American Pluralism

American Pluralism November 20, 2015

Kevin M. Schultz’s contribution to Faith in the New Millennium is “The Blessings of American Pluralism, and Those Who Rail Against It.” The essay is partly a study of the history of Americans’ reconciliation with American pluralism. He starts with Sonya Sotomayor’s appoint to the Supreme Court. A Catholic, she replaced the last Protestant on the court: “for the first time in American history, not a single Protestant sat among the constituents of one of the three branches of the federal government.” Yet “hardly anyone seemed to notice.”

The response to the rise of the “nones” is another sign of America’s nonresponsiveness: “One-third of millennials claim to have no religious affiliation. And among this third, nearly 90 percent say they aren’t looking for a religious group to belong to. This isn’t just a generational dispute. Instead, the youth are simply leading the way. With the exception of the ‘Greatest Generation,’ the percentage of nones has increased among every demographic group since 2007. Rather than simple youthful rebellion, then, there are larger forces at work. For our story, though, what is revealing is that as the nones have increased during the past decade, there have been almost no protests. Instead, major institutions have accommodated.”

Such peaceableness has been a long time coming. In the early part of the twentieth century, interfaith groups appeared throughout the country, pooling resources in response to natural disasters: “A 1912 flood in Dayton, Ohio, led all the organizations in the Cincinnati and Dayton areas to come together to create a Community Chest. Interfaith Community Chests began popping up everywhere, and by the 1930s they operated in more than four hundred cities across the United States and Canada.” Interfaith cooperation wasn’t the rule, though, during the 20s and 30s, when “Anti-Semitism and anti-Catholic vitriol persisted long into the twentieth century. Although discrimination against religious minorities was minimal compared to that confronted by racial minorities, Catholics were still widely suspected of seeking political control of the United States in an effort to kowtow to the Vatican line, while Jews were thought to yearn for financial control of the country, one business at a time. For their part, Protestants used their power to discriminate, having real estate agents shepherd Catholics and Jews to separate neighborhoods, preventing Catholics and Jews from joining business clubs and social fraternities, and even restricting Catholics and Jews from certain kinds of jobs.”

World War II was crucial: “With the rise of Hitler, America’s faith leaders (and others) worked hard to promote a vision that embraced America’s pluralism. To do otherwise risked making America look no better than Hitler’s Germany. . . .The Religious News Service (RNS) was crafted in this period to promote and report on interfaith activity. All were efforts to challenge the idea that the United States was in any way a Christian nation. In the face of Hitler, the national imagination had to change, and interfaith leaders sought to promote an image premised on what was then being called Judeo-Christianity. With the Cold War, the image of a tri-faith America prevailed.”

The Religious Right fought a defensive war against “the rising tide of religious pluralism,” but the effort was unsuccessful: “In the 1990s, the US Navy commissioned its first Muslim chaplain and opened its first mosque. Religious celebrations are held throughout the country by millions of religious minorities, without repercussion or restriction. New friendships have formed, and the country has, by and large, accepted its new identity.” Schultz doesn’t think there’s any real exclusion going on, since “the loudest claims of religious discrimination during the first decades of the twenty-first century have come not from some persecuted minority but from the largest, most powerful religious groups in the country, including evangelical Protestants who historically have dominated the moral life of the nation and that group with the supermajority on the Supreme Court, American Catholics.”

Schultz’s history is illuminating, but he works in the naive belief that pluralism institutionalizes religious neutrality. He doesn’t reckon with the possibility that pluralism might itself become an ideology, one that marginalizes and excludes those who refuse to accept it on one level or another. Religious pluralism does indeed bring blessings, but it’s not all blessing.


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