In that moment, Abigail is making a philosophical contribution to the theory of democracy. It is not possible to deliver on those principles of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for everybody if power does not include everybody.
DR: Some people would say that “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal” is the creed of our country in many ways, though we obviously haven’t honored it completely. How important were the Declaration and that sentence outside the United States? Did it inspire other people to have revolutions or make declarations of independence?
DA: It’s inspired the whole world. David Armitage, a historian, has written a beautiful book on declarations around the world. There are hundreds of them at this point, and they range from the Purna Swaraj declaration in India in the 1930s, which drew a lot on the text of the Declaration, to Ho Chi Minh using the Declaration in Vietnam. So there are really quite variable cases for the use of the Declaration.
CATHERINE BREKUS on Religious Freedom
Charles Warren Professor of the History of Religion in America, Harvard Divinity School
“It’s one of the biggest myths of American history and American religious history that the Puritans came here to create a new world of religious freedom.”
Religion is heavily intertwined with the founding of many of the English colonies established in North America throughout the seventeenth century. The Puritans, Pilgrims, Quakers, Catholics, Lutherans, Mennonites, and Amish, among others motivated to create or build the American colonies, were invariably seeking to practice their religion in ways not permitted in their native countries.
The irony is that once in the colonies, these seekers of religious freedom and tolerance were not all that tolerant of those who had different religious beliefs than their own. Native Americans, who had inhabited the lands later occupied by the settlers, saw this quite early. The settlers made enormous efforts to convert them to Christianity. Indeed, the first Bible printed in the colonies was printed for the sole purpose of converting the Algonquin tribe.
One religious leader, Roger Williams, had to flee the Massachusetts Bay Colony in part because of his advocacy of religious freedom. He left and formed Rhode Island, where all religions were officially welcomed. My home state of Maryland was originally formed to provide a haven for Catholics, who were not welcomed in the other colonies.
It was recognized by a few leaders in some colonies that religious tolerance was a virtue and not a vice. Thomas Jefferson was one of the leaders of the Virginia General Assembly who in 1776 drafted a bill guaranteeing religious tolerance in the commonwealth—one of his proudest accomplishments—and James Madison was among the leaders of the assembly who pushed through its passage, albeit ten years later.
It was also Madison, as a member of the first Congress, who drafted and helped pass the initial Bill of Rights, whose First Amendment stated that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” And while Congress has generally, with the help of the courts, honored this commitment to religious freedom (e.g., prohibiting prayer in public schools), the story of religion in the United States has actually been one of intense disputes between religious groups.
It has also been a story at times of virulent prejudice against those who were not adherents of the dominant religion in the United States—Protestantism. This is not to say that the many Protestant sects did not have their own intrareligious disputes and disagreements. But for a bit more than the first half of the twentieth century, the anti-Catholicism and anti-Semitism of American society, notably led by the Ku Klux Klan, was an accepted fact of life, and a visible sign of religious-based prejudice.
Sometimes this type of prejudice was violent, and at times it was silent; but it was there. When John Kennedy was running for the presidency in 1960, his election was thought to be unrealistic by many, for he was Catholic. The only earlier Catholic Democratic nominee for president, Al Smith in 1928, was widely thought to have lost in no small part because of his religion.
In this century, especially after 9/11, the anti-Muslim feeling in parts of American society has also been very visibly and strongly held. The quite public and unapologetic effort by the Trump administration to effectively ban immigration from certain majority-Muslim countries for a period reflected, in the view of many, this prejudice.
Religion continues to be an important part of American life, though perhaps less so than in the earlier days of the republic. Attendance at places of worship, measured as a percentage of the population, is down, particularly in recent decades, though still higher than in most European countries (where religion has seriously receded in its appeal). A religious-affiliation survey conducted by the American Values Atlas in 2019 showed that almost 69 percent of Americans identify as Christian, about 1.3 percent as Jewish, 0.7 percent as Muslim, 0.8 percent as Buddhist, and 4.3 percent as some other religion, while almost a quarter—24 percent—identify as “unaffiliated.”
Through the help of the New-York Historical Society, I had a discussion on these subjects on November 20, 2020, with Catherine Brekus, a professor of the history of religion at the Harvard Divinity School. A nationally recognized scholar of the role American women have undertaken in religion, Professor Brekus is also a leading scholar on the development and importance of religion in the history of the United States.
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DAVID M. RUBENSTEIN (DR): Who exactly were the Puritans, and why did they leave Europe and come over to what later became the United States?
CATHERINE BREKUS (CB): The Puritans came to the colonies from England, where they were being persecuted under Charles I. Remember that Henry VIII had broken from the Catholic Church during the Protestant Reformation.
There were religious wars in England from the sixteenth century on where, depending on the monarch, either Catholics or Protestants were being persecuted. Bloody Mary, the Catholic queen, tortured and imprisoned many Protestants. Then Elizabeth I, a Protestant queen, imprisoned Catholics. There was very little toleration for any kind of religious dissent.
