II. MARCO TEÓRICO
2.2. BASES TEÓRICAS
2.2.3. PRINCIPALES CONSIDERACIONES PARA EL DISEÑO DE UNA SOBRECAPA DE
Surprisingly few American religions scholars have directly engaged the category of religious intolerance. American religious historian American historian David Brion Davis’s analysis of nineteenth century nativist literature is one of the field’s earliest considerations of similarities among anti-religious minority rhetoric.6 His 1960 essay, “Some Themes of Counter-Subversion: An
Analysis of Anti-Masonic, Anti-Catholic, and Anti-Mormon Literature,” demonstrates “important tensions” among nativist attempts to suppress and cast suspicion on Mormonism, Masonry, and Roman Catholicism.7 Davis notes that while Mormons, Catholics, and Masons differed significantly
on theological terms, as “imagined enemies,” public rhetoric regarding these groups “merged [them] into a nearly common stereotype.”8 Nineteenth century expressions of religious intolerance were
marked by fear and fascination with religious outsiders; Masons, Catholics, and Mormons “were seen to embody those traits that were precise antitheses of American ideals.”9 Rejection of these groups,
then, was understood as an articulation of patriotism and piety.10
Davis’ concept of counter-subversion, or nativists’ rhetorical attempts to suppress minority religions, relies on an assumption of common American values and shared American ideals. Nativists emphasized the necessity of “a common loyalty and a fundamental unity among the people,” insisting that true Americans “freely subordinat[ed] themselves to the higher and more abstract demands of the Constitution, [mainstream Protestant] Christianity, and American public
6 Nativism refers to the socio-political tendency to favor the interests of established inhabitants of a country over
those of immigrants or “outsiders.”
7 Davis David Brion, “Some Themes of Counter-Subversion: An Analysis of Anti-Masonic, Anti-Catholic, and
Anti-Mormon Literature,” The Mississippi Valley Historical Review 47, no. 2 (1960): 213-4.
8 Ibid., 208. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid., 209.
opinion.”11 This religiously intolerant rhetoric subordinated denominational and institutional
specificities to the presumed primacy of common Protestant American values. This insistence on the necessity for a shared public American morality encouraged a marked suspicion of the seemingly occult workings of American Catholicism, Masonry, and Mormonism, Davis suggests. “Most Americans of the Jacksonian era appeared willing to tolerate diversity and even eccentricity,” he notes, “but when they saw themselves excluded and even barred from witnessing certain
proceedings, they imagined a ‘mystic power’ conspiring to enslave them.”12 Suspicion and anxiety
concerning non-public religious practices led counter-subversives to accuse religions outside the Protestant mainstream of treason, mind-control, religious zealotry, inherent dishonesty, and sexual perversions.13
While the public sphere of Davis’ nineteenth century nativists is not equivalent to that of late 20th century, the author’s work has bearing on contemporary considerations of religious intolerance.
His work provides evidence both for religious intolerance’s historical precedent and for accusations similar to those made against contemporary intolerable religions (such as immoderate piety and sexual perversion). The characteristics Davis found common to nativist rhetoric—most importantly for my purposes, the persistent accusations or insinuations of sexual perversion—are absolutely endemic to more contemporary instances of religious intolerance. Thus Davis’ understanding of nineteenth century rhetorical attempts to police American religion by excluding Mormons, Masons, and Catholics demonstrates important similarities among different rhetorics of religious
intolerance.14 The counter-subversive rhetoric Davis examines is rooted in convictions that marginal
religions are not simply theologically wrong, but dangerous. Thus rejections and even persecutions
11 Ibid., 209, 211. 12 Ibid., 211. 13 Ibid., 211, 216-17.
14 On contemporary attempts by individuals and institutions to correct American religion through expressions of
of the “imagined enemies” of American religion constitute attempts to correct and police dangerous religiosities; and religious intolerance becomes patriotism and piety.
Robert Bellah and Frederick Greenspahn produced the first edited volume of note on American interreligious conflict. In their 1987 collection, Uncivil Religion: Interreligious Hostility in America, sociologist Bellah and Judaic Studies scholar Greenspahn noted the contradictory
prevalence of a rhetoric of tolerance and interreligious conflict throughout American history. “The facts of American life have not always been as benign as the United States’ official policy of tolerant religious pluralism,” the authors insisted.15 “Intergroup hostility has been as real a fact of American
life as the rhetoric of tolerance.”16 Greenspahn and Bellah attributed this tradition of religious
conflict to the historical influenceof an American Protestant mainstream and anxieties about religious difference, as well as the necessity for “tight-bounded” understandings of appropriate religious belief and practice.
