Religion in American History: Moments of Crisis & Opportunity

>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. >> Good afternoon. Can you all here me all right? I'm Ted Widmer, I'm the brand new Director of the John W. Kluge Center. I want to welcome you all to LJ119 on a day in which we will talk about history, we're also experiencing some history across the street. I just checked my laptop and the Health Bill just passed 217 to 213. There was a quote last night from a wavering Republican, Thomas Massie, Congressman of Kentucky who said, "This bill is like a kidney stone. The House doesn't care what happens to it as long as it passes" and it just passed, so if you hear yelps of pain coming from across the street that may actually be Senators because it's now heading over to their side of the Capitol, but it just happened. We have a very exciting event today. We will be considering Church and State, Moments of Crisis in American History. Before we get underway, I want to say a few words. First of all, if you can silence your cellphones and other electric devices, these proceedings will be filmed for the Library of Congress and the Kluge Center websites as well as for our YouTube and iTunes U channels and I want to also mention a few upcoming talks. On May 16 at four, our Burkhardt Fellow Shaden Tageldin, from the University of Minnesota will be speaking here towards a transcontinental theory of modern comparative literature. On May 18, downstairs in the Coolidge Auditorium, Elaine Chao, the Secretary of Transportation and Reed Hastings, the CEO of Netflix will be leading a very interesting conversation on service and idealism. That's part of a tribute to the Peace Corps and to the 100th anniversary of the birth of John F. Kennedy so that's Coolidge Auditorium at 6:30 on May 18th and then on this room again on May 25th, Professor Jose Casanova of Georgetown who was until very recently Kluge Chair in the Countries and Cultures of the South, will be speaking on early modern globalization through a Jesuit prism. The Kluge Center was created in the year 2000, 17 years ago through a generous gift from the philanthropist John W. Kluge. Every year it brings nearly 100 scholars to these rooms to do research in the great library here. True to the original founding letter that created the Kluge Center, we bring in the words of James Billington, the former Librarian of Congress, "Doers and thinkers." We have a rich community of scholars who come here but we also are doing a great deal to reach out across the street to Congress and I'll be talking about that more during our meetings with the Scholars Council over the next two days. Among other things, we award the Kluge Prize. We're anticipating an awarding of that prize in 2018, it's the major prize offered by the Library of Congress. Previous recipients include Fernando Enrique Cardozo, the former President of Brazil in 2012, and John Hope Franklin, the great African-American historian in 2006. I mention the Scholars Council and they are among us today and we're so happy to welcome them. I went this morning to a history presentation at the White House Historical Association in Lafayette Park and the topic was the early influence of France, in the very beginning even before the White House was built in the administration of George Washington and there was a feeling that gravitas was much needed in the early years of the republic. And so, George Washington and Martha Washington would have levees in which they would invite prominent intellectuals to just settle things down when politics weren't going that well, and that's a tradition we keep going here at the Library of Congress with our Scholars Council and we're so grateful to them for coming literally from around the world to bring us their wisdom and their connectivity to the outside world. They bring us a great deal of prestige. We have former winners of the Pulitzer, the Holberg Prize, the Balzan Prize, the Guggenheim, Fulbright, many other prizes and they also bring many tangible ideas that we put into practice and I want to thank today two members of our Scholars Council who will be leaving after this year. One of them, Roger Louis, I'd like to thank later tonight but I want to mention Pauline Yu who is among us, because she is flying out immediately after this panel to go to Bloomington, Indiana where she will be the commencement speaker at Indiana University and is receiving an honorary degree. She's the President of the American Council of Learned Societies, an organization that unites 74 scholarly organizations and unites them often far more successfully than the federal government unites the 50 states and she's brought so many ideas to the Kluge Center including in 2008, she brought the idea of the Burkhardt Fellowships and we've had 11 in disciplines ranging from law to literature and history and they're a wonderful contribution to our community so thank you Pauline. I know Dan Turello is here and he has a gift from the Kluge Center to Pauline Yu on behalf of all of us so please join me in thanking Pauline Yu for her service. [ Applause ] >> I mentioned at the beginning of