Puritans objected to the Elizabethan Religious Settlement, a middle way between Catholics and Protestants, that allowed the Anglican Church to preserve certain Catholic customs like kneeling and priestly vestments. Puritans were called Puritans because they wanted to purify the Church of England. They refused to conform to Anglican worship, and, as a result, many were imprisoned or lost their lands.
The so-called Puritans didn’t call themselves that at first. It was a term of derision. Some decided to flee from England and settle in Massachusetts Bay.
DR: When did they come over?
CB: The Puritans arrived in 1630. The more radical Pilgrims had already settled in Plymouth. The Puritans said that they wanted to reform the Church of England, but the Pilgrims said the Church of England was so corrupt that there was no way that it could be reformed. People just had to separate from it.
The Puritans put an ocean between themselves and the Church of England while continuing to say that they were not separating from it. In fact, they ended up creating their own church system in Massachusetts Bay.
DR: I’ve often thought it was ironic that the Puritans and the Pilgrims came over for religious freedom reasons, but when they got here, they didn’t exactly let other people worship differently. Is that right? In other words, if you didn’t agree with them, in what became the United States, they would treat you very poorly?
CB: Definitely. It’s one of the biggest myths of American history and American religious history that the Puritans came here to create a new world of religious freedom. They came here because they wanted religious freedom for themselves, but once they got to Massachusetts Bay, they persecuted people of other religious faiths.
The Quakers, for example, were also part of the radical wing of the Protestant Reformation, but the Puritans objected to their decision to abolish the sacraments and an ordained priesthood. When Quakers started appearing in Massachusetts Bay, the Puritans l
iterally put them on boats and deported them. Some refused to leave, or came back after being banished, including Mary Dyer, one of four Quakers between 1659 and 1661 who were hanged on Boston Common. So the Puritans were not religiously tolerant at all.
DR: Who was it that settled Virginia—the Pilgrims, the Puritans, or somebody else?
CB: The colonies were a patchwork founded by people of different religious faiths. The people who settled Virginia were Anglicans from the Church of England. Most of them were explicitly coming to Virginia for commercial reasons. They were hoping to make money, unlike the Puritans, who came mostly as families, not as twentysomething men hoping to make it rich in the New World. The Puritans hoped to find a place to worship freely.
The people who settled in Virginia had more commercial motives, but they also had sincere religious convictions, and they established the Church of England, meaning that only Anglicans were tolerated in Virginia. If you were not a Puritan in Massachusetts Bay, you could be imprisoned or fined or, if you were a Quaker, you could have one of your ears cropped. In Virginia, Anglicans did the same to people who were not Anglican.
DR: When did Catholics start coming over, and where did they come from?
CB: The first Catholic settlement was in Maryland, a fascinating story because most of the colonies were settled by Protestants. Early America had a definite Protestant bent that continued past the Revolution, but Maryland was different. It was founded by the Calvert family, a distinguished Catholic gentry family in England who hoped to make money while giving Catholics a place to worship freely. Catholics in England were not tolerated and could not worship in public.
After the Calvert family founded Maryland, they extended religious toleration to all Christians, not just Catholics. The first settlers of Maryland were Catholic gentry who brought Protestant servants with them, and Protestants actually outnumbered Catholics from the beginning. Lord Baltimore, George Calvert, wanted to protect Catholics’ religious freedom by extending religious toleration to all Christians. He wasn’t motivated by a desire to defend an abstract principle of religious toleration but by a fear that Protestants would ultimately end up oppressing Catholics. That’s exactly what happened: by the early 1700s, Catholics in Maryland were forbidden to vote, hold public office, or worship in public.
DR: The Germans who came over, what religion were they?
CB: There were a number of small German sects like the Amish and the Mennonites who ended up in Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania was founded by William Penn, the wealthy son of an admiral in the British navy who converted to the Society of Friends, known as the Quakers because of their ecstatic worship in which they would tremble and quake. Penn decided to found a colony in which everybody would be allowed to worship freely, and dissenters from all over Europe ended up flocking to Pennsylvania, including Christians who belonged to small sectarian German groups.
DR: Where did the first people who were Jewish come from?
CB: There are a few scattered references to Jews in the records of different colonies in the early seventeenth century, but the first significant settlement came in what was then known as New Amsterdam, now New York. New Amsterdam was the Dutch colony.
There was a group of Dutch Jews who had come from the Caribbean by way of Brazil, which had been a Dutch colony before the Portuguese conquered it. In the beginning, the governor of New York did not want to tolerate them, but under pressure from Jews involved in the Dutch West India Company, they were allowed to stay and to practice their faith in New York. And New York became, of course, a magnet for Jewish immigrants into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
DR: What was it that propelled people in Virginia to talk about religious freedom? Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, George Mason were all very interested in this. Why were they so interested, and what was their religion? Some people say Thomas Jefferson was a Deist. Can you explain what a Deist is?