Uncivil Religion demonstrates that America’s Protestant mainstream has been historically anxious about religious difference. Bellah and Greenspahn noted that “America originated as a predominantly Protestant culture” and that “a perceived threat to the ‘American way of life,’ however that is understood,” underlies much religious conflict.17 The authors suggested “the sheer
emotion” underlying much interreligious hostility demonstrates underlying suspicions of religiosities outside the Protestant mainstream.18 “These diverse forms of religious hostility…reflect a sense of
15 Robert Neelly Bellah and Frederick E. Greenspahn, Uncivil Religion: Interreligious Hostility in America (New York:
Crossroad, 1987), vii.
16 Ibid., ix.
17 Ibid., ix. See Bromley on this point as well: “When a group feels that its interests are threatened, it is likely to
attempt to vest its interests and activities with the mantle of legitimacy by contending that its rights and privileges flow from and support a basic cultural value. Hence this makes the legitimation of extreme measures against that group contestable.” David G. Bromley, Anson D. Shupe, and J. C. Ventimiglia, “Atrocity Tales, the Unification Church, and the Social Construction of Evil,” Journal of Communication 29, no. 3 (1979): 42–43 (emphasis added).
fear, fear that the other groups are not just wrong, but dangerous,” they insisted.19 Greenspahn and
Bellah located this fear in “religious uncertainty, with deep-seated social and psychological concerns masked by theological language.”20 The authors proposed that fear and suspicion of religious beliefs
and practices outside the Protestant mainstream inform much religious conflict.
Bellah’s conclusion to the volume attributed these anxieties about religious difference to tensions between “loose” and “tight-boundedness” in modes of American religiosity, concepts Bellah mapped roughly onto American political liberalism and conservatism.21 “Tight-bounded” (i.e.
conservative) understandings of American religion claim exclusive access to America’s “fundamental values,” while “loose-boundedness” (i.e. liberalism) resists definitions and prizes consensus.22 Thus
Bellah located religious conflict in desires to maintain group identities and boundaries.23
Bellah and Greenspahn ultimately insisted not only on the reality of interreligious conflict, but also on its relative rarity. “Despite the passion that often accompanies interreligious relations, it is probably fair to say that religious persecution has caused fewer deaths in America than in most Western countries over a comparable period,” the authors maintained. “We must, therefore, not only note the reality of religious hostility, but also explain its relatively small proportions.”24 The
authors attributed the “relatively small proportions” of religious intolerance to patterns of increased secularization among Americans. “Bluntly put, many Americans do not regard religion as important enough to fight for,” Bellah and Greenspahn concluded.25
19 Ibid. On the erotics of fear at play in political religions, see also Jason Bivins, Religion of Fear: the Politics of Horror in
Conservative Evangelicalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
20 Bellah and Greenspahn, Uncivil Religion, ix. 21 Ibid., 222.
22 Ibid. 23 Ibid., 225. 24 Ibid., ix. 25 Ibid.
Uncivil Religion highlights the importance of the lived realities of interreligious conflict to the study of American religious history. Bellah and Greenspahn suggested such hostilities originate in a shared sense of fundamental American values – values that require defense against “loose-bounded” non-Protestant-mainstream religions. Whereas minority religions might display intolerant
tendencies, they lack the cultural influence to normalize their intolerance or meaningfully
discriminate against mainstream religions. The historical Protestant dominance in America’s religious sphere renders “other” religions suspect and, as Greenspahn and Bellah proposed, dangerous. However persistent interreligious conflict has been throughout American history, the authors concluded by insisting that interreligious conflict has been rare in comparison to the conflicts experienced by other modern nation-states.
Several Christian theologians also have contributed to scholarly considerations of American religious intolerance. Dorothee Sölle detected religious intolerance in what she perceived as the inherent normativizing absolutism of all religion. “Religious groups…lay claim to absolute and universal validity for their theological propositions,” Sölle explained in her 1984 “Christianity and Intolerance.” “Because of this claim to universal validity, [religious] knowledge is imperative and authoritative in character [and]…communication with other groups is severely limited.”26 Susan
Thistlethwaite’s 1994 “Settled Issues and Neglected Questions: How Is Religion to Be Studied?” likewise defines religion itself in universalizing and intolerant terms. “Religion is by definition value- laden and poses universal claims,” Thistlethwaite insists. “Thus, even societies that have a history of religious tolerance have resident within them the fundamental intolerance and its accompanying tendency to social instability that is characteristic of religion.”27 Both Sölle and Thistlethwaite attempt to
26 Dorothee Sölle, “Christianity and Intolerance,” in The Strength of the Weak: Toward a Christian Feminist Identity
(Westminster: John Knox Press, 1984), 63-4.
