Religion Out Loud: Religious Sound, Public Space, and American Pluralism

4. Sound Car Religion and the Right to Be Left Alone

98 > 99 Underlying these different ways of interpreting the Witnesses’ practice were different understandings of the relationship between religion, media, and technology, and, indeed, different understandings of religion itself. Even more, the parties to the Saia case expressed very different conceptions of how religious publics were properly constituted. In fact, for the Witnesses’ opponents , the greatest problem with their preaching was that it made religion public in the wrong ways. These arguments were not merely academic in the end, but had important regulatory implications, which revealed the Witnesses ’ legal victory to be far more tenuous than it at first seemed. Although the Supreme Court overturned Saia’s conviction, it did so in a way that actually proved more restrictive of the Witnesses’ right to preach on the ground in Lockport. This was because the logic of the Court’s decision made space for the Witnesses to make use of sound cars, but it did not affirm their right to practice sound car religion. This case thus reveals how, even under a new constitutionalized regulatory regime, noise ordinances continued to prove useful for restraining religious dissent while maintaining a formal commitment to state neutrality. It demonstrates how complaints about noise continued to figure in important ways into broader efforts to regulate religion’s boundaries in the modern world. Testing the Limits of Ecumenical Toleration Given Lockport’s long history of ecumenical toleration and cooperation, it was perhaps an unlikely site for a religious conflict that would ultimately end up before the U.S. Supreme Court. Located in the northwest corner of New York, approximately twenty miles from Niagara Falls and thirty miles from Buffalo, Lockport housed a myriad of religious institutions nearly from its inception. In fact, a mid-twentieth-century sketch housed in Lockport Public Library’s local history collection visually represents the city exclusively through its nine historic church steeples. In 1934, the Reverend Harry A. Bergen of Lockport’s Plymouth Congregational Church had highlighted the city’s religious variety as a source of its civic vitality and strength. “Do you know that there are at least thirteen denominational groups functioning in the city of Lockport at the present time?” he inquired rhetorically. “That in our city of approximately 25,000 population there are 25 church buildings?” Encouraged by these numbers, Bergen enthusiastically concluded that “the Christian enterprise in this city is one of vast proportions.”2 Lockport’s religious variety reflected the town’s particular patterns of settlement and growth, which were intimately tied to the construction of the Erie Canal in the 1810s and 1820s. The city was founded at the site of 100 > 101 them. They celebrated religion as a unifying source of moral virtue and actively discouraged sectarian rancor. Lockport residents generally seemed to care very little about which church their neighbors attended—as long as they attended church. “Sunday was a ritual,” one longtime Protestant Lockport resident recently recalled. “You [went] to a church. That’s the way it was with me and, of course, I thought everybody got up on Sunday morning and went to church because that’s just what we always did.”4 Lockport shared in the liberal ecumenical spirit that marked postwar American religious life more generally. At the national level, organizations such as the Federal Council of Churches and the National Conference on Christians and Jews had been promoting interdenominational and interfaith cooperation for several decades, but their efforts really began to bear fruit during the 1940s. As soldiers returned home from war, they brought with them the experience of having fought alongside Americans of other faiths. A popular ideology of religious inclusiveness grew steadily, perhaps best exemplified by the widely circulated story of the “four chaplains”—one Jewish, one Catholic, two Protestant—who gave away their life preservers in order to save others as the troop ship Dorchester was sinking in 1944. As an idealized moment of religious solidarity, the story offered a powerful lesson for postwar American society. Americans could be Protestants, Catholics, or Jews, yet share the same set of moral values. Despite the apparent differences among religious sects, religion “in general” could serve as a source of civic harmony rather than division. This inclusive ideology received a name—the “Judeo-Christian tradition”— that proved particularly valuable for uniting Americans in their struggles against “godless fascism” and “godless communism .” According to this vision, the United States was not Christian but “trifaith ,” a diverse nation...