civic influence of Protestant churches needed to be upheld illustrates a double standard that typically faced religious and other minority groups. While there were legitimate concerns over the influence of the Catholic church in political life, Catholics bore a uniquely high burden when defending themselves against charges that they were mixing religion and politics. To illustrate this, it may be helpful to compare Smith to his opponent, Herbert Hoover. The irony in the charge that Smith would be unable to uncouple religious and political commitments was that Hoover was a member of the Society of Friends. Quakers, to a greater degree than Catholics in the United States, had a history of breaking the law in order to follow the dictates of their consciences. But many of the same people who attacked Smith saw no need to worry that Hoover would be able to reconcile his personal religious commitments and his fidelity to his oath of public office. For example, one southern judge who attacked the ability of any Catholic to rule a Protestant country argued that Hoover would be able to bracket his religious beliefs when in office: “[Covington] defended Hoover against those who question what he would do, as a Quaker, in the event of war if he should be elected president. [He] said that Sergeant Alvin York, hero of the world war, is a Quaker, and that ‘the president does not tote a gun in the case of war.’”39 What this reveals is a common double standard in which reli-

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gious, racial, and cultural minorities are expected to placate the majority while the majority are not required or expected to reciprocate. H. L. Mencken, one of Smith’s biggest fans during the 1928 campaign, summarized this double standard: In their inflammatory warnings to their customers the parsons describe a Catholic Church which, in theory and practice, is precisely like their own churches. It pretends to the same right to the obedience of its communicants, the same right to dictate to public officers, the same infallible authority in all matters of morals. It is in politics, as they describe it, exactly as they themselves are in politics. If it triumphs, then it will seize and exercise the power that is now theirs. They prefer mightily to keep that power themselves. They are against the Pope until the last galoot’s ashore. They hate him as Mussolini hates a Communist, and for the same reason.40

The Catholic Citizen Father John A. Ryan, a theologian who was frequently called upon to articulate the American Catholic position that the church posed no threat to democratic institutions, explained that it was possible that church teachings could conceivably come into a conflict with an immoral law and that a Catholic would be forced to make a decision between religious and political authority. This potential choice, however, was a problem that faced anyone who had religious convictions: The Catholic citizen is not in an essentially different position from the non-Catholic who rejects the principle that the state can do no wrong. In both cases the decision will finally be made by the citizen’s conscience. In forming his conscience, that is, in considering what decision a right conscience ought to make, the non-Catholic citizen will pursue a somewhat different course from the Catholic. He will consult the minister of his denomination, perhaps, or his Bible or some other person or book. The good Catholic will consult his bishop or priest, or authoritative works on ethics. In the end each will be compelled to decide the question for himself in the light of what help he has received and according to his own best judgment, that is, according to his conscience.41

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Ryan did bring up a significant difference, although a theological one. Both Protestants and Catholics made decisions based on conscience, but their consciences were shaped differently. Catholics did indeed owe allegiance to ecclesiastical authority in religious matters. The capacity of Catholics to honor the separation of church and state did not imply that they had autonomous individual consciences following a Protestant model. For Smith’s critics, the very existence of a foreign hierarchical allegiance proved that Catholics lacked the independence necessary to participate competently in democratic life. Ryan argued that the separation of church and state encouraged democratic participation regardless of where religious allegiances lay. In other words, what was at stake in the argument over religious disestablishment was to what extent disestablishment mandated a particular form of religious adherence. Because Smith insisted that religion had no place in politics, he did not articulate the theological convictions that drove his interests in social reform. Indeed, he could not have done so even if he wanted, since he knew very few details about what the church actually taught. As Neal points out, “Smith was a devout and a dedicated Roman Catholic, but he knew nothing about theology and did not question his faith; his daughter describes his faith as ‘almost childlike.’ He could not explain why meat was forbidden on Fridays, and he was dumbfounded by the ‘enclickycals’ that he was called upon to defend in 1927. His knowledge and acceptance of Christianity was as simple and literal as that of any fundamentalist.”42 For this reason, historians of American Catholicism like John McGreevy have tended to see him as peripheral to Catholic discourse: “Smith developed his ideas in concert with an eclectic mix of Democratic reformers, not Fordham Jesuits.”43 While this is certainly true, Smith’s Catholicism actually may have been more representative of the mass of American Catholics than were the beliefs of Fordham Jesuits. According to Garry Wills, “In 1928, when Al Smith became the first Catholic to run for president of the United States, he was asked about certain anti-democratic statements in papal documents. He said he had never heard of the documents. Neither had most American Catholics. We thought our duty to the Pope was discharged when we learned the catechism and donated to the annual ‘Peter’s Pence’ drive for the Vatican.”44 In this way, Smith provided an excellent example of how a devout lay Catholic understood his relationship to American public life. His

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secularism on political matters and lack of theological education did not in any way imply that he was a halfhearted or lapsed Catholic. He attended daily mass, sent all of his children to parochial school, and was loyal to the Catholic hierarchy. So how should Smith’s Catholicism be understood in relation to his demands for religious liberty? What was it that the separation of church and state was supposed to protect? These are complex questions if Smith’s religious convictions are not best described as intellectual commitments made by an individual conscience. The liberty that Smith defended was not a personal autonomy that was free from all institutional constraints. For example, Smith related the story of one conversation over dinner on a Friday night with the Republican Frank Munsey in which Smith explained that he would not be able to eat meat: “He asked me why and I said that my church prohibited eating meat on Friday. He wanted to know why it was prohibited and I told him that I could not answer that but that if it made no difference to him I would prefer to have fish.”45 Smith’s refusal to eat meat on Friday was not a matter of theological reflection. He was not embarrassed by his inability to explain the rationale behind his behavior because it was not the kind of thing that a lay Catholic like himself would need to know. Eating fish on Friday was what Catholics did. The act of eating fish marked a Catholic’s identity and his loyalty to the church. Thus, when Smith was challenged to explain how he could reconcile his candidacy for the presidency with papal encyclicals that decried the Americanist heresy, Smith had no idea what his critics were talking about. According to Proskauer, this was part of the reason why Smith did not want to respond to Marshall’s Atlantic Monthly piece. Proskauer quoted Smith as saying, “Joe, to tell you the truth, I’ve read it; but I don’t know what the words mean. I’ve been a devout Catholic all my life and I never heard of these bulls and encyclicals and books that he writes about. They have nothing to do with being a Catholic.”46 It should be clear that this was not in any way an anticlerical sentiment. Smith was completely deferential to the theological and religious authority of the Catholic hierarchy and, in many ways, was in awe of people with a great deal of book learning. What Smith meant was not that papal bulls had no religious authority but that a lay Catholic such as himself had no obligation to come to an independent intellectual agree-

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ment with church teachings. At one point in the Atlantic Monthly piece in which Smith’s own voice comes through, he explained that “so little are these matters of the essence of my faith that I, a devout Catholic since childhood, never heard of them until I read your letter.”47 In some sense, this passivity in the face of ecclesiastical authority was precisely what nativists and Protestant liberals were worried about. If Smith was following church teachings that he did not understand uncritically, his intellectual independence was in question. But in Smith’s view, separating religious and political loyalties did not imply that one did away with loyalty altogether. Indeed, in the ethos Smith learned through his Tammany political affiliation and his Catholic religiosity, any person who ignored personal and organizational loyalties would be politically and morally suspect.

Being a Catholic Identifying what Smith meant by “being a Catholic” brings up some difficult methodological problems. The problems revolve around the reality that Smith was not himself a systematic religious thinker and spoke little and wrote less about what he meant when stating that bulls and encyclicals had nothing to do with being a Catholic. There are several responses to this. First, one could concede that the question is unanswerable. Because Smith did not himself provide a constructive explanation of his Catholic identity, it lies beyond the ability of the historian to draw any conclusions. This is more or less the status quo in scholarly accounts of Smith’s religion. While there is a great deal of work about anti-Catholicism in the 1928 campaign, there has been less of an attempt to reconstruct Smith’s own faith. A second option is to be suspicious of Smith’s claims to be ignorant of encyclicals. As an altar boy, a product of Catholic schools, and a daily participant in mass, he would have had to know more about the teachings of the church than he admitted. Following this reasoning, because it was politically useful and expedient to disavow any place of Catholicism in his political thinking, Smith may have been projecting a false naïveté that historians should be wary of taking at face value. Thus, the Atlantic Monthly piece as well as Smith’s other statements about religious freedom should be read as a rhetorical strategy designed to placate Protestants without altering his

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own Catholic commitments.48 A third option is to discount the role of Catholicism because, while he may have been an active participant in church life, his lack of knowledge of church teachings limits the impact of his Catholic practice on his political thinking and conceptions of religious liberty. I reject all three options. While the first may appear initially to be historically responsible, it is not satisfactory from the perspective of the history of religions. Assessing the role of religious identity in the public sphere requires some attempt to reconstruct the cultural logic of Smith’s Catholic identity, even if this means offering interpretations that go beyond his own explanations of his religion. On the second question of whether Smith may have projecting a false naïveté that should not be taken at face value, there is no record or statement that indicates that Smith had any theological acuity that would surpass the general knowledge possessed by the average lay Catholic with an eighth-grade education. Of course, Smith had a grasp of the intricacies of government that was far in advance of his education, but this was something he learned on the job. Furthermore, the statement that Smith had never heard of an encyclical occurred in a private conversation recorded by Smith’s friends and family. The public response to Marshall that Smith signed was full of allusions to papal documents and the Catholic Encyclopedia. Rather than project a false naïveté, Smith wanted to show that he knew his church’s teachings and was somewhat flustered and embarrassed that he had not read more. Therefore, it was inconsistent with other public statements for him to record in his biography that he did not know the reason why Catholics ate fish if he in fact knew the answer to the question. The third option, that Smith’s insufficient grasp of his church’s teaching makes him largely irrelevant to Catholic history, would disqualify most American Catholics. Equating Catholicism with knowledge of Catholic theology evades complex questions of what constitutes religious identity. To reconstruct some of Smith’s Catholic identity in order to understand how it might have informed his views on the separation of church and state, it may be helpful to consider the role of the neighborhood and parish. Born on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in 1873, Smith described the neighborhood of his youth as a place where everyone knew their neighbors, helped each other through hard times, attended every

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wake and funeral, and incessantly debated politics. The neighborhood was far more than an accident of geography. For working-class urban Catholics in the late nineteenth century, the local parish endowed the neighborhood with a quasi-sacred quality. As Smith’s daughter would later write about the neighborhood in which she and her father were brought up: “The church naturally formed, as it still does, the heart and center of the parish, and in that compact neighborhood it was an intimate part of our daily lives.”49 As McGreevy has argued in his work on popular Catholicism, one of the distinguishing marks of American Catholics was their practice of ordering geographic and social space religiously. Whereas most non-Catholics made decisions about which church to attend based on some kind of theological or personal preference, all Catholics were assigned a parish based on where they lived. Catholic parishes helped to set boundaries between neighborhoods, and parish priests encouraged a strong identification between location and religious community. As McGreevy explains, “The Catholic parish itself, because of its size and community base, helped define what neighborhood would mean. For the parishioners, the neighborhood was all-Catholic, given the cultural ghetto constructed by the parish. Invisible to census takers (and later historians) concerned solely with ethnicity and class, Catholics enacted this religiously informed neighborhood identity through both ritual and physical presence.”50 This localism helped to instill a sense that religious identity was something with which people were born, and it was therefore not easily uncoupled from other forms of identification like family, ethnicity, or even political affiliation. As one of Smith’s supporters explained, “People are members of [Tammany] by neighborly association—I was about to say, almost by the accident of birth. In a sense it is like a large family or clan life, full of mistakes and worse, but also full of sympathy, effective helpfulness, and an intensely realistic understanding of what is practical. Before the social psychologists got busy in their interpretations, Tammany Hall practiced what later the sociologists taught.”51 In addition to their brand of social psychology, Tammany sachems and Catholic priests subscribed to a similar kind of organizational sociology. Outsiders often cast the institutional authority of Tammany Hall or the Catholic church in terms of unyielding discipline that could tolerate no internal diversity. In practice, however, much of the survival of hierarchical organizations

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depends upon their (sometimes hidden) institutional flexibility. An organization composed of everyone assigned to it (such as everyone living within a parish or political precinct) will, by necessity, have a different character from one made up of like-minded people. Tammany leaders, like the Catholic hierarchy, did depend on loyalty, but they also tacitly recognized that not everyone would agree on every issue. Consequently, symbolic displays of deference to authority satisfied the conditions of membership because such formal gestures signified a willingness to work within institutional constraints. People had to learn to accept their place within the institutional order. The neighborhood, with its multiple forms of collective identity, was the training ground where they learned and internalized the habits, practices, and idioms of institutional discipline. The morality of loyalty depended upon people who did not “forget where they came from.” For Smith, then, being a Catholic implied loyalty to one’s neighborhood and upbringing. As Father Ryan pointed out, the Catholic conscience was not the product of an autonomous individual but was formed in deference to ecclesiastic authority and in communion with other Catholics. While most American Catholics did not read Ryan’s arguments, their sense of a collective conscience was reinforced by their social experience. This has implications not only for Smith’s commitment to his Catholicism but also for his sense of how the separation of church and state worked. Smith’s understanding of religious freedom was not reduced to individual choices; it included institutional and communitarian loyalties. A conception of freedom that was divorced from the realities of institutional power would be politically irrelevant. In other words, a serious commitment to religious freedom required Americans to respect the cultural and religious integrity of groups. As a Tammany member, Smith respected the church hierarchy’s expectation of organizational discipline. But this was less because he lacked the intellect to think outside of institutional constraints than because he saw loyal membership in strong organizations as a practical prerequisite for getting things done. For that matter, the parish priests who Smith knew prided themselves on just such practical skills of institution building. Part of this practicality meant recognizing that the representatives of church and state had to respect each other’s institutional territory. Thus, part of Smith’s deference to the church hierarchy involved a recip-

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rocal obligation for priests and bishops to understand that giving political orders to an elected official violated the proper division of authority. To grasp Smith’s view of the proper relationship between religion and politics, it is necessary to consider how loyalty functioned as a religious and political value. From the perspective of progressive reformers, personal loyalties smacked of corrupt favors and distracted from disinterested concern for the broader public good. But to Tammany Hall, loyalty was a measure of one’s ability to work within the organization to achieve collective goals. Disloyalty marked the moral weakness of a selfish person who betrayed his family, friends, and benefactors. A loyal person was someone who remembered where he came from and took care of the people who helped him along the way. As one of Smith’s supporters explained, Smith’s continued allegiance to Tammany had to be understood in this context: “Now Smith was brought up with this crowd. And he is loyal to it as he is loyal to his family, to his church, to his neighborhood, to his city, and to his State.”52 Like many divergences between Tammany and bourgeois progressivism, machine politics emphasized relationships between human beings as opposed to the invocation of abstract principles of reform. For Smith, therefore, the religious issue was itself a test of loyalty. As David Burner noted, “It may be pointed out that the display of an autographed picture of the Pope in Smith’s Albany office, for example, falls outside the scope of religious duty. Yet even here, Al Smith’s conscience might have equated the least coyness in the affirmation of his faith with moral cowardice.”53 Of course, this close association between political and religious loyalty might pose a problem for the separation of church and state in that the neighborhood that is the basis for political participation was so closely tied to religious identity. From Smith’s perspective, this was simply a fact of social and political life. He understood, for example, that the people of Oklahoma City would have their own set of cultural and religious identities. When Smith described his views about state sovereignty, for example, he cited the role of local allegiances in the American polity: “In the formation of the Union our forefathers in their wisdom understood that with our vast area and its heterogeneous population with their varying local interests what may be sound local policy in one community may be entirely inappropriate to the needs of another.”54 Smith’s view of American citizenship did not demand a removal of local

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identities. Rather, it implied willingness to work with and support people from different backgrounds. Everyone should be from some kind of neighborhood in the sense that all citizens should be brought up within local religious and civic institutions. From Smith’s perspective, what was unreasonable about nativist demands for religious and cultural conformity was that it was asking people to be something other than what they were. This would be like forcing the Protestants of Oklahoma City to become New York Catholics. For Smith, this was incoherent because American citizenship was learned within local political institutions. To this end, Smith found it perfectly reasonable for Protestants and Jews to defend their own religious loyalties so long as all were accorded an equal place in American life. Because local political power depended upon the ability to read and respond to the diverse needs of constituents, political operatives prized an intimate knowledge of everything that was happening within their territory. Smith’s mastery of the neighborhood was the first step in his political education: “He knew everybody—and everybody knew him: the decent people, who made up the bulk of the neighborhood’s population,  . . . the gangsters such as Chick Tricker and Eat ’Em Up Jack McManus and Indian Louie, whom he would meet in the Bowery hot spots or on the fringes of Chinatown.”55 One irony of Smith’s intense localism, then, was that it instilled a kind of practical cosmopolitanism. Of course, not everyone from the Lower East Side was so affirming of ethnic and religious differences. But whether through conflict or cooperation, New Yorkers had to live within heterogeneous social spaces. As Moses pointed out, “Smith grew to manhood in a decent home in the midst of alternately shivering and sweltering humanity in ancient rat-infested rookeries in the swarming, anonymous, polyglot East Side, an international center before the U.N. was dreamed of. It was the ‘old neighborhood’ where souls and bodies were saved by the parish priest, the family doctor and the local political saloonkeeper and boss who knew everyone and was the link between the exploited immigrant and the incomprehensible distant law.”56 My point here is not to defend Smith’s implicit view of the separation of church and state. Rather, I am trying to understand the logic behind the rhetoric that equated Protestant religious hegemony with un-Americanism and how this complicates a genealogy of secular lib-

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eralism. Smith was in effect arguing that loyalty to where one was from and how one was brought up was protected under the umbrella of religious freedom. The logic of this position blurred the separation of church and state with the agenda of encouraging cultural differences. This was a particularly powerful rhetoric if social and cultural snobbery could be exposed and dismissed as a “red herring” for religious bigotry. The implication of this argument was that demand for cultural homogeneity was itself un-American. Smith’s defense of his right to be both Catholic and president could be the basis of an argument for the normative value of diversity and the protection of the rights of minority groups. Smith and his Catholic and Jewish advisors were calling for something more ambitious than formal legal tolerance of religious minorities. Arguing that the separation of church and state implies an active respect for religious and cultural difference comes a long way from classical liberal arguments about the practicality of religious toleration. As Hamburger points out, the Constitution does not say anything that would prohibit individual citizens from making political choices and decisions based upon the tenets of their faith. In this logic, there was nothing explicitly unconstitutional about having a personal preference for an Episcopalian or a Methodist president based on a heartfelt belief that the values and beliefs of Episcopalians or Methodists corresponded to one’s own. Many of Smith’s defenders, however, claimed that the Constitution prohibited this kind of preference. For example, when the assistant attorney general Mabel Walker Willebrandt called on Methodist ministers in Ohio to campaign for Hoover from the pulpit, the editors of Commonweal argued that she was violating her oath of office: “Mrs. Willebrandt  . . . is, as an officer of the United States government, sworn to uphold the constitution of the United States, which says that ‘No religious test shall be required as a qualification for any office or trust under the United States.’  . . . [However], she called upon the Methodist ministers of the country to use their pulpits in a fight for one presidential candidate against another.”57 Commonweal did not claim that Willebrandt said that Smith should not be allowed to take his oath of office because he was a Catholic. Rather, a public official displaying a religious preference was sufficient to violate the separation of church and state. Smith made a similar argument:

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Our forefathers, in their wisdom, seeing the danger to the country of a division on religious issues, wrote into the Constitution of the United States in no uncertain words the declaration that no religious test shall ever be applied for public office, and it is a sad thing in 1928, in view of the countless billions of dollars that we have poured into the cause of public education, to see some American citizens proclaiming themselves to be 100 per cent American, and in the document that makes that proclamation suggesting that I be defeated for the presidency because of my religious belief.58

Smith was arguing that American citizenship, if properly understood, was antithetical to personal religious prejudice. Following Smith’s logic, the separation of church and state was itself a value that made active and positive demands on citizens’ personal convictions about the role of religion in political life. It was not enough for the state to ensure the free exercise of Catholicism and to prevent a formal Protestant establishment. Each citizen must reproduce the separation of church and state by refusing to allow religious prejudice to influence his or her political thinking. As one of Smith’s supporters argued, “Officers are required to take an oath to support the Constitution. Natural born citizens are not required to take such oath. But, whether required or not, it is, and ought to be, the duty of every office holder and every American citizen to support the Constitution and the whole Constitution, and when any office holder or voter denies the eligibility of a candidate to office because of his religion, he is indirectly, if not directly, offending both the letter and the spirit of our fundamental law. He is nullifying it.”59 What was at stake for Smith was a broader principle than the protection of the rights of religious minorities, as he described the effects of religious bigotry: “The Catholics of the country can stand it. The Jews can stand it. Our citizens born under foreign skies can stand it. But the United States of America cannot stand it.”60 For America to live up to its ideals, mere religious toleration was insufficient. Catholics and Jews had to be equal partners in political life. To be clear, Smith was by no means a constitutional lawyer. What I am getting at here is not so much a coherent and systematic legal theory as a visceral and intuitive sense of what was implied by religious freedom. While he drew on legal language, his primary concern was deflecting implicit and explicit anti-Catholic argu-

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ments in order to win a national election. To this end, Smith employed secular arguments to mount an expansive defense of his political, ethnic, cultural, and religious sensibilities.

