Cory Booker on tolerance and the problem of using and understanding history

Corporate Democratic Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey spoke at the Democratic Convention Monday night, Sen. Cory Booker: 'We are called to be a nation of love' PBS Newshour 07/26/2016:

I was glad to see that he made prominent use of the Declaration of Independence, the proclamation from the Continental Congress formally initiating the American Revolution:

Time has the transcript of Booker's speech (Will Drabold, Read Cory Booker’s Speech at the Democratic Convention 07/26/2016):

Two hundred and forty years ago, our forefathers gathered in this very city and they declared before the world that we would be a free and independent nation. Today, we gather here again in this city, in this city of brotherly love, to reaffirm our values before our nation and the whole world. ...

Now, looking back to our history, looking back to our history, our founding fathers put forth founding documents that were indeed genius. But our founding documents weren’t genius because they were perfect. They were saddled with the imperfections and even the bigotry of the past. Native Americans were referred to as savages. Black Americans were fractions of human beings. And women were not mentioned at all.

But those facts and ugly parts of our history don’t distract from our nation’s greatness. In fact, I believe we are an even greater nation, not because we started perfect, but because every generation has successfully labored to make us a more perfect union. [my emphasis]

I've been disturbed recently at how wiling the Democrats and even the independent left in the US to cede any kind of patriotic imagery from the period prior to 1860 to the Republicans and their favorite pseudohistorians like David Barton. And my perspective is very much like what Cory Bookder expressed there.

Yes, Thomas Jefferson was a slaveowner, he believed black people were biologically inferior to whites, and called Native Americans savages. He was also a key leader of the American Revolution and a cutting-edge philosophical and practical advocate for revolutionary democracy in the 18th and 19th century. And all those things are important to understand if we're trying to have a meaningful grasp of that period in history.

If we think that democracy is a good thing, or that it represents some kind of historical progress, then it's hard to say that events like the American Revolution, the adoption of the Constitution and Jefferson's election as President in 1800 and his subsequent Presidency were all good things insofar as they were advances in democracy. Like all major historical processes, they were also contradictory and had their dark sides. From a democratic perspective, there are advances in human history. And also retrogressions. Both even can and do occur at the same time.

But the American left at the moment seems ready to abandon any positive democratic symbolism from the days of the Revolution until at least 1860 to conservatives. Republicans are actually good at using patriotic symbolic and invoking the Founders. And those symbols resonate with many people, not just conservatives. There's a reason that the organized, well-funded astroturf Republican mobilization that began in 2009 called itself the Tea Party. Instead of, say, Americans for a New Gilded Age. Or, White People for White Power.

We're talking here about that strange conceptual badlands area between history as intellectual discipline and history as politics and ideology. Neither of the two sides of that polarity should determine the other. History needs to be written and understood for what it is. And that task shouldn't be subordinated to passing political fads and current ideologies, though there can never be history written in isolation from the historical context in which the historian lives and writes. On the other hand, it's not necessary for a politician evoking a historical theme in support of a current cause to parse every significant issue debated in the professional historical literature.

I note that Barack Obama in his speech to the Democratic Convention also invoked the most famous document written by the slaveowner and Indian-hater Thomas Jefferson and did so to invoke American tradition and to democratize it further. Hillary Clinton also invoked the American Revolution. Although she evoked it to stress the importance of compromise. (What th ...?!?)

But Booker's invocation of love instead of tolerance strikes me as distinctly strange:

And so this is the high call of patriotism. Patriotism is love of country. But you can’t love your country without loving your countrymen and your countrywomen. Now, we don’t always have to agree, but we must be there for each other, we must empower each other, we must find the common ground, and we must build bridges across our differences to pursue the common good.

Let me tell you, we cannot devolve into our — to a nation where our highest aspirations are that we just tolerate each other. We are not called to be a nation of tolerance. We are called to be a nation of love.

That’s why that last line in the Declaration of Independence says it so clearly. It says that we must — to make this nation work, we must mutually pledge to each other our lives and our fortunes and our sacred honor. Tolerance is the wrong way. Tolerance says I’m just going to stomach your right to be different, that if you disappear from the face of the Earth, I’m no better or worse off.