these remarks what an exciting day it is in politics in Washington. We're going to study another form of public debate that has roiled the republic since its earliest days, how religion touches our daily life here in Washington and around the country. It wasn't that much noted in the media this morning as they were rushing to cover today's healthcare vote but it's also a day in which President Trump is asking for well, he's issuing an executive order that will relax the so-called Johnson Amendment, which was a law passed by Lyndon Johnson in 1954, prohibiting religious organizations from overt political activity for fear of tax consequences if they did that and that is also changing today. Today is the National Day of Prayer at the White House and last night, President Trump met with his evangelical advisory board and that's a group of people who only a year ago were not very happy with the candidacy of President Trump. These things change very quickly and at the meeting I went to this morning about the very early republic, it was clear that what we might call evangelical in the first decade of the republic was really coming from New England and from the supporters of Vice President and then President John Adams, so these alignments change substantially from generation to generation and we're very lucky to have three leading thinkers today to help us consider three different moments when religion and politics intertwined. We will begin with Sally Barringer Gordon, who will tell us about the way James Madison was thinking about the separation of church and state even before the famous first amendment to the Constitution. Sally is the Arlin M. Adams Professor of Constitutional Law and Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania, an expert on religion in American public life and the law of church and state, especially how religious liberty developed over the course of American history. Her current book project, Freedom's Holy Light, Disestablishment in America 1776 to 1876, is about the historical relationships among religion, politics, and law and I'm expecting, I have not quite been able to announce this but she will soon be joining our community as a member of the Kluge Center. Next, Peter Manseau will be speaking on the year 1860, and the forgotten voices of American religious diversity. He's the Lilly Endowment Curator of the American Religious History at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History, the author of six books including the memoir Vows, the novel Songs for the Butcher's Daughter, the travelogue Rag and Bone, and the retelling of America's diverse spiritual formation, One Nation Under Gods. I only just met Peter but I feel an immediate kinship with him because during a fellowship he held in Chesterton, Maryland he lived in my former house. And last, we're really lucky to have a member of our Scholar's Council, John Witte, who will be speaking on the year 1947, and the Supreme Court in the modern era of Constitutional religious freedom. John is the Robert W. Woodruff Professor of Law and McDonald Distinguished Professor and Director for the Center of the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University. He's a specialist in legal history, marriage law and religious liberty. He's the author of 26 books and 220 articles, that's not a typo, 220. His writings have appeared in 12 languages, he's received honors around the world and he's a former holder of the Cary and Anne McGuire Chair in Ethics and American History so each of these three panelists will speak for 20 minutes. At 4:20 roughly, we'll take a five minute break and then we will open it to audience questions so thank you again for being here today and why don't we begin by welcoming Sally Barringer Gordon to the stage? Thank you. [ Applause ] >> Thank you so much. Is this too loud, okay, good? Okay well my talk today, I'm sorry to say it's not about Madison but it is about religion and slavery in 1785, and it does focus on Virginia and Virginia, as many people here know, has long been considered the most important jurisdiction to disestablish in the early republic. I hope to persuade you that a single anti-slavery Methodist and many pro-slavery Presbyterians were actually crucial to disestablishment in Virginia. I explore two streams of political activism among lay Virginians that have not previously been studied together. My story centers on two preachers. Church men are not the only, or even the only important actors in the story, but through their sermons, lectures, and journals we can learn about the common folks who's traces otherwise don't appear in the historical record. First is this guy, who I described on the way up as an upstart Brit. The cherubic little man, Thomas Coke, who was born into a prosperous English family in 1747, educated at Oxford, and ordained as a Priest in the Church of England in 1770. He came under the influence of John Wesley's evangelical Methodism in 1776 and Coke began preaching in fields, a good sign in North America, a very bad sign in Britain. Influential parishioners at his church objected. A new Priest was secretly hired. Coke was suddenly