27 Susan Thistlethwaite, “Settled Issues and Neglected Questions: How Is Religion to Be Studied?,” Journal of the
problematize what they see as the universalizing tendencies of all religion and emphasize the potential of religious diversity to combat intolerance.
American Jewish historian Jonathan Sarna was among the first American religions scholars to consider interreligious conflict from the perspective of minority religions. Sarna’s 1998 Minority Faiths and the American Protestant Mainstream emphasizes the historical diversity of American religion, as well as the contributions of minority religious communities to “American life.”28 At the same
time, though, Sarna argues that the historiography of American religious has largely obscured important tensions between marginal religions and the American Protestant mainstream. The “dynamic encounter” between minority religions and the Protestant mainstream—between “minority outsiders and majority insiders”—is “central to the religious experience of millions of Americans,” Sarna insists.29 He detects these outsider/insider tensions “between pressures [on
minority religions] to conform to the religious patterns of the mainstream; and countervailing pressures…to resist them and remain apart.”30 Sarna emphasizes minority religions’ desire to be
recognized as legitimate American religion. At the same time, Sarna underscores the distance between these minority religions and the American Protestant mainstream.
These “arenas of conflict” have forced minority religions to develop “survival strategies” under the Protestant mainstream’s “shadow,” Sarna suggests.31 Despite the inescapable influence of
Protestantism, Sarna emphasizes the necessity of “treating minority group members as historical actors in their own right rather than just as victims of history acted upon by the majority.”32 Sarna
28 Jonathan D. Sarna, Minority Faiths and the American Protestant Mainstream (Champaign: University of Illinois Press,
1998), 3.
29 Ibid.
30 Sarna, Minority Faiths and the American Protestant Mainstream, 3. 31 Ibid., 2, 4, 10.
insists on taking seriously the agency of minority religions in the analysis of interreligious conflict, as well as the potential for such conflict to present not only “contention and pain,” but also “stimulus for wondrous creativity.”33
Minority Faiths makes several key contributions to defining religious intolerance. Sarna argues for the importance of considering American religion from perspective of minority religions, as well as for the significance of recognizing the agency and creativity of religious outsiders. The author notes that members of minority religious communities often negotiate desires to be recognized as American religions while remaining distinct from the American Protestant mainstream. Minority religions negotiate their identities under the “shadow” of the Protestant mainstream; they strive for recognition as American religions while attempting to retain their theological and practical
specificities. In sum, Minority Faiths underscores the contentious dynamism of interreligious encounters while insisting that such conflicts also provide opportunities to expand popular
understandings of American religion. Sarna’s work is particularly significant for its emphasis on the agency of religious minorities, particularly minority religions’ negotiations of their place in the American public sphere.
American religious historians John Corrigan and Lynn Neal provide a recent and significant consideration of religious intolerance in their 2010 Religious Intolerance in America: A Documentary History.34 This volume represents a major contribution in demonstrating importance and persistence
of intolerance throughout American religious history. In their introduction, Neal and Corrigan note that religious intolerance is “seemingly more generic than the term religious violence yet more
33 Ibid., 3, 4.
34Lynn Neal has written several other pieces of note on American religious intolerance. See Lynn S. Neal,
“Christianizing the Klan: Alma White, Branford Clarke, and the Art of Religious Intolerance,” Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture 78, no. 02 (2009): 350–378, Neal, “Intolerance and American Religious History,” and Lynn S. Neal, “‘They’re Freaks!’: The Cult Stereotype in Fictional Television Shows, 1958–2008,” Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions 14, no. 3 (February 2011): 81–107.
specific than either bigotry or prejudice,” and thus “does not lend itself easily to definition.”35 The
authors note the appeal of what we might call a definition of intolerance analogous to the definition of pornography, which is to say we (scholars and citizens alike) know religious intolerance when we see it.36 But Corrigan and Neal also note that the assumptions that underlie this assessment—the
presumptions of shared values and cultural “common” sense—are the very building blocks that often shape religious intolerance itself.37 “Religious intolerance often occurs precisely because a
religious group challenges or seeks to defend an assumed cultural morality,” Neal and Corrigan insist.38 Thus the authors demonstrate the limitations of a definition that relies on a presumed
common American morality.