But love — love knows that every American has worth and value, that no matter what their background, no matter what their race or religion or sexual orientation, love, love recognizes that we need each other, that we as a nation are better together, that when we are divided we are weak, we decline, yet when we are united, we are strong, when we are indivisible, we are invincible. [my emphasis]

This is in line with the Clinton campaign's distinctly non-populist theme of unity, Stronger Together.

But it's worth remembering here that Booker is not only a loyal Wall Street Democrat. He's also kissed up to the Christian Right. So it's worth paying attention to what the implications of his love-not-tolerance rhetoric, which superficially invokes Christian themes of loving your enemies and turning the other cheek.

The Young Turks raise a question about the political effectiveness of Cory Booker's approach, which Cenk Uygur mocks in this context as, "Oh, I'm going to smother the fascists with love." Does Donald Trump Have Dirt On Cory Booker? 07/26/2016:

That report points out how easily Booker's love-not-tolerance slogan can function not just as a willingness to give someone who's wronged you another chance but also as yet another excuse for corporate Democrats to refuse to oppose Republicans or even to offer an alternative framing of political issues.

Here is the full Cory Booker speech, Watch Sen. Cory Booker’s full speech at the 2016 Democratic National Convention PBS Newshour 06/25/2016:

That report points out how easily Booker's love-not-tolerance slogan can function not just as a willingness to give someone who's wronged you another chance but also as yet another excuse for corporate Democrats to refuse to oppose Republicans or even to offer an alternative framing of political issues. Bipartisanship!

Returning to Mr. Jefferson, this is the text of the Virginia Statute on Religious Freedom of 1786 Whereases) which he considered one of the greatest achievements of his life (Digital History 2016):

Be it enacted by the General Assembly, That no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burthened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions or belief; but that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinion in matters of religion, and that the same shall in no wise diminish enlarge, or affect their civil capacities.

And though we well know that this assembly elected by the people for the ordinary purposes of legislation only, have no power to restrain the acts of succeeding assemblies, constituted with powers equal to our own, and that therefore to declare this act to be irrevocable would be of no effect in law; yet we are free to declare, and do declare, that the rights hereby asserted are of the natural rights of mankind, and that if any act shall be hereafter passed to repeal the present, or to narrow its operation, such act shall be an infringement of natural right. [my emphasis]

That is one of the great statements of the classical liberal principle of religious tolerance and freedom of religion. It frames religious tolerance in the Enlightenment version of natural rights, which is not so common today.

But the basic democratic principle of religious tolerance and religious freedom is the same today. We also talk about intellectual tolerance in terms of being open to hear other ideas and treating them fairly. But the political/juridical version in the Virginia Statute on Religious Freedom and the First Amendment is not about intellectual openness or personal politeness. It’s about the right to not be put in jail or otherwise legally punished for expressing religious beliefs different from those of the party or faction in power.

It’s also about the obligation of the government to prevent people from being physically harmed or persecuted because of their religious beliefs.

Karl Marx gave a rather cynical definition of religious freedom in his Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875), “Everyone should be able to attend his religious as well as his bodily needs without the police sticking their noses in.“ Impious wording aside, there is nothing distinctly Marxist about this definition of religious freedom. On the contrary, Marx there was expressing his own support of classical liberal-democratic, Jeffersonian/Madisonian version of religious tolerance and freedom of worship expressed in the Virginia Statute on Religious Freedom.

In other words, the democratic principle of religious tolerance, as well as tolerance for various kinds of non-religious speech, could be characterized this way: "Tolerance says, I’m just going to stomach your right to be different, that if you disappear from the face of the Earth, I’m no better or worse off.“

Fundamentally, that is exactly what tolerance as a historical, democratic, liberal concept is: I may think you’re worthless and your soul will burn in Hail forever because you don’t worship God the way I do and I’m never going to invite you to have dinner with me to discuss your despicable ideas, but I have to respect and defend your right to be as horribly wrong as you are.