dismissed while standing up to preach on Easter Sunday 1777, and he was wrung out of church like being drummed out of the military. He strode down the center aisle as the bells pealed and was greeted by a mob outside who were already drunk on cider but he rebounded. He became John Wesley's confidante, drafted much of his correspondence, and all the Methodist petitions to Parliament. In September 1784, Wesley ordained Coke as a Bishop for the rapidly growing American branch of the movement. Coke left quickly for America when his fellow clergy accused him of exercising undue influence over a senile Wesley. In December 1784, he arrived in America and began the work of organizing a new, separate Methodist church here. In early 1785, Coke drafted new rules for the church in a book of discipline. Coke's rules were designed to eradicate slavery. He included provisions that copied Virginia's Manumission statue that allowed masters to free slaves in the Commonwealth. That statute had been enacted in 1782, and by early 1785, had produced Manumissions but also dedicated opposition from a pro-slavery majority. Coke took Manumission a step further. He required that all church members manumit their slaves within two years or be denied communion and eventually expelled. After the church was formed and its discipline written, Coke left on a preaching tour of Virginia. From February to April 1785, he sermonized against the unchristian act of slave holding. He reported in his journal repeatedly that he was greeted by outrage and violence. When he preached near Norfolk and here I'm quoting from him, "A high headed lady offered 50 pounds to anyone who would give that little Englishman 100 lashes." At another house, Coke debated slavery with a Colonel Bedford who, "Used some threats" and as Coke's reputation spread, doors were closed against him, he was indicted for sedition and at least one plan was formed to murder him but he left the state in May, before the law or the assassins could catch up with him. But he left behind an antislavery petition, which he gave to itinerant Methodist evangelists to carry around Virginia. In the petition, Coke called for the legislature to abolish the grand abomination of slavery. He argued that slaveholders acted against the most fundamental goal of Christianity, the return of the Messiah. He said that enslavement made it virtually impossible for a slave to receive the noble principles of the Gospel meaning that slaveholders actively prevented Christian progress. The boldness of Coke's claims might well cause an uproar because he argued that anyone who owned a slave was anti-Christian and the tone deaf Coke added another insult, a political one. As an Englishman, he should have known that his opinions on the American Revolution might not be well received in Virginia. None the less, his petition claimed that, and here I'm quoting, "The oppression exercised over slaves exceeds the oppression formerly exercised over these states by Great Britain." These were fighting words and William Graham, our second preacher, picked up the gauntlet. Graham was born in 1746, in Paxton, Pennsylvania. His family were Scott's Irish covenanters, that is Presbyterians who still remembered the brutal British suppression of the Scottish rebellion in the 17th century. Graham hated the British and maintained a lifelong sympathy for populist vigilante movements. In many senses, this guy Graham was Coke's opposite. He was hatchet faced and lanky, not a gifted speaker. His sermons were monotonous and he was a strict disciplinarian. His congregations tended to be small but he excelled as a schoolmaster, where his discipline was imposed on less powerful objects. The school he founded was first known as the Liberty Hall Academy and now Washington and Lee University. It was successful, but it never made him much money, which brings us to my next point, the question of minister's salaries and how the debate over tax support for preachers eventually blended in to the backlash against Thomas Coke. In December 1784, Patrick Henry proposed a bill that would require each taxpayer to designate a portion of his taxes to a Christian minister of his choice. This general assessment bill, as it was called, seemed like a good idea to Henry and others, who worried about a decline in church attendance and the closing of schools maintained by the established Church of England clergy, many of whose churches had been looted during the revolution and whose tax support had been suspended since 1776. By 1784, the church was in free fall. Presbyterians were actually sympathetic. Graham often wrote petitions to the Virginia General Assembly on behalf of the church and now he co-authored an endorsement of the assessment bill. Graham had been dismayed by enlightenment deism which I'm sorry to tell you Ted, he called the French Principle but equally important, Graham's income had suffered terribly during the revolution even though he was an ardent patriot. He was so patriotic that one Sunday sermon he used to call for volunteers to fight against the British and he wound up keying himself up so much he volunteered himself. He