Talking Down Intolerance
Dr. Tisa Wenger, a professor at the Yale Divinity School, has been interested in the concept of religious freedom for years. Much of her research is explained in the book “Religious Freedom: The Contested History of an American Ideal,” which she recently discussed at a conference at Hofstra University. The Herald, speaks to her about the role religious freedom and its surrounding discourse have played in American history.
Yale Herald: I was reading that one of the main themes of your book is “religious freedom talk” or the discourse around the concept of religious freedom in America. What did religious freedom talk look like at the time of the country’s founding?
Tisa Wenger: That’s actually not a period I really focus on in the book, but I would say in general terms, throughout U.S. history, the concept of religious freedom is contested and so religious freedom talk is going to be different and varied depending on who is doing the talking. The point of the concept of religious freedom talk is that there’s not really a single or essential meaning of what religious freedom means that can be abstracted from how people talk about it. That it’s not only a legal or constitutional concept, but it’s an idea that gets deployed in various ways by different groups of people. For example, in the Revolutionary period, some British colonists who were not members of the Church of England were not happy with the Anglican establishment and so used religious freedom to argue against the establishment and were particularly worried about the proposal to have an Anglican bishop in the colonies. And so they used the idea of religious freedom to argue against that.
YH: How would you say that religious freedom talk has changed shape over the years, especially now, considering that the election of Trump has changed the political climate?
TW: That’s a really good question. Again, this is a very contested concept, but you can see in the past few years — and I actually think that this is not new with the election of trump, but it has maybe been even heightened and intensified with his campaign and the election — that the concept of religious freedom is used by conservatives as a kind of rallying cry, and they have focused it around issues of gender and sexual morality interpreted in a very particular way. So [for example], the right of conservative Christians not to participate in abortion or provide funding for abortion or contraception or issues of same-sex marriage. And it’s striking to me that so much of the public attention and public discourse over religious freedom now has to do with those issues. I find that to be in a sense troubling, [and] narrowing of what religious freedom means. I also think it’s worth pointing out that thinking specifically about the issue of abortion, in earlier decades, even in the 1970s, in the decade or two right after the Roe v. Wade decision, the concept of religious freedom was associated far more with a pro-choice position than it was with a pro-life position, which is surprising for a lot of people to hear now because it’s so different now. So that’s an example of a kind of shift in religious freedom talk and the way that the concept generally gets invoked because at that time, the focus was much more on the right of the individual woman to follow her own conscience in whether or not to have an abortion. And so that is a way of understanding and talking and invoking the idea of religious freedoms. There’s an organization called Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice that still is around, but maybe had more prominence at that time, and they had big banners saying “Religious Freedom” that they would carry in marches.
YH: We’ve touched on this a little, but could you elaborate some more on the way that the concept of religious freedom has been used by both majority groups and minority groups, and how those visions contrast or interact with each other?
TW: Yeah, absolutely. I want to bring it back to the material that I actually talk about in the book because the book focuses on the period from the 1890s through World War II, and doesn’t bring that history up to present, although I do think it’s an interesting history for reflecting on the present; but when you talk about majority groups, one of the main arguments that I make in the book is that religious freedom talk historically was used to defend white privilege and also Christian majority privilege. I think that is still often the case. White Protestants in the period that I’m talking about certainly associated themselves with the idea of religious freedom. They argued that the whole concept of religious freedom came out of Protestant Christianity. And they linked this also to race. Scholars of race and religion talk about a kind of co-constitution of race and religion. Oftentimes racial and religious identities are defined in relation to each other. And we can also put national identities in that mix, right? So what it meant to be an American — they placed themselves as White Protestants, or Anglo Saxon Protestants [and] talked about religious freedom as a value that they particularly exemplified and kind of racialized it, that white people were more inclined or able… they had a kind of racial aptitude for freedom, and religious freedom in particular, oftentimes. And so Catholicism was racialized. Other racial groups were seen as not fully capable of exercising these freedoms or sort of having to be tutored and taught to exercise those freedoms. I’m also thinking about racism in American history. And I’m thinking now about the history of slavery and segregation. White southerners and the defenders of the slave society used religious freedom among other things to defend slavery and to argue against abolitionists. They argued that slavery was a Christian system, was in the Bible, it was the southern way of life — and not only the southern way of life, but that it was a religious, Christian way; that it was the true Christian system, and that abolitionists, by trying to legislate against slavery, were not only infringing on states’ rights and these other kinds of constitutional defenses for slavery, but were infringing on religious freedom for the South. Similar kinds of arguments were made in defense of segregation. Now, the other side of your question was on how minority groups have used religious freedom. So to continue with the same example, Black abolitionists and African-American activists for civil rights also used religious freedoms for their cause. So you do see minority groups of all kinds defending their interests in the language of religious freedom in American history, and we can think about this because of the constitutional status of this idea and the way that it has a kind of cultural and political salience in American life that makes it an idea that lots of people are going to appeal to. And so one of the things I’m interested in looking at in the book is how that appeal, that kind of stature that the idea has when people appeal to it, also has a way of shifting traditions and shifting the way people think about what religion is. There are some pros and cons to that. So for Native Americans… I have a chapter on Native American history in the book, and there are a lot of examples of this in Native American history. Native appeals to religious freedom… There’s a kind of catch-22 for them. The dominant society understands what religion is according to a kind of white, Christian mold. And so for native leaders and native communities to make an argument for religious freedom was in some cases a useful strategy for them to resist suppression by the government of their practices, traditions, ceremonies, but in order to make that argument, they also had to represent their traditions in a way that authorities and the larger society would recognize as being legitimately religious, and that often made them look like more like Christianity.