The Western democratic concept of tolerance was decisively influenced by the bloody Wars of Religion of the 1500s in the wake of the Protestant Reformation. Rainer Forst writes in Toleration and Conflict (2013 English edition, pp. 138-9)

Sixteenth-century France provides the backdrop for the decisive further development in the discourse of toleration as political thought and action became increasingly independent of religious authorities. This development was triggered by fierce religious wars leading to a secular understanding of the state, whose counterpart was the increasing autonomy ofindividuals and their revised self-understanding. '

With increasing religious plurality, followed by the Reformation and the ensuing conflicts, the traditional constellation of church and state collapsed and the political question of how to uphold the unity of the state and, most importantly, to preserve peace acquired central importance. The state- or, more precisely, the sovereign understood as an increasingly neutral authority situated above the religious denominations, was proposed as an answer to this question. Thus, out of the crisis of the Wars of Religion there developed a discourse of sovereignty and toleration in which the latter features as the only rational option for securing peace, a discourse in which a 'secular' legitimation of the state, which enjoys sovereign authority above the parties to the religious confiicti (even though it remains bound to the dominant religious denomination), took shape. This idea was first developed by the politiques, a heterogeneous group of politically minded lawyers in France during the second half of the sixteenth century, and in particular by [Jean] Bodin, and it would acquire a distinctive expression in the seventeenth century in the political philosophy of Hobbes.

Our concept of political and religious tolerance developed out of a context in which people had experienced how massively destructive killing each other over religious beliefs could be. Or to go back to Cory Booker’s contemptuous formulation, it was a big advance in freedom and civilized behavior when Europeans decided it was not a good thing for one kind of Christian to think of another that if you disappear from the face of the Earth, I’ll be better off.

Cory Booker essentially sneered at that notion. But both historically and conceptually, that’s the most essential part of what freedom of speech and religion actually mean!

Fundamentalist pseudohistory and "religious freedom"

Eric Metaxas has been one of the Christian Right's "It" Boys since he got cheeky with Obama at a White House Prayer Breakfast event. An event, BTW, that deserves to go to the trash bin of history along with the White House Correspondents' Dinner.

Metaxas' has a new book about the Founders' belief in "religious freedom." Which in the Christianists' view of the world, means the right of fundamentalist Protestants to impose their views on everyone else via the government. There are a few evangelical Christian historians who do real history who take the time to refute some of the nonsense from people like Metaxas. Because they are somehow affiliated with non-fundamentalist conservative Protestantism, they can at least be heard by some of the fundis.

Warren Throckmorton is one of those and here's his take on Metaxas' latest pseudohistory text: Eric Metaxas’ If You Can Keep It: A Critical Review 07/07/2016. Throckmorton's article appears at the rightwing Daily Caller website, so some fundis may encounter it there.

At the end, he links to three other "evangelical history professors" debunking Metaxas:

John Fea, Review of Eric Metaxas, “If You Can Keep It” Way of Improvement: Part 1 07/05/2016; Part 2 07/07/2016; Part 3 07/07/2016; Part 4 07/09/2016.

In Part 4, Fea himself cites a common but dubious assumption that "nearly one-third of British-American colonies ... did not support the American Revolution." The support for Britain was probably much less than that.

Tracy McKenzie at Faith and American History: Eric Metaxas on Christianity and the Constitution 07/07/2016; Faith and American History 07/07/2016; The Good, the Bad and the Awful: Eric Metaxas' New Book "If You Can Keep It" 06/30/2016; Metaxcas on America as a "City on a Hill" 07/04/2016.

Gregg Frazer, A Republic If You Can Keep It The Gospel Coaliton 06/04/2016:

One of the more egregious historical errors is the claim that the “very first settlers on American shores” came “precisely” to gain religious freedom, along with the equally false claim that “in America the idea of religious freedom was paramount,” and that there was “a complete tolerance of all denominations and religions” from the beginning (34–35).

The first settlers to the American shores (that would become the United States) settled at Jamestown in 1607 and came seeking profits, not prophets. Like many on the Christian Right, Metaxas skips Jamestown altogether. He says: “Since the Pilgrims came to our shores in 1620, religious freedom and religious tolerance have been the single most important principle of American life” (70). The Pilgrims and Puritans did come seeking religious freedom, but only for themselves. They didn’t value or allow religious freedom for others.

