Religious Freedom: The Contested History of an American Ideal by Tisa Wenger (review)

A number of case studies have explored the limits of religious freedom in the United States, collectively demonstrating that courtrooms often denied non-Protestants the supposed protections of the First Amendment’s establishment and free-exercise clauses. In Religious Freedom, Tisa Wenger approaches the issue through comparative religious history, excavating the discursive framework of “religious freedom talk” (1) among Catholic, Jewish, Native American, and African American leaders. Wenger confines her study to the years between the Spanish-American War and World War II, arguing that this was the era that enabled the subsequent “reformulation of American religion as tri-faith rather than exclusively Protestant” (49).

Religious Freedom generally avoids jargon and theoretical debates, but Wenger does insist on employing one key term, the Deleuzian concept of “assemblage,” which she defines as “the complex interplay of ideological and institutional processes that work together to define who and what counts as civilized and thus fully human—and by contrast, who and what does not” (3). This insistence pays off, as every chapter fortifies her thesis that race and religion mutually defined and reinforced one another. Religious freedom was implicitly contingent on whiteness, and religion was normatively imagined as Protestant; groups that did not successfully claim at least one of these identities were severely constrained in their attempts to harness the powers of religious freedom.

Of the four traditions that Wenger focuses on, Roman Catholicism receives the most attention. Chapters 1 and 2 examine religious freedom talk among American and Filipino Catholics from 1898 to 1927. Chapter 3 analyzes Native Americans’ efforts to resist the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ policies to eradicate indigenous rituals. Chapter 4 demonstrates how some Jewish and Catholic leaders harnessed religious freedom talk by embracing the civilizational hierarchies of whiteness, ultimately recasting their ethnic rituals in terms of religious diversity rather than racial inferiority. Chapter 5 focuses on the oppression of Black Nationalist religious movements, arguing that their persistent but unsuccessful attempts to gain the protections of religious freedom explain why, several decades later, Protestants in the civil rights movement made so few appeals to religious freedom talk. In the conclusion, Wenger reminds readers that religious freedom has not merely been an instrument of racial hegemony, but served both “as a resource for [minority] resistance” and as a technology of imperial rule (238).

Wenger’s analysis of Filipino Catholicism is particularly helpful for illustrating her hypothesis that “religious freedom claims and counterclaims provided a way to construct and defend—but also to challenge—the civilizational assemblages of an expanding U.S. empire” (10). In the years leading up to the Spanish-American War, religious freedom talk served to justify imperial conquest, and certain U.S. Catholic leaders seized upon this racialized rhetoric as a path towards demonstrating their loyalty to the state. After the war, by helping to administer and control Filipino Catholics, U.S. bishops positioned the church “as the ideal civilizing force” (46), the natural arbiter between American democracy and Filipino and Moros savagery. Finally, in disputes with the Philippine Independent Church over property and taxes, the U.S. government and Roman Catholic hierarchy reinforced one another’s claims on the archipelago’s assets.

Wenger frames these imperializing moves against the countervailing ideas of Gregorio Aglipay, the Filipino revolutionary ex-priest who became the first archbishop of the Independent Church of the Philippines. In spite of his dynamic, sometimes brilliant appeals to the establishment clause, Aglipay won only minor concessions in his efforts to negotiate local sovereignty for his country and its churches. Aglipay is interesting both for the nuance that he adds to this story and for the scholarly limitations that he represents. Although Wenger describes the section on Aglipay as the discourse “on the ground,” revealing the “stories” of “the peoples of the Philippines” (53), her evidence—colonial correspondence, church archives, newspapers, and legal records—comes entirely from powerful men, essentially, writing to one another in various official capacities. Methodologically, Wenger reads this...