Secularism and Collective Privacy Smith was, of course, not entirely successful in making his case. But importantly for the argument of this chapter, he did succeed in converting many liberals. But while much of the liberal tradition has focused on limiting the power of the state and protecting the formal legal rights of property-owning individuals, Smith’s liberalism was increasingly fused with a demand that all Americans gain substantive access to full participation in civic institutions. Following this idea, Smith’s supporters argued that the election of a Catholic president would itself be a progressive political development because it would advance the cause of religious inclusion. The success of this argument can be seen in the frustration of Theodore Schroeder, a strong critic of Smith: “There is also a type of excited ‘liberalism,’ sometimes adhering to papal candidates, that cannot be explained except on a basis of a psychoneurotic affliction. Such sentimental liberalism often likens the political situation of Catholics to that of Jews.”61 While Schroeder rejected the analogy between Catholics and Jews, many were convinced that anti-anti-Catholicism was a principle of liberal reform. Thus, we may need to reconsider some contemporary scholarly assumptions about secularism in light of Smith’s defense of collective identity and institutional loyalty. While he was personally religious, Smith’s insistence on disestablishment followed a secularist logic in that he insisted that the public sphere should be free from particular religious prejudices and endorsements. But this complicates genealogies of secularism that trace its roots to Protestant voluntarism. In Asad’s discussion of the conflict between the Kantian public sphere and Islamic ideas of communal criticism, for example, he argues that the liberal public sphere favors a particular form of religion: “We have the construction of religion as a new historical object: anchored in personal experience, expressible as belief-statements, dependent on private institutions, and practiced in one’s spare time.”62 Smith and his advisors, however, advanced a conception of privacy that defended the distinctiveness of

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groups and did not need to refashion religious commitments in terms of personal experience or belief statements. While Smith did see religion as a private institution, his did not consider this privacy as mandating a commitment to individual autonomy free from institutional constraints. Unquestioning obedience to institutional authority was persistently cited as the reason why no Catholic could faithfully execute the office of president. But, ironically, Smith’s uncritical loyalty to the church was the basis for his argument that religious matters could be rigorously separated from political questions. Furthermore, Smith attacked any attempt to bring these issues into public debate, claiming that this was an illegitimate intrusion into his privacy. His categorical dismissal of questions about his allegiance to the pope closed off the possibility of public theological criticism and scrutiny. In this way, secularism may have actually served to create a hermetic seal around communitarian religious commitments. Secularity does not always break down collective loyalty in favor of individual choice; it can also be relatively compatible with identity politics. In conclusion, none of this is to argue that classical liberal conceptions of individual privacy played no role in shaping secular discourse. Indeed, the equation of individual voluntarism and secular liberalism was a commonplace among Smith’s critics, and Smith himself recognized that he was a religious minority fighting an uphill battle. The point is that the historical contingency of secular categories allowed for creative appropriations of the rhetoric of secularism and that this was made possible by competing visions of liberal freedom and in this way invoked an alternative economy of religious freedom. In the particular institutional context of the United States in the 1920s, Catholics and Jews were scolding Protestants for their inability to live up to secular ideals. In important ways, Smith’s attempt to unmask the religiously specific character of secular attacks on Catholicism anticipated contemporary postcolonial critiques of secularity. In this sense, Smith’s progressive rhetoric of religious freedom might offer some contribution to what William Connolly has described as “a critical liberalism that both expands and thickens the range of secularism.”63

6

Do You Hate Me? Malcolm X and the Truth Truth is on the side of the oppressed today; it’s against the oppressor. You don’t need anything else. —Malcolm X

In July 1959, public broadcasting aired a documentary about the Nation of Islam (NOI) titled The Hate That Hate Produced.1 The documentary, the work of journalists Louis Lomax and Mike Wallace, was preoccupied with the subject of hate. Within American liberalism, racial hatred was an un-American pathology that required an explanation. The documentary’s explanation was that NOI was itself a creation of white racism. Lomax and Wallace’s ambiguous condemnation of NOI was a curious inversion of the rhetoric of American religious freedom. While NOI members were guilty of hatred, it was not exactly their fault. They were so imprisoned by racism that they lacked the freedom to choose hatred. Religious hate, unlike other religious choices, was not really a choice at all. Some observers wondered whether a movement with NOI’s racial and political agenda should be called a religion. Described as a “voodoo cult” in the earliest scholarly study in 1938, NOI saw scholars call its religiosity into question.2 In his landmark book that appeared a couple years after The Hate That Hate Produced, C. Eric Lincoln asserted that the sources for NOI’s appeal were primarily sociological and not religious. As Lincoln explained, “Although the Black Muslims call their movement a religion, religious values appear to have secondary importance. They are not part of the movement’s basic appeal, except to the extent that they foster and strengthen the sense of group solidarity.”3 This was an odd claim as many social theorists argue that one of the functions of religious movements is to foster and strengthen group solidarity. This thesis made sense if sources of social cohesion were religious only when 113

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they affirmed prevailing social norms. While the cult and religion distinction would eventually lose traction among scholars, many continued to distinguish between the heterodox theology of NOI and Sunni Islam.4 Scholarship on African American Islam has challenged this distinction as well.5 Aminah Beverly McCloud has argued for NOI’s Islamic character because of its adherence to core tenets of Islam: “African-American Islamic expressions have maintained the Islamic notions of social justice, absolute faith in one God, and willingness to assert Islam in the face of all odds—even against the American government and its enemies.”6 Edward Curtis asserts that the “indigenous nature of Islamization” requires scholars to look at the variety of ways different groups identify themselves as Muslim: “The mere fact that these persons decided to call themselves Muslims represents a dramatic break with the past; in the context of an African-American culture defined by Christian institutions, language, symbols, rituals, and doctrines, these human beings crossed a key social boundary.”7 Arguments about whether NOI is really a religion or really Islam say a great deal about the potency of religious freedom. Identifying as a religion provides a legitimate vehicle for groups to express differences.8 NOI’s focus on race, however, imperiled this legitimacy. Like the producers of The Hate That Hate Produced, NOI adherents believed that racism limited free choices. In NOI’s teaching, however, white Americans were unable to be liberated from their racial identities. Imprisoned by their devilish nature, white people could do nothing to prevent the coming apocalyptic fall of America. Unapologetic racial determinism was so foreign to liberal ideas of freedom that NOI made sense only as a hate group. Malcolm X’s staunch critique of American inequality faced hostility for a number of reasons. Many resisted his deterministic view of whiteness. He asserted that to be white was to be implicated in a history of oppression that could not be transcended through individual choices. This troubled those who expected their support for civil rights to absolve them from responsibility for the structural conditions of racism.9 According to the popular Catholic mystic Thomas Merton, the civil rights struggle promised to save white people if they had the humility to accept the invitation: “The Negro (especially the Christian Negro of the heroic stamp of Dr. King) is offering the white man a ‘message of salvation,’ but the white man is so

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blinded by his self-sufficiency and self-conceit that he does not recognize the peril in which he puts himself by ignoring the offer.”10 Merton hoped for transformations modeled after religious conversions. A convert to antiracism should confess and be forgiven. He lamented that Martin Luther King, Jr.’s critics offered no such salvation; the black Muslim movement was a militant threat that reduced King’s spiritual strength to weak sentimentalism: “Unfortunately, not all Negroes can appreciate the Christian foundation of non-violent action as it is practised by the followers of Dr. King. Many northern Negro leaders, and especially the organizers of the Black Muslim movement, categorically reject Dr. King’s ideas as sentimental.”11 If the refusal to save white people was spiritually impoverished, it followed that Malcolm X’s break with NOI was a sign of spiritual growth. Therefore, many welcomed Malcolm X’s conversion to Sunni Islam toward the end of his life. A reviewer in the New York Times described the change as a “spiritual transformation that allowed him to transcend his hate.”12 In this interpretation, Malcolm X moved away from hatred and toward Islamic values of universal brotherhood and equality; his trip to Mecca freed him from racial essentialism. Malcolm X’s conversion from NOI to “orthodox” Islam was taken to vindicate liberal convictions about the causes and cures of racism; the last year of his life was fashioned to promote inclusive religiosity as the antidote to structural inequality. His apparent transcendence promised that white Americans could be saved. Malcolm X resisted this spiritual economy by refusing to take responsibility for saving white America. His life offers several lessons about the limits of liberal religious freedom. First, he drew attention to how abstract ideals of freedom and equality were in tension with reality. On this point, he shared some aspects of modern liberalism’s recognition that abstract legal rights failed to address substantive social and economic inequality. Second, he criticized sympathetic liberalism as part of the problem. This critique marked a more definitive departure from the liberal tradition. Malcolm X taught that well-intentioned people who hoped for the end of racism reproduced structural inequalities in ways that differed little from conservatives. Indeed, NOI supporters entertained the idea that the “separate but equal” logic of segregationists might offer a more honest appraisal of the reality of racial divisions in American life. Third,

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he chided liberalism’s failure to come to terms with the violence inherent in politics, especially in the role of revolutionary violence in the constitution of democratic states. This led him to look outside of the United States for practical models of revolutionary political change.

America’s Conscience The Hate That Hate Produced drew a sharp contrast between supposed black Muslim hate and Christian love. The first statements made by Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad in the documentary proclaimed the failure of Christianity. Attacks on Christianity only reinforced the perception of NOI’s pathological character. White liberals were not the only ones who saw NOI’s turn from Christianity as symptomatic of American racism. King described NOI as fueled by “bitterness and hatred” and saw it as a movement “made up of people who have lost faith in America, who have absolutely repudiated Christianity, and have concluded that the white man is an incurable ‘devil.’”13 While King was unsparing in his critique of racism, to see the white man as incurable was to give up hope in progress. King had faith that even those who comfortably accepted racial inequality had consciences that could be stirred if compelled to confront evil. The white devil doctrine led to charges of reverse racism. Describing his first reaction to hearing a black Muslim teach on a street corner in Harlem, Lomax recounted how he was “struck by the inverse racism in everything the speaker said. I knew full well that if some white speaker had taken to a street corner platform to say similar things about Negroes there would have been hell to pay and I would gladly be among those who dished it out.”14 While the mixed apology of The Hate That Hate Produced ameliorated NOI’s responsibility for its hatred, it reinforced liberal convictions that racism was an interior sentiment. While liberals might concede that racial inequality had social and political causes, liberal antiracism hoped to cure inequality by emancipating individuals from social forces. Asking people to choose between love and hate, liberalism appealed to the private virtues of tolerant citizens.15 While liberals focused on fixing racist persons, critics of structural inequality asserted that the problem was political. As James Baldwin explained, “Color is not a human or personal reality; it is a political reality.”16

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The most confrontational tenets of NOI taught that racism was not foreign to American life but was part of the normal order of things. In their early proselytizing work in Detroit, NOI’s founder W. D. Fard and Elijah Muhammad synthesized theology and biology to account for the pervasive power of whiteness. In the story of a mad scientist named Yacub, NOI explained that the origins of white devils accounted for their innate moral inferiority and political dominance. Offering a theological explanation of racial origins, NOI made theories about race into religious tenets.17 According to Malcolm X, racial theology was not an eccentric feature of NOI. Race was a religious matter regardless of whether this was made explicit. This was as true for Christianity as it was for Islam. As he asserted, “Some of you may say, ‘I came up here to listen to some religion, about Islam, but now all I hear you talk about is black.’ We don’t separate our color from religion. The white man doesn’t. The white man never separated Christianity from white, nor has he separated the white man from Christianity.”18 By preaching a pie-in-the-sky message of compensation in an afterlife for the sufferings of this world, Christianity served a white supremacist agenda that undercut efforts for social and economic improvement. As Muhammad explained, “Christianity offers you a salvation after death. You must go down into the earth and rot. That kind of salvation I don’t want. I will not give you two cents for it. Any man that will work hard all his life praying to God to take and give him a home beyond the grave is a fool.”19 Malcolm X questioned whether Christian appeals to conscience did any good. King’s faith in the “conscience of the community” taught that racism was a distortion of human character. Racial animosity would lose its appeal when brought out in the open.20 Malcolm X thought this was a flawed concept: “Don’t change the white man’s mind—you can’t change his mind, and that whole thing about appealing to the moral conscience of America—America’s conscience is bankrupt.”21 Racism did not exist despite people’s consciences but because of people’s bankrupt consciences. Appeals to inner convictions offered no solution. In response to a question about the morality of white people, he answered, “Until the problem is solved, we’re not interested in anybody’s moral nature.”22 While King saw racism as a social evil that distorted people’s true natures, Malcolm X thought liberalism was the real distortion. If anything, social conventions rewarded people for pretending they were

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not racist. When challenged, white liberals revealed their true selves. As he recounted, “Snakes couldn’t have turned on me faster than the white liberal.”23 The Autobiography is full of well-intentioned people who nevertheless reproduced the structural logic of inequality. Reflecting on how he became a ward of the state as a child, Malcolm X remembered a judge who hearkened back to slavery when he took an African American woman’s family from her: “A white man in charge of a black man’s children! Nothing but legal, modern slavery—however kindly intentioned.”24 As he further explained, “This is the sort of kindly condescension which I try to clarify today, to these integration-hungry Negroes, about their ‘liberal’ white friends, these so-called ‘good white people’—most of them anyway. I don’t care how nice one is to you; the thing you must always remember is that almost never does he really see you as he sees himself, as he sees his own kind.”25 NOI taught that liberal proclamations of love for African Americans were devilish deceptions. White people who welcomed integration were not seeking to uplift African Americans but were desperately trying to save themselves from apocalyptic doom. As Muhammad warned, “Today the white race, the blacks’ worst enemies, has planned to make a last try to destroy the black man by pretending to be their friends and allow intermarriage.”26 In one of the most famous scenes from the Autobiography, a college student approached Malcolm X and asked if there were any good white people. Profoundly affected by an earlier lecture, the student was crying and hoped to perform penance. As Malcolm X recalled, “Anyway, I’d never seen anyone I ever spoke before more affected than this little white college girl. She demanded, right up in my face, ‘Don’t you believe there are any good white people?’ I didn’t want to hurt her feelings. I told her, ‘People’s deeds I believe in, Miss—not their words.’ ‘What can I do?’ she exclaimed. I told her, ‘Nothing.’ She burst out crying, and ran out and up Lenox Avenue and caught a taxi.”27 By telling her she could do “nothing,” Malcolm X confronted her with the logic of racism. Reduced to her racial identity, she felt powerless. Despite his desire not to hurt her feelings, he told her the truth. To promise that she could become a good person was to offer a way out, to present racism as if it were a matter of personal conscience, of love triumphing over hate. Refusing to offer salvation, Malcolm X challenged sympathetic liberalism. Sympathy re-

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duced social inequality to feelings that could be transcended by good intentions, thereby ignoring the sociological and political realities of racial divisions. Regardless of how much a public lecture affected a student, her desire to empathize was based on her own need for salvation. Her support of civil rights understood African American subjects as passive recipients of her sympathy. According to Baldwin, part of what troubled liberals was that the black Muslim movement challenged the image of passive victimhood so crucial to well-intentioned white sensibilities: “When in private debate or in public, any attempt I made to explain how the Black Muslim movement came about, and how it has achieved such force, was met with a blankness that revealed the little connection that the liberals’ attitudes have with their perceptions of their lives, or even their knowledge—revealed, in fact, that they could deal with the Negro as a symbol or a victim but had no sense of him as a man.”28 By analyzing racial inequality as part of historical, political, and social reality, Malcolm X anticipated the “racial realism” of critical race theory.29 Emphasizing the gap between legal principles and the actual practice of the law, critical race theorists assert that white Americans have been more comfortable with freedom and equality as ethereal ideals rather than as governing principles in American society. As legal theorist Derrick Bell argues, liberal principles amount to “an attractive mirage masking the reality of economic and political power.”30 Unlike NOI teachings, racial realism does not insist that race itself is real in a biological or theological sense. Realism does not require access to an unmediated real as much as it deconstructs the unrealism of the ideals that supposedly govern politics. Malcolm X’s realism focused on deeds rather than words. Refusing to offer salvation appeared to be reverse racism, and in a sense it was in that it confronted white Americans with a system that reduced people to racial identities. The well-meaning college student felt helpless when reduced to nothing other than her whiteness. She was blamed for sins that were not hers but were imputed to her on account of her race. Her tears mourned the loss of individuality in the face of collective guilt. Malcolm X explained that calling people devils was necessary to hold them collectively accountable for history. As he explained, “Unless we call one white man, by name, a ‘devil,’ we are not speaking of any individual white man. We are speaking of the collective white man’s historical record.”31 The

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categorical nature of his indictment taught that structural racism could not be erased by good individuals transcending social forces. Malcolm X thought that the height of liberal hypocrisy was the expectation that all people had equal responsibility to choose love over hate. As he exclaimed, “For the white man to ask the black man if he hates him is just like the rapist asking the raped, or the wolf asking the sheep, ‘Do you hate me?’ The white man is in no moral position to accuse anyone else of hate!”32 Telling white people they were loved exacerbated the evils of racism. Proclamations of love were the favored strategy of Uncle Toms, who did not necessarily love whiteness. Rather, they encouraged white people’s sense of their own lovability. Uncle Toms played on the vanity of those who thought that the oppressed would still love their oppressors more than themselves. Malcolm X asserted that he understood Uncle Toms because he had formerly used their tactics. In remembering his work shining shoes, for example, he described the financial rewards of giving people what they wanted: “It didn’t take me a week to learn that all you had to do was give white people a show and they’d buy anything you offered them. It was like popping your shoeshine rag. The dining car waiters and Pullman porters knew it too, and they faked their Uncle Tomming to get bigger tips.”33 Uncle Tomming was a hustle that astutely studied people’s need for attention. Malcolm X’s refusal to play the role of Uncle Tom when he converted to NOI did not come about because he changed his assessment of white Americans. By his own account he had not really loved white people, nor did Uncle Toms. Uncle Tommism was based on deception. Converts to NOI could not be Uncle Toms because they had to tell the truth. Malcolm X was sometimes still willing to play white vanity to his own strategic gain. By charging integrationist civil rights leaders with loving white people instead of the more damaging charge of pretending to love white people, he led a white audience to see the conflict within antiracist movements as a division between Christians who loved them and Muslims who were willing to seize power by any means necessary. While Malcolm X rejected the hustler’s nihilistic ethos, he retained his attunement to the desires of his interlocutors. As critical theorist Michael Eric Dyson observes, “He wasn’t against using the hustling tactics he gleaned from his years on the street to portray the crimes of white racism. He knew how to rhetorically master black and white opponents.”34 With

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the skills of a confidence man, Malcolm X used other people’s hopes and fears to his advantage, especially when he invoked his right to use whatever means necessary to achieve liberation. As he warned, “Our objective is complete freedom, complete justice, complete equality, by any means necessary.”35 In his study of Malcolm X’s debate at Oxford, Saladin Ambar notes that Malcolm X’s critics often overlooked the implications of the word “necessary” when pressing him on the implications of the phrase “by any means necessary.” When people leapt to the conclusion that violence was the necessary means, it said a great deal about their own hopes and fears. According to Ambar, “Yet when heard not only by whites, but also by blacks, many took the expression as an open call to violence. And while Malcolm didn’t reject this possibility— one he deemed appropriate for all human beings denied their fundamental rights—he certainly used the phrase as a mirror to hold up to his audience as a kind of gauge of their own racial sensibilities. If whites feared the expression, they did not genuinely believe in the equality of black people; if blacks feared it, they were in abject denial of their own humanity.”36

Conversions The Autobiography’s second conversion from NOI to Sunni Islam also served as a mirror. White liberals saw themselves embraced by Malcolm X’s epiphany of universal brotherhood, as if the story climaxed in a cathartic affirmation of their own humanity. In the trajectory of the book, Malcolm X converted when he saw the limits of NOI’s leadership and theology. He lost faith in his mentor when he learned about personal sexual transgressions, and doubted his theology when he learned about Sunni Islam. Coming to terms with Muhammad’s personal failings as well as the interracial possibilities of global Islam, the Malcolm X of the Autobiography became disenchanted with NOI’s provincial outlook and moved toward a global vision. In the liberal reading, the minister from the hate group finally learned to love. In some ways, Malcolm X contributed to this narrative by describing the break with his mentor as a personal change forced by new revelations about Muhammad’s character. What the conversion story plays down is that Malcolm X knew about Elijah Muhammad’s personal infidelities

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as well as the differences between NOI and Islam as practiced in the Middle East and Africa. Malcolm X continued to profess loyalty to his mentor even after he learned of Muhammad’s indiscretions. As Mattias Gardell notes in his study of NOI, “Malcolm described in his Autobiography how truly shocked he was upon learning that Elijah Muhammad was a ‘betrayer,’ an ‘adulterer,’ and a ‘dupe.’ There are reasons to doubt this self-described reaction.  . . . As he also notes in his memoirs, hints about the Messenger’s sexual life had been circulating since 1955 and had not caused this mental turmoil.”37 Similarly, someone who had read as extensively as Malcolm X would have been aware of the heterodoxy of NOI theology. His hajj in 1964 was not his first personal encounter with other Muslims.38 To heighten the impression that his encounter with Islam on the hajj caused a radical transformation, the Autobiography pays little attention to Malcolm X’s trip to the Muslim world in 1959. As Manning Marable speculates in his biography, “Perhaps because the trip marked the beginning of Malcolm’s private concerns with the NOI’s organization, he was virtually silent about it in the Autobiography. He could obviously see the discrepancies between what he had been taught by Elijah Muhammad compared to the richly diverse cultures that he had observed.”39 Marable’s choice of “perhaps” to preface this sentence is telling. Attempts to know why Malcolm X concealed whatever lessons he learned from his 1959 trip cannot be found in the Autobiography’s single paragraph on the journey.40 What is clear is that as an NOI minister he did have concerns that criticism from Sunni Muslims could undermine Muslim solidarity. When a Sudanese Muslim student wrote to the Pittsburgh Courier to challenge Elijah Muhammad’s Muslim credentials, Malcolm X did not tell him that his theology was wrong.41 He appealed instead to the pragmatic need for Muslims to stick together in the face of common Christian opposition. The 1962 letter hints that Malcolm X did know something about Islam in Africa: “In 1959 I was in the Sudan, in Khartoum and Omdurman. I also visited the Muslims in Nigeria, Ghana, Egypt and Arabia, but none of the people anywhere impressed me like the people of the Sudan. They seemed very pi[o]us, very hospitable. I really felt at home there.” Once establishing these credentials, Malcolm X implored his Sudanese interlocutor not to air dirty laundry in public: “No real Muslim will never [sic] attack another Muslim just to gain the friendship of Christians. If

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Muslims have differences they settle their differences in private, not in public to the delight of Christians.”42 While we cannot know for certain how much of the choice to downplay Malcolm X’s evolving engagement with Islam reflected the posthumous editing of Alex Haley, the Autobiography makes it appear that the Mecca conversion was a dramatic, relatively sudden event. It also frames the Malcolm X of NOI as a naïve and provincial thinker unaware of the truth of Islam and unprepared for the complexities of global politics. Considering that Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad were aware that stories about mad scientists did not match Islam in the Middle East, however, it becomes clear that NOI’s theology was less a reflection of naïveté than a set of strategic rhetorical choices. Even when Malcolm X knew about the existence of white Muslims he continued to work within NOI. What changed in the last year of his life was not Malcolm X’s knowledge, but his decision to use this information. The official break with Muhammad came after Malcolm X told the press that “chickens came home to roost” after President Kennedy was assassinated in 1963. This statement called attention to how the president was a victim of the violence that had always been present in the American exercise of power. Such a verdict was consistent with the rhetoric of a movement that taught that Kennedy was a devil presiding over a nation headed for apocalyptic doom. Muhammad, however, decided to silence his most famous minister. It might seem, then, like Muhammad used the incident as an excuse to get rid of a potential usurper. Interpreting the reaction to the Kennedy statement as a mere pretext could underestimate the extent to which Muhammad was genuinely upset at the comments. Muhammad had explicitly instructed all NOI ministers to avoid any reference to Kennedy’s assassination.43 Indeed, he had earlier told Malcolm X to avoid any reference to Kennedy at all: “Be careful about mentioning Kennedy in your talks and printed matters by name; use U.S.A. or the American Government.”44 Knowing that he could face organizational discipline, Malcolm X chose to defy Muhammad’s instructions. Their different reactions to the Kennedy assassination reflected a deeper conflict between Malcolm X and his mentor over the future of NOI. Muhammad’s prediction of the destruction of white America was a matter of apocalyptic prophecy rather than a call for direct political confrontation. His prophetic rhetoric was not intended to change the behavior of white Americans.