Corrigan and Neal’s efforts to define religious intolerance further highlight the Protestant biases that inform many expressions of intolerance. “A definition [of religious intolerance] that takes its cues from understandings of right and wrong shared by a certain group tends to privilege majority religious views, namely Protestant Christianity, and thereby fails to adequately define or recognize religious intolerance.”39 The authors and other contributors to this volume thus attempt more
precise definitions of the phenomenon. The volume foregrounds the ways “perceptions of religious difference” instigate “disrespect, intimidation, or violence toward others.”40 The authors propose a
causal link between “religious beliefs and attitudes”—specifically beliefs or attitudes informed by particular Protestant notions of common American values—and “actions against or interactions with
35 John Corrigan and Lynn S. Neal, Religious Intolerance in America: a Documentary History (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 2010), 11.
36 On the difficulties of defining obscene or pornographic material, see Justice Potter Stewart, Jacobellis v. Ohio
(Supreme Court of the United States of America 1964).
37 Corrigan and Neal, Religious Intolerance in America, 11-12. 38 Ibid., 12
39 Ibid. (emphasis added). 40 Ibid.
those who are perceived as religiously different.”41 Thus Corrigan and Neal’s definition indicates the
ways in which the perception of shared Protestant values informs and instigates episodes of religious intolerance.
Religious Intolerance in America’s definition of religious intolerance is also notable for its understanding of the phenomenon in emphatically violent and overt terms. Intolerance “use[s] religion as a weapon;” indeed, the authors “define intolerance as a type of violence.”42 Corrigan and
Neal suggest that scholars often confine intolerant rhetoric to “the realm of the imagined, the symbolic,” while religious violence is better understood as “actual, real, and enacted.”43 In contrast,
the volume broadens its definition of violence to include rhetoric and affect, insisting that “hateful ideas, words, and acts are related to violent practices.”44 Thus “cross burning, vandalism, hate
speech, public protests, threatening notes, written treatises, and the propagation of false allegations can also be viewed as religiously violent acts.”45 By locating intolerance in rhetoric and prejudice as
well as in violent action, Neal and Corrigan highlight the complex and multiple locations of religious intolerance.
Corrigan and Neal’s definition takes seriously the role played by intent and experience in considerations of religious intolerance, specifically the intent to “intimidate and inhibit” religious practice, which might be experienced as violent by targets of those actions. “A court decision that denies the legitimacy of one’s religious practice or a stereotypical portrayal and of one’s faith in a film may…[be] experienced as an ‘attack,’ as violent,” the authors propose. “[This experience] is not the same as being tarred and feathered, raped, or lynched, but these [intolerant] acts may still intimidate
41 Ibid. 42 Ibid., 252, 13. 43 Ibid., 13. 44 Ibid., 14. 45 Ibid.
and inhibit the practice of one’s faith and be defined by victims as violent.”46 Neal and Corrigan’s
definition highlights the roles of intentionality and experience in the volume’s understanding of religious intolerance.
Thus Religious Intolerance in America’s definition of religious intolerance is a valuable contribution to American religious studies in its insistence on the complexity of the category. Corrigan and Neal insist upon the term’s breadth and elusiveness. They note the dangers of presuming common values or morality, gesturing toward the mainstream Protestant bias that often undergirds such a presumption. The volume demonstrates the prevalence of religious intolerance in the lived experience of American religion by illustrating intolerance’s historical prevalence and contemporary instantiations. The authors define intolerance in emphatically violent terms, and they insist upon the connections between intolerant rhetoric and violent actions. In addition, Neal and Corrigan take seriously the affective consequences of religious intolerance, insisting that the targets of religious prejudice might experience broader cultural interactions as a form of violence. The volume presents complex and multiple locations for religious intolerance as an analytical lens in American religious studies, in which the authors ultimately define religious intolerance as a violent and intentional rejection of religious difference.
Taken as a whole, the scholars I discussed above demonstrate several common elements in episodes of religious intolerance. All note the influence of mainstream Protestant theology, praxis, and aesthetics on the understanding of “American religion” while noting that the effects and boundaries of an American Protestant majority resist definition. Most of these authors note the simultaneous appeal and danger of relying on assumed shared or common values in defining religious intolerance. Many point out the contradiction between popularly expressed allegiance to a uniquely American religious tolerance and the material realities of religious conflict. Several insist note the efficacy of intolerant rhetoric in justifying and inciting action against religions perceived as
intolerable. All suggest that fear, suspicion, and a sense of “other” religions as dangerous undergird interreligious hostilities and propose significant ties between religious intolerance and nationalist ideals. All conceptualize religious intolerance as intentional; most understand interreligious conflict in violent terms. Ultimately, the authors concur on the importance of religious intolerance as an analytical lens in American religious scholarship.
All of the authors I have explored above ultimately conceptualize religious intolerance in terms of deliberate or overt acts. These acts include assault, hate speech, and the production of material culture hostile to religious difference. In all of the definitions offered above, this hostility is