A Response to Thomas Allen

The case for the importance of studying religion in its myriad forms has been made. Our understanding of the overlapping realms of society, culture, and politics is in nearly every case enhanced by attention to religion or religiousness. Twenty-first century America is no exception. The once quiet hamlet of Vancouver, British Columbia has been transformed from a site of contact and exchange between Anglicans and practitioners of indigenous religions to a point of entry into Canada for Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims, and practitioners of traditional Chinese religions. Today the US is the most religiously diverse nation on the planet. As Diana Eck points out eloquently in her recent book A New Religious America: How a "Christian Country" Has Now Become the World's Most Religiously Diverse Nation (2001), there are more varieties of Buddhism in Los Angeles, California than in any other city in the world. American Catholicism, once dominated by Irish and German Catholics and later shaped by immigrants from central and southern Europe is now being reshaped by Catholics from Mexico and Central America. Questions that have occupied the politics of Canada, Mexico, and the US,—immigration, indigenous peoples' rights, family structures, reproductive ethics, environmental custodianship, the use of military force—while answerable without reference to religion, are certainly interestingly illuminated by consideration of religious voices and by attention to religiously informed presuppositions that inform and sometimes frame the debates.

Stunningly religiously diverse and usually politically functional, North America is indeed a complicated puzzle. It has only become more complicated as the dynamics of globalization have been brought to bear on America's civic and religious polities. Gone are the days when a strictly parochial approach to "American" religious history suffices to answer contemporary and, in many cases, historical questions. One must be alert to the presence of the religious traditions of the world and to the global communities of which their practitioners are a part. One must also understand the influence of global factors on America's Herbergian trinity, Protestant–Catholic–Jew. Can we fully comprehend American Judaism without an understanding of the Arab–Israeli conflict? Can Episcopalians in the US and Canada, and those who study them, think and write about churches and dioceses without studying the increasing influence of conservative African bishops? The global dimensions of American Catholicism, present from the moment Catholicism arrived in the so-called New World, always cast an interesting light on seemingly "local" stories.

As Thomas Allen points out, Jules-Paul Tardivel lived and died a North American Catholic. Tardivel no doubt witnessed plenty of religious and racial bigotry. In the nineteenth century Catholics, Jews, and Mormons in America endured periods of persecution, prejudice, and marginality during which no accusation seemed too outrageous to be believed. Protestant polemicists, clergy, and historians often treated the presence of these "others" as corrosive to America and American ideals. This was the America that Tardivel saw and despised. We can account for many of his views—his assertion that no Catholic or African American could ever be president of the US, for one—based solely on these "local" experiences. However, his critique of "liberalism" and the God-less public life of the US is harder to fathom when considering only local information. Could it really be the US in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era in which Tardivel saw a "secularization of politics" and the exclusion of "all religious ideas . . . from the government of the people?" This lament would have struck Alexis de Tocqueville and other nineteenth-century observers of American religion and politics as shallow, if not daft. It starts to make more sense if we understand Tardivel to have been wrestling locally with concerns that had both local and global dimensions, and to have done so with a definition of religion devoid of the capaciousness toward which Allen and Talal Asad push us.

Between 1848 and 1870 a "liberal" revolt in Italy shook Catholicism to its core. Liberal nationalists throughout the fragmented land launched an eventually successful struggle to unite Italy under a constitutional democracy. Left on the outside looking in, and later stuck on the inside looking out, was the...