Religious Organizations and “Public Witness”

by Janine Giordano Drake
Religion in American History

A few weeks ago, Jon Stewart made the news with a pithy statement regarding the Catholic Church’s rejection of financial support for medical care they deem inappropriate. He said, “You’ve confused a war on your religion with not always getting what you want.” The statement stirred me for days, as it might have been uttered at any time in American history against any religious leader with a fair degree of temporal power. Over and over, Americans have dealt with the question of where to draw the line between the freedoms of individuals and freedoms of religious institutions. To what extent should a civic dedication to human rights supercede the rights of religious institutions to their own fiefdoms of temporal and spiritual power?

We can all think probably of a half dozen examples of this conflict within American history. We think of Southern Christian slaveholders’ defense of their theology of paternalism. We think of Margaret Sanger’s insistence that she spoke on behalf of Catholic women as much, or more, than the Bishops of New York.

The most vivid example that comes to my mind is Frances Willard’s crusade against churches for barring women from the pulpit, undermining women’s gifts for public work, and supporting the liquor industry. Some male clerics held that it was within their “religious freedom” to run the churches and administer the sacraments as they wished, but Willard insisted that this was not really a question of religious freedom, because she and her army of women were also Christians. To her and presumably many in the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, the problem of women’s underrepresentation within the ranks of formal religious leadership was a moral and political issue that Americans had to deal with outside the walls of political institutions because those controlling those political institutions were intractable. To Willard, the stodgy defense of patriarchy was hiding under claims to “religious freedom.”
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