In fact, the Rhode Island colony was founded by dissidents forced out of Massachusetts Bay because of religious nonconformity. Far from guaranteeing “complete tolerance,” all the way through the Founding era non-Christian religious groups and some Christian denominations were discriminated against in most of the colonies/states, and even persecuted in some. That persecution was, for example, what motivated James Madison and Thomas Jefferson to push for religious tolerance legislation.

Religion, secularism and the complications of the American tradition of religious freedom

In my recent post Mark Twain's white suit and Andrew Jackson 02/16/2016, I cited Tracy Fessenden's book Culture and Redemption: Religion, The Secular, and American Literature (2007).

Her book is a collection of essays divided into two sections. The four chapters in the first part are more thematically tied together with the idea that the development of the American notion of freedom of religion well into the 19th century largely took the form of the privileging of a non-sectarian Protestant Christian narrative. The second is a more diverse set of essays on literary topics, including the one that deals with Mark Twain's white suit.

I was especially intrigued by her elaboration of Puritan texts equating the "savage Indians" with "Catholicism." Puritan views lumped women with Indians as part of Nature, a condition above which white European Protestants had risen, though obviously white European Protestant women weren't put on quite so low a level as the other humans regarded as part of degraded, unregenerate Nature. Or at least true Protestants like themselves. Dissenters from their true way were quickly lumped in with the other wretched inferiors who were part of Nature: Indians, Catholics, women. The Puritan era is one of Fessenden's specialties. She is a co-editor of The Puritan Origins of American Sex: Religion, Sexuality, and National Identity in American Literature (2001).

But Protestantism was plagued from the start by its own schismatic tendencies. Fessenden in a footnote (p. 245) quotes Ralph Waldo Emerson from 1844: "[T]he Catholic religion respects masses of men and ages. ... The Catholic church is ethnical [sic], and in every way superior. It is in harmony with Nature, which loves the race and ruins the individual. The Protestant has his pew, which of course is only the first step to a church for every individual citizen - a church apiece." (my emphasis)

So in terms of the secular government's attitudes toward establishment and protection of the Christian religion, Papist and heathen Indians came in practice to be regarded as far more threatening to the True Faith than dissenting Protestant sects.

Fessenden writes about the great appeal of captive narratives, stories of whites who lived among the Indians. This is a fascinating shadow side of white-dominated American history, a reminder that some whites were forced into a relation with natives peoples in which they were regarded to treat them as humans like themselves. At least at some level, for some length of time. In some cases, such whites decided they preferred the company of the "savages" to that of the civilized whites.

The following passage gives a glimpse of Fassenden's nuanced treatment of the complexity of these trends and their evolution over time:

Bur if the view of Indians as deficient Christians - and of wayward Protestant Christians as Indians [in an earlier Puritan view] - made Indians the inverse of the Puritan ideal, it also permitted the Puritans' gradual recasting of Indians not as the image of the unregenerate Puritan interior but instead as the external periphery of an increasingly incommensurable otherness, against which different varieties of Protestant Christianity could then be subtly consolidated. After 1679, the civil and spiritual reforms of the Puritans were directed less toward individual regeneration than toward securing ministerial leadership and civil order among the new outlying towns and "unwalled villages" of the expanding white frontier. Because Puritans failed to credit Indians with a distinctive interiority, the Indian became a blank slate for Puritan projections of spiritual deficiency, first by being made into emblems of unregenerate Puritans, and then subtly and increasingly as tools of enemy Catholics. The "conversion" of lndians from weak Puritans to vigorous papists was facilitated by the literal removing or subduing of autonomous tribes from southern New England, which meant that the resistant Indians with whom Puritans came into contact after King Philip's War were those who had been "Romanized" in their association with French colonists to the north. "There is a Danger lest your Neighbors be made Captives," warned Cotton Mather in 1707; "If they become Captives, they fall into the hands of Papists. The Papists will use more than ordinary Pains to Debauch them." Indian captivity had earlier provided Mather the occasion to exhort his congregants to examine their spiritual fragility, their own incipient Indianness in the absence of full conversion. As Tara Fitzpatrick argues, however, the threat of captivity to "papists" now enabled Mather to emphasize less the vulnerability of the Puritan community than its theological strengths, its elevation of faith over works and the gracious workings of the Word over the meretricious agency of the sacraments [associated especially with the "Papists"]. (my emphasis in bold; p. 30)