YH: In addition to writing books about religion, you teach several classes at Yale Divinity School. What aspects of religion have you found that today’s students are most interested in discussing?
TW: Well, I’m not sure that the divinity school students are necessarily representative of the larger student population because they are a kind of self-selecting group that comes to the Divinity School because they’re interested in religion already. Many of the Divinity School students are in training for some form of ministry, but not all of them. Others are planning other kinds of professional careers or planning to go on into further graduate study in the study of religion or in history or social studies or theology or lots of different kinds of disciplines. But… oh gosh, the kinds of things that current students were interested in varies immensely. Thinking about the larger student body, some people are not that interested in looking at religion, but certainly, I see students very much interested in thinking about how religion intersects with racial politics, gender politics. But also understanding religious traditions as a source of meaning and meaning-making, looking at questions of religious practice, religious materiality, religious history… There’s so many different avenues into the study of religion. I’ve been particularly interested, as of late, in thinking about the relationship of religion in American history to settler colonialism. I taught a class last semester called Religion and the U.S. Empire. That ended up being a pretty good size for a seminar and attracted several undergraduates as well as a good mix of people from across the university. So I think religion and religious history intersects with other topics that students are interested in. Politics, imperialism, race, class, gender, sexuality, all of those things are important topics.
YH: And how did you first become interested in religious studies?
TW: Well, here’s an autobiographical answer to that, which is that my parents were missionaries, and I spent the first half of my childhood in Swaziland in Southern Africa while [my]parents were missionaries in about six different African countries with the Mennonite church. And they were very much conscious of… I would say, the way that Christian missionaries were often complicit with colonialism. And they talked about that at home. We were also in Swaziland, which is almost entirely surrounded by South Africa, during the years of the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa and had in our home sometimes refugees from the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa. My parents were not able to get visas into South Africa because they were anti-apartheid activists. And so, these questions of missions, religion, race, colonialism… for them it was a question of “How can we be responsible as missionaries, as American missionaries, who are relatively wealthy in this context?” Even though they didn’t feel wealthy, there, they seemed very wealthy, right? So, you know, how they struggled with how to act responsibly as missionaries without further perpetuating this legacy of racism and colonialism and knowing the kind of complexity of missionary. So, I think hearing them wrestle with that and thinking about these questions of race, religion, colonialism absolutely brought got me to where I am and the kinds of things I work on. The religious freedom topic may seem distant from that. But for me, the issue of religious freedom was a kind of lens into these questions about race, religion, and empire in American history.
YH: Do you have any ideas that you’ve already begun to consider for future books or future research?
TW: Yes, I do. It’s very early to talk about, but I am thinking about how the dynamics of settler colonialism in early America, early in the National period, intersect with American religious history and shape American religion.
YH: Finally, in your opinion, what should people keep in mind when engaging in discussions about religious freedom?
TW: Well, that religious freedom can mean lots of different things depending on who’s involved. I don’t have a sort of final definition of religious freedom, but I do think that exploring the history of how this idea has been used and invoked for so many different purposes by different people has given me as a real sense of caution with it. This idea can’t be a trump card over everything else. I think religious freedom is the ideal worth preserving and that this still has value for us, but that it needs to be balanced with other values and ideals.
