Religious Freedom
The Contested History of an American Ideal
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
Religious freedom is so often presented as a timeless American ideal and an inalienable right, appearing fully formed at the founding of the United States. That is simply not so, Tisa Wenger contends in this sweeping and brilliantly argued book. Instead, American ideas about religious freedom were continually reinvented through a vibrant national discourse--Wenger calls it "religious freedom talk--that cannot possibly be separated from the evolving politics of race and empire.
More often than not, Wenger demonstrates, religious freedom talk worked to privilege the dominant white Christian population. At the same time, a diverse array of minority groups at home and colonized people abroad invoked and reinterpreted this ideal to defend themselves and their ways of life. In so doing they posed sharp challenges to the racial and religious exclusions of American life. People of almost every religious stripe have argued, debated, negotiated, and brought into being an ideal called American religious freedom, subtly transforming their own identities and traditions in the process. In a post-9/11 world, Wenger reflects, public attention to religious freedom and its implications is as consequential as it has ever been.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Wenger (We Have a Religion) offers a sharp analysis of the intersection of religion, race, and empire in America between 1898 and World War II. Wenger focuses primarily on four groups that used religious concepts to frame themselves as fully civilized people equal to white Americans: Native Americans, Jewish Americans, African-Americans, and Filipinos living in the Philippines after it became a U.S. territory. In Wenger's diagnosis, segments of Filipino and Native American populations aligned themselves with Christianity to prove they were not racially inferior "savages," while Jewish Americans positioned themselves as practitioners of a white religion, not members of a race. African-Americans were less successful in Wenger's estimation; groups such as the Nation of Islam found their religious freedom arguments dismissed as fraudulent and their faith practices condemned as "inauthentic, and overly political." She employs the work of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze to argue that religion, race, and empire are not distinct from one other, and to demonstrate how subaltern groups were forced to adapt their religions to more closely hew to white Protestant Christian norms. This is a convincing and illuminating book about a little-studied facet of American religious history.