never saw action but he boasted of his service to the revolution for the rest of his life. Yet, the conflict impoverished him because all his students went off to fight and the end of the war only brought a deep recession. Patrick Henry's general assessment bill gave him the prospect of a steady income but Graham soon learned that the Presbytian laity, his congregants, would not stand for a general assessment. They had been used to controlling the salaries of ministers and they objected that Henry's bill would free clergy from lay control. Graham was not known to back away from a fight, he was quite a pugilist, and he might well have stood his ground on the general assessment bill but slavery entered the picture. Coke appeared on the scene just after Graham's pro-assessment petition was submitted. Coke of course, was British, elite, arrogant, plump, tailor-made to be Graham's chew toy. The threat to slavey from Coke affected Graham directly. He owned six slaves, according to the census of 1790, and his school Liberty Hall also owned slaves. By the mid-spring of 1785, in other words coinciding exactly with Coke's tour, it sounds so funny Coke's tour right, because there's a [inaudible] but it's a different Coke. By the mid-spring of 1785, Graham's about face on disestablishment was so complete that Presbyterians selected him once again to draft a petition, this one, a full-throated call for disestablishment. Now, Graham argued that patriots had fought against British oppression in spirituals as well as temporals, that it was a religious war and that continued establishment would be a fatal symbol of what he called abject slavery. For the first time, a religious organization, the Presbyterian Church, directly called for passage of Thomas Jefferson's bill for establishing religious freedom, which had been kicking around the legislature for years without much support. All of a sudden, in 1785, popular support for disestablishment took off. The traditional explanation (gesture to Ted) is that smart Parliamentary maneuvering by James Madison deserves credit but I want us to think about another side of the story, the missing link is Thomas Coke's anti-slavery campaign, which convinced Graham and others of a link between pro-slavery and pro-disestablishment or anti-slavery and pro-establishment, they're flip sides of the same coin. Graham explained how separation of church and state would protect slavery. He also became the first clergyman and the first academic leader to speak out in favor of slavery and he did so clearly in response to Coke. In a lecture that Graham gave at Liberty Hall starting in the mid-1780s, he explained why Virginia must embrace both slavery and disestablishment and how each reinforced the other. Not only had the revolution been fought to secure slavery he said, but now a tool of the British administration meaning our pale Coke, had undertaken to reverse the American victory, hiding his plot to destroy the country behind the veil of piety. Graham answered Coke in an equally religious register. The word of God, Graham said, directly contradicted the Methodists and as Coke's petition was carried around the Commonwealth by Methodist itinerants, Graham and pro-slavery petitions outpaced them, drawing many hundreds, about 1,500 evangelical signatures and dwarfing the few dozen on the anti-slavery petition. The pro-slavery petitions track Graham's lecture almost word for word. The central argument was that Christian scripture did not in any sense condemn slavery and that any attempt to interpret either the Old or New Testaments as anti-slavery would pervert the word of God. Instead, scripture instructed that religious status such as conversion to Christianity in no way altered civil status such as enslavement. The liberty conferred by Christian faith was an internal freedom from sin and the devil rather than any change in the believer's outward condition. Paul's First Letter to the Corinthians established that even Christian slaves were to remain loyal and obedient to their masters. Colonial statues had written this into law as early as 1677. Conversion was not a ticket to emancipation. In other words, spiritual freedom and bodily coercion belonged to two distinct spheres, the first inward and religious and the second outward and political. These scriptural arguments were made with new force to counter the Methodists, who charged that bondage affected the spiritual health of slaveholders and urged changes in the secular law to save the souls of masters as well as slaves. The danger to slavery was apparent and Graham and others realized that antislavery religion had been let loose in Virginia. Under the general assessment bill, just to give one example, tax dollars could well flow to antislavery ministers either because the individual taxpayers directed the funds to preachers who opposed slavery or the ministers who received tax funding acted at the behest of church leaders like Coke. A religious establishment therefore posed a danger. Separation of church and state in Virginia was built on this distrust of clergy, who were not dependent directly on local congregations, set