Religious Pluralism in America: The Contentious History of a Founding Ideal (review)

Hutchison has written a history more of attitudes toward religion than of religion itself. Unlike in his great work The Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism (Cambridge, Mass., 1976), a model of discussing complex theology lucidly for general historians, this latest book's aim is not to explicate beliefs but to trace over time how groups of believers were received in a country that, regardless of its ideals, had a Protestant establishment that presumed to run the country.

Hutchison spots a fascinating paradox: Early Americans had enormous religious strife—anti-Mormonism, anti-Catholicism, and so forth—and yet thought of themselves as being an open society. Hutchison's explanation is that the United States was remarkably pluralist, but its pluralism was one of grudging toleration, which could quickly be exasperated. Only later would the ideal of pluralism as toleration morph into an ideal of pluralism as inclusion, which finally gave way to an ideal of pluralism as participation. In 1800, Catholics and Jews were welcome to live here; by 1950, they were not outsiders; by 2000, they were entitled to a "fully respectful pluralism" in which all could raise "agenda questions" (235, 221).

But if true pluralism means the right of all religious groups to raise agenda questions, what does that mean? Does it mean that Hindus and Jews may now be politicians, bank presidents, and university presidents? Does it mean that we have come to think of diversity as a positive good, in the way that affirmative action proponents do? What is this "agenda"?

Hutchison misstates his own case a little. His pluralism is not so much concerned with who gets to make policy or set agendas as with who seems truly American. It used to be just wasps, but no longer. Hutchison is implicitly picking a side in the historiographical debate about how Puritan this country was, and for how long. Hutchison believes that we were not Puritan, but wasp in spirit, for a long time. This is a vexing belief. Intuitively, it seems right. Even today, assimilation means looking and sounding like Americans of Anglo-Saxon Protestant stock; writing well means writing in Ralph Waldo Emerson's or Herman Melville's dialect, not in Irish brogue or African-American slang. Hutchison is surely right that only recently has it become allowable, even celebrated, to bring ethnicity into the public square. This is what he appears to mean by agenda—the agenda of desiderata for American-ness.

But a look at immigration numbers and at the multiplication of religious denominations reveals that American has long had diverse meanings. Americans have been voting in diverse ways, and worshipping in diverse churches. So what anyone thinks of Hutchison's argument depends on what he or she thinks of his chosen body of evidence. Hutchison prefers to focus on intellectual currents among mainline Protestants. The 1893 World Parliament of Religions, in Chicago, was a watershed, as were the intellectual crises caused by the world wars. In the twentieth century, the Federal Council of Churches became more inclusive, and liberal Protestantism became less confident of its mandate to save the world for Christ. For Hutchison, the Shakers or Holiness Methodists who proudly rejected the mainline churches were shunning pluralism; the mainline Protestants who invited the dissenters back for conversation were not. Ironically, Hutchison has nonpluralist criteria for who has the right to say what counts as pluralist.

Hutchison focuses on the intellectual trends that argue for early and persistent Protestant hegemony; he is less attentive to trends that argue against it. This is not a flaw. Hutchison is right that early Americans were all, in a sense, Protestants. Hutchison might have brought some of his own assumptions to light more diligently. Nonetheless, this book is gratifying. Hutchison writes well; he takes the mainline churches seriously, which is not fashionable...