She concludes that by the end of the eighteenth century, with the image of Indians as the Other, bolstered by and identified with the image of the Papist Other, "the Puritans' recasting of the otherness of Indians as a spiritual difference of kind rather than degree enabled the proliferating sects of white New England Protestants to remain united as solid and worthy heirs of the Reformation against the miscegenate corruption represented to [Increase] Mather as the 'half Indianized French ... half Frenchified Indians." (p. 31) The Puritans were particularly focused on the "Papist" threat because of the close proximity of Catholic French settlements.

Fassenden is careful to look at the periods she examines as what they are, events taking place in particular temporal and geographic contexts and is careful against generalizing those experiences beyond the evidence she cites. But she does argue that the broad trend in the United States well into the 19th century tended to regard "freedom of religion" in schools and public institutions as a nonsectarian support of Protestant religiosity. She doesn't stress the legal and Constitutional evolution in the United States. But it is important to remember that the freedom of religion enshrined in the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the federal Constitution was generally understood as applying only to the federal government, not to the states. It wasn't until the 14th Amendment extended the protections of the Bill of Rights fully to the states as well, that the pre-Civil War state-level approach to religious liberty was superseded by the protections of the federal Constitution.

As she does note, "Just prior to the Revolution, religious establishment was the rule in nine of the thirteen colonies. Soon after, New York's state constitution of 1777 abolished establishment, South Carolina's in 1778 for the first time require it, and other states proceeded unevenly to codify their relationship to established churches."

Her third chapter looks at local rounds in the "Bible wars," in the nineteenth century over religious education in public schools. The influx of Irish Catholic immigrants into northern cities added nativist and ethnic elements to Protestant anti-Catholicism. Use of the King James Bible in public school education became a flashpoint with Catholics:

In Massachusetts, whose 1780 Constitution had stipulated that "public protestant teachers" would be supported to foster the "piety, education, and morality" on which civil government must "essentially depend," an 1827 law gave school committees power over textbooks "provided also that said committee shall never direct any school books to be purchased or used in any of the schools under their superintendence, which are calculated to favor any particular religious sect or tenet. " Sectarian objections that the public schools made no provision for specifically religious teachings were answered by interdenominational Protestant assurances that the content of instruction would be broadly Christian. At the center of the curriculum was the King James Bible. As the educational reformer Horace Mann insisted, the public school "welcomes the Bible, and therefore welcomes all the doctrines which the Bible really contains .... [I]t listens to these doctrines so reverently, that ... it will not suffer any rash mortal to thrust in his interpolations of their meanings, or overlay the text with any of the 'many inventions' which the heart of man has sought out" - a policy that rendered the annotated Douay Bible used by Catholics unacceptable, even as it enshrined the edition (the King James Bible) whose dedication referred to the pope as the "man of Sinne„ and whose preface refuted the legitimacy of the Catholic Church. As head of the Massachusetts School Committee, Mann vetoed as inappropriately sectarian a book then in wide use, The Child at Home, which was staunchly Calvinist in matters of sin and final judgment, but he made the Bible into the principle of tolerance itself: "In every course of studies, all the practical and preceptive parts of the Gospel should ... [be] sacredly included .... In no school should the Bible ... [be] opened to reveal the sword of ... polemic, but to unloose the dove of peace." [my emphasis in bold; pp. 66-7

The real-life conflicts between Catholics and Protestants in the US cannot be cleanly separated into religious, ethnic/cultural and political elements. But there was a political element. And whatever their various motivations, American Protestants were not wrong when they viewed the Catholic Church as largely an opponent of free, republican institutions Fessenden writes about the aftermath of the failed democratic revolutions of 1848 in Europe:

