God and the Atlantic: An Interview with Thomas Albert Howard
- God and the Atlantic: An Interview with Thomas Albert Howard
SINCE THE 18TH CENTURY, AMERICANS HAVE BEEN MUCH friendlier to traditional religion that their European counterparts. In God and the Atlantic: America, Europe, and the Religious Divide (Oxford University Press, 2011), Thomas Albert Howard explores the complex roots of this transatlantic religious divide. He contends that in order to properly understand contemporary anti-Americanism in Europe, one must explore deeper historical forces, especially those in the religious sphere. Howard is professor of history at Gordon College. He is author and editor of a number of books, including Protestant Theology and the Making of the Modern German University (Oxford University Press, 2006). Senior Editor Donald A. Yerxa interviewed Howard in April 2011.
: Could you speak to the nature of the current transatlantic religious gap? How does that feed into broader misgivings contemporary Europeans register about America?
: Among pundits and sociologists it has become something of a truism in recent decades to speak of an “Atlantic gap” in religious matters. One must be careful with generalizations, of course, but by and large the United States presents a much more religious society than that of Western Europe. Comparative indices of church attendance, belief in God, belief in an afterlife, etc., make this very clear. Europeans of a secular bent tend to frown on the religious scene in the United States, believing American society—or at least significant sectors of it—to be essentially backward. For many Europeans (and some Americans, too), modernity and increasing secularization were supposed to go hand in hand. That was the regnant idea in much of 20th-century social theory. America—a very “modern” place by a host of measures—has thrown a monkey wrench into the traditional secularization narrative. This causes puzzlement, concern, worry. As one French scholar has put it, American democracy is simply not cut from the same cloth as the secular European variety and should be understood as a distinctive “théodémocratie.”
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A French cartoon from 1790. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [reproduction number, LC-USZ62-95469].
: And how does God and the Atlantic, a work of transatlantic religious history, help us understand these anti-American dynamics? You write in the book that “the reproachful glances across the Atlantic should figure in any assessment of the deeper historical currents informing transatlantic realities” (23).
: Allow me to focus on the phrase, “deeper historial currents.” I wrote my book to shed light on this religious divide, but I wanted this light to be distinctively historical in nature. Much that has been written about transatlantic religious dynamics comes from those taking stock of present-day realities. A good example is Peter Berger and Grace Davie’s book, Religious America, Secular Europe. This is not a bad book. Far from it. But it is short on historical depth.
History brings the “big picture” into clearer focus. In my view, the categories of “religious America” and “secular Europe” are too simple, even if not altogether beside the point. I suggest that we need to go back to the American and French Revolutions, respectively, and ask how the “religion question” was dealt with in each revolution. Here one observes a stark contrast. During and shortly after the American Revolution, North America was overrun with religious communities competing for souls. This worked against the possibility of a single established church along the European, Westphalian model, but also against European-style anticlericalism, which has—historically speaking, if I may—fueled itself in strident opposition to established churches. This American, disestablished, live-and-let-live mentality was enshrined in the First Amendment, which forbids a national church but protects the “free exercise” of religion.
By contrast, in the 1790s the French Revolution launched a frontal assault against the established church in France; and the revolutionary and Napoleonic armies did much the same to churches in the sagging Holy Roman Empire and other parts of Europe, such as the Italian peninsula. After the Restoration of 1815 a legacy of vitriolic anticlericalism continued in Europe, coming in liberal, republican, and, later, socialist forms. “Varieties of...