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For Muhammad, America was what it was. While he anticipated its apocalyptic destruction, this particular teaching remained a theological conviction rather than a guideline for revolutionary action. Muhammad preached separation and self-defense, but he did not seek out unnecessary confrontation. From his perspective, attacking Kennedy at a moment of national mourning was an unwise decision. While the expulsion was brewing for a while, the conflict over the Kennedy comments was more than just personal. Malcolm X’s confrontational style signaled an evolving political philosophy. While he was indeed changing in the early 1960s, he was not moving toward liberalism. He was developing an increasingly radicalized political vision that sought direct means to transform social reality. As he reminded Americans, their own revolution against British rule was an example of what could be accomplished when people seized whatever means necessary to ensure their own freedom: “This is what the Americans did; they didn’t turn the other cheek to the British. No, they said, ‘Liberty or death!’”45 As Sohail Daulatzai argues, this reminder was a practical assessment of American history and contemporary global politics: “Malcolm’s rhetoric of armed struggle and self-defense wasn’t misplaced or even romantic. Instead, he expressed an acute and perceptive understanding of the role of violence in American history.”46 Insisting that historical change occurred only through violent resistance, Malcolm X challenged Muhammad’s views as insufficiently revolutionary. While NOI’s prediction of an apocalypse and a call for a separate state were certainly radical visions, Muhammad’s response to the Kennedy assassination demonstrated that these were not imminent practical realities. Malcolm X was getting increasingly impatient with rhetorical apocalypses. As he learned more about the world, he saw alternative political possibilities.47 He bristled against NOI’s separation of religion and political participation. Muhammad’s response to this development was to appeal to his charismatic minister to stick to religion: “When you go to these Colleges and Universities to represent the Teachings that Allah has revealed to me for our people, do not go too much into details on the political side; nor into the subject of a separate state here for us.”48 Moving away from NOI practices like refusing to vote, Malcolm X increasingly emphasized political engagement. To this end, he turned to global revolutionary movements for different models of

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citizenship.49 His attempts to forge connections outside of the United States in order to foster transnational black identities functioned as what Melani McAlister calls a form of “counter-citizenship.”50 Africa was not just an imagined place of origins, but a practical model for citizenship in the present. When talking about revolutionary movements in Kenya, Malcolm X called for African Americans to adopt their practices: “You and I can best learn how to get real freedom by studying how Kenyatta brought it to his people in Kenya, and how Odinga helped him, and the excellent job that was done by the Mau Mau freedom fighters. In fact, that’s what we need in Mississippi. In Mississippi we need a Mau Mau. In Alabama we need a Mau Mau. In Georgia we need a Mau Mau. Right here in Harlem, in New York City, we need a Mau Mau.”51 Whereas he had previously taught that the racial politics of America were a tragic but unavoidable feature of social life, he now imagined liberation promised by a revolutionary social order. One crucial feature of African revolutions was that they really happened. African independence movements successfully employed violent resistance against powerful colonial regimes. More than consciousnessraising journeys, Malcolm X’s trips to Africa brought him into conversation with African revolutionaries who led him to think about the realities of state power and practical means to challenge American economic and foreign policy.52 In a debate with Lomax in which he described himself as experiencing a “spiritual rebirth,” Malcolm X also noted “unless the race issue is quickly settled, the 22 million American Negroes could easily adopt the guerrilla tactics of other deprived revolutionaries around the world.”53 Instead of embracing American liberalism, his break with NOI signaled a revolutionary stance in which he saw himself in common cause with anticolonial resistance. The chickens coming home to roost comment resonated with the analysis of colonial critics like Aimé Césaire, who portrayed genocide in Europe as a logical consequence of violent and dehumanizing rule abroad. European and American tactics of oppression were signs of weakness that portended a new order on the horizon: “The colonists may kill in Indochina, torture in Madagascar, imprison in Black Africa, crack down in the West Indies. Henceforth the colonized know that they have an advantage over them. They know that their temporary ‘masters’ are lying. Therefore that their masters are weak.”54

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Now the White Man Names Colleges after Malcolm The confrontational nature of violent revolution necessitated a break with the separatism of NOI. For the globally awakened Malcolm X, the problem with NOI was not its intolerance but its tolerance. Muhammad allowed a racist society to remain racist. For all of his condemnation of the United States, Muhammad was an American thinker. Africa and Asia were imagined places of mythological origins, and not present-day guides for theology and politics.55 Discounting any new global consciousness, Muhammad understood his former minister’s conversion to Sunni Islam as a retreat to American liberalism. According to both liberals and Muhammad, Malcolm X’s trip to Mecca caused him to change his mind about white people. As Muhammad lamented, “Malcolm fell out from us a hypocrite. He went and joined white people and worshiped them and he got what he preached for. Now the white man names colleges after Malcolm only to get you to join in the philosophy which he left behind; that white people are good. Malcolm went to Mecca and saw white people. And instead of joining in with the Black Man, he joined in with the white man, although he was taught the white man’s birth and death.”56 According to Muhammad, his prize pupil made a complete about-face. No longer seeing white people as devils, Malcolm X moved toward a doctrine that embraced the essential goodness at the core of all people. It is telling that NOI and liberal readings of the Autobiography focus on human sameness when so much of the hajj chapter was focused on differences. Malcolm X repeatedly framed his experience in the Middle East in opposition to America. He was struck by how unlike his experiences were from everything that had happened to him previously. He did not suddenly draw the conclusion that everyone was good; he puzzled over how the white Muslims he met in Mecca could be so different from white Americans. In seeing all white people as the same, Muhammad had no way to account for these differences. As Malcolm X noted, Elijah Muhammad had taught us that the white man could not enter into Mecca in Arabia and all of us who followed him, we believed it.  . . . When I got over there and went to Mecca and saw these people who were blond and blue-eyed and pale-skinned and all those things, I said, “Well,”

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but I watched them closely. And I noticed that though they were white, and they would call themselves white, there was a difference between them and the white ones over here. And that basic difference was this: In Asia or the Arab world or in Africa, where the Muslims are, if you find one who says he’s white, all he’s doing is using an adjective to describe something that’s incidental about him, one of his incidental characteristics; there is nothing else to it, he’s just white.57

Malcolm X decided that his earlier views about the inherent evil of whiteness were in error because he thought only in terms of American racial politics. When addressing the United States, however, his previous analysis still held. While whiteness was an incidental characteristic, to be white in America was to benefit from the unequal distribution of power. As he explained, “But when you get the white man over here in America and he says he’s white, he means something else. You can listen to the sound of his voice—when he says he’s white, he means he’s the boss.”58 This was an insight that Malcolm X, at least retrospectively, noticed in the distinction between European and American press corps. Reflecting on his early experiences with reporters, he recalled, “The Europeans never pressed the ‘hate’ question. Only the American white man was so obsessed with being ‘hated.’ He was so guilty, it was clear to me, of hating Negroes.”59 The hate question was the perfect mirror. Only those consumed with their own hatred focused on hate. Similarly, those asking if there were any good white people were looking for confirmation of their own goodness. Therefore, Malcolm X saw the question of whether white people should be hated or loved as a distraction from political activism. As he stated, “Why, brothers and sisters, when you wake up and find out what this man here has done to you and me, you won’t even wait for somebody to give the word. I’m not saying all of them are bad. There might be some good ones. But we don’t have time to look for them. Not nowadays.”60 His concession that “there might be some good ones” was followed by an assertion that looking for them would be a waste of time. While he no longer advocated biological explanations of racial difference, the pragmatic effects of his rhetoric remained consistent. The question of racial essence did not really matter because he was no longer criticizing human essences. As he explained, “The white race is doomed not because it’s white but because of its misdeeds.”61 He was fighting the

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persistent realities of racial inequality, whatever their origins. Rejecting biological origins, Malcolm X recognized what social scientists would identify as the socially constructed character of race.62 However, his warning that “we don’t have time” also signaled his awareness that criticism of racial essentialism could become co-opted by discourses of race neutrality. While he acknowledged the invented quality of race, he still maintained that racial politics had deterministic effects. He was trying to figure out how to act as a political realist after one recognizes that reality is socially constructed.63 Malcolm X was wrestling with a question that confronts all social theory: how to explain the relationship between social forces and individual behavior. In his final year he was developing new answers to these practical and theoretical problems, but they remained unresolved at the end of his life. After his return from the Middle East and Africa in 1964, Malcolm X made clear he was not recanting his past critiques: “Any time you do any travel, your scope will be broadened. It doesn’t mean you change— you broaden. No religion will ever make me forget the condition of our people in this country. . . . No God, no religion, no nothing will make me forget it until it stops, until it’s finished, until it’s eliminated. I want to make that point clear.”64 By describing himself as “broadened,” Malcolm X signaled that he was no longer thinking strictly within the American context. Rather than accepting American racism as an unchangeable political reality, he adopted a revolutionary perspective informed by global politics. Whereas calling white people devils had acknowledged reality for what it was, the prospect of revolution suggested the possibility of changing reality. Malcolm X did not so much affirm the essential goodness of whiteness as he allowed the possibility that people could change. The poet and activist Amiri Baraka clarifies this point: “That his admission that all white people might not be the Devil was not morphing into a Dr. King replica but an understanding, as he said at Oxford University, that when Black people made their revolution there would be some white people joining them.”65

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Something Like This Kills a Lot of Argument One of the reasons why the scene of the crying white college student is so well remembered is that Malcolm X came to regret it. As he said in an interview not long before his assassination, “Well, I lived to regret that incident. In many parts of the African continent I saw white students helping black people. Something like this kills a lot of argument.”66 His global education did not mean that Malcolm X now subscribed to conventional American narratives about racial healing, or that he imagined racism as a problem that could be changed by transforming the inner lives of people. He did not state that he regretted that he hurt a college student’s feelings so much as he regretted that he did not use hurt feelings as an opportunity to work for social transformation. Malcolm X described himself as broadened not because he recognized that he was wrong all along about American racism, but because he might have been wrong about the methods to change it. His life was a series of personal transformations that produced a person with increasingly ambitious plans for altering social institutions. To many readers, Malcolm X’s Autobiography was a parable that illustrated social forces. According to Bashir El-Beshti, the narrative of Malcolm X’s life balanced between the competing demands of his resistance to prescribed social roles and his desire to be an individual worthy of emulation: Malcolm’s story is, therefore, offered as a parable. It is important for Malcolm, however, to stress that he is not unique; he is a black man who shares his experience with other black men. If the notion of individuality is introduced, the justification for autobiography becomes more complicated: one has to reconcile the writing of one’s life with the applicability of that life to the general conditions of blacks. The later conception that humans are unitary beings deriving their essence from God complicates it even further: if we are all alike, then to preserve the peculiarities of an individual’s life is, perhaps, not so pressing.67

Malcolm X’s search for an identity animated a life of profound transformations. Liberalism, however, did not provide a vehicle to transform the realities of racial inequality as much as it hoped for individual liberation from racial politics. Pushing back against this erasure of social

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responsibility, Malcolm X insisted on the relevance of racial forms of identification to remind people of their roles within the political order. His final crusade to frame racial injustice as a matter of international human rights reflected his widening the scope of analysis to imagine new forms of reality. While Malcolm X’s perspective broadened, what remained consistent was his conviction that he had to tell the truth. Moshik Temkin observes that truth telling has endeared Malcolm X to a range of people, making him “a sort of blank screen onto which a seemingly endless variety of people and groups have projected their fantasies, ideas, and visions.”68 Conservative Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas, for example, has professed admiration for Malcolm X’s teachings of self-help, seeing in the Muslim minister an independent citizen who refused to accept government handouts. Reflecting on Thomas’s admiration, Patricia J. Williams notes the irony that so many have embraced someone who so steadfastly resisted conforming to people’s expectations: “No one knew better than he how complicated is heroism: how much of it is the product of good acts and bad, of bravery, craft, dumb luck, and brilliant insight, all mixed up in serendipitous proportion. If Malcolm had conformed to the politically pornographic imagination of his generation’s fixed ideals—even just a little—he would no doubt be alive today, hosting a talk show, lunching with Clarence. But Malcolm was never one for mannered acquiescence.”69 Mannered acquiescence gave way to confrontation with social and political reality in a world full of deception.70 Malcolm X accepted the accusations of hatred because he understood that a demagogue could be a mirror of the world in which he lived: “Yes, I have cherished my ‘demagogue’ role. I know that societies often have killed the people who have helped change those societies. And if I die having brought any light, having exposed any meaningful truth that will help destroy the racist cancer that is malignant in the body of America—then, all credit is due to Allah. Only the mistakes have been mine.”71 Accepting Allah’s guidance, Malcolm X believed that the truth would set him free. His willingness to die was the measure of his unwillingness to accept a life prescribed for him, to acquiesce to reality instead of changing it. Personal freedom was useful only if it produced a self capable of challenging unjust social conditions.

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The final year of his life was a conversion not to American liberalism, but to a way of seeing the world that invited him to think outside of American liberal ideals of freedom and equality. If he sought to transcend anything, it was America.72 As he explained in a speech delivered in Ghana, “I’m from America but I’m not an American. I didn’t go there of my own free choice.”73 He remained a trenchant critic of American religious freedom by rejecting appeals to conscience as the way to achieve social progress. Instead of looking inward to transform interior selves, he wanted people to broaden their vision to act on an international stage. As he learned from his travels, “The Africans see it, the Latin Americans see it, the Asians see it. So when you hear them talking about freedom, they’re not talking about coffee with a cracker. No, they’re talking about getting in a position to feed themselves and clothe themselves and make these other things that, when you have them, make life worth living.”74

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Science in a Little Box Intelligent Design and Secularity Freedom is what this country is all about, and a huge part of freedom is freedom of inquiry. But now, I’m sorry to say, freedom of inquiry and science is being suppressed.    .  .  . There are people out there who want to keep science in a little box where it can’t possibly touch a higher power, cannot possibly touch God. —Ben Stein

Few endeavors would appear to be as antisecular as the challenge to modern science of intelligent design (ID). As the heir to scientific creationism’s attempt to develop an alternative to secular biology, ID is a collection of theories that hope to show the inadequacy of naturalist attempts to explain the origins of life. To this end, ID rejects mainstream secular scientific authority. But while ID advocates acknowledge religious motives for their work, they insist that their research and theories are science. This claim to be doing science is a crucial part of convincing courts that teaching ID in public schools does not violate the separation of church and state. This follows a strategy laid down by scientific creationists. To meet legal criteria for a religiously neutral science, creationists rely on empirical evidence and produce textbooks that avoid references to God, the Bible, or Christianity. The stated goal of this work is not to replace evolution but to provide an alternative that would be given “equal time” in the schools. The courts, however, have rejected equal time laws at least partly on the grounds that creationism is too closely tied to fundamentalist Christianity. In the wake of legal decisions against creationism, ID arose to offer a minimal theory that asserted only some kind of intelligence was necessary for the creation of life and refrained from developing constructive theories that would support any 132

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one religious viewpoint. However, these challenges have failed as well as ID has been taken to be an updated version of creationism.1 In this chapter, I do not assess the merits of the legal or scientific arguments about ID but focus on how advocates for ID have used the language of religious and intellectual freedom. In particular, I am interested in how ID proponents invoke liberal virtues of tolerance and religious privacy to argue for the need to respect all forms of free inquiry. Ironically, ID advocates have used the secularity of American political institutions to their strategic advantage by insisting on the need to separate private beliefs from public policy. In this way, they have used the language of religious liberty to erode support for public scientific and educational institutions. One aspect of this rhetorical strategy has been to position ID proponents as a persecuted group whose liberty has been infringed upon by imagined secular elites. Complaining that the scientific establishment has marginalized critics, defenders of ID have borrowed from the rhetoric of creationists who portrayed themselves as the victims of religious prejudice. As the prominent creationist Duane Gish stated, “During the Scopes Trial of 1925, when the Tennessee law that excluded the teaching of the theory of evolution was being challenged, Clarence Darrow thundered that it was bigotry to teach only one theory of origins. . . . The situation has been essentially turned 180 degrees.”2 For scientists, charges of bigotry are confused because evolution is not a matter of belief or identity. From their perspective, the simplest argument against equal time laws is that ID is bad science and that schools should not teach bad science. One problem, however, is that public schools in the United States are accountable to elected officials, some of whom have sought to include alternatives to evolution in the curriculum. Opponents of ID, therefore, seek legal remedies to counter political mandates. Advocates for teaching only evolution in the schools have to show that school boards infringe upon the constitutional rights of students. What makes this tricky is that science has no official legal autonomy that places it beyond the reach of democracy. Students have no constitutional right to learn good science or be protected from bad science. As one ID critic laments, “There is, after all, no constitutional protection against pseudoscience.”3 In other words, because arguments against bad science lack political and legal force, success for ID opponents in the courts hinges on exposing ID’s scientific pretensions as a

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ruse that conceals ulterior religious motives. It is not sufficient to say that ID is not science; it has to be positively defined as religion. Distancing themselves from creationists who offer evidence for the biblical account of origins, ID advocates focus instead on evidence for irreducibly complex features in nature that cannot be explained without some intelligent agent. Because it does not specify who or what this intelligence is, ID endorses no particular religion. Regardless of how many people believe in ID, a supermajority of Americans agree with its inclusion in the curriculum.4 This has significant ramifications for public schools, but it also points to a broader skepticism about the authority of secular scientific reason. ID’s persuasiveness, I argue, rests on its ability to play on tensions within secular distinctions between public reason and private belief. Importantly, I do not argue that ID rejects secular divisions between public and private, or that it erases boundaries between science, religion, and politics. Rather, ID flourishes as a result of more rigorous enforcement of such secular divisions and boundaries. In this sense, ID should be understood not as an attempt to gain more public authority for religion, but as part of a pervasive effort to privatize public institutions. ID represents an identity politics distinct from groups that have sought to broaden the scope of religious freedom. Whereas people like William Jennings Bryan, Al Smith, and Malcolm X challenged arguments for individual freedom that masked social inequalities, ID flourishes within a libertarian religious and political economy.

Public and Private In ID’s attempts to gain public legitimacy and scientists’ efforts to keep it out of public schools, both parties appear to share the sense that the public sphere is a privileged space from which private matters are barred entry. This devaluation of private concerns is consistent with what Hannah Arendt saw in classical views of privacy: “In ancient feeling the privative trait of privacy, indicated in the word itself, was all-important; it meant literally a state of being deprived of something, and even of the highest and most human of man’s capacity.”5 Immanuel Kant’s classic description of enlightenment reason mirrored this dichotomy of public freedom and private restriction. To reason in public was a mature exercise of freedom. Private reason, by contrast, was restricted

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by institutional obligations, such as those imposed by a “civic post or office.” Religion was, Kant held, not exclusively public or private. A pastor in the pulpit, for example, was restricted by private obligations to do his job in a manner befitting his ecclesiastical setting, but also could enjoy a certain intellectual freedom when writing for his reading public. Religious belief, however, was an odd case. Because Kant presumed that personal beliefs should have no bearing on a citizen’s duty to follow the law, he believed the state had no reason to intervene in theological debates. Religion was free from state intervention, but was also not relevant to public debates about legislation. With developments in modern liberalism, however, the term “public” has come to refer both to the civil society that fosters democratic debate as well as to state institutions that execute the people’s will. To a contemporary reader, therefore, Kant’s model of religion appears distinctly private. According to Talal Asad, Kant participated in a liberal construction of religion as a kind of interior private property. Religion was free on the condition it was removed from shared public life. As Asad notes, “This construction of religion ensures that it is part of what is inessential to our common politics, economy, science, and morality. More strongly put: religion is what actually or potentially divides us, and if followed with passionate conviction, may set us intolerantly against each other.”6 It would make sense, then, that religious voices would resent the loss of authority that comes with the privatization of religion. ID’s crusade for public legitimacy would seem to be an excellent illustration of José Casanova’s deprivatization of religion thesis, which argues that fundamentalist rejections of secular institutional divisions between religion, economy, science, and the state reflect a refusal to accept religion’s relegation to the private sphere: “By deprivatization I mean the fact that religious traditions throughout the world are refusing to accept the marginal and privatized role which theories of modernity as well as theories of secularization had reserved for them.”7 Asad and Casanova are making different arguments, of course, but what is important here is that they both observe that secularism presumes that the exclusion of religion from the public will be felt as a loss or restriction. For ID supporters, the situation is more complex. For example, it is not entirely clear that ID suffers serious setbacks when losing legal challenges. In practice, these failures actually serve to build political capital.

