R. Laurence Moore

Every American concerned about the religious right's never ending attack on the constitution by trying to re-write history (I'm looking at you David Barton) needs to read this book. It completely destroys the claims that the founders of the United States had any intention of creating a christian nation, and proves that the first amendment really means what it says as far as separating church and state. I found it fascinating that the constitution was under attack by the church as an show more "atheist" document before the ink was even dry. Also, it turns out that baptists were initially supporters of the separation of church and state (before they had sufficient numbers to try and push their misguided morals into government).

My only nit to pick is that the book really needed endnotes. The authors state that because the book is intended for a general audience and that the material cited is familiar to historians and political scientists, that they have foregone including footnotes. However, for those of us (in the general audience) who are not historians and political scientists, endnotes would have been very useful in further study. Admittedly, complete endnotes would probably add 100 pages to the book, but they could have easily been provided via a web site. show less

The clumsy-sounding “Americans” of Moore’s title is intended to highlight the issue of like-it-or-not pluralism that pervades the book; there is no unitary America on the plane of religion. He characterizes ecumenism as a Protestant appetite, and emphasizes the recurrent usefulness of religious particularism and dissent. In many respects, he provides a historical and philosophical structure to comprehend the “supply-side” assertions of Stark and Finke’s later Churching of show more America, while transcending their focus on the statistically predominant Protestant institutions of American religious history. He also places himself in opposition to the expansive insider paradigm advanced in Robert Bellah’s theory of American civil religion, which Moore describes as “inexplicable” in its attractions, absent the ecumenical motive developed by Protestants and imposed by misreading onto Herberg’s Protestant, Catholic, Jew. (pp. ix, 18-19) In fact, Moore points out adroitly enough that “Civil religion...like more ordinary religions, may have split Americans into separate camps as often as it has brought them together.” (p. 202)

While apologizing for an apparent lack of narrative development or thematic unity in his relatively short book, Moore maintains throughout a consistent perspective highlighting the essential nature of the outsider position in American religion, to the point where a reader may suspect that to be genuinely religious in the US requires being an outsider of one sort or another. Reading the book provokes the question: who are “religious outsiders” in America? Moore starts with a clear-cut instance; in their origins and early history at least, Mormons were a tiny minority undoubtedly cast as deviant and progressively alienated from the national establishment. But his next two chapters, on Catholics and Jews respectively, implicitly demarcate all non-Protestant religions as “outsider.” And in his essay on “The Protestant Majority as a Lost Generation—A Look at Fundamentalism,” he depicts the numerical bulk of Protestants adopting or being cast into the position of outsiders for much of the twentieth century. Ultimately, the pluralism described and advocated by Moore is a circumstance binding on all Americans, and an ideal held by few, if any. In such a situation, a conscious embrace of “outsider” status offers both a measure of authenticity and tactical advantage. Religions can preserve their truth claims while excusing a lack of universal acknowledgement (thus Protestant fundamentalists). Even more importantly, they can reify social and cultural niches that provide their adherents with places in a nation that has never been a utopia.

Moore’s introduction is reminiscent of the introduction to Ahlstrom’s Religious History of the American People, providing a wide-angle review of the historiography of American religion, though in Moore’s case with particular and critical reference to the idea of religious diversity. He observes that histories—whether because of the providential theology of the 19th century or the denominational theories of the 20th—have typically gotten their facts wrong because they trained their attention on the “mainline” groups that embraced insider status and promoted tolerance, even while outsider and intolerant groups did as much or more to define the overall picture of American religious life. Moore later also deploys Ahlstrom’s category of harmonialism, without collapsing occultism and the general run of non-Abrahamic religion into it as Ahlstrom had done; the effect is that he situates Christian Science among Judah’s “Metaphysical Movements,” although he uses Ahlstrom’s term. (p. 116)

The book’s essays are divided into two groups, of which the first concerns itself with “ethnicity and American identity” in the context of outsider religions. In one chapter, Moore casts the development of Mormonism as the crafting of a novel ethnicity. In another, he reviews the “Americanizing” controversy within 19th-century Catholicism. He explains “non-Americanizers” as participants in a conscious strategy by which ethnicity could be used to maintain Catholic ties while adapting immigrants to American society, and presents them as antagonists of the premise that Catholicism was inherently anti-American. The chapter on Judaism describes not only the novelty of the American experience for Jews who found themselves promoted from an object of extraordinary prejudice in Europe to an “ordinary minority” in America, but also the extent to which Jews were able to turn around and become a vanguard in the representation of America to itself through both entertainment media and social justice organizing. By emphasizing ethnicity in these religious identities, Moore brings notions of difference from their peripheries to their centers.

In the second large division of the text, Moore treats “religions for average Americans” under the title “the Progressive’s Despair.” His “average Americans” include Christian Scientists, pre-millenialists, Fundamentalists, and African-Americans. In the first three cases, he soundly makes the case for their ordinariness alongside their “outsider” status, refusing to stigmatize them on the latter account. In the final case, he documents the exceptional nature of Black Christianity in both cultivating and undermining the sense of social autonomy among African-Americans.