them free from their congregants and who knows what would happen. Evidence for this overlap in commitments to slavery and disestablishment is found in the signatures on both sets of petitions. That is, pro-establishment and proslavery. We can trace the political actions of the laity through this unique resource. Five of the six counties that memorialized in favor of slavery also sent pro-disestablishment petitions. Common signatures are found in about 40 percent of the total, a remarkable convergence of religious and political activism. In his convergence, religious conviction was painted as private and personal while enslavement rested firmly on the political side that is, with the legislature. One might think of this resolution as a kind of compromise, proslavery evangelicals apparently believed they could buy peace by parking slavery in the political realm. They told themselves that they were neutral or apolitical on the question even as their doctrine of the division between religion and politics clearly protected a proslavery status quo and the system worked. It silenced antislavery voices quickly and effectively. Thomas Coke conceded in 1787, that it had been ill judged of him to preach antislavery from the pulpit and in 1791, the Hanover Presbyterian (we saw a picture of their beautiful church) decided that enslaved persons could be married in the sight of God, even though the civil law would not recognize their relationship. But if one of the spouses was sold away from the other, then the marriage was dissolved as if the other was dead. Baptists also endorses a death or removal standard saying that any other policy might yield unpleasant things. Such marriages were a potentially enormous issue. One study concluded that one out of three of all slave marriages was terminated by the internal slave trade, that's a lot. Acceptance of the divide between freedom of the spirit and the physical coercion of slavery also spread among the Methodists. By the mid-1790s, they had backed away from their emancipatory rules saying now that they hoped Christian faith would sweeten the bitter cup of bondage. Some white evangelicals objected including one Methodist minister in the 1790s who said that human laws could not wash away the guilt of an act prohibited by the word of God. But his son, also a Methodist minister, became a slaveholder. So where does this story of freedom and coercion leave us? It's a different picture of disestablishment, maybe a little less heroic but believable in light of religious history and political reality and of course, there's the question of Jefferson. What did he think? He was out of the country in 1785, but he also followed the debate closely. Did he accept the divide between freedom and coercion? It looks like he did 20 years later. A clue from 1815 is found in a letter he wrote to a correspondent who had sent him a book of sermons by the Reverend Alexander MacLeod of New York. MacLeod called for preaching on politics, especially in opposition to slavery. In his letter, Jefferson thanked his correspondent for the book but then said that MacLeod had breached the contract that underlay religious freedom by discussing public affairs in the pulpit. He advised ministers to avoid such topics as the construction of government or the characters or conduct of those administering it otherwise, they would violate the terms of disestablishment. We're seeing a similar debate today right, flipping that. But despite Virginia's outsized importance in the early republic, it didn't actually control how other jurisdictions interpreted their own law. The Virginia model, as it was called in the 19th century, never governed separation of church and state as perfectly as Virginia's secular thinkers and proslavery Christians hoped it would. Instead, the mandate to consign concerns about slavery to the political sphere began to create its own politics. Those who could not stand the constraint often left and many who had no other choice were sold away. Some found their way to freedom and those who had left voluntarily still resented the strictures. Over time, the strict divide between religion and slavery began to work its own undoing. The end of that story is beyond the scope of my talk today but one way to summarize the trajectory is to note that the first wall of separation was all about power, but it wound up not being all powerful. Thank you. [ Applause ] >> Thank you Sally, that was somewhat mind blowing and thank you Ted, for the earlier introduction. It's wonderful to be here with you. My name is Peter Manseau. I work down the road at the National Museum of American History where I'm the Curator of American Religious History and this is my first time speaking in a building where I've done quite a lot of research so it's truly an honor to be here. I would like to speak with you a bit today about religion in America before the Civil War and one way in which the subject is often addressed has a lot of resonance with Sally's talk, it often is explored as a way of exploring the tensions among Christians about the place of slavery in scripture. How was it that some religious