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

In her insightful study of the contested history of the category of religion, Tisa Wenger analyzes how different groups made use of “religious freedom talk” during a period of expanding American imperial ambitions. Her book is likely to introduce many American religious historians to the Deleuzian concept of an “assemblage,” which she uses to talk about formations of power that are not exactly top-down or bottom-up but are produced through overlapping religious, racial, national, and imperial systems of classification. Wenger’s close attention to intersecting forms of collective identification is a welcome corrective to popular views of religious freedom as a distinctive right exercised by individuals who seek to opt out of social obligations.

One recurring theme in the book is that people watch each other. Wenger’s account of religious freedom resonates with Jonathan Z. Smith’s assertion that religion is the product of scholarly projects of observation, comparison, and generalization. In Wenger’s book, however, everyone is a scholarly observer with a stake in defining religion. Multiple actors make comparisons and cite past precedents from other groups in order to advance their collective claims.

One of the most impressive aspects of Wenger’s book is its ability to identify common themes across diverse cases. While dealing with contexts ranging from imperial classficiations of Catholics, Protestants, and Muslims in the Phillipines to legal surveillance of new religious movements among African Americans in the United States, Wenger finds a pattern. In the face of pressure from the governing apparatuses of nation and empire, groups try to use religious freedom claims to their advantage by arguing for the legal protection of practices, beliefs, and institutions that they might not have previously identified as religious. These attempts at religious redefinition are met with mixed success. The persuasiveness of religious freedom talk often has less to do with the internal logic of legal arguments than with their overlap with racial and civilizational assemblages. White Catholics and Jews, for example, were able to forge a “tri-faith” coalition that provided access to an American consensus in ways that were more elusive for Filipinos, Native Americans, and African Americans. However, even partial successes in the strategic use of religious freedom arguments came with a price. As Wenger explains, “Religious freedom was a double-edged sword: while it promised expanded rights for minorities, it also required that they reshape themselves and their traditions according to its demands” (145). Once identified as religious, diverse practices, beliefs, and institutions were now expected to conform to Anglo-Protestant norms of good religion.

Reclassyifying various and sundry social phenomena as religion did not mean that what was previously secular became religious. Rather, these contests invented the divisions between secular and religious. In this process, secularism acted as “a system or ideology that separates out something called ‘religion’ from other dimensions of life” (237). In its careful attention to the arbitrariness of the line between religion and politics, Wenger’s analysis is informed by recent studies that have noted that secular institutions are often shaped by liberal Protestant conceptions of good and bad religion. This meant that communal obligations were sometimes recast as individual choices, or that social authority had to be divided into distinct ecclesiastical and political spheres.

One group that does not get its own treatment are Anglo-Protestants. Rather, they tend to be hegemonic gatekeepers who play an asymetrical role in producing religious and racial classifications. This is an important reminder that contests over American religious freedom have not taken place on a level-playing field, but it also means that the Anglo-Protestant voice can come across as singular. The historical period covered by Wenger’s book, however, is full of tumult and conflict over the future of American Protestantism. While Wenger provides a subtle and convincing account of liberal assumptions within the Protestant secular, her analysis raises the question of what to make of fundamentalists who attacked liberalism as...