Tri-Faith America: How Catholics and Jews Held Postwar America to Its Protestant Promises (review)

In part 1 of this valuable book, Kevin Schultz documents the origin, development, and general acceptance of the “tri-faith” idea in the second quarter of the twentieth century. “Tri-Faith America” meant that the country could no longer be understood simply as a “Protestant nation”; rather, Catholicism and Judaism had attained equal status as spiritual constituents of American identity. By the 1950s, that view shaped what Schultz calls “standard operating procedure” (p. 43) in American social thought. In part 2, he analyzes significant shifts in American thinking related to this development.

The National Conference of Christians and Jews, formed in 1928 in reaction to Ku Klux bigotry, was the key agency in systematically promoting the tri-faith idea. Its message of tolerance and brotherhood was reinforced in the wartime years by the prevailing sense of cultural crisis and the conviction that America’s democratic values were rooted in the “Judeo-Christian tradition.” The NCCJ’s programmatic activities in training camps, enthusiastically supported by military authorities, made the organization “one of the most extensive propagandists for what the nation was fighting for” (p. 49). The same linkage of tri-faith/Judeo-Christianity with Americanism was carried over into the cold war battle against “godless communism.”

Schultz’s account of how the “three faiths of democracy” (p. 50) came to be regarded as the leading markers of diversity in American society is well researched and convincing. However, his treatment of Will Herberg’s Protestant, Catholic, Jew (Garden City, NY, 1955), the classic contemporary analysis of the phenomenon, is surprisingly ungenerous. His summary of its argument is incomplete; he calls Herberg’s critique of American religiosity cynical and characterizes his interpretation as derivative—Herberg was merely “the most famous of the bunch” of sociologists who had been theorizing along the same lines for years (pp. 88–89). This dismissive evaluation of Herberg’s work seems quite wrongheaded. However, Schultz’s review of the overall impact of the tri-faith idea is more rewarding. Here he argues, first, that the tri-faith vision legitimated “communalism”—that is, the right of minority groups to maintain a distinctive identity—and implicitly suggested that groups as such have rights. Second, it was associated with a shift in constitutional thinking whereby church-state separation was grounded in the need to protect minorities from discrimination. Third, by being associated with the Jewish campaign to exclude religious questions from the census, the tri-faith idea helped establish the principle that religion is a strictly private matter. Finally, it “softened the ground” for the civil rights movement by supplying a language that Reverend Martin Luther King and other leaders could “tap into” in their struggle for equality and by making “American pluralism an accepted part of the nation’s identity” (p. 185). However, the leaders of tri-faith America did not formally embrace the cause of racial justice until the 1960s, and Schultz is highly critical of the “sometimes willful blindness” (p. 194) that kept them from including racial minorities in their campaign for brotherhood and tolerance from a much earlier date.

The broadly interpretive claims Schulz makes in part 2 are definitely provocative, but also plausible and well worth further investigation. There are, however, some disquieting errors of detail in part 1. Schultz mistakenly calls Whittaker Chambers a “Catholic convert” (p. 90); and he errs in respect to the dating of Father Charles Coughlin’s antisemitic agitation (p. 30), Carlton Hayes’s service as ambassador to Spain (p. 31), and Servant of God Fulton J. Sheen’s elevation to episcopal dignity (p. 63). To assert that Stuart Symington—rather than the courtly Joseph N. Welch—“famously asked [Sen. Joseph R.] McCarthy if he had any decency” (p. 90) has to be called a howler.