[I]n 1853 [in Cincinnati], violence was again narrowly averted when the visiting Archbishop Gaetano Bedini of Rome was burned in effigy by a crnwd of two thousand Protestant marchers, who advertised on placards their intention to burn the residence of Archbishop Purcell, where Bedini was staying. As Peter D'Agostino observes, Bedini's American visit "crystallized Catholic loyalty to the symbols of papal Rome" in the wake of Pius IX's triumphant return from exile after the fall of the independent Roman Republic in April 1849. Before coming to America, Bedini had been assigned by the Vatican to oversee the defeat of the liberal rebellion in Spain, an involvement that earned him the nickname of the "Bloody Butcher of Bologna" among the rebellion's supporters at home. While Catholic immigrants saw in the pope's hurniliation and exile a mirror of their own experiences of alienation in an often hostile new land, American Protestants (among them Margaret Fuller, William Lloyd Garrison, and Horace Greeley) vigorously hailed the rebellion that would have secularized the Papal States and destroyed the Vatican's temporal power. ("So deeply rooted in every American heart is the love of liberty," declared the American consul Nicholas Brown in Rome, that Americans would "at once hail with joy the independence of the Roman Republic." ) As a symbol of the Roman Republic's defeat, Bedini's visit to Cincinnati revitalized Catholics' spiritual allegiance to the "Eternal City" and gave urgency to the Protestant project of portraying as dangerously un-American those whose more deeply imagined community lay beyond national and temporal borders. [my emphasis; p. 75]

She defined the outlines of the Protestant-Catholic conflict in the mid-19th century this way in "The Other Woman's Sphere," her own essay in The Puritan Origins of America Sex:

The arrival of more than three million Catholic immigrants in the middle decades of the nineteenth century reconfigured urban spaces and magnified existing tensions among races, classes, and regions. Skilied craftspeople viewed the immigrants as fodder for industrialists, while factory owners saw them as shiftless and unprofitable. Immigrants threatened industrial and domestic laborers by accepting even the lowest-paying jobs, which until then only free black men and women had been called on to fill. To slave owners, Catholic immigrants were instinctive abolitionists who were unwilling to compete with slave labor; Protestant abolitionists who saw Catholicism as inherently despotic, meanwhile, considered them natural allies of the slave power. Tue seemingly monolithic structure of Catholicism cast the splintering of Protestant congregations and the arrival of new religious bodies into relief, while Catholicism's celibate vocations appeared to threaten both the family and the workplace as bulwarks of Protestant power. [my emphasis, p. 171]

Giovanni Maris Mastai-Ferretti served from 1846-1878 as Pope Pius IX. When the College of Cardinals selected him as Pope, "Liberal Europe applauded his election." (Richard McBrien, Lives of the Popes, 1997) But the shock of the revolutions of 1848 and that in Italy in particular shocked the previously liberal-minded Pope into becoming "one of "the more reactionary popes of history," as McBrien writes. Hans Küng writes in Das Christentum (1995) that after French and Austrian troops restored Pius IX in the Vatican, he became "an unreconstructed opponent of all free ('liberal') political, intellectual and theological currents." Küng claims that Pius' thinking "was not clouded by intellectual doubt" but instead was "marked by psychopathic features." (my translation) McBrien lists some of his later dubious accomplishments: "He called the First Vatican Council (1869-70), which defined papal primacy and papal infallibility; he defined the Immaculate Conception of Mary; and he published the 'Syllabus of Errors,' which condemned the major developments of the modern world."

Fessenden in Culture and Redemption sensibly does not attempt to draw direct lines between the history she recounts of the limits of earlier American conception of freedom of religion as the tolerance and public support of nonsectarian Protestantism, and the present-day disputes over freedom of religion and religious establishment in the United States.