CB: In the 1760s and 1770s, before the American Revolution, a number of elite men, including Thomas Jefferson, were influenced by their reading of Enlightenment tracts about the reasonableness of Christianity.
Jefferson was very suspicious of institutional, organized Christianity, which he called “priestcraft.” He thought that religion was interfering with people using their powers of reason. When we say that Jefferson or other founders were Deists, what we mean is that they did not believe in the Jesus of the Gospels but a more distant God who had set the world in motion and then stood apart from creation, sort of like a watchmaker winding a watch and letting it run.
Jefferson didn’t believe in the efficacy of intercessory prayer, and he didn’t think that Jesus had been the incarnate form of God. But he thought that Jesus was an exemplary person. You may have heard the story about the Jefferson Bible: Jefferson took a pair of scissors to the Gospels and cut out all the miracles of Jesus and left the ethical teachings, which he found admirable.
DR: The first Bible printed in the United States was a Bible designed to help convert Indians to Christianity. What religion did Native Americans have? Did the effort to convert them get anywhere?
CB: You’re referring to the Eliot Indian Bible. John Eliot was a Puritan who became known later as the “Apostle to the Indians.” One of the justifications for Puritan settlement was that they said they wanted to convert Native Americans to Christianity.
But the Puritans’ evangelism was always accompanied by an attempt to take away Indian lands. That meant that many Native Americans were justifiably suspicious of missionaries.
Indigenous peoples already had their own religions, a variety of religions. They wouldn’t have called their beliefs “religious” because there wasn’t a word for religion in Indian languages. It was more like a way of life.
DR: What religions were slaves allowed to have, if any? Could they practice it, or they just were told that if they had a certain religion, they couldn’t practice it?
CB: We know that enslaved Africans came to America with a number of different religions. Some practiced indigenous African religions. Some, from the Kingdom of Congo (in modern-day Angola), were Catholic. The Congolese king and many Congolese had converted to Catholicism in the fifteenth century. Based on descriptions of religious practices, we also know that some of the enslaved were Muslim.
In the seventeenth century, there was not that much interest in converting the enslaved. But around the middle of the eighteenth century, missionaries began a more active outreach to enslaved Africans. By the nineteenth century, during the 1820s and 1830s, plantation missions led to the conversion of significant numbers of enslaved Africans, but this was always in the context of what the slave owner would allow. Many feared that Christianity would make slaves rebellious.
DR: In the First Amendment, the first part of the Bill of Rights, there is a right to religious freedom. Why was there such a desire to have religious freedom? It doesn’t seem like so many people in the United States were really practicing religious freedom.
CB: The First Amendment is one of the glories of the American system. “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”
In some ways the First Amendment came out of the sheer multiplicity of Christianity in early America. Most of the founders were not devout Christians by any means. We’ve already talked about Jefferson being suspicious of institutional Christianity.
There were a number of dissenters who wanted religious freedom so that they could practice their religion freely. The Baptists were especially influential. In both New England and in the South, in the two decades or so before the American Revolution, Baptists were being persecuted for their faith by both Puritans and Anglicans. They were forced to pay taxes to establish churches that they didn’t support, and rather than pay those taxes, they went to jail.
Historians usually account for the First Amendment by pointing to the alliance between Deists and religious dissenters who wanted religious freedom for practical reasons. Skeptics and dis
senters came together around the idea that religion should be something that people were free to practice as they pleased.
What was really astonishing about the First Amendment is that, for the first time, it allowed people to not practice anything at all. At the time of the Revolution, nine of the thirteen colonies had an established church that people were legally required to pay taxes to, but now, on the federal level, there was no longer an established church. Someone could say, “I want to be president and I don’t practice any religion at all.” Not that this has ever happened. An avowedly atheist president is still too radical for our system, I think.
DR: After the Civil War and Reconstruction, the Ku Klux Klan emerges. It’s seen as anti–African American but as also anti-Catholic and anti-Jewish. Was that an important part of American religious history—anti-Catholicism, anti-Semitism?
CB: Definitely. There were two Klans. The first was active during Reconstruction, explicitly trying to disenfranchise newly freed Black men. That dissipated and then was given new life by the racist 1915 movie Birth of a Nation, which depicted the Reconstruction Klan as heroes.
The Klan reorganized in the 1920s, and at that point it was not only a racist organization but also strongly anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic. In order to be a member of the Klan, you had to be a white Protestant man, and you took an oath of allegiance on a Bible draped with the American flag.
Both Catholics and Jews were suspected of not being true Americans. Catholics supposedly paid their first allegiance to the Vatican, to the pope, and so they couldn’t be trusted to follow American laws. Remember that a deep vein of anti-Catholic hostility had existed since the time of the Protestant Reformation. Protestants had rejected the Catholic Church, and they become anxious in the 1830s when huge waves of immigrants, largely Catholic, began arriving from Ireland and Germany. There were also waves of Jews arriving from Germany and then from eastern Europe, and Jews were also seen as being a potential threat to the republic and the white Protestant identity of the United States.
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