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That is, every legal loss dramatizes the exile of Christians from public institutions monopolized by scientific elites who enforce secular liberal orthodoxy. One example of how this might work would be a case in which a teacher subscribed to ID. Biology teachers in public schools, restricted by their positions as government employees, exercise what Kant would call private reason. As long as their teaching conforms to the official curriculum, they are still free to draw different conclusions at their leisure. For contemporary Americans, however, asking a teacher to say one thing in public and believe another in private smacks of hypocrisy. By restricting intellectual and religious freedom, the public becomes a hostile space that constrains liberty. The public school, then, stands as one more example of government tyranny. When the public sphere becomes a hostile space, citizens feel most free in private, but it is a kind of freedom that is at odds with the ideal of secular reason. Privacy is a space of protected unreason in which one is free to believe regardless of one’s ability to persuade or withstand criticism from others. Or more precisely, private reasons are intelligible only to people who share prior commitments known as values. Privacy is not equated with individuality, but protects a private sphere that contains institutions (like families, churches, or corporations) from which people draw some sense of their identity or earn their material livelihood. The private, then, is the repository of those beliefs, identities, and occupations that many Americans see as most productive, valuable, and sacred. Because privacy is both free and sacred, many Americans flip Asad’s formula and hold that it is the public itself, rather than religion, that is inessential. When the public is equated with state institutions and an overreaching state is cast as the enemy of personal freedom, science educators become thought police. Portraying themselves as dissidents challenging an entrenched public authority in the name of intellectual freedom, ID advocates protect the rights of all Americans to believe what they want without interference from the state. In doing this, ID plays on a tension implicit in secularism’s commitment to public reason in the pursuit of secular truth and secularism’s promise of a neutral space in which people are free to hold whatever private convictions they please. In my view, ID is one theater within a broader campaign to shrink the public in favor of private freedom. Practical responses to ID’s legal

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failures, for example, include homeschooling, enrolling children in religious schools, and advocacy for voucher programs that subcontract government education services (a policy with the advertised benefits of respecting parental choices and fostering market competition). In this way, Casanova’s deprivatization of religion might just as well be described as a more rigorous extension of the logic of privatization to scientific, economic, and political institutions. This is consistent with Patricia J. Williams’s observation that liberal fears of tyranny have justified legislative restraint that has eroded public institutions in favor of private power.8 So what does this mean for the efforts of earnest political theorists who design criteria for who is let in or kept out of the public? Is the persistent popularity of ID a sign that secularity is on the wane? On the one hand, ID appears to be a clear attack on secular public reason. On the other hand, it draws its persuasive force from secular ideals of privatization and toleration. ID flourishes in a secular age that Charles Taylor has characterized as a historical moment in which belief is one option among other options.9 By making scientific truth a matter of belief, ID seeks to secularize science in this sense. In saying this, I am aware that I am stretching conventional usages of secularization. What I want to draw out is the way science loses public authority when delegated to a private sphere in which scientific truth becomes a matter of belief. In the face of the institutional apparatus of peer-reviewed journals, university science departments, and foundations and agencies that award grants for scientific research, ID appeals instead to private citizens whose consciences are the ultimate arbiter of scientific truth. Scientists would be perfectly free to believe in evolution as long as they do not seek to impose their ideas on anyone else. In essence, this is a call for a more rigorous application of secular institutional differentiation in the form of a separation between science and state. Secularized science would lose public authority but would remain protected as a private matter. While secularization theory usually considers whether religious institutions will flourish in the modern world, the question raised by ID is whether scientific authority will be able to withstand the corroding acids of modernity. This is not to say that secularity is just another word for relativism. After all, most ID advocates express grave concern about relativizing

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forces that erode moral and intellectual certainty. They do not hold that scientific truth is itself relative, but insist only that no institution should have the legal authority to impose any version of truth on free people. Indeed, private freedom is preferable to public engagement because privacy protects moral, theological, and scientific certainty in a way otherwise impossible in a pluralistic society. This vision rejects any earnest engagement with pluralism, but is fueled by a staunch antirelativist adherence to absolute truth wedded to the logic of privacy. ID employs legal and scientific arguments not only to protect private commitments but to show that such protection should be the main purpose of public institutions.

Secular Establishment As guardians of freedom, ID proponents try to turn the First Amendment to their advantage. This follows a strategy best summarized over three decades ago in a Yale Law Review essay by Wendell Bird. Bird claimed that teaching creationism in the public schools would satisfy both free exercise and establishment clauses because it would avoid forcing Christian children to accept a secular theory of origins without having to teach Christianity in the classroom: “Scientific creationism not only offers a nonreligious and scientific model of origins, but also appears substantially consistent with the views of most religions that object to the general theory of evolution, because its terms generally are divorced from particular theological conceptions of deity or sacred authority.”10 Teaching evolution without offering an alternative violates religious freedom by discrediting the beliefs of many students. Evolution teaches, for example, that it is in fact wrong to believe that human beings were created in a single day within the past ten thousand years. Importantly, ID does not claim that this kind of biblical literalism is true (many ID advocates disagree with young earth creationism), it simply allows for the possibility that it might be true. If religious freedom protects the rights of people to believe whatever they want as long they do not use state institutions to impose beliefs on others, the differences between secular and religious citizens would be no less pressing than those dividing members of different religions. Bird’s argument appeals to a sense of fair play in which everyone should have to privatize something.

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Otherwise, citizens whose public secularism matches their private convictions would enjoy power analogous to a religious establishment. According to ID proponent Phillip Johnson, any such establishment corrupts science: “History has taught us that an established religion tends to fall into bad habits, and the same thing may be true when a scientific establishment starts to act like a governmental body with an official ideology to uphold.”11 Johnson turns the tables by arguing for more strenuous enforcement of distinctions between science, religion, and politics. Whatever the merits of his argument, forcing the courts to specify why secular humanism is not a religious establishment opens up a can of definitional worms. Lawyers and judges would have to arrive at clear definitions that have eluded scholars of religion. Considering that some things labeled religions have gods and some do not, that some have sacred texts and some do not, that some have significant rituals and some do not, the courts face a challenge in identifying the taxonomic markers that define ID as religious or secular humanism as nonreligious. A common rebuttal to lawyers like Bird and Johnson is that evolution does not restrict religious freedom because religion and science involve different kinds of truth. Groups that reconcile theology and evolution insist that no real conflict exists as long as religious texts are read metaphorically. This distinction appeals to scientists such as Stephen Jay Gould, for example, who welcome theology that celebrates religion and science as nonoverlapping magisteria. Speaking of Catholicism, Gould stated, “While I cannot personally accept the Catholic view of souls, I surely honor the metaphorical value of such a concept  . . . for grounding moral discussion.”12 For scientists like Gould as well as religious liberals, critics of evolution, trapped in a literalist mind-set, fail to grasp that the essence of religion lies in metaphors and symbols that communicate distinctive moral, spiritual, or aesthetic truth. Practically speaking, however, this apotheosis of metaphor calls for superinstitutional policing that decides which truths are metaphorical and which are literal. Evolution supporters are free to be scientific literalists if they so choose. Darwinian scientists do not tell a metaphorical story about how human beings find their place within the cosmos (although some might). Evolution explains what really happened. Religious liberals do not have a superior cognitive capacity for metaphor. They simply accept the literal truth of modern science and adjust their

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theology accordingly. Using liberal theological categories to define religion sends a mixed message. For legal purposes, ID is really religious. For theological purposes, it is not really religious. Furthermore, resorting to theological judgments to justify state policy offends religious privacy by encroaching on people’s freedom to believe whatever they want. Liberal appeals to metaphor tend to backfire because they favor a particular kind of religion.

Leaps of Faith None of the ID arguments would be compelling or relevant if the courts were charged with tossing bad science out of textbooks. In that case, it would be in scientists’ interest to insist ID was science. In other words, because of the historical and legal contingency in which labeling ID as religion removes it from public schools, scientists avoid the more assertive claim that all ideas about the origins of life are scientific and that science has the authority to reject any alternative theories. Enforcing clear boundaries between scientific and religious truth might actually play into ID’s rhetorical hands. To explain, it might be helpful to explore ID advocates’ fondness for appropriating theories from sociologists of knowledge and historians of science. Thomas Kuhn is a particular favorite because his analysis of paradigm shifts in scientific revolutions focuses attention on the interpretive biases of scientists. As Johnson explains, “A paradigm is a general theory, like the Darwinian theory of evolution, that has achieved general acceptance in the scientific community.  . . . Thus, zoologists, botanists, geneticists, molecular biologists and paleontologists all see their research as aiming to fill out the details of the Darwinian paradigm.”13 Paradigms can impair scientists’ ability to make sense of new data that challenge their assumptions. Refusing to acknowledge data that contradict the evolutionary hypothesis demonstrates Darwinists’ commitment to their paradigm even when evidence for irreducible complexity makes it no longer tenable. As one ID theorist asserts, “If Kuhn was correct, we may expect to see Darwinian biologists, like Ptolemaic astronomers, dealing with anomalous evidence by adding epicycles to their theory.”14 Paradigms play a curious role in the call for equal time laws, however. By stressing underlying interpretive commitments, ID proponents

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portray disputes between evolution and ID as a matter of competing worldviews. As Stephen C. Meyer explains, “According to one worldview, mind is the primary or ultimate reality. On this view, material reality either issues from a preexisting mind, or it is shaped by a preexistent intelligence, or both.”15 Those who accept the agency of a preexisting mind will interpret data differently from those predisposed to eliminate outside intelligence. In Meyer’s characterization, evolution is the logical consequence of a materialist worldview, which “holds that the physical universe or nature is the ultimate reality. In this view, either matter or energy (or both) are the things from which everything else comes.”16 While Meyer insists his claims are based on evidence accessible to anyone, he recognizes that people with fundamentally divergent assumptions about the cosmos will interpret this evidence in different ways. Following Meyer’s logic, Darwinism and ID both require some leap of faith. In this portrayal, the ID debate takes on a distinctive character that distinguishes it from ordinary intellectual disagreements. It is a symptom of a clash of worldviews in which two parties begin with such fundamentally different assumptions about the nature of reality that they would not be able to agree. There is an internal inconsistency, therefore, in ID’s professed desire to encourage a scholarly debate about origins. On one hand, ID advocates insist that their theories draw on data accessible to all: “We have worked to show that the case for intelligent design is based on physical evidence and tools of reasoning available to anyone, regardless of creed.”17 On the other hand, contending that worldviews limit interpretation of available evidence admits that not all people will see the truth. If leaps of faith create unbridgeable gaps between interpretive frameworks, any debate would not invite mutual criticism but would serve only to demonstrate irreconcilable differences between competing worldviews. Creationists anticipated ID’s discussion of paradigms and worldviews. But as ID has developed as an heir (and sometimes rival) to creationism, this method of challenging scientific authority has undergone significant revision. In Susan Friend Harding’s study of a creationist museum, she suggests that creationism’s mimicry of science can at times be an elaborate parody facilitated by self-consciously ironic “cosmopolitan postfundamentalists.” In this reading, creation science has a deliberately preposterous quality evidenced in absurd theories and museum exhib-

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its. Built to inspire doubt in secular reason, the creationist museum is designed to discount the efficacy of the entire scientific enterprise. As Harding explains, “Tacky, plastic, and plaster-cast imitations of scientific thought were displayed as if they were ‘real science,’ then verbally ridiculed by calling attention to their human authorship and all its foibles, to the stories embedded in theories of evolution and how the stories transform minutiae into ‘evidence,’ to the iffyness of the evidence and how easily it can be suborned to ‘prove’ another story or theory, including creationism.”18 Harding argues that creationism is not designed to give positive proof and that its primary goal is to demonstrate that all science can be doubted. Much of Harding’s account is convincing, especially its attention to creationist attempts to undermine scientific authority. However, she also notes that the tacky, plastic, and plaster-cast imitations are taken down because not everyone gets the joke. While creationists do seek to question Darwinian paradigms, satirical irony cannot entirely account for the earnestness with which creationists conduct their research. This earnestness is evidenced by the diligent work of trying to make the creationist system cohere. Creationists go to remarkable lengths to resolve the internal logical contradictions of their system. An example of these theoretical gymnastics is the postulation of an antediluvian vapor canopy. A theoretical problem arose in conjunction with creationists’ use of Noah’s flood to explain a whole of host of geological formations as well as patterns of fossil deposits. Before the flood, mountains and oceans did not exist in the form that they do today. The tumultuous floodwaters carved them into the earth in a manner of months and left a geological record that modern scientists misinterpreted as evidence of hundreds of millions of years of terrestrial development. One problem posed by this solution was how to account for where all of the water came from. If the world lacked today’s oceans and mountains, water would completely cover the earth. To resolve this dilemma, creationists invented a vapor canopy, in which all of the water existed as atmospheric vapor awaiting eventual condensation into Noah’s flood. As Henry Morris explains, “The waters above [the earth] must have been in the form of a vast blanket of invisible water vapor, translucent to the light from the stars but productive of a marvelous greenhouse effect which maintained mild temperatures from pole to pole, thus preventing air-mass circulations

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and the resultant rainfall.”19 One remarkable feature of the vapor canopy is that the obvious explanation “God, in his omnipotence, created rain” is carefully eschewed. The game of scientific investigation is never called off, and it is pursued to its logical extreme. Not surprisingly, the vapor canopy brings with it a new set of theoretical and empirical problems, which bring on further attempts at elaboration and reconciliation. Far from simplifying the matter, the creationist system creates a complex labyrinth. To be consistent with itself, creationist speculation runs the risk of exposing its own internal contradictions. This is an especially pressing problem in light of fundamentalist Christian commitments to commonsense realism, which are at odds with postmodern parodies of scientific reason. As James Moore points out, creationists who espouse a “democratic epistemology” based upon Baconian empiricism and commonsense realism have an ambiguous attachment to the rhetoric of paradigms and worldviews. As Moore states, “Protestant fundamentalists, as a whole, are innocents abroad in a post-Kantian, relativistic, cybernetic world. Suggest the social conditioning of perception—broach the sociology of knowledge—and their absolutes begin to shake. Certitude vanishes; either-or reasoning is out; the cosmos disintegrates.”20 Because of their empiricism, creationists find ways to preserve the fundamentalist adherence to common sense about facts at the same time as they attempt to create doubt about theory. Thus, they draw sharp divisions between empirical science and theoretical speculation. According to creationist Ken Ham, this distinction is blurred by evolutionists seeking to deceive students: “These young people are being indoctrinated to believe that evolution is a science. Because they are growing up in a world full of wonderful technology that is an outgrowth of real science, they have a great respect for what is called science. Sadly, they don’t realize that evolution is not a science.”21 Whether Ham’s distinction is tenable, his respect for “real” science tells us something about creationist books, journals, museums, and doctoral degrees in hard sciences from Berkeley and Harvard. The reason that scientific creationists do not just reject science outright in favor of a fideist commitment to biblical truth is that they really believe in science. They accept that there is a single physical world subject to empirical measurement. Consequently, the evidence of evolutionary scientists that points to the impossibility of the physical and historical truth of Genesis is a real problem that demands a response.

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To be clear, ID theorists believe in science as well. They no more seek to devalue science than to devalue religion. They hope to value both in the same way. But whereas creationists argue that facts support a biblical account of origins, ID theorists commit only to a minimal account of some kind of intelligence. This commitment avoids the charge, leveled against creationism, that in sanctioning only one other theory of origins as an alternative to evolution, it protects only the religious freedom of biblical literalists. However, the minimal account of ID undercuts a key purpose of creation science. Creationists insist that conservative Protestant Christianity is reasonable in a way that other religions are not. In restricting its theories to a vague and generic intelligence, ID makes particular religious convictions entirely matters of arbitrary personal choice—It offers no good reasons to be Christian as opposed to any other religion. If there are reasons, they are distinctively religious as opposed to scientific. In this way, ID participates in the construction of a profoundly secular model of religion that distinguishes between scientific and religious truth. By limiting its scope to the minimal claim that some kind of outside intelligence operates in nature, ID reduces the debate to a disagreement between worldviews. In a sense, creationism does this as well. ID, however, pushes this further by avoiding the problems latent in creationist attempts to construct explanatory theories that would be accessible to criticism. None of this is to say that ID’s arguments undermine religious belief. ID simply asserts that these beliefs, like all beliefs, are necessarily private matters. My point here is not that ID’s reasoning is fatally flawed but that this reduction to privacy makes equal time laws persuasive to contemporary Americans. Furthermore, because legal arguments against ID have stressed that it is a religious movement even in the absence of any commitments to particular rituals, texts, creeds, institutions, or communities, it has forced courts to define religion as anything that is in any way influenced by the belief in any outside intelligence acting at any point in the history of the cosmos. ID advocates have gained a remarkably expansive and fluid definition of religion from their legal opponents. Privatizing everything that falls under this umbrella limits the scope of public authority. Rather than an acid that uniformly corrodes theological certainty, secularity can at times protect absolutist truth claims by removing them from public scrutiny and criticism. ID’s calls for equal

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time, then, are not in the interest of evaluating ideas. Rather, they appeal to the need for uncritical tolerance of differences that will remain a persistent feature of social life. ID depends upon a clear distinction between private faith and public reason, except that the public is reduced to a forum in which people express and affirm private commitments. The result is a model of the public that is neither deliberative nor agonistic. Rather, the logic of equal time simply leaves everything in its place. Consistent with its political and economic effects, the privatization of science strengthens the status quo under the guise of protecting freedom. There is an irony, then, in secularity’s claim that managing difference is its particular genius. In the midst of debates about whether a secular public should privatize difference, resolve difference, welcome difference, or learn to begrudgingly live with difference, what is sometimes lost is the way in which secularity provides political rewards for manufacturing and sustaining claims of incommensurable difference on the grounds that these differences reflect underlying private values beyond the scope of secular reason. Secularity, in practice if not in theory, tends to encourage political actors to frame disputes as matters of private identity and personal freedom. In saying this, I want to be clear that there is a significant distinction to be drawn between this model of privatization and attempts to address real inequalities in social life. If ID’s demand for equal time parodies anything, it parodies movements that have sought to remedy social and historical inequalities. It does this by reducing difference to intractable disagreements stemming from arbitrary private choices and in turn dislocates conflict from the social, cultural, political, economic, sexual, scientific, and religious contexts in which differences might have meaning. Focusing on arbitrary personal belief equalizes all differences in that everyone has some analogous private identity that merits the same kind of affirmation and protection. While ID might appear as a rebuttal of secular liberalism, it actually draws its rhetorical force from secularity’s encoding of freedom, conscience, value, and religion as private matters.22 For secular liberals concerned for the public good, legal victories over ID have come with significant political costs. While the effort to relegate ID to the private sphere by demonstrating its essential religiosity might serve to protect the public authority of science, this authority is increasingly tenuous in

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a political moment that celebrates privatization as the cure for all social ills. For this reason, opponents of equal time laws might want to consider a moratorium on statements like “intelligent design is fine for religion class, but just not for science class.” Such clarifications are not especially damning in the eyes of people who see religion as valuable. More importantly, such distinctions also grant that alternatives to evolution are reasonable as long as they are properly labeled as private truth. The result is that instead of defending their science, ID proponents defend our freedom.

8

The Most Sacred of All Property Corporations and Persons There’s a God-factor here that changes normal economics. —David Green

In the wake of the 2014 Burwell v. Hobby Lobby decision, many wondered how corporations could exercise religious liberty.1 There seemed to be something absurd about extending rights to ethereal legal fictions rather than flesh-and-blood human beings. For liberals, only persons capable of feeling and believing needed religious freedom. Personal privacy, the interior space where conscience was free, appeared to be co-opted by corporations seeking protections for private property. As with the case of intelligent design, however, privacy might have less to do with protecting individual freedom than with empowering private institutions. Challenging the authority of science or the state, conservative Christians have used the arbitrariness of what counts as religion to their advantage. Whereas intelligent design advocates have convinced many Americans that science is a form of religious belief, advocates for corporate religious exemptions have successfully defined public health policy as a problem for moral convictions they classify as religious.