people saw it as an abomination like our Reverend Coke we just heard about, while others argued as Texas did in its causes for secession that African servitude was authorized and revealed by the revered will of the almighty creator? Well, that religion can be used to argue both sides of an issue will not be a surprise to anyone here today I imagine and so instead of pursing that dimension, I'd like instead to focus on a lesser known aspect of religion in America in the middle of the 19th century and that is the struggle and endurance of forgotten forms of American religious diversity. The landscape of American religious difference in the US changed dramatically in the 1860s. Some of this had to do with the war and some of it simply had to do with the ways in which the lines between religious traditions tend to blur over time yet before I get there to my main topic, since this is my first time speaking in the Library of Congress, I can't resist telling you one of my favorite stories about a disagreement concerning religious differences in American history. It's a story that actually has to do with the founding of this great institution. As many of you will likely know and as I heard someone, a tour guide giving a tour about this just as I was walking in, the founding collection of the Library of Congress came from Monticello to Washington 202 years ago this spring in the form of 6,487 books that Thomas Jefferson had sold to the federal government near the end of the War of 1812. Congress had a reference collection before that of course, but it was a little less than half the size and those 3,000 books had gone up in smoke when the British burned Washington in August of 1814. Jefferson had been retired for five years by then and so he didn't get a briefing on the fact that the White House, the Capitol and other federal buildings had been all but destroyed. Instead, he learned about it as many of us might have, he read about it in the newspaper and apparently one of the first things he thought about when he learned of the destruction were all those books in the Capitol, all that paper that fueled the fire. Wondering what he might do about it and perhaps considering if this sad turn of events might also free up some space in his own over-burdened bookshelves, Jefferson wrote to a friend on the Congressional Library Committee and he basically said, so I hear you might need some books. What he actually wrote was this, "I learned from the newspapers that the vandalism of our enemy has triumphed at Washington over science as well as the arts by the destruction of the public library with a noble edifice in which it was deposited. I presume it will be among the earliest objects of Congress to re-commence their collection." Jefferson was beating around the bush a bit here. He was clearing his throat before making Congress an offer he hoped they could not refuse. As he then explained, like a true salesman, the books he had available were the best in the land. They were the best because only he had had the resources and the time throughout his life to do the kind of research and travel necessary to acquire a significant collection. He proudly noted that he had spent much of his time as US Minister to France shopping for books. While residing in Paris, he said, he devoted every afternoon to examining all the principle bookstores, turning over every book with his own hands, apparently unconcerned if anyone would wonder if he was also doing his job, Jefferson sent this letter off to Washington and those 6,487 books soon followed on 10 wagons that traveled more than 100 miles over bumpy roads. But their journey from that Virginia hilltop to Capitol Hill was far from simple. In between Jefferson's letter in the fall and the loading of the wagons in the spring, his books became the focus of a remarkable debate. It raged in the press and in Congress for months. It's subject was the possibly atheistical character of the library and of the man who had acquired it. It was said that Jefferson's books were full of infidel ideas, ideas that might infect the nation if they were allowed into the halls of government. With the smoke of British arson still lingering over Washington, some members of Congress even discussed burning the offending titles in Jefferson's library to avoid potential spiritual contamination. This campaign was led by a federalist representative from my home state of Massachusetts, Representative Cyrus King, who argued that evidence Jefferson's collection contained "Many books of irreligious and immoral tendency could be found not only in the character of the man who's assembled it, but in the fact that he had done so in France." Other congressmen found King's talk of book burning too much to take. Representative James Fiske of Vermont, a democratic republican like Jefferson, reminded his colleagues that King came from a state once known for hanging witches and he wondered whether that practice might be reintroduced. Maryland's Representative Robert Wright asked King if he wanted to start an inquisition. To this charge, King replied that he had no such intention, at least not while his party was