Americans love religious freedom. Few agree, however, about what they mean by either "religion" or "freedom." Rather than resolve these debates, Finbarr Curtis argues that there is no such thing as ...religious freedom. Lacking any consistent content, religious freedom is a shifting and malleable rhetoric employed for a variety of purposes. While Americans often think of freedom as the right to be left alone, the free exercise of religion works to produce, challenge, distribute, and regulate different forms of social power.
The book traces shifts in the notion of religious freedom in America from The Second Great Awakening, to the fiction of Louisa May Alcott and the films of D.W. Griffith, through William Jennings Bryan and the Scopes Trial, and up to debates over the Tea Party to illuminate how Protestants have imagined individual and national forms of identity. A chapter on Al Smith considers how the first Catholic presidential nominee of a major party challenged Protestant views about the separation of church and state. Moving later in the twentieth century, the book analyzes Malcolm X's more sweeping rejection of Christian freedom in favor of radical forms of revolutionary change. The final chapters examine how contemporary controversies over intelligent design and the claims of corporations to exercise religion are at the forefront of efforts to shift regulatory power away from the state and toward private institutions like families, churches, and corporations. The volume argues that religious freedom is produced within competing visions of governance in a self-governing nation.
While affirming Craig Martin's analysis of how the language of spiritual freedom celebrates individual agency in a way that deflects attention from the institutional conditions that produce ...individuals, this essay wonders whether there are useful distinctions to be made among people who Martin reads as sharing uncritical appraisals of capitalist individualism. On the question of the relationship between individuals and social contexts, for example, William James's assessment of the role played by social and natural environments might distinguish him from contemporary subjects who describe themselves as "spiritual but not religious" and who seek to transcend institutional constraints to gain personal freedom. Different responses to alienation suggest that there might be some role for individual creativity and criticism as resources for imagining institutional change.
This essay introduces a special forum on the study of American religions. The essays in the forum consider what role, if any, the discipline of religious studies plays in shaping work within one area ...of specialization. This introduction attempts to place the issues raised by the contributors within the context of debates about the status of religious studies in the wake of critiques of sui generis approaches to the study of religion. In different ways, the essays argue that some kind of critical theoretical reflection is necessary for religious studies to make sense as a discipline.
Curtis discusses Al Smith's secular politics. Smith, the New York governor and first Democratic Catholic nominee for president, has often been portrayed as a curious combination of progressive and ...antiprogressive elements. On a political level, Smith's persistent allegiance to Tammany Hall cast him as the most prominent spokesperson for an organization that had been the bane of nineteenth- and twentieth-century progressive reformers. Smith, however, drew upon his skills as a machine politician to be a remarkably effective advocate of the progressive cause. By the 1920s, he had managed to convince progressives of the need to deliver on promises by wielding real power. On the matter of his religion, Smith's respect for organizational discipline and loyalty enhanced the apparently paradoxical quality of his progressivism.
Science in a Little Box Curtis, Finbarr
The Production of American Religious Freedom,
08/2016
Book Chapter
Few endeavors would appear to be as antisecular as the challenge to modern science of intelligent design (ID). As the heir to scientific creationism’s attempt to develop an alternative to secular ...biology, ID is a collection of theories that hope to show the inadequacy of naturalist attempts to explain the origins of life. To this end, ID rejects mainstream secular scientific authority. But while ID advocates acknowledge religious motives for their work, they insist that their research and theories are science. This claim to be doing science is a crucial part of convincing courts that teaching ID in public schools
Sentiment Rules the World Curtis, Finbarr
The Production of American Religious Freedom,
08/2016
Book Chapter
William Jennings Bryan can appear to be two distinct people in history. In his first incarnation as a three-time presidential candidate in 1896, 1900, and 1908, he was a famed orator from Nebraska ...who fought for the agrarian and laboring masses against the elites of industry and finance. The second Bryan is cast, incongruously, as a quintessential reactionary. This Bryan of the 1920s was the tireless foe of evolution and the defender of biblical authority against modernism. This apparent dichotomy has posed a problem for those trying to place Bryan in historical context. Was he a modernist or antimodernist, progressive