Business of the Spirit Combining their Christian beliefs with their business practices, the owners of Hobby Lobby bring together evangelical and capitalist ideals of individual freedom.2 Bethany Moreton describes this convergence in her study of Wal-Mart, in which corporate philosophy was driven by the “conviction that economics, like salvation, was a matter best addressed at the level of individual conscience.”3 As with Wal-Mart and other Sun Belt corporations like Tyson Foods and Chick-fil-A, Hobby Lobby 147

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typifies a style of corporate governance in which Christian principles pervade its organizational culture and contribute to its bottom-line success. In Darren Dochuk’s account of the rise of the Sun Belt, suburban prosperity moved evangelicals away from rural populism and toward a warm embrace of corporate power: “Residents of this corporate dreamland internalized the pro-growth, antiregulatory assurances of free market capitalism and sought to limit the reach of the federal state in sectors that did not serve these interests.”4 The Hobby Lobby decision asks us to consider how corporations exercise religion. This is a separate matter from whether religious freedom cases have been correctly decided. There are good reasons to suggest that Hobby Lobby simply sticks to the literal application of legal precedent. Legal scholar Paul Horwitz has even suggested that this could be an “easy case.”5 Alan J. Meese and Nathan B. Oman respond to the claim that for-profit corporations cannot exercise religious freedom by breezily noting, “As an empirical matter, this claim is false.”6 These assessments are based on interpretations of the 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), in which Congress tried to correct for the court’s unpopular decision in the 1990 case Employment Division v. Smith.7 In the Smith decision, Justice Antonin Scalia departed from the court’s precedent by discarding the strict scrutiny test for free exercise cases set in Sherbert v. Verner.8 RFRA told the court to return to the Sherbert test, requiring the federal government to have a compelling interest in refusing to make an exemption for a law that some perceive to violate their religious freedom as well as showing that the policy is the least restrictive means of furthering the government’s interest. In the 1997 case City of Boerne v. Flores, Justice Anthony Kennedy decided that Congress could not instruct the court how to interpret the Constitution.9 It would seem that Kennedy’s logic would have rendered RFRA dead and buried. The effect of the Boerne decision, however, was to say that even though RFRA is unconstitutional there was a legal back door that allowed for its use in federal cases. One way to understand this is that RFRA functions as a legislative precommitment.10 While Congress cannot tell the court how to interpret the Constitution, Congress can instruct the court how to interpret Congress’s own statutes. RFRA would not apply to state laws because this would require Congress to tell the court how to interpret Section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment,

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and the Boerne decision ruled this out. RFRA continues to guide the court’s decisions at the federal level because these are matters of statutory and not constitutional law. Some legal commentators have viewed this as a mere technicality. While Douglas Laycock thinks that RFRA is constitutional, he is willing to accept its application to federal law for whatever reason: “In the absence of a court order or opinion expressly constraining the behavior of the other branches, they can act on their own view of liberty or of the Constitution, and it matters little whether we think of such action as constitutional interpretation or as something else.”11 Others warn that making religious liberty subject to statutory law might have unforeseen consequences. RFRA critic Ira Lupu warns that “religious liberty legislation is an attractive nuisance.”12 Legislative protections of religious liberty might allow legislatures more leeway than would be true for the court’s interpretation of the Constitution. According to Gregory Magarian, this means that “Congress has two ways around the Federal RFRA—repeal of the Act itself or exemption of a particular action from the Act’s effects—either of which it can achieve by simple majority vote. Thus, Federal RFRA is far easier to abrogate than a constitutional provision.”13 The ability to abrogate RFRA might allow democratic majorities to define religious freedom by cherrypicking which practices to protect.14 In the long run, this might provide fewer protections for religious minorities from the whims of legislatures. In the short run, RFRA allowed Hobby Lobby to pose as a religious minority who required an exemption from tyrannical health care policy. While many would argue that the state does not have a compelling interest in mandating contraceptive coverage in employee health plans, the majority decision focused on the least restrictive means test. In short, the court found that the government could still provide for contraceptive coverage for employees by creating a separate fund. The fund was an improvised response by the Department of Health and Human Services to Catholic objections to covering any forms of contraception for employees of Catholic-run organizations. If it is obvious that contraception is a religious issue, the decision appears to be relatively straightforward. What is at stake is whether the government can force people to pay for things that violate their religion. According to this commonsensical reasoning, the court is not granting religious exercise to a craft store as much as it is refusing to force

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the owners to pay for things that offend their consciences. All of this takes for granted that contraception is religious. By focusing on whether corporations are persons, legal scholarship largely ignores the question of why the refusal to offer contraceptive coverage in a corporate health plan is indeed a form of religious exercise. Because substantive analysis of religion is largely irrelevant to the law, the legal literature leaves open the question of what kind of religious exercise Hobby Lobby seeks to protect. One significant development implicit in Hobby Lobby is that the court has invented a novel form of religious practice in which persons protect their property from polluting contact with other persons. To do this the court has not simply granted Hobby Lobby the status of a person but has allowed corporations to define themselves as holy persons whose moral purity is endangered by sexual pollution. The court has therefore developed a doctrine of monetary sanctification. This doctrine is different from ensuring the right to refuse to pay for immoral practices; the proponents of sanctifying money insist that property has its own integrity that is threatened by financial contact with the immoral practices of others.

Delphic Pronouncements To understand arguments for and against monetary sanctification, one must accept that justices of various political persuasions invent the religious practices they claim to protect. One example of legal inventiveness would be Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s narrow view that religion should be restricted only to obvious religious practices like prayer and ritual practice. In an essay that appeared within a couple weeks of Hobby Lobby, Winnifred Fallers Sullivan argued that Ginsburg’s narrow view is symptomatic of incoherent definitions of religion. As Sullivan notes, “The exercise of religion, as Justice Ginsburg suggested in her dissent in Hobby Lobby, might more usually be understood to be centered on activities such as ‘prayer, worship, and the taking of sacraments’ by individuals.”15 Sullivan finds this inadequate in light of the diverse ways in which people practice religion; Ginsburg’s narrow focus is at odds with conventional usages of religion as well as the subjects that scholars of religion have chosen to study.

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Ginsburg’s definition of religion is wrong only if a wrong definition of religion of exists. There might be no such thing as a wrong definition, however, if religion is produced within legal and political institutions. If it serves judges’ purposes to restrict religion to prayer and sacraments, then that is what religion is. If judges prefer expansive definitions that include sexual regulation, then religion is that. To say that religion is too complex for legal definitions presumes that religion exists in the world prior to its labeling and classification. While such arbitrariness might make lawyers uneasy, accepting that justices fashion religion to serve their own purposes is the best way of predicting what courts will actually decide. Instead of high-minded legal principles, free exercise claims are ordinary matters of political and institutional power. About liberal challenges to the court’s definition of religious organizations, Sullivan writes, “Justice Ginsburg announces that, ‘Religious organizations exist to foster the interests of persons subscribing to the same religious faith.’ It is not clear to whom she refers here. As with the other justices in this case and others, her Delphic pronouncements about religion seem to come from the ether. How does she know this? Few who study religion would agree with this statement.”16 But Ginsburg’s description might be just as plausible as any other definition of a religious organization. If definitions of religion are rhetorical fictions, then Ginsburg’s narrow view could be a strategic attempt to combat the majority opinion’s definition of personhood. The reason why highlighting people of the “same religious faith” might be useful is that it addresses the claim Hobby Lobby is making about itself. Hobby Lobby argues that it is a singular person expressing the will of the Green family. For Ginsburg, singular corporate personhood ignores the liberty of third parties in the persons of employees.17 In pointing this out, she works within the rhetorical fictions used to decide this case, and calls attention to the arbitrariness of who Justice Samuel Alito chooses to call a person. One common neoliberal response to Ginsburg’s concerns is that Hobby Lobby employees are free to do whatever they want. As free citizens in a free market, women can buy contraception for themselves. Furthermore, Alito assures us there is no economic burden because of the separate fund. As the court argues, “The effect of the HHS-created accommodation on the women employed by Hobby Lobby and the

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other companies involved in these cases would be precisely zero. Under that accommodation, these women would still be entitled to all FDAapproved contraceptives without cost sharing.”18 This assurance raises questions about the decision’s purpose, however. If the effect is “precisely zero,” then why bother? Some Catholic organizations have objected to the separate fund on the grounds that it makes no difference.19 A separate fund works in pretty much the same way that health insurance already works. Ginsburg has pointed out that it is unclear what will happen if Hobby Lobby decides this accommodation also violates its conscience. Alito’s assertion that the separate fund will make Hobby Lobby happy is curious considering his assertion that contraception is a matter of great weight. As he explains, “The Hahns and Greens believe that providing the coverage demanded by the HHS regulations is connected to the destruction of an embryo in a way that is sufficient to make it immoral for them to provide the coverage. This belief implicates a difficult and important question of religion and moral philosophy, namely, the circumstances under which it is wrong for a person to perform an act that is innocent in itself but that has the effect of enabling or facilitating the commission of an immoral act by another.”20 But what “important question of religion and moral philosophy” is resolved by saying “you can do whatever you want as long as I don’t have to pay for it”? Such a resolution would be satisfying only if one had no strong moral convictions. Presumably, Hobby Lobby would prefer to legally enjoin some contraception methods or to persuade its employees not to use them. This decision accomplishes neither of these aims. So what does the separate fund accomplish?

Sincerity and Other Expressions Some hints about the purpose of the separate fund can be found Justice Kennedy’s concurrence, in which he insists, “Free exercise  . . . implicates more than just freedom of belief.  . . . It means, too, the right to express those beliefs and to establish one’s religious (or nonreligious) self-definition in the political, civic, and economic life of our larger community.”21 The right to political expression would seem to make any solution with effects of “precisely zero” an untenable one. The solution works, however, if one distinguishes between expression and persuasion.

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Hobby Lobby does not expect to persuade its employees or to affect the “political, civic, and economic life of our larger community.” It seeks instead to protect itself from the community by expressing “sincere beliefs” that are immune to persuasion.22 Sincere beliefs are a special category of propositions located in an inscrutable interior domain. In equating sincerity with conscience, the court reproduces secular assumptions about the category of religion—that is, to define beliefs as religious is to define them as private intuitions kept rigorously separate from public reason. The purported privacy of sincere beliefs makes them elusively personal.23 The only criterion for sincerity is if someone says so. This creates a problem for legal scrutiny of diverse consciences.24 In addition to the legal implications, separating beliefs from reasons has perplexing implications for public discourse. On one hand, sincere beliefs need to express themselves through the expenditure of money. On the other hand, these beliefs have a logic that is accessible only to the people who hold them. This would meet no criteria for a serious moral debate, and that is exactly the point. The Hobby Lobby decision seeks to dramatize that public debates about moral questions are impossible. There can be no such thing as public health policy because these issues involve private matters that should be left to persons, families, churches, and corporations. Failing to persuade its employees of the immorality of their sexual practices, Hobby Lobby attempts to inflict punitive financial harm. Failing to inflict harm, the corporation barricades itself against threats to its property. Sincerity helps to establish the capitalist fantasy of property, free from accountability to others or regulation by the state. Understanding that conscience is a marker for the ability to use property as one pleases explains why an effect of precisely zero is satisfying. The separate fund keeps Hobby Lobby’s money free from pollution by immoral practices. Creative accounting performs the work of corporate sanctification.

Faith and Business The Greens’ attempt to affect a broader public while seeking the legal right to opt out of public scrutiny is distinct from the kinds of religious exercise exemptions sought by religious minorities. Whereas religious

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minorities have sought to protect practices perceived to be different from mainstream religiosity, the Greens ask not for the right to be different, but for the right to refuse to accommodate differences. This is not to say that the Greens do not tolerate religious diversity. In defending Hobby Lobby’s practice of taking out newspaper advertisements that remind people of the Christian character of Christmas and Easter, for example, CEO David Green asserts, “They don’t have to agree with me on all religious matters. They don’t have to embrace the same Savior I embrace.”25 While the Greens happily tolerate the diverse religious practices of their employees, tolerance of the wrong kinds of contraception is impossible because this is not a religious matter in the way that the court defines religion. The Greens refuse to accept that contraceptive methods they believe to be abortifacients are matters of sincere belief dictated by inscrutable interior claims. Taking the life of a human being is an intolerable act and should be prohibited by civil law. It is not enough for the Greens themselves, then, to exercise religious freedom by refusing to use some forms of contraception. This regulation of private behavior might be fine for a theological disagreement, but not about a universal moral question. The logic of the Greens’ argument invokes what philosophers would call “objective moral facts” in which individual sincerity and belief are irrelevant. Of course, the Greens would object to any description of their views on contraception as not religious. But the reason it is important for scholars to make analytic distinctions between the court’s and the Greens’ usages of religion is that religious freedom is purportedly protecting interior beliefs while in practice regulating broad swaths of social life. For the Greens and other Christian corporate families, everything could be religious. For example, Chick-fil-A founder S. Truett Cathy teaches his family the importance of “glorifying God, not seeking praise for themselves, and caring for the customer first.”26 From the perspectives of persons like Hobby Lobby or Chick-fil-A, a religious businessman is someone who works hard to support his family, treats his employees well, is honest in his business dealings, and uses his own money for charitable purposes. In other words, there is nothing that is not religious. As Green asserts, “This whole assumption on the part of many people that there should be a Jeffersonian ‘wall of separation’ between faith and business is a view I have never accepted.”27 According to

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the logic of Green’s argument, all business activity could be exempt from government regulation on religious grounds. While petitions for Hobby Lobby’s religious exercise resemble arguments for religious toleration made by a classical liberal theorist like John Locke, one analytic difference is that Locke distinguished between religious and civil matters. Locke’s rationale for “the mutual toleration of Christians in their different professions of religion” resembled the court’s interior sincerity test, but this was one reason that religion could not be the basis for civil authority.28 The Greens do not accept this Lockean distinction. They say that there is no distinctively religious sphere of life, and therefore their conscience protects whatever economic and political positions are at odds with existing civil law.

Our Property, Ourselves In the court’s view of religious self-definition, property is what makes you a person. If your property is free, then you are free. Scrubbed clean of concerns about institutional power and inequality, the alchemy of religious freedom converts corporations and their employees into equal persons free to express themselves. A woman’s personhood, however, is curiously fragmented. She is a person on her own time, but while employed she is part of another corporate person who has an interest in moral surveillance over her person as her body is a piece of its own person. The price of an employee’s participation in economic life is to forfeit control over her person, but to be free as her leisure self. In the court’s logic, however, corporations cannot be fragmented. The court does not ask that the Greens exercise religious liberty on their own time and forfeit some control over their corporation when participating in the marketplace. Hobby Lobby expects to protect the sanctity of all aspects of its person. If employees violate Hobby Lobby’s morality, they do so only when their sexual behavior is symbolically removed from the corporate person through the separate fund. It is no accident that contraception provides a symbolic test for the court’s model of personhood. Reproductive sex is fraught with opportunities for pollution because sex gets mixed up with the messy world of intercourse between persons. Sex poses problems for a moral universe based on the principle that people should be free to do whatever they

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want with their property. In Hobby Lobby, this came to a head when the personhood of what a corporation sincerely believed to be embryos was granted equal standing to the personhood of employees. For Hobby Lobby’s morality to hold together, women’s bodies must be clearly marked as the objects of property rather than as persons entitled to reciprocal consideration. By invoking its sacred right to private property, Hobby Lobby can absolve itself from engaging other persons in public debate.

Most Cherished Liberty Hobby Lobby raises the question of whether corporate freedom has a peculiarly evangelical logic. This would be consistent with alliances in contemporary American politics in which, as William Connolly notes, “the right leg of the evangelical movement today is joined at the hip to the left leg of the capitalist juggernaut.”29 It is an open question whether this convergence between faith and business is a product of recent transformations in American religion or whether it fits with evangelical tradition. Hobby Lobby’s style of corporate Christianity has certainly come a long way from Charles Grandison Finney’s suspicion of privacy or William Jennings Bryan’s critique of predatory capitalism. Bryan would vehemently oppose the sanctification of corporate property. Hobby Lobby’s claim to be a holy person might also erode the distinctive authority of traditional religious institutions. It is unclear what special protections for religion would look like in a legal order with disappearing boundaries between religious and economic institutions. Some Catholics, for example, could be wary of the sanctification of corporate property in light of Pope Francis’s recent critique of the marketplace as a false idol. While Francis would agree that contraception is immoral, it is less clear that he would use property rights to defend the church’s position. In his view, faith in markets competes with traditional forms of Christian faith and invents new forms of sanctity that threaten God’s law. He has cautioned against “a crude and naïve trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power and in the sacralized working of the prevailing economic system.”30 American Catholics are a diverse group, however, and many have political commitments that do not easily shift with the change of pontiff.31 Catholics like former senator Rick Santorum have been some of the most vocal advocates for faith in the

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goodness of those wielding economic power. Santorum even proposes measuring social goods as private forms of capital. As he explains, “Our task as stewards of this great land is to enhance the richness of these five pillars of American civilization: social capital, economic capital, moral capital, cultural capital, and intellectual capital.” This capital is depleted by threats to the family posed by “out-of-wedlock births, divorce, cohabitation, and absentee parenthood.”32 For Santorum, women’s sexual freedom threatens the common good not because it hurts shared public life, but through the wasteful expenditure of various forms of private capital. While Santorum’s position is not embraced by all Catholics, he does not stand alone. Catholic arguments, at least those espoused by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), have mirrored the economy of religious freedom proposed by Hobby Lobby. In the USCCB’s letter “Our First, Most Cherished Liberty,” the bishops attempted to craft a nonpartisan statement that included concerns about illegal immigration, social justice, as well as the regulation of sex.33 However, the letter’s first complaint about the contraception mandate was the most prominent. In addition to addressing the legal questions the contraception mandate raised, the letter considered the public consequences of this policy, articulated their vision of civil society, and expressed their desire to contribute to an American public square: “What is at stake is whether America will continue to have a free, creative, and robust civil society—or whether the state alone will determine who gets to contribute to the common good, and how they get to do it. Religious believers are part of American civil society, which includes neighbors helping each other, community associations, fraternal service clubs, sports leagues, and youth groups. All these Americans make their contribution to our common life, and they do not need the permission of the government to do so.”34 Calling for a robust civil society, the bishops argue that strong voluntary associations are essential to the health of a public sphere that exists between the state and individual citizens. From their perspective, the public must exist independently of the state and provide a forum for vigorous criticism of government policies. The kind of implicit political theory that the bishops invoke also expects civil society to do more, however, than protect the liberty of voluntary associations. The civil society they describe would also require commitment to public

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persuasion and argument.35 Thus, the letter poses questions like these: What is the bishops’ understanding of public reason exactly? What action is the church taking to persuade the public of the merits of its moral stance on contraception? These questions are distinct from whether the church has the legal right to resist the mandate.

The Most Sacred of All Property The letter’s vision of civil society matters because the bishops not only defend the church’s legal rights but also endorse a political philosophy. In particular, the letter embraces a classical liberal vision of freedom in which only the state can threaten liberty. This is a departure from at least some Catholic support for progressive reforms over the past century. Catholics like Al Smith, for example, sought to use democratic institutions to advance the interests of citizens against social forces that inhibited human freedom. Fear of a leviathan state has been a prominent feature, however, of recent attacks on progressive reforms. As conservative Catholic law professor Charles E. Rice warns, the ACA contraception mandate is merely a “preliminary event” that prefaces a longer campaign to establish secular tyranny.36 Whatever arguments about civil society it employs, the letter’s persuasive force rests on its ability to tap into this current vogue for shrinking the government. If the state is the only institution that threatens liberty, the contraception mandate becomes a conflict between the church and the Obama administration. If we expand the scope of analysis beyond state power to include the ways in which corporate power could constrain human freedom, however, whatever conflict might exist between the church and the Obama administration would have to be considered alongside an equally contentious battle between Catholic organizations and their employees. The citizens most directly affected by the mandate are those who by definition do not agree with the church’s teachings on contraception. The Department of Health and Human Services is intervening in a conflict between parties who do not share the same conscience. The mandate would ensure that American citizens receive insurance coverage without being subject to religious beliefs they do not hold. This raises the question of whether the church is burdening the religious freedom of its employees. As in the Hobby Lobby decision, the argu-

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ment that women can buy contraception for themselves has persuaded many commentators. The sociologist Peter Berger wrote, “But I do agree very much with the protesters’ view that the Obama administration was about to violate constitutionally guaranteed religious freedom in a serious way. That is the issue here, and not women’s health—contraceptive devices are easily and inexpensively available in places other than Catholic hospitals.”37 Consistent with the Supreme Court’s use of sincerity as the measure of religious authenticity, Berger’s evidence supporting the taxonomy that makes contraception a religious freedom issue and not a women’s health issue is that religious issues are whatever religious organizations say they are. He adds to this the qualifier that contraceptive devices are inexpensive. Berger echoed the bishops’ own clarifications in another letter about the mandate earlier in 2012: “This is not about access to contraception, which is ubiquitous and inexpensive.  . . . This is not about the Bishops’ somehow ‘banning contraception,’ when the U.S. Supreme Court took that issue off the table two generations ago. Indeed, this is not about the Church wanting to force anybody to do anything.”38 What is not clarified is what exactly the legal standard would be for “inexpensive” and why this would matter for First Amendment rights. From Berger’s perspective, religious freedom does not need to be free as long as it is relatively affordable, making religious freedom rights available to those with the property to exercise those rights.39 Whether this defense of religious freedom succeeds as a minimal protection of legal rights, it is unclear how it serves the mission to shape an American public square. By acknowledging that employees have the liberty to buy contraception, the bishops assure the public that the church’s policies will not affect anyone’s moral action. The practical effect of the church’s actions, then, is not to change the law (which it recognizes it cannot do) but to protect itself from polluting contact with women whose behavior the church finds to be immoral. The public envisioned is not a place of moral persuasion, but a marketplace in which religious liberty sacralizes the freedom to do what one wants with one’s property. This is not to say that there are no differences between the church’s and Hobby Lobby’s claims to exercise corporate freedom. One defense of the church’s protection of its organizational authority is that it is a corporate body whose conscience is not neatly located within individual

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citizens. Catholics have challenged narrowly individualist definitions of religious freedom in a largely Protestant nation.40 The conundrum for the church, however, is how to reconcile this challenge to Protestant individualism while framing religious freedom as an inviolable private property. What does it mean if the mystical body of the church is equated with the right of Catholic organizations to spend money? While the letter claims to be a critique of a naked secular public square, it accepts the secular liberal idea that religion is a kind of private property. As the bishops state, “James Madison, often called the Father of the Constitution, described conscience as ‘the most sacred of all property.’”41 Does this mean that all the people employed by Catholic organizations are part of the mystical body of the church? The property of the church appears to be consecrated as religious money accorded a special treatment that is different from other kinds of conscience/money. This means that the church can make a claim on the conscience of anyone who accepts a paycheck from an organization supported by Catholic funds. As conservative Catholic Michael Novak approvingly notes, identifying the church as a corporation might not so much complement as replace the ideal of the church as a mystical body. As he states, “The corporation is an expression of the social nature of humans. Moreover, it offers a metaphor for the ecclesial community that is in some ways more illuminating than metaphors based on the human body (‘the mystical body’) or on the family, the clan, the tribe, or the chosen people.”42