But her account does give us some insight into the religious and rhetorical traditions on which today's Christian Dominionists draw in trying to define freedom of religion as freedom for Christians to use state institutions to impose their religion - most often a version of fundamentalist Protestant Christianity - on everyone else. And as the right to discriminate in public businesses and accommodations against people using Christianity as the justification. She notes, "Janet Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini suggest that the Christian right develops its political and cultural power 'both by
drawing on its connection to the Christian aspect (itself supported by mainline Protestantism) of hegemonic Christian secularism and by claiming to be oppressed by the same secularism.'"(p. 214) She also suggests, tentatively and in parentheses, "Secularists, meanwhile, might be said to draw on the secular aspect of hegemonic Christian secularism while claiming to be oppressed by its Christian aspect."

In a concluding chapter written after the Presidential election of 2004, Fessenden describes her book as "calling even the progressive elements of a secularized Protestant culture to account" and as putting "hard questions to cherished liberal narratives about, for example, the separation of church and state, the value of literacy, or the privatization of religious faith." But she also expressed concern that in the post-9/11 "war on terror" and its Islamophobic baggage, "the hegemonic power of appeals to a Protestant consensus in American public life remains, it would seem, as strong than ever: what William Hutchison identifies as the nineteenth-century dynamic of '[religious] pluralism as selective tolerance' ..."

What she means about troubling "liberal narratives" on the topic is that she objects to any easy explanation of the history of religious tolerance in America doesn't reflect historical realities, especially when our foreign policy or our occasional exercise in nation-building tires to apply simplistic models based on an idealized version of the American experience:

[T]he model we seek to export in the name of American values, one that attempts to ensure religious freedom and eradicate conflict by confining religion to a privatized sphere, does not even describe the dynamics of our own history. Worse still, it hides the violence and coercion that have attended the formation of American democratic space in the guise of the neutrality and universality of the secular. Academics tend to dismiss challenges to this narrative as the retrogressive voices of religionists who clamor for an ever greater share of public power. And not without evidence. Even so, however, our own embrace of a simplified narrative of secularization-as-progress is in part what allows this template to operate as the norm for bringing American values to a benighted world. [my emphasis]

And she makes this important observation about the endless scolding of the religion of Islam generally for allegedly never having had its own Reformation:

[I]n the post-September 11 calls from politicians and pundits for a "Reformation" in Islam, an Islam that would conform to Western expectations of acceptable religion: should we be surprised if such appeals are no longer made by the side of a moderate Muslim leader produced for the occasion, and all forms of Islam are now suspect for not looking enough like post-Reformation Christianity? [emphasis in original]

And she notes how this not-Protestant-enough criticism of Islam is used by advocates of war against Islamic countries as propaganda:

In the same way that a familiar liberal narrative of Islam - "the Reformation of Islam will arrive as an inevitable byproduct of modernization" - is made to yield up to its more violent and triumphalist counterpart - "Islam will ever remain incompatible with the West's secularized Protestant values" - so also do two versions of U.S. imperialism become mutually supporting and difficult to untangle. In the first, a liberal interventionist narrative sees the United States as uniquely able to redress, even if reluctantly, the failure of backward states and cultures to enter fully into modernity. The United States acts in its own interests and in the interests of those oppressed by the failed states in which they reside, this story runs, when it uses whatever means necessary to bring the blessings of religious liberty, economic freedom, and representative government to those parts of the world that would otherwise remain breeding grounds for violence, human rights abuses, and terrorism. This narrative's calming appeal to freedom, democracy, and their inevitable sway migrates also to its more hawkish counterpart, which urges perpetual aggressions against all those who oppose our universal values and who "hate" the freedoms we hold so dear - witness the hypocrisy of our guarantee of "religious freedoms" to those Muslims violently detained at Guantänamo Bay, without due process and apparently indefinitely.