While I understand that Moore’s thesis requires him to cultivate sympathy for the religious groups about which he writes, I think he tends to cut too much slack for Biblical inerrancy, e.g. when he characterizes it as “the notion...that the Bible means what it says.” (p. 169) The dilemmas regarding popular hermeneutics of scripture didn’t begin with higher criticism or theological modernism. No text is self-interpreting, and the Bible is less transparent than most. In fact, I think it is rather easier to defend the intellectual integrity of denying biological evolution than that of denying reading.

Another terminological quirk is Moore’s repeated invocation of the “Moral Majority,” which must have seemed like something more than a decade-long political coalition in 1986. (Falwell’s attempted resurrection of a grouping under that banner in 2003 made little progress before his 2007 demise.) Still, Moore’s analysis of Fundamentalism’s persistence after Scopes—as contrasted with the illusion of its reconstitution by Billy Graham—is a sound one, and he puts his finger on the political dilemma that confronted both Fundamentalists and their sectarian pre-millenialist cousins at the close of the 20th century. Their relationship to “Caesar” is necessarily different than the one shown in the gospels, but what should it be?

In the postscript, I was struck by the following remark: "If Americans are now more religiously tolerant than they were in the nineteenth century, it is not because they are collectively more high-minded but because they care less about religion." (p. 205)

My disagreement with the final clause of the apodosis preoccupied me for minutes, until I realized that I rejected the protasis. And it seems that Moore may as well, if we attend to his final suspension of judgment on whether “consensus as a myth” will continue to be supportable in the future of American religions. (p. 210) I strongly concur that the “invented oppositions” (p. 46) in which our pluralism is rooted are what nourish its religious dynamism. show less

It is axiomatic to argue the Founding Fathers had enormous respect for religion, believed firmly that human rights originated from a divine being, and accepted that democracy would benefit from a moral citizenry who believed in God. So why does the Constitution make no mention of a divine being?

Most states (with the notable exception of New York and Virginia) had religious tests for public office that were specifically designed to keep out Quakers and especially the dreaded Papists (Quakers show more were anathema for their pacifist and antislavery views). One anti-Constitution article widely distributed in Connecticut, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts worried that the proscription of religious tests for office in the new Constitution would cause the government to be overrun with "1st. Quakers, who will make the blacks saucy, and at the same time deprive us of the means of defense - 2dly. Mohometans, who ridicule the doctrine of the Trinity - 3dly. Deists [Most of the Founding Fathers were in fact Deists, a non-doctrinaire group that rejected a supernatural, anthropomorphic God who intervened in human events, believing instead that God was a supreme intelligence who set things in motion to operate forever according to natural, rational and scientific laws.:] abominable wretches - 4thly. Negroes, the seed of Cain - 5thly. Beggars, who when sent on horseback will ride to the devil - 6thly. Jews, etc. etc. [sic:]."

There is a tradition the authors refer to as "religious correctness," which takes the position that America is a religious, especially Christian, nation and there is one correct religious persuasion that must exclude all others. The religious right has gone to great extremes to prove the Constitution was created to perpetuate "a Christian
Order," (James Dobson) and they would like to see a country "once again governed by Christians" (Ralph Reed) - I don't know what he considers Carter, Bush and Reagan.

Kramnick and Moore state flatly and demonstrate convincingly that this viewpoint is wrong. The Founding Fathers wanted to disassociate a person's religious convictions from the value of his political opinion. The Founding Fathers thinking originated from several traditions: the religious thought of Roger Williams, the Baptists of that era, and the English liberal tradition "that put at the center of its political philosophy individuals free of government, enjoying property and thinking and praying as they wished."

Roger Williams' secular approach to government was paradoxically religious in nature. Because "he believed that the number of true Christians would always be a small proportion of the population in any society, he rejected the concept of a nation under God. For England or for the Massachusetts Bay colony to make a claim that it was a Christian polity, a civil government party to a divine contract, was arrogant blasphemy. "

The authors suggest that the writers of the Constitution adopted this secular stance to protect religion from government, and to prevent the trivialization that "religious correctness" standards would cause. They wanted religion to do "what it did best, to preserve the civil morality necessary to democracy, without laying upon it the burdens of being tied to the fortunes of this or that political faction." show less

This is a good, well-researched look at the history of the religion clauses in the First Amendment, and a great corrective to those who feel certain that we are merely given the freedom to choose what god to believe in, or even worse, which Christian sect to join. While it is very refreshing to see such a strong, no-holds-barred defense of church/state separation, the sanctimonious tone of the authors is very offputting. They are also prone, in most cases, perhaps all, to take religious show more claims of morality and charity at face value, and to accept the religious definitions of morality. This is corrected somewhat in the final chapter, added in a re-issue during the second Bush administration, but the holier-than-thou tone remains, making it obvious that, at least in the minds of the authors, they have managed to grab the high ground from the religious right, the religious left, and the non-religious. That is at best irritating and at worst infuriating, and moved this book from an awesome and superb 4.5 star book to a 3.5 star book. That, and the misspelling of Karl Rove's name, something that has the impact of making you look poorly read. show less