Civil Rights? The bishops’ appeal to an ideal of a civil society is in tension with their insistence on the church’s liberty to do whatever it wants with its property. As with Hobby Lobby, the church wants to affect public policy while still immunized from public accountability on the grounds that these are matters of private conscience. This simultaneous assertion of public influence and private immunity is in conflict with the letter’s professed desire to work within the tradition of civil rights activism as exemplified by Martin Luther King, Jr. As the letter asserts, “The civil rights movement was an essentially religious movement, a call to awaken consciences, not only an appeal to the Constitution for America to honor its heritage of liberty.”43 While the bishops correctly note

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King’s indebtedness to Catholic traditions of natural law, his practice of nonviolent direct action was designed to dramatize the injustice of segregation so that any human being with a conscience would recognize the evils of racism. King did not defend the personal liberty to be as racist as one wants as long as he did not have to pay for it. Whatever the merits of his arguments, King’s appeal to the “conscience of the community” challenged the negative peace that exists when conscience is reduced to private property.44 The point of nonviolent direct action was to remove the separations in society that protected people’s consciences from exposure to social realities that made them uncomfortable. The bishops argue that, like King, they hope to appeal to the consciences of all people and not only Catholics. According to this reasoning, arguments for chaste marriage outlined in papal encyclical Humanae Vitae should be able to persuade Americans of any religious affiliation. These arguments should be persuasive if the contraception issue is a moral question accessible to natural reason. This appeal to universal reason is in tension with the church’s assertion of a peculiarly religious liberty. In this way, the bishops’ letter revisits some tensions between natural reason and papal infallibility that Garry Wills noted in Humanae Vitae itself. Wills contends that Catholic traditions of reason and persuasion were abandoned by the Pope Paul VI’s assertion of institutional authority. When Paul VI wrote his encyclical in 1968, he rejected the findings of a committee who saw no conflict between traditional Catholic teaching and the practice of contraception within marriage. Wills asserts that by ignoring the committee’s reasoning Paul VI rejected the principle of public persuasion: “It was a resort to sheer church authority where persuasion had failed—and this in an area not of direct revelation but of natural reason.”45 Regardless of whether one accepts the theological basis for a distinction between revelation and natural reason, this distinction is internally necessary for the logic of the church’s position about why the consciences of non-Catholics would be under its jurisdiction. The evils of contraception should be apparent to everyone with a conscience regardless of what they believe. As Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger argued before he became pope, a conscience is not something subjective but reveals universal moral truths: “It will not do to identify man’s conscience with the self-consciousness of the ‘I,’ with its subjective certainty about itself

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and its moral behavior.”46 In Ratzinger’s view, sincere beliefs only superficially resemble a conscience. A conscience is a conscience precisely to the extent that it does not belong to your person, but participates in objective truth that exists outside of you. The conscience internally divides persons; it is what makes you feel ashamed and guilty about your own actions. If you sincerely believe that everything you do is right, you do not, properly speaking, have a conscience. This is especially true for contraception. In Humanae Vitae, Paul VI explained that it concerned an “objective moral order which was established by God, and of which a right conscience is the true interpreter. In a word, the exercise of responsible parenthood requires that husband and wife, keeping a right order of priorities, recognize their own duties toward God, themselves, their families and human society. From this it follows that they are not free to act as they choose in the service of transmitting life, as if it were wholly up to them to decide what is the right course to follow.”47 The problem with contraception is that it enshrines personal freedom and distracts people from fulfilling their duties to God. Contraception profanes the sexual act by making it a form of property, allowing people the freedom to do whatever they want with their bodies. The American bishops, then, invoke religious freedom as the most sacred of all property in order to defend the teaching that modern views of the body as private property are morally impoverished. On one hand, the bishops hope to influence civil society. On the other hand, they insist on the private character of peculiarly religious arguments that they concede will not change the civil law or moral behavior. Instead of restricting their efforts to moral persuasion, the bishops seek to use private institutional power to inflict punitive economic harm on women they have failed to persuade. One could conceivably argue that this might be consistent with the civil rights movement’s attempt to exert economic pressures through boycotts. Citing the principle that “an unjust law is no law at all,” the bishops could say that the duty to defy an unjust law would not depend upon persuasion. They are not, however, seeking a legal ban on contraception. Arguments against contraception are different from the fight against segregation in that the bishops do not call for defying unjust laws; they simply assert the rights of some organizations not to comply with what are otherwise acceptable laws on the grounds that it would violate their property rights.

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The Third Class The bishops’ letter appeals to legal precedents that grant special rights to religious organizations, such as in the recent Hosanna-Tabor decision statement that the First Amendment “gives special solicitude to the rights of religious organizations.”48 But they also argue for a broader understanding of the rights of conscience of any property owner. To this end, the bishops decry the lack of First Amendment rights for putatively nonreligious corporations: The HHS mandate creates still a third class, those with no conscience protection at all: individuals who, in their daily lives, strive constantly to act in accordance with their faith and moral values. They, too, face a government mandate to aid in providing “services” contrary to those values—whether in their sponsoring of, and payment for, insurance as employers; their payment of insurance premiums as employees; or as insurers themselves—without even the semblance of an exemption. This, too, is unprecedented in federal law, which has long been generous in protecting the rights of individuals not to act against their religious beliefs or moral convictions. We have consistently supported these rights, particularly in the area of protecting the dignity of all human life, and we continue to do so.49

In lamenting the predicament of this “third class,” the letter makes a double move. First, it charges the Department of Health and Human Services with an overly narrow definition of what counts as a religious organization (in order to argue that any organization supported by Catholic money counts as religious). Second, it says this should not really matter anyway because the exemptions that the church seeks should be available to any corporation with a conscience (though only those classified as “religious” consciences). The church supports the efforts of Hobby Lobby and others to resist the contraception mandate, greatly expanding the rights of individual and corporate persons to resist regulations now defined as tyrannical encroachments on private freedom. The bishops’ decision to frame their letter as a defense of minimal privacy rights invokes the discourse that Mary Ann Glendon saw as a rising feature of American politics in the 1990s: “A penchant

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for absolute formulations (‘I have the right to do whatever I want with my property’) promotes unrealistic expectations and ignores both social costs and the rights of others.”50 In the end, exemptions to the contraception mandate represent a movement toward privatization in American politics that celebrates liberty but in practice empowers corporations to control property in a way that could burden the substantive freedom of citizens. The bishops’ letter would illustrate Francis’s warning about “ideologies which defend the absolute autonomy of the marketplace and financial speculation. Consequently, they reject the right of states, charged with vigilance for the common good, to exercise any form of control. A new tyranny is thus born, invisible and often virtual, which unilaterally and relentlessly imposes its own laws and rules.”51 While Francis shares the bishops’ opposition to contraception, his use of “tyranny” to describe marketplace ideology is at odds with the usage of freedom employed by the American Catholic hierarchy. It is analytically incoherent, therefore, to claim that social actors are motivated by a desire to protect a singular thing called religious freedom. This claim overlooks how different market metaphors produce distinct visions of political institutions. Regardless of whether one accepts that market autonomy is tyrannical, it seems that a less controversial conclusion would be that the libertarian exercise of religious freedom is primarily designed not to empower individual human beings, but to shift regulatory power from public to private institutions like families, churches, and corporations.52 The Hobby Lobby decision and the bishops’ letter sanctify private property. Of course, property rights have deep roots in American democracy, and it might be that all of this is nothing new. In her study of free market rhetoric, Linda Kintz argues that the parallels between financial and religious freedom are as American as apple pie and are part of an “American mythology that might be visualized as a set of concentric circles stacked one on top of the other and ascending heavenward: God, property, womb, family, church, free market, nation, global mission, God.”53 For my part, I am not convinced that corporate sanctification is essentially American because I do not believe there is any one thing as American religious freedom. Religious freedom adapts and shifts to different circumstances as it is exercised by different kinds of persons. The bishops’ letter and the Hobby Lobby decision are not

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just attempts by people to gain freedom from government control; they seek to extend personhood to diverse phenomena including citizens, embryos, and corporations. These diverse persons are imagined as free when the government leaves them alone to do what they wish with their money. This is an ironic spin on the ubiquitous slogan “freedom isn’t free.” When incorporated, religious freedom is doled out depending on what you can afford. One problem for liberal arguments that Hobby Lobby and the church extend the rights of persons to corporations is that they presume persons have been a stable category in American life. This overlooks the diverse kinds of persons produced in social spaces like Charles Grandison Finney’s revivals, Louisa May Alcott’s greenhouse, and Al Smith’s neighborhood. While everyone seems to agree that people should be able to exercise religious freedom, the controversies arise when figuring how best to produce the persons who will exercise this freedom. The confusion that plagues analyses of religious freedom is that by examining how religious persons seek to liberate themselves from social constraints, they overlook the labor and resources necessary to produce religious persons. Extending religious freedom to corporations not only makes them into persons, but defines all personhood in terms of property. When this property is held to be sacred, persons seek protection from profaning contact with the bodies and choices of others. Persons understood to be property feel most free when they are rigorously protected from having to consider their relationships to other people, when they are absolved from performing the labor of producing a society in which people can live together.

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Epilogue You, and You, and You

While no one agrees about what religious freedom is, most Americans seem to think it is a good thing. Disagreements about religion have been the subject of exhausting legal, popular, and scholarly analysis over the course of American history. Scholars have hoped to resolve these disputes by trying to figure out what religion is and then determine how to make it free. Attempts to make sense of religion take various and sundry phenomena classified as religious at different times and for different reasons, and then look for some internal logic, unifying principle, or coherent narrative that ties it all together. As these phenomena have no consistent internal logic, religion appears mysterious and seems to require special treatment and analysis. The only reason that religion’s coherency exists, however, is that we think it has to. When American religious historians bring order and clarity to the unruly contests that make up social life, they produce their own forms of scholarly governance. This is not to say that governance is unreal or the study of religion is unproductive. Scholars of religion participate within the American economy of religious freedom when they decide what is to be counted and uncounted, valued and devalued. There is no way to opt out of this political participation by finding a stable point of reference that lies beyond our interpretations, nor is such a way out necessarily desirable. Rather than isolate religion, this book has examined its production within social institutions. It has argued that imagining religious freedom in terms of individual participation in a religious marketplace conflicts with how economies work. Ranging from the nineteenth century thought of Charles Grandison Finney through discussions of Louisa May Alcott, William Jennings Bryan, and D. W. Griffith, up to Malcolm X, the proponents of intelligent design, and corporate persons, this book has charted the fluidity and flexibility of secular divisions of public and 167

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private at different points in American history. By tracing how religious freedom has been approached in America over two centuries, this volume has argued that a focus on individual citizens as the primary bearers of religious freedom has diverted attention from institutional forces and collective religious identities that have shaped private and public life. Religious freedom’s malleability is part of what ensures its potency; its ability to be used for different ends makes it a useful currency for a variety of agendas. As we have seen, different forms of identification have shaped religious visions that have both supported and opposed social, economic, political, and religious inequality. While there is no essential difference between religious freedom and other kinds of freedom, classifying conflicts as religious can alter how social and political institutions distribute power. Conventional equations between religious freedom and individual autonomy, however, deflect attention from these social forces. Religious freedom does not liberate people from rules, norms, constraints, and forms of governance. On the contrary, religious freedoms are forms of governance, ways that Americans regulate themselves. Arguments about religion are arguments about what rules should govern social life and about what kinds of social institutions produce free persons. This book will have frustrated readers looking for a single thesis that explains religious freedom. It is possible that this study fails at one of the essential tasks of theorization, which is to offer general explanations of human behavior.1 Made up of eight studies chosen to elucidate conceptual problems rather than to provide any coherent narrative, the book has drawn out contests over religion rather than provided a comprehensive or inclusive overview. Its aims have not been merely deconstructive, however. Thinking through religious freedom can help us to understand a lot of things. I hope this book has offered some insights into how democratic forms of governance and sovereignty work, how collective subjects are formed, how consciences are constructed, how sympathy is embraced and resisted as a form of social protest, how arbitrary lines are drawn between public and private life, and how processes of institutional differentiation produce not only religious freedom but economic, artistic, and scientific freedom as well.

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Religious freedom’s malleability does not mean that it is limitless. The production of religion happens within contests over finite social resources. An economic approach not only notes that religious forms of identification are socially constructed, but considers why some identities resonate more than others. Finney’s theories of revivalism, for example, made sense when people were working out democratic citizenship and self-governance. Alcott labored to resolve tensions between independence and domesticity in order to provide a refuge from depersonalizing market forces in nineteenth-century America. Bryan and Griffith appealed to sympathy among people who felt that white Christian nationhood was imperiled. Smith was shaped by the machine politics and ethnic loyalties of urban America. Malcolm X looked for models of freedom outside the American nation-state during a postcolonial moment of revolutionary change. Arguments for intelligent design and corporate personhood flourish in an environment of privatization that uses conscience to enshrine personal property. This book does not tie all the pieces together because they do not fit together. The jagged edges of social life rub up against each other. America does not add up. What the study of religious freedom illustrates is the need to abandon the quest for the legal fantasy of the perfect rule, the abstract principle that governs all situations in the same way. Religious freedom cannot be abstracted from diverse contests over the distribution of social power, nor can it be divorced from the interested choices of social actors. What this means is that freedom is on you.2 While the people in this book have not acted as unconstrained individuals, everyone has had to make choices of some kind or another. Without some principle that can make decisions for you, then, you need to ask what you want to do with religious freedom.

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Notes

Introduction 1 On broadening definitions of freedom, see Foner, Story of American Freedom. 2 Dewey, Liberalism and Social Action. 3 As Nancy Cohen describes this shift, “The minimal state of an earlier liberalism was abandoned in favor of one with the power to intervene in the market and to promote social welfare.” Cohen, Reconstruction of American Liberalism, 5. 4 Tocqueville, Democracy in America. 5 On the necessarily comparative nature of the category of religion, see Smith, “Religion, Religions, Religious.” 6 Craig Martin describes this celebration of individual freedom as part of an ideology of individualism that “obscures how ‘individuals’ are constituted by their communities. Telling people that they are free to consume commodities or cultures in whatever way they wish does not make them autonomous; rather it obfuscates how their apparently free choices are determined by the social fields that limit, reward, and penalize their ‘choices.’” Martin, Capitalizing Religion, 6. 7 On this historical contingency of processes of identification, see Bayart, Illusion of Cultural Identity. 8 On classical views about economy, see Agamben, Kingdom and the Glory. 9 Duggan, Twilight of Equality?, xiv. 10 Williams, Alchemy of Race and Rights, 43. 11 Because the book does not tell the complete story of American religious freedom, its subject matter is limited to the United States instead of the Americas. Therefore, I follow the colloquial usage of “American” to describe nationalist forms of identification within the United States. 12 Sehat, Myth of American Religious Freedom; Sullivan, Impossibility of American Religious Freedom. 13 Fessenden, Culture and Redemption; Modern, Secularism in Antebellum America. 14 Smith, Rise and Decline.

Chapter 1. You, and You, and You 1 Letter from Charles Grandison Finney to Jacob Helffenstein, November 18, 1873, Charles Grandison Finney Papers, Oberlin College, box 7. 2 Finney, How to Win Souls, 4.

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3 Finney did not develop these measures himself. On how most were tactics employed by Methodist revivalists, see Hardman, Charles Grandison Finney, 84. 4 Stowe, Charles G. Finney, 59. 5 Finney, Revivals, 235. 6 Hatch, Democratization of American Christianity, 162. 7 Finke and Stark, Churching of America. 8 Hatch’s concerns about the dangers of popularization and anti-intellectualism are echoed by evangelical historians when writing about later trends in evangelicalism, such as in Noll, Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. 9 Hatch, Democratization of American Christianity, 162. 10 Finney, Memoirs, 81. 11 Ibid., 64. 12 Finney, How to Win Souls, 4. 13 Porterfield, Conceived in Doubt, 11. 14 Albanese, America. 15 Sehat, Myth of American Religious Freedom, 27. 16 Modern, Secularism in Antebellum America, 84. 17 Foucault, Power/Knowledge, 98. 18 Michael McKeon describes this process as the production of an “averaged typicality.” In his description, “The public might be figured not as a flow or an agglomerated totality but as a quotient, a totality of qualitative subjects quantified by averaged typicality.” McKeon, Secret History of Domesticity, 165. 19 Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 48–49. 20 Dod, Essays, 117. 21 Finney, Revivals, 4. 22 Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 71. 23 Noll, America’s God, 441. 24 On the persistent influence of Edwards on nineteenth-century thought, see Conforti, Jonathan Edwards. 25 Finney, Revivals, 229. 26 As George Marsden points out, Edwards’s ideas of free will were concerned not only with excessive freedom but with modern theories of mechanistic determinism. Marsden, Jonathan Edwards, 440. 27 Edwards, Freedom of the Will, 159. 28 Ibid., 172. 29 Finney, Lectures, 13. Some scholars might object to my use of Finney’s later work to understand his approach to revivalism in the 1820s and 1830s. While it is true that Finney did not have a systematic theology that guided his early revivalism, my reading is that his later thought was an attempt to develop a second-order understanding of his success as a revivalist. Therefore, I am using late Finney’s analysis to explain early Finney. 30 Ibid., 14. 31 Ibid., 15.

Notes

32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40

41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54

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Finney, Revivals, 220. Ibid., 36. Ibid., 415. Ibid., 251. Ibid., 257. Ibid., 172. Finney, Memoirs, 92. Dod, Essays, 124. As Warner describes sermons during the Second Great Awakening, “Suddenly men, even women, were preaching to strangers. The revival context and itinerant preaching made the publicness of the sermon more salient, in a way that was perceived at the time to be scandalous.” Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 84–85. Johnson, Shopkeepers Millennium, 97. Finney, Memoirs, 13. Ibid., 63. Finney, Revivals, 378. Ibid., 412. Ibid., 328. Modern, Secularism in Antebellum America, 98. Finney, Character, Claims, and Practical Workings, 242. Finney, Decay of Conscience, 15–16. Finney, Revivals, 347. Sehat, Myth of American Religious Freedom, 52. Finney, Revivals, 336–37. Ibid., 201. Finney, Decay of Conscience, 5–6.

Chapter 2. I’m Not Myself To-night. I Owe Money 1 Alcott, Work, 124. In this chapter, I use the characters’ first names because this follows the conventions of the novel. 2 Ibid., 124. 3 Ibid., 124. 4 Ibid., 125. 5 Ibid., 125. 6 Ibid., 111. 7 Ibid., 112. 8 Ibid., 10. 9 Alcott did write a number of other books that were not intended for an audience of children. At the time of Work’s publication, however, she had become most famous as a children’s author. 10 Although it should be noted that Alcott’s characters pressed up against gender norms in her children’s books as well. In Little Women, for example, Jo expresses her frustration that she is not a boy: “It’s bad enough to be a girl, anyway, when I

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17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34

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like boys’ games and work and manners! I can’t get over my disappointments in not being a boy; and it’s worse than ever now, for I’m dying to go and fight with papa, and I can only stay home and knit, like a poky old woman!” Alcott, Little Women, 21–22. Alcott, Work, 127. Ibid., 126. Yellin, “From Success to Experience,” 535. For more on feminism, secularism, and economic independence, see Fessenden, Culture and Redemption, 161–80. The kind of reading Yellin proposed has long been the subject of criticism by literary theorists like Jane Tompkins, who argue that the “popular domestic novel of the nineteenth century represents a monumental effort to reorganize culture from the woman’s point of view.” Tompkins, Sensational Designs, 124. Alcott’s style of moral allegory was heavily influenced by John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, which was a favorite of her father’s and played an instrumental role in her own education. Keyser, Whispers in the Dark, 86. Matteson, Eden’s Outcasts. For more on the elder Alcott’s views about the relationship between spirit and education, see Alcott and Peabody, How Like an Angel I Came Down. Emerson, “Nature,” 38. West, American Evasion of Philosophy, 4. Saxton, Louisa May Alcott, 193. Alcott, Work, 167. Parker, Discourse, 12. Ibid., 18, capitalization in original. For the roots of Parker’s ideas of a sense of dependence as the core of religion, see Schleiermacher, On Religion. Parker, Discourse, 175. Ibid., 177. Albanese, “Having Nature All Ways,” 31. Alcott, Work, 239. Albanese, Corresponding Motion, 5. Alcott, Flower Fables, 78. Buell, Environmental Imagination, 44–49. Mann, “Gardening as ‘Women’s Culture,’” 53. By teaching Christie how to work within natural and social limits, her horticultural work anticipates Wendell Berry’s critique of the limitless economy of industrial capitalism. In favor of limits, Berry writes, “Our human and earthly limits, properly understood, are not confinements but rather inducements to formal elaboration and elegance, to fullness of relationship and meaning.” Berry, “Faustian Economics,” 41. McKeon, Secret History of Domesticity, 162–211. Parker, Sermon, 2.