In an observation that sheds some light on the incongruous ecumenical alliance in Islamophobia between Christian fundamentalists and some self-professed atheists:

However starkly continuing dispatches from the "culture wars" may portray an America divided into a conservative Christian faction hostile to the secular and a dogmatic secularism at odds with religion, it must be noted that the category of the West readily accommodates both of these polarized alternatives when the paradigm shifts from the culture wars between Christians and secularists to the "clash of civilizations" between the West and the rest. ... According to either version of this story, the formation of democratic societies requires that "irrational" religious behavior be banished to the private sphere, on the Protestant model, as a way of containing otherwise intractable and potentially violent conflict between contending worldviews. This is the model to which warnings of a "clash of civilizations" continue to appeal, even if secularists looking out from the Westsee theocratic assaults on modernity where religionists see godless assaults on the cherished values of Western civilization. lt is also the model that Western projects of nation building have traditionally sought to install around the globe. [my emphasis]

Dahlia Lithwick on the legal strategy behind Christian Right "religious freedom" laws

Dahlia Lithwick looks at the political/legal strategy behind the Christian Right's new favorite device to promote discrimination, the so-called "religious freedom" laws, in Complicit as Sin Slate 04/09/2015.

She explains laws that respect a person's right to their own religious beliefs are qualitatively different that laws that protect people from doing something that someone else might use to do something that the first party thinks is sinful. Thus, the title of the article.

Indiana Gov. Mike Pence defended his state’s RFRA [religious freedom restoriation act] as recalibrating the balance of civil rights and “religious freedom.” But these are simply not your father’s religious liberty claims. As [Doug] Siegel and [Reva] NeJaime note, the claim here is not that a religious individual is being forced to do something that violates his religion, such as shaving his beard; it is that he must be free from endorsing or enabling the behavior of others who are engaging in what he sees as sinful behavior. This was the central claim of the employers who sued in Hobby Lobby. They argued that it was itself sinful to provide health coverage to employees who might then use those benefits to engage in ostensibly sinful conduct. This is the same argument as the business owner’s claim that frosting a cake or arranging the calla lilies for a same-sex wedding is an act of “complicity” in a union that the business owner deems sinful.

Why does this matter? Because as Siegel and NeJaime argue, the new religious objections affect bystanders, ordinary folks in the greater community. These “third parties” are just people (often marginalized people, like gay couples or women seeking birth control) whose beliefs and values are not shared by the religious claimant. The authors point out that these new complicity-based religious conscience claims may well be authentic and sincere, as were the religious freedom claims originally contemplated by Congress when it drafted and passed the RFRA in response to a Supreme Court decision that declined to protect the religious freedom of Native Americans seeking to use peyote in a religious ceremony. But the new RFRAs may hurt third parties in ways these earlier state and federal RFRAs never quite imagined. The intent of this new article is to consider why. [my emphasis]

The Seigel and NeJaime article she references is Conscience Wars: Complicity-Based Conscience Claims in Religion and Politics Yale Law Journal Vol. 124/2015 (02/08/2015).

The Hobby Lobby decision and this year's pro-discrimination "religious freedom" laws

William Greider in Theocracy Versus Democracy The Nation 04/03/2015 how the current controversy over state "religious freedom" laws was encouraged by the Supreme Court's radical Hobby Lobby decision and have redefined the purpose of religious freedom laws modeled on the 1993 federal statute into their opposite:

This result is very different from what Senators Orrin Hatch of Utah and Teddy Kennedy of Massachusetts had in mind back in 1993 when they co-sponsored the original RFRA [Religious Freedom Restoration Act]. Both senators emphasized that the original legislation was a bipartisan attempt to avoid petty church-state conflicts and defuse nettlesome issues that might mean a lot to various faith groups but have only trivial effect on government’s objectives.

Should horse-drawn Amish buggies be compelled to carry state-required warning of a slow-moving vehicle? Does a municipal law banning consumption of alcohol apply to serving wine at communion services? Did a public school ban on wearing headgear in class prohibit Jewish yarmulkes? [my emphasis]

With the 2014 Hobby Lobby decision, Greider writes:

The Roberts Court blew away the original law’s careful restraints. The justices reinterpreted the RFRA and granted First Amendment rights to the private religious views of some company owners. Some of the new laws enacted by state legislatures like Indiana’s attempt to expand things further. When Governor Mike Pence insisted Indiana’s law did not explicitly authorize discrimination against gays, he was technically correct. What he didn’t say is that the law is deliberately designed to encourage true believers to litigate and it strengthens their legal foundation for winning.