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37 As Parker stated, “Everywhere in the family, the community, the church, and the state, we want the masculine and feminine element cooperating and conjoined. Woman is to correct man’s taste, mend his morals, excite his affections, inspire his religious faculties.” Ibid., 23. 38 Alcott, Work, 30. 39 Ibid., 218. 40 Matteson, Eden’s Outcasts, 380. 41 Alcott, Work, 174. 42 Ibid., 188. 43 Ibid., 194. 44 Ibid., 180. 45 For more on the equation of leisure and nature, see White, “‘Are You an Environmentalist?’” 46 Alcott, Work, 190. 47 Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son, 14. 48 Kathleen Margaret Lant and Angela M. Estes draw attention to this problem in their study of the saving work of Christie. As they note, “To deal adequately with Work, one must first recognize that Alcott has not offered us a realistic novel. What she instead presents is a series of stories or sequence of parables which hint at the kingdom to come, which challenge her readers to find within themselves the insight to make real that kingdom.” Lant and Estes, “Feminist Redeemer,” 228. 49 Michael Warner defines a counterpublic as one in which “a dominated group aspires to re-create itself as a public and in doing so finds itself in conflict not only with the dominant social group but with the norms that constitute the dominant culture as public.” Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 112. 50 Hendler, Public Sentiments, 137. 51 Smith, Imagining Religion, 63. 52 Alcott, Work, 275. 53 Ibid., 315. 54 Thoreau, Walden, 37. 55 Alcott, Work, 330. 56 Berlant, Female Complaint, 40. 57 Parker, Sermon, 19. 58 Alcott had herself volunteered to serve as a nurse in the Civil War, and concluded her account by stating, “The next hospital I enter will, I hope, be one for the colored regiments, as they seem to be proving their right to the administration and kind offices of their white relations, who owe them so large a debt, a little part of which I shall be so proud to pay.” Alcott, Civil War Hospital Sketches, 73. 59 Alcott, Work, 26. 60 Matteson, Eden’s Outcasts, 344–45. 61 Louisa May Alcott to My dear Miss Churchill, Xmas Day, Louisa May Alcott Collection of Papers, 1865–84, Berg Collection of English and American Literature, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

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Parker, Dangerous Classes, 12. Alcott, Work, 19. Ibid., 323. Hendler, Public Sentiments, 143. Alcott, Work, 343. Ibid., 344. Ibid., 319.

Chapter 3. Sentiment Rules the World 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

14 15 16 17 18

19

20 21 22 23

Larson, Summer for the Gods, 234. Lawrence and Lee, Inherit the Wind, 128. Levine, Defender of the Faith, 361. Hofstadter, Age of Reform. For a popular version of this thesis, see Frank, What’s the Matter with Kansas? Bryan, In His Image, 151. Bryan, Speeches, 249. Mitchell, “Economentality,” 481. Friedland and Alford, “Bringing Society Back In,” 234. Turner, Frontier in American History, 23. Ibid., 281. Ibid., 305. As Michael Kazin points out, “Bryan was the first leader of a major party to argue for permanently expanding the power of the federal government to serve the welfare of ordinary Americans from the working and middle classes.” Kazin, Godly Hero, xviii. Letter from Eugene V. Debs to WJB, Terre Haute, IN, July 27, 1896, William Jennings Bryan Papers, Library of Congress (WJBP-LC), box 4. WJB to Mary Baird Bryan, Washington, DC, August 16, 1893, WJBP-LC, box 3. Goodwyn, Populist Moment, 39. Ibid., 263. As Charles Postel states, “Many Populists embraced a social Christianity that rejected the notion of salvation apart from overcoming poverty and inequities among the living. Reflecting post-Darwinian understandings of human and social evolution, Populists tended to discard biblical literalism in their search for a cosmology suitable for a scientific age.” Postel, Populist Vision, 21. One issue here is a semantic disagreement about the use of the term “populism.” Whereas Goodwyn and Postel restrict their usage to adherents of the People’s Party, I use “populism” in the broader sense of a political rhetoric that invokes the power of the people against entrenched plutocratic interests. Bryan, In His Image, 235. Bryan and Bryan, Memoirs, 9–10. Bryan, In His Image, 197. Bushnell, Christian Nurture, 22.

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24 Bryan and Bryan, Memoirs, 44. 25 Bryan, In His Image, 155. 26 According to E. Brooks Holifield, Bushnell was suspicious of intellectual currents that invested too much confidence in the innate goodness of human nature: “He thought that  . . . naturalism overlooked both the human conviction of sin and the need for a supernatural redemption. This was why he could never express any confidence in either social or individual progress that supposedly occurred through ‘mere laws of natural development.’” Holifield, Theology in America, 465. 27 Edwards, Religious Affections. 28 Carnegie, Gospel of Wealth, 16. 29 Bryan, In His Image, 15. 30 WJB, address delivered at the laying of the corner stone of the Scottish Rite Temple, Miami, FL, December 7, 1922, WJBP-LC, box 36. 31 McMath, American Populism, 51. 32 Hofstadter, Age of Reform, 289–90. 33 Mencken, Carnival of Buncombe, 71. 34 Bryan and Bryan, Memoirs, 292. 35 As Norman H. Clark explains, “The saloon business, in this image, was the slave business. Called the ‘liquor traffic’ by three generations of reformers who demanded liberation, it was a commerce not only in beverages but in flesh, in corruption.” Clark, Deliver Us from Evil, 3. 36 As Thomas R. Pegram notes, “Beyond the brutality of drunken husbands and fathers, or the damage done by squandered wages or alcohol-induced accidents, the very fact that many American men spent time away from home drinking caused unease in an age that lavished sentimental affection on the ideals of home and family.” Pegram, Battling Demon Rum, 54–55. 37 Bryan, Seven Questions in Dispute (New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1924), 136. 38 Bryan, In His Image, 133. 39 Ibid., 91. 40 Bryan, Seven Questions in Dispute, 150. 41 Larson, Summer for the Gods, 27. 42 Bryan, In His Image, 108. 43 Ibid., 134. 44 WJB to F. M. Reed, Hartington, NE, March 22, 1923, WJBP-LC, box 37. 45 Anderson, Imagined Communities; Brubaker, “Myths and Misconceptions.” 46 Panizza, “Introduction,” 10. 47 Bryan and Bryan, Memoirs, 10–11. 48 Ibid., 18. 49 Strong, Our Country, 56. 50 Thomas J. Walsh to WJB, Washington, DC, December 26, 1922, WJBP-LC, box 36. 51 WJB to Thomas J. Walsh, Washington, DC, December 30, 1922, WJBP-LC, box 36. 52 WJB to John A. Taylor, Tallahassee, FL, April 17, 1925, WJBP-LC, box 40. 53 Levine, Defender of the Faith, 257–58.

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54 Bryan, First Battle, 138. 55 As one newspaper account recorded, “Speaking of Mr. Bryan, Rabbi Wise declared that the Klan could have been stifled at the New York convention had William Jennings Bryan been ‘true to his mettle and not metal.’” “Wise Censures Silence of Coolidge on Klan,” New York Times, October 20, 1924. 56 J. W. Jones to WJB, Hill City, KS, November 15, 1901, WJBP-LC, box 27. 57 Kazin, Godly Hero, 278. 58 W. Thomas Soders to WJB, Washington, DC, February 23, 1923, WJBP-LC, box 36. 59 WJB to W. Thomas Soders, Washington, DC, March 3, 1923, WJBP-LC, box 37. 60 Bryan, Old World, 193. 61 Bryan, “Bryan Says North Would Act as South.” 62 Laclau, On Populist Reason, 19. 63 McMath, American Populism, 210. 64 Canovan, People, 3. 65 Kazin, Populist Persuasion, 40.

Chapter 4. The Helpless White Minority 1 These critics were in the minority, however, because the initial critical and popular response was largely positive. For an excellent account of the NAACP’s attempts to prohibit screening of the film, see Stokes, D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, 129–70. 2 Griffith, Rise and Fall, n.p. 3 Kazin, Godly Hero, 4. 4 Foner, Reconstruction, xx. 5 Bryan, “Bryan Says North Would Act as South.” 6 Agamben, Means Without End, 28. 7 Laclau, On Populist Reason, 110. 8 In this, I am indebted to Susan Buck-Morss’s reading of Walter Benjamin, in which she grounds aesthetic theory in collective sensual experience. According to Buck-Morss, the nature of sense perception blurs the distinction between the individual body and the surrounding environment, as we see, hear, taste, touch, and smell what is in immediate proximity. Buck-Morss describes what she terms “synaesthetic” experience: “The nervous system is not contained within the body’s limits. The circuit from sense perception to motor response begins and ends in the world. The brain is thus not an isolable anatomical body, but part of a system that passes through the person and her or his (culturally specific, historically transient) environment.” Thus, aesthetic experience blurred the lines between subjects and the world around them. To the extent that other people often participated in each other’s sensory experiences, aesthetic appreciation contributed to the organization of intersubjective worlds. Buck-Morss, “Aesthetics and Anaesthetics,” 128–29. 9 Connolly, Capitalism and Christianity, 45. 10 For more on a theory of the gut, see Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity.

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11 On the film’s portrayal of whiteness, see Dyer, “Into the Light,” 173. 12 For a thoughtful analysis of the relationship between lynching and Agamben’s state of exception, see Squires, “Outlawry.” 13 Kahn, Political Theology, 21. 14 Ibid., 46–47. 15 Ibid., 16. 16 Williams, Alchemy of Race and Rights, 154. 17 Du Bois, Black Reconstruction. 18 Blum, Reforging the White Republic, 5. 19 Brown, Strain of Violence, 149–50. 20 For more on the Klan’s religious imagery, see Baker, Gospel According to the Klan. 21 Mathews, “Southern Rite of Human Sacrifice.” 22 Dixon, Clansman, 333–34. 23 Simmon, Films of D. W. Griffith, 129. 24 Wood, Lynching and Spectacle, 44. 25 Wilson, Baptized in Blood. 26 Agamben, State of Exception, 37. 27 Williams, Playing the Race Card, 110. 28 Griffith, “Reply to the New York Globe,” reprinted in Lang, Birth of a Nation, 168. 29 Robinson, Forgeries of Memory and Meaning, 115. 30 Taylor, “Re-birth of the Aesthetic,” 33. 31 Connolly, Why I Am Not a Secularist, 85–86. 32 Griffith, “Reply to the New York Globe,” 169. 33 Williams, Alchemy of Race and Rights, 64. 34 Griffith, Man Who Invented Hollywood, 29–30. 35 Griffith, Rise and Fall, n.p. 36 Wills, Necessary Evil. 37 In her defense of the Tea Party, for example, Elizabeth Price Foley ties constitutional originalism to a government limited in all respects other than what is required to protect U.S. sovereignty. Foley, Tea Party, 22. 38 In her study of Tea Party rhetoric, Jill Lepore decries originalism as a form of historical fundamentalism: “Originalism looks like history, but it’s not; it’s historical fundamentalism, which is to history what astrology is to astronomy, what alchemy is to chemistry, what creationism is to evolution.” Lepore, Whites of Their Eyes, 124. 39 Kahn, Political Theology, 121.

Chapter 5. The Fundamental Faith of Every True American 1 2 3 4

Hofstadter, Age of Reform, 298. Bliven, “Al Smith,” 70–71. Croly, “Smith of New York,” 12. William Allen White, quoted in Moore, Catholic Runs for President, 133.

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5 Schroeder, Al Smith, 6. 6 For an example of an argument that held that “papal principles” were irreconcilable with principles of “self-government,” see Strong, Our Country, 62–91. 7 As Oliver E. Allen points out, Tammany Hall was originally a nativist organization that viewed early waves of Irish and German Catholic immigrants with suspicion and hostility. The nineteenth-century transformation of Tammany into a political machine with a largely Catholic membership was a practical concession to changing demography and not a natural outgrowth of a politico-ecclesiastical worldview. Allen, Tiger, 8. 8 Fessenden, Culture and Redemption, 61. For more on the Protestant logic of American secularism (or the secular logic of American Protestantism), see Modern, “Evangelical Secularism and the Measure of Leviathan.” 9 Asad, Formations of the Secular; Bhargava, Secularism and Its Critics; Hurd, Politics of Secularism. 10 Asad, “Response to Casanova,” 209. 11 In discussing Smith’s secular politics, I reconstruct an implicit working model of secularism from a politician who was not himself a political or legal theorist. Thus, my use of terms like “institutional loyalty” or “collective identity” reflects a social scientific language that is not Smith’s own. However, I believe these concepts offer useful descriptions of the practical logic of Smith’s political action and rhetoric. Furthermore, there are a number of sources of Smith’s arguments. Some are his own experiences as a Tammany politician and lay Catholic. However, many of the arguments made under Smith’s name were heavily influenced and sometimes ghostwritten by his Jewish advisors (as I will discuss later). Because my main goal is to evaluate genealogies of secular liberalism (as opposed to isolating a distinctly American Catholic argument for religious freedom), I am interested in whatever arguments were made in Smith’s name and how they worked to advance the interests of religious minorities. Thus, I use Smith’s view as a placeholder for this constellation of positions. 12 Schultz, “‘Favoritism Cannot Be Tolerated.’” 13 Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World, 172. 14 I should note that despite her attention to Protestant hegemony, Fessenden identifies a similar movement toward a Catholic secular liberalism in her discussions of nineteenth-century Bible wars as well as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Catholic identity. 15 Smith’s liberalism anticipates Alan Wolfe’s attention to the distinction between modern and classical liberalisms. Wolfe, Future of Liberalism. 16 Dewey, Liberalism and Social Action, 41. 17 Dewey, “Why I Am for Smith,” 321. 18 Smith, Campaign Addresses, 53. 19 Ibid., 58. 20 Moses, Tribute to Governor Smith, 51–52. 21 Ibid., 57.

Notes

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28 29

30 31

32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45

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Hamburger, Separation of Church and State, 481. Marshall, “Open Letter.” Hamburger, Separation of Church and State, 449. Proskauer, Segment of My Times, 191. Slayton, Empire Statesman, 176. Smith believed that Catholic and Jewish interests were so aligned as to make Catholic anti-Semitism a contradiction in terms. Toward the end of his life, he gave a speech in which he summed up these sentiments: “Let’s resolve that we will forget bigotry, intolerance and racial and religious hatred. Nothing that I can think of could possibly go further to promote disunity. A Catholic—an Irish Catholic anti-Semite! Why, that’s a complete contradiction. There can’t be any such thing.” Smith, Addresses of Alfred E. Smith, 125. Proskauer, Segment of My Times, 55. As Duffy’s biographers described the unit’s ethnic makeup, “The roster of the regiment, living and dead, reads like a Dublin telephone directory.” Bishop and Bishop, Fighting Father Duffy, 54. Duffy and Kilmer, Father Duffy’s Story, viii. Duffy’s emphatic Americanism may not have necessarily reflected the most careful adherence to church teaching. As Thomas J. Shelley argues, Duffy’s positions were influenced by modernist commitments that had gotten him into some trouble as a young seminarian. Consequently, he looked at his contribution to Smith’s response to Marshall as an opportunity to argue for his own vision of Catholicism: “[Smith and Proskauer] may not have realized, however, that they were also getting a theologian who, like John Henry Newman in the Letter to the Duke of Norfolk, welcomed an opportunity to respond not only to critics outside the church like Marshall, but also to those Catholics whose anachronistic opinions gave credibility to Marshall’s charges of Catholic intolerance.” Shelley, “‘What the Hell Is an Encyclical?,’” 95. “Anti-Blaine Slogan Applied to Smith,” New York Times, June 11, 1923. Earle, “Why I Am for Smith,” 239. Lippmann, “Wetness of Al Smith,” 133. William H. Anderson, quoted in “Anderson Attacks Smith,” New York Times, September 10, 1923. Smith, Up to Now, 287. Smith, Campaign Addresses, 51. Neal, World Beyond the Hudson, 209. “Judge Covington Assails Al Smith,” Atlanta Constitution, November 3, 1928. Mencken, Carnival of Buncombe, 196. Ryan, Catholic Church and the Citizen, 41–42. Neal, World Beyond the Hudson, 7. McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom, 147. Wills, Why I Am a Catholic, 11. Smith, Up to Now, 245.

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46 Proskauer, Segment of My Times, 55. It should be noted that this quotation was most likely a paraphrase of Smith’s actual words as Proskauer offered a tamer version of Smith’s question: “What the Hell Is an Encyclical?” 47 Smith, “Catholic and Patriot,” 724. 48 I thank Professor Kathleen Flake for pointing out this second possible interpretation. 49 Warner and Daniel, Happy Warrior, 13–14. 50 McGreevy, Parish Boundaries, 20. For more on the Catholic neighborhood, see Orsi, Madonna of 115th Street. 51 Simkhovitch, “Al Smith,” 10. 52 Ibid., 10. 53 Burner, Politics of Provincialism, 208. 54 Smith, Progressive Democracy, 293. 55 Graham, Al Smith, 30. 56 Moses, Tribute to Governor Smith, 46. 57 “Keeping the Record Straight,” Commonweal 8 (October 10, 1928): 559. 58 Smith, Campaign Addresses, 52. 59 Pomerene, “Why Democrats Favor Smith,” 469–70. 60 Smith, Progressive Democracy, 253. 61 Schroeder, Al Smith, 6. 62 Asad, Genealogies of Religion, 207. 63 Connolly, Why I Am Not a Secularist, 10.

Chapter 6. Do You Hate Me? 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

9

10

Wallace and Lomax, Hate That Hate Produced. Beynon, “Voodoo Cult.” Lincoln, Black Muslims in America, 26. Interestingly, Shi’a forms of Islam are almost never used as the standard by which to assess the authenticity of the Nation of Islam (NOI). Turner, Islam in the African American Experience. McCloud, African American Islam, 166. Curtis, “African-American Islamization Reconsidered,” 681. On how different groups use religious identification as a means of social legitimacy, see Wenger, We Have a Religion; Levitt, “Impossible Assimilations”; Johnson, “Rise of Black Ethnics.” As Lomax pointed out, white liberals felt particularly hurt by critiques by African Americans because these seemed unappreciative of support for civil rights: “Precisely because they are now the power elite, the white liberals have become the new status quo and are under increasing attacks. Some barbs come from the old right, others from the new left; the unkindest arrows of all, so far as the white liberals are concerned, come from the Negro, from the very people whose cause the liberals have purported to champion.” Lomax, “White Liberal,” 40. Merton, Seeds of Destruction, 64.

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18 19 20

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Ibid., 53. Bone, “Black Man’s Quarrel.” King, “Letter from Birmingham City Jail,” 296–97. Lomax, Negro Revolt, 178–79. On how a focus on hatred makes racism appear as exceptional and aberrant in a tolerant society, see Jakobsen and Pellegrini, Love the Sin, 45–73. Baldwin, Fire Next Time, 139. Sarah Barringer Gordon describes how racial theology informed an NOI legal strategy that developed in tandem with a refusal to fight in the army: “Muslims repeatedly claimed discrimination, but not on the basis of race. They focused instead on religious discrimination—with racial difference among the core beliefs they sought to protect.” Gordon, Spirit of the Law, 115. Malcolm X, End of White World Supremacy, 25. Muhammad, Fall of America, 4. This is not to say that King was naïvely optimistic about the consciences of white Americans. He recognized that appealing to economic interests through boycotts was often more practically effective than moral persuasion. As King wrote, “The awful fact about the South is that Southerners are making the Marxist analysis of history more accurate than the Christian hope that men can be persuaded through teaching and preaching to live a new and better life. In the South, businessmen act much more quickly from economic considerations than do churchmen from moral considerations.” King, “Un-Christian Christian,” 61. As Lewis V. Baldwin and Amiri YaSin Al-Hadid point out, despite their differences King and Malcolm X agreed that America faced divine judgment for its many sins: “Malcolm and Martin warned us that America, due to years of arrogant and misguided foreign policy, would one day face judgment and the wrath of God.” Baldwin and Al-Hadid, Between Cross and Crescent, 358. Malcolm X, Malcolm X Speaks, 53. Malcolm X, quoted in Warren, Who Speaks for the Negro?, 257. Malcolm X and Haley, Autobiography, 276. Ibid., 21. Ibid., 28. Muhammad, Message to the Blackman in America, 107. Malcolm X and Haley, Autobiography, 292. Baldwin, Fire Next Time, 81. Delgado and Stefancic, Critical Race Theory, 20–24. Bell, Faces at the Bottom of the Well, 102. Malcolm X and Haley, Autobiography, 271. Ibid., 245. Ibid., 78. Dyson, Making Malcolm, xiv–xv. Malcolm X, Malcolm X Speaks, 135. Ambar, Malcolm X at Oxford Union, 74.

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| Notes

37 Gardell, In the Name of Elijah Muhammad, 79. 38 On Malcolm X’s prior engagement with Muslims in Africa and the Middle East, see DeCaro, On the Side of My People, 130–44. 39 Marable, Malcolm X, 168. 40 Malcolm X and Haley, Autobiography, 242. 41 In particular, Hayari challenged Muhammad’s claim to have completed the pilgrimage to Mecca on the grounds that he did not go during Ramadan. As Hayari stated, “Mr. Muhammad said he went, if he went at all, in December, 1959. So he is not telling the truth.” “Charges Muhammad Was Not at Mecca,” Pittsburgh Courier, August 25, 1962. 42 Letter from Malcolm X to Yahya Hayari, September 1, 1962, Malcolm X Collection, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York (MX-SCRBC), reel 3. 43 Marable, Malcolm X, 269. 44 Letter from Elijah Muhammad to Malcolm Shabazz, August 1, 1963 (MX-SCRBC), reel 3. 45 Malcolm X, Malcolm X Talks, 18. 46 Daulatzai, Black Star, Crescent Moon, 31. 47 On Malcolm X’s interest in international politics, see Noer, “Learn a Lesson from History.” 48 Letter from Elijah Muhammad to Malcolm Shabazz, February 15, 1962 (MXSCRBC), reel 3. 49 On the role of anticolonial thinking in the political milieu that influenced Malcolm X, see Kelley, Freedom Dreams, 60–109. 50 McAlister, “One Black Allah,” 650. 51 Malcolm X, Malcolm X Speaks, 123–24. 52 Markle, “Brother Malcolm, Comrade Babu.” 53 “Malcolm Rejects Race Separation,” New York Times, May 24, 1964. 54 Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 32. 55 On Muhammad’s lack of interest in Africa, see Williams, Concrete Demands, 69. 56 Muhammad, Fall of America, 95. 57 Malcolm X, Malcolm X Speaks, 182. 58 Ibid., 182. 59 Malcolm X and Haley, Autobiography, 244. 60 Malcolm X, By Any Means Necessary, 54. 61 Malcolm X, quoted in Warren, Who Speaks for the Negro?, 255. 62 As Michael Omi and Howard Winant explain in their classic study of racial formation, the invented quality of race makes it no less real in its effects: “While it may not be ‘real’ in a biological sense, race is indeed real as a social category with definite social consequences.” Omi and Winant, Racial Formation in the United States, 110. 63 The final year of Malcolm X’s life can be read as an attempt to answer a set of questions posed by the anthropologist Michael Taussig about how to respond to

Notes

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71 72 73 74

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the socially constructed quality of identity: “When it was enthusiastically pointed out within memory of our present Academy that race or gender or nation  . . . were so many social constructions, inventions, and representations, a window was opened, an invitation to begin the critical process of analysis and cultural reconstruction was offered. And one still feels its power even though what was nothing more than an invitation, a preamble to investigation has, by and large, been converted instead into a conclusion—e.g. ‘sex is a social construction,’ ‘race is a social construction,’ ‘the nation is an invention,’ and so forth, the tradition of invention. The brilliance of the pronouncement was blinding. Nobody was asking what’s the next step? What do we do with this old insight? If life is constructed, how come it appears so immutable?” Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity, xvi. Malcolm X, Malcolm X Speaks, 86. Baraka, “Manning Marable’s Malcolm X Book,” 241. Malcolm X, quoted in Parks, “Malcolm X,” 122. El-Beshti, “Semiotics of Salvation,” 362. Temkin, “Black Revolution,” 267. Williams, Rooster’s Egg, 128. Ta-Nehisi Coates similarly describes this honesty as a willingness to make people uncomfortable: “Malcolm was the first political pragmatist I knew, the first honest man I’d ever heard. He was unconcerned with making the people who believed they were white comfortable in their belief.” Coates, Between the World and Me, 36. Malcolm X and Haley, Autobiography, 389. On Malcolm X’s critique of Americanism, see Thomas, “African Diasporic Blackness Out of Line,” 63–68. Malcolm X, Malcolm X Talks, 11. Malcolm X, Malcolm X Speaks, 147.

Chapter 7. Science in a Little Box 1 On creationism and its fate in the courts, see Gilkey, Creationism on Trial; Numbers, Creationists. For more on recent legal controversies over intelligent design, see Miller, Only a Theory. 2 Gish, Teaching Creation Science, v. This position may not be the full 180-degree turn that Gish describes. William Jennings Bryan hoped that anti-Darwinist legislation would carry no penalties for individual teachers and did not want all references to evolution removed from the classroom. Bryan actually voiced a position similar to equal time proponents. He argued that teaching evolution in the public schools could be permissible as long as it was clear that Darwinism was only a theory and not settled fact: “In regard to the teaching of Darwinism or any other evolutionary hypothesis that makes man a blood descendent of the brutes, I would put in the two words, ‘as true’ and I would make it apply to any book used in the schools. A book which merely mentions it as an hypothesis can be considered as giving information as to views held, which is very different from teaching

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10 11 12 13

14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22

it as a fact.” Bryan, “Letter to Senator W. J. Singleterry,” April 11, 1923, William Jennings Bryan Papers, Library of Congress, box 37. Cole, “Wielding the Wedge,” 126. For data on American public opinion, see Berkman and Plutzer, Evolution, Creationism. Arendt, Human Condition, 38. Asad, Genealogies of Religion, 207. Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World, 5. Williams, Alchemy of Race and Rights, 43. Taylor, Secular Age. I am aware that invocating Taylor for this point is a stretch, as ID does not follow the model of an immanent frame of reference for natural science, but I believe that this is the same stretch made in popular discourse. Bird, “Freedom of Religion,” 563. Johnson, Defeating Darwinism, 55. Gould, Leonardo’s Mountain of Clams, 282. Johnson, Objections Sustained, 24. Of course, this has been based on a very partial and unfair reading of Kuhn, but my purpose is not to contest ID readings of the history of science. Wells, “Unseating Naturalism,” 67. Meyer, Signature in the Cell, 36. Ibid., 37. Dembski and Wells, Intelligent Design Uncensored, 27. Harding, Book of Jerry Falwell, 225. Morris, Scientific Creationism, 211. Moore, “Creationist Cosmos,” 56. Ham, Creation Evangelism, 16. On the evangelical value of privacy, see Watt, “Private Hopes”; Erzen, “Testimonial Politics.”

Chapter 8. The Most Sacred of All Property 1 Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc., 134 S. Ct. 2751 (2014). 2 Kevin M. Kruse has argued that Christian nation rhetoric was a reaction to New Deal policies by 1950s businessmen who equated Christian and corporate freedom. While the idea of a Christian nation did exist in earlier periods, it is possible that one novel development is the belief that corporations are uniquely poised to protect the nation. Kruse, One Nation Under God. 3 Moreton, To Serve God and Wal-Mart, 175. 4 Dochuk, From Bible Belt to Sun Belt, 329. 5 Horwitz, “Hobby Lobby Moment,” 160–66. 6 Meese and Oman, “Hobby Lobby, Corporate Law,” 278. Meese and Orman do not explain what kind of empirical test could resolve disputed semantic interpretations. On why this might be a difficulty, see Davidson, Inquiries into Truth. 7 Employment Division v. Smith, 110 S. Ct. 1595 (1990).

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8 Sherbert v. Verner, 83 S. Ct. 1790 (1963). 9 As Justice Kennedy wrote, “When the political branches of the Government act against the background of a judicial interpretation of the Constitution already issued, it must be understood that in later cases and controversies the Court will treat its precedents with the respect due them under settled principles, including stare decisis, and contrary expectations must be disappointed. RFRA was designed to control cases and controversies, such as the one before us; but as the provisions of the federal statute here invoked are beyond congressional authority, it is this Court’s precedent, not RFRA, which must control.” City of Boerne v. Flores, 521 S. Ct. at 536 (1997). 10 Magarian, “How to Apply.” 11 Laycock, “RFRA, Congress, and the Ratchet,” 154. 12 Lupu, “Case Against Legislative Codification,” 592. 13 Magarian, “How to Apply,” 1922. 14 For an example of why some conservative legal analysts have welcomed this expanded legislative power, see McConnell, “Religious Freedom.” 15 Sullivan, “Impossibility of Religious Freedom.” 16 Ibid. 17 This argument is also advanced by Gedicks and Van Tassell, “RFRA Exemptions,” 384. 18 Hobby Lobby, 134 S. Ct. at 2760. 19 In a Seventh Circuit case earlier in 2014, the University of Notre Dame argued that the separate fund still made it complicit in providing contraceptive coverage. Judge Gerald Posner rejected Notre Dame’s claim and stated that the university had no grounds to force another corporation (in this case Aetna) not to provide coverage that did not violate the health insurer’s conscience. Notre Dame v. Sebelius, 743 F. 3d 547 (2014). 20 Hobby Lobby, 134 S. Ct. at 2778. 21 Ibid., at 2751. 22 Weiner, “On the Unreasonableness of Legal Religion.” 23 As William E. Arnal and Russell T. McCutcheon observe, the purported interiority of religion makes it both irrational and a quintessential feature of the human self: “Religion is identified with the quintessence of the human self, the most ineffable interiority, the ultimate concern so powerful as to be immune from criticism or coercion, and it is simultaneously peripheralized as irrational, subject to individual and arbitrary choice, and positively ruled out of state activity and thus also ruled out of effective social potency.” Arnal and McCutcheon, Sacred Is the Profane, 110–11. 24 One other effect of this is that it makes sincerity an attribute that can be exercised only by self-identified religious persons. As Micah Schwartzman points out, “It may be difficult to know whether claims based on secular beliefs are sincere. And since nonbelievers will often not be associated with a religious group or some other structured organization, that difficulty is compounded by the lack of

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36 37 38 39 40

41 42 43 44 45 46 47

48 49 50 51

| Notes

some more objective measure for determining the authenticity of their claims.” Schwartzman, “What if Religion Is Not Special?,” 1420. Green and Merrill, More Than a Hobby, 168. Cathy, Eat Mor Chikin, 194. Green and Merrill, More Than a Hobby, 163. Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration. Connolly, Capitalism and Christianity, 44. Francis, Evangelii Gaudium, 28. McGreevy, “Catholics, Democrats, and the GOP.” Santorum, It Takes a Family, 9. On the church’s attempt to couch issues of contraception within a consistent defense of life as they lobbied the state, see McAndrews, What They Wished For. United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, “Our First, Most Cherished Liberty.” The church’s defense of voluntary associations recalls Tocqueville’s ideas as articulated in Democracy in America, as well as evidences debts to the kinds of classical liberal theory found in Mill, On Liberty. For an overview of the development of the public sphere, see Habermas, Structural Transformation. To be clear, I am not arguing here for the value of liberal distinctions between public and private as much as I want to show how the church’s own logic presupposes such a distinction. Rice, Contraception and Persecution, 8. Berger, “Contraception and the Culture War.” United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, Administrative Committee, “United for Religious Freedom.” On property as a prerequisite for the exercise of rights, see Williams, Alchemy of Race and Rights, 15–43. On the subject of Catholic challenges to Protestant understandings of the separation of church and state that equated religious freedom and individual voluntarism, see Green, Bible, the School, and the Constitution. USCCB, “Our First, Most Cherished Liberty.” Novak, Toward a Theology, 1. USCCB, “Our First, Most Cherished Liberty.” King, “Letter from Birmingham City Jail.” Wills, Under God, 309. Ratzinger, On Conscience, 20. Paul VI, Humanae Vitae, July 26, 1968, http://w2.vatican.va/content/paul-vi/en/ encyclicals/documents/hf_p-vi_enc_25071968_humanae-vitae.html (accessed February 14, 2014). Hosanna-Tabor v. EEOC, 132 S. Ct. 694 (2012). USCCB, Administrative Committee, “United for Religious Freedom.” Glendon, Rights Talk, xi. Francis, Evangelii Gaudium, 29.

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52 On the production of privacy as a justification for shrinking the state while reinforcing national forms of sexual regulation, see Berlant, “Live Sex Acts,” 173–78. 53 Kintz, Between Jesus and the Market, 6.

Epilogue 1 Boyer, Religion Explained, 6. 2 John Lardas Modern makes a similar point when he states, “When you talk about religion—believe in it, promote it, explain it, condemn it, historicize it—you are making religion up. You are giving weight and shape to it in the world. But religion is also making you up. For whatever it is, the questions made it manifest in the world have already contributed to your making.” Modern, “My Evangelical Conviction,” 446.

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Index

Agamben, Giorgio, 71–72, 74, 76, 80, 171n8 Albanese, Catherine L., 11, 33 Alcott, A. Bronson, 27, 31 Alcott, Louisa May, 3, 26, 165; anti-Irish sentiment of, 35, 40; and domesticity, 28–29, 34–40; on failure, 29, 30, 39, 41; and feminism, 30, 38; and financial success, 39; on healing, 28–29; on labor, 27– 29, 31–37; on marriage, 35, 37; millennialism of, 35, 40–41; and nature, 31–37; on politics, 38; on salvation, 29, 30,33, 35; and sentiment, 26, 31; on slavery, 39 Alito, Samuel, 151–152 Ambar, Saladin, 121 Anti-Saloon League, 96, 98 Anti-Semitism, 62–63, 95, 181n27 Arendt, Hannah, 134 Arnal, William E., 187n23 Asad, Talal, 89, 111, 135–136 Baldwin, James, 1, 6, 36, 116, 119 Baraka, Amiri, 128 Bell, Derrick, 119 Berger, Peter, 159 Berlant, Lauren, 38, 189n52 Berry, Wendell, 174n34 Bird, Wendell, 138 Blum, Edward J., 76 Bryan, William Jennings, 3, 156, 165, 169; antievolution crusade of, 52, 56–58, 185n2; on imperialism, 64–65; on labor, 44, 52–53; on love, 49, 53, 57; on Prohibition, 54–56; racism of, 46, 58– 65, 70–71; and sentiment, 26, 44; and sympathy, 44, 45, 52–53

Buck-Morss, Susan, 178n8 Burner, David, 107 Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, 147–156, 164 Bushnell, Horace, 50–51, 177n26 Calvinism, 7, 15, 51 Canovan, Margaret, 66 Carnegie, Andrew, 57 Casanova, José, 91, 135 Cathy, S. Truett, 154 Césaire, Aimé, 125 Chick-fil-A, 147, 154 Christian nation, 1, 4, 42, 49, 59, 65, 73, 85, 89, 164, 186n City of Boerne v. Flores, 148–149, 187n9 Coates, Ta-Nehisi, 185n70 Common Sense, 3, 11, 143 Confederacy, 4, 70–71, 75, 78, 84–86 Connolly, William, 73, 82, 112, 156 Conscience, 106, 150, 168; as arbiter of scientific truth, 137; as bankrupt, 117, 131; of the community, 161; in conflict, 158; and corporations, 152; as justification for breaking the law, 99–100; making economic decisions, 147; objectivity of, 161–162; as private, 145, 147, 160; as property, 160–163, 169; as Protestant, 94, 101, 160; sincerity of, 153, 155 Corporations, 1, 5, 63; attempting to inflict harm, 153; constraining human freedom, 158, 164; exercising religious freedom, 148, 153, 155, 164; expressing themselves, 155; as persons, 147, 150, 165 205

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Index

Croly, Herbert, 88, 89 Curtis, Edward, 114 Daulatzai, Sohail, 124 Debs, Eugene V., 46, 47, 48 Democratization, 9, 10, 11, 14, 23, 24 Devil, 8, 14, 24; as white, 116, 119, 123, 126, 128 Dewey, John, 1, 91–92 Dochuk, Darren, 148 Dod, Albert B., 14, 20 Du Bois, W. E. B., 63 Duffy, Francis, 95–96, 181n31 Duggan, Lisa, 3 Dyson, Michael Eric, 120 Edwards, Jonathan, 15–18, 51 Economentality, 45 El-Beshti, Bashir, 129 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 31–32 Employment Division v. Smith, 148 Farmer’s Alliance, 48 Fessenden, Tracy, 6, 89, 180n14 Finke, Roger, 9–10 Finney, Charles Grandison, 3, 38, 156, 165; on conversion, 7–8, 10, 13, 19, 21, 24, 26; on free will, 7–8, 16–18, 25–26; and new measures, 8, 14, 15, 21, 26; on personal preaching, 19–21; on politics, 23–26; on revivalism, 7–10, 13–16, 18, 22–23, 26, 169, 172n29; vulgarity of, 8, 9, 13–14, 20 Foner, Eric, 71 Foucault, Michel, 12–13, 14 Francis, Pope, 156, 164 Free speech, 69, 73, 80 Free will, 7, 14–18, 57–58, 131 Freemasons, 23 Gilded Age, 51–52, 56 Ginsburg, Ruth Bader, 150–152 Gish, Duane T., 133 Glendon, Mary Ann, 163–164

Gold standard, 44, 47, 48 Goodwyn, Lawrence, 48–49 Gould, Stephen Jay, 139 Green, David, 147, 151, 153–155 Griffith, D. W., 4, 169; on aesthetic freedom, 69, 73, 80–84; and Birth of a Nation, 68–74, 81–85; and Intolerance, 69–70; and victimization, 69–71, 72, 77, 82 Haley, Alex, 123 Ham, Ken, 143 Hamburger, Philip, 94–95, 109 Harding, Susan Friend, 141–142 Hatch, Nathan, 9, 10 Hendler, Glenn, 36–37, 40 Hofstadter, Richard, 43, 54, 65, 87 Hoover, Herbert, 99, 109 Horwitz, Paul, 148 Humanae Vitae, 161–162 Individual, the; adapting to social norms, 23; desiring independence, 28, 30; diverting attention from institutional forces, 2, 168, 171n6; as effect of power, 12; as fiction, 50; as focus of surveillance, discipline, and security, 13; going to Hell, 20; limited and hemmed in on all sides, 32; made to feel uncomfortable, 6; making choices, 7, 16, 20, 23, 25–26, 112, 145, 169; managed within a population, 12–13; 19–22, 26; not empowered, 164; not valued by all Protestants, 66; praying, worshipping, and taking sacraments, 150; and social forces, 128; unable to transcend racism, 114, 116, 119–120, 129; under pressure, 7–8, 20–21, 26 Inherit the Wind, 43 Institutional differentiation, 52, 135, 137, 168 Intelligent design; claiming to be science, 132, 138–139, 141, 144; legal strategies

Index

of, 132–133, 138–140, 144; and public schools, 132–133, 136–138; and secularity, 132–134, 136–138, 144–145 Irish, the: dangerous women of, 35; forming the Fighting Sixty-Ninth, 95–96; old pols of, 95; as starving, 39 Jefferson, Thomas, 93, 154 Johnson, Paul, 20–21 Johnson, Phillip, 139–140 Kahn, Paul, 74–75, 85 Kant, Immanuel, 111, 134, 136 Kazin, Michael, 64, 67, 71, 176n13 Kennedy, Anthony, 148, 152, 187n9 Kennedy assassination, 123–124 Keyser, Elizabeth Lennox, 30 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 114–115, 116, 160– 161, 183n17 Kintz, Linda, 164 Ku Klux Klan, 60–63, 68–69, 70, 73, 78, 80, 88, 98 Kuhn, Thomas, 140 Laclau, Ernesto, 65–66, 72 Larson, Edward J., 42 Laycock, Douglas, 149 Levine, Lawrence, 43, 62 Lincoln, C. Eric, 113 Lippmann, Walter, 97 Locke, John, 17, 155 Lomax, Louis, 113, 116, 125, 182n9 Lupu, Ira, 149 Lynching, 63–64, 69, 73, 74, 77–78, 82, 84 Madison, James, 160 Magarian, Gregory, 149 Marable, Manning, 122 Marshall, Charles C., 94–96, 102–103 Marx, Karl, 32 Mathews, Donald, 78 Mau Mau, 125 McAlister, Melani, 125

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McCloud, Aminah Beverly, 104 McCutcheon, Russell T., 187n23 McGreevy, John, 101, 105 McKeon, Michael, 172n18 McMath, Robert, Jr., 53, 66 Mencken, H. L., 54, 100 Merton, Thomas, 114–115 Meyer, Stephen C., 141 Mitchell, Timothy, 45 Modern, John Lardas, 6, 11–12, 23, 189n2 Moore, James, 143 Monetary sanctification, 2, 150, 153, 155, 156, 160, 164 Moreton, Bethany, 147 Morris, Henry, 142–143 Moses, Robert, 93, 95, 108 Moskowitz, Belle, 95 Muhammad, Elijah, 116–118, 121–124, 126 Nation of Islam, 4, 113–117, 120, 121–124, 126, 183n17 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), 82–83, 178n1 Neal, Donn C., 98–99, 101 Noah’s flood, 142–143 Noll, Mark, 15, 172n8 Novak, Michael, 160 Omi, Michael, 184n62 Our Country, 60 Panizza, Francisco, 58 Parker, Theodore, 31–32, 34–35, 37, 39–40, 175n37 People, the; consenting to be governed, 10; diversity of, 23; as a floating signifier, 71–73, 82; imagination of, 58–59, 65–67, 70–73; and sovereignty, 74–75, 84–86; vagueness of, 66; will of, 11, 70 People’s Party, 47–49 Philippines, 65 Phrenology, 25–26

208

| Index

Populism, 42–53, 58–67, 70–80; antistatist, 70–71, 84–86; distinction between hard and soft, 43–44, 65 Porterfield, Amanda, 10 Postel, Charles, 49, 176n18 Privatization, 4–5, 133–138, 144–146, 161–165 Prohibition, 54–56, 60, 96–98. See also Bryan, William Jennings Proskauer, Joseph, 95–96, 102 Quakers, 99 Ratzinger, Joseph, 161–162 Religious Freedom Restoration Act, 148– 149, 187n9 Revivalism. See Finney, Charles Grandison Rice, Charles E., 158 Robinson, Cedric J., 81 Ryan, John R., 100, 106 Sacrifice, 69, 78–80, 85 Santorum, Rick, 156–157 Scalia, Antonin, 148 Schultz, Kevin M., 90 Schwartzman, Micah, 187n24 Scientific creationism, 132–134, 138, 141– 144 Scopes trial, 43, 133 Sehat, David, 11 Simmon, Scott, 79 Slayton, Robert A., 95 Smith, Al, 4, 165; and anti-Catholicism, 88, 93–98, 111; loyalty to the Catholic church, 87–89, 91, 95, 101–103, 106–107, 112; and Progressivism, 87, 93, 95, 107, 111, 158; and secularity, 88–93, 99, 102, 108–112; and Tammany Hall, 87, 89, 91, 92, 95, 97–98, 105–107; Smith, Jonathan Z., 37, 171n5 Smith, Steven D., 6

Soders, W. Thomas, 64 Stark, Rodney, 9–10 Stein, Ben, 132 Stowe, Charles Hambrick, 8 Sullivan, Winnifred Fallers, 150–151 Tammany Hall. See Smith, Al Taussig, Michael, 178n10, 184n63 Taylor, Charles, 137 Taylor, Clyde, 82 Tea Party, 4, 75, 84–85, 179n37, 179n38 Thoreau, Henry David, 31, 35, 38 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 2 Tolstoy, Leo, 52–53 Tompkins, Jane, 174n15 Transcendentalism, 31 Truth, the, 8. See also X, Malcolm Unitarianism, 31–33 United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, 157–165 Walsh, Thomas J., 60–62 Warner, Michael, 20, 173n40, 175n49 West, Cornel, 32 White, William Allen, 88 Willebrandt, Mabel Walker, 109 Williams, Linda, 81 Williams, Patricia J., 5, 76, 83, 130, 137 Wills, Garry, 84, 101, 161 Wood, Amy Louise, 79 X, Malcolm, 4; hajj of, 122–123, 126; and liberalism, 113, 115–118, 124–126, 128, 130; and revolution, 116, 124–128, 169; and the truth, 113, 118, 120, 128, 130; on Uncle Toms, 120; on whiteness, 114– 117, 119–120, 126–129 Yellin, Jean Fagan, 29–30 You, 7, 19, 20, 155, 162, 167, 169, 189n2

About the Author

Finbarr Curtis has taught at UC San Diego, NYU, Fresno State, Bucknell University, Lafayette College, and the University of Alabama, and is currently Assistant Professor of Religious Studies in the Department of Literature and Philosophy at Georgia Southern University.

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