in the minority. In the end, party politics ruled the day. By a slim margin, the democratic republican majority approved the purchase. Now, I mentioned this story first of all as a reminder that Americans have been struggling with overheated rhetoric surrounding religious difference for a very long time and maybe we should count ourselves lucky that we don't hear much talk of hanging witches or burning books lately. Not lately. Yet the truly fascinating thing to me about this moment is this, while in Washington, Jefferson's tastes seemed eclectic to the point of being threatening, in fact they barely scratched the surface of the actual religious diversity that existed beyond the Capitol. While government was arguing over religious ideas, it was oblivious to many forms of religious practice then found in the US. For example, among the best known books included in that original Jefferson collection which came to the Library of Congress was this one, Jefferson's 1734 edition of the Koran, which remains here in the library today. Now, Jefferson's Koran is often put forward as a symbol of some of the founding generations curiosity about a variety of religious perspectives and on the one hand it's appropriate to see it that way. Jefferson bought the book while he was a young man studying law and he may have read it as a way to make himself aware of Islam's influence on some of the world's legal systems. Yet, viewing Jefferson's Koran only as an American engagement with far off exotic beliefs obscures a crucial fact. To many people living then in Jefferson's young nation, this book meant very much more. As Jefferson's library rolled north and his Koran went with it, this man was a 45-year-old resident of Fayetteville, North Carolina. His name is Omar ibn Said. In 1815, he had been in this country just eight years, all of them under the yoke of a master he called a cruel man and a kefyr, which means an infidel. After he was recaptured following an attempt to escape from slavery, Omar ibn Said was locked inside the County Jail in Cumberland County, North Carolina. By this point, it was no longer legal to directly import human beings from Africa and so for many residents of Fayetteville, it may have been unusual to see a man who maintained so many of the traditions of the land where he was born. Now, while locked in his jail cell in Fayetteville, Omar ibn Said began to draw a crowd first for his quiet and some said mysterious demeanor, then for the strange way in which he prayed five times a day and finally, for the graffiti that he began to put on his jail cell walls. Apparently, he had found some coals from a warming fire that were large enough to write with and he began to fill his jail cell walls with Arabic script, most likely it was verses from the Koran. As his story became known, it emerged that he had once been a religious teacher. He had been 37 years old when he was captured in what was now Senegal. After his time in jail, Omar ibn Said became the property of a prominent local political family, which encouraged him to convert to Christianity and soon persuaded him to write an account of his life. Through the decades that followed, this family was successful in publicizing their successful conversion of their enslaved man and they placed articles about him throughout the United States. In 1825, a Philadelphia Christian paper told the story of his time in jail, which recounted his filling the walls with Arabic graffiti and it also relayed how he had been brought to his new faith. In 1837, an article in the Boston Reporter hailed him as a convert from Mohammedism and it devoted two full columns to his Christian virtues. In 1854, a reporter wrote that he had, "Thrown aside the blood stained Koran and now worships at the feet of the Prince of Peace." In all of this, it was claimed that though he was still enslaved, he wore no bonds but those of gratitude and affection. Yet, a very different story was told by Omar ibn Said himself. He originally wrote the account of his experiences in Arabic, which those taking credit for his conversion could not read very well and in fact, his original account was not translated for a full I believe it's 17 years after he wrote his account in Arabic. And if they had been able to read his original account, they would have seen his adoption of Christianity stated sincerely but also in very practical terms. "In freedom" he said, "He had prayed as a Muslim but now, enslaved he would say the Lord's Prayer." He also filled his text with prophetic declarations directed at those who had enslaved him. "Oh people of America, oh people of North Carolina," he wrote in 1831, "Do you have a good generation that fears Allah? Are you confident that he who is in heaven will not cause the earth to cave in beneath you so that it will shake to pieces and overwhelm you?" Even after his conversion, Islam continued to shape his experience of his enslavement and in this, he was not alone. An estimated 20 percent of the enslaved men and women brought to the Americas were Muslims. Some plantation owners made it a point to add Muslims to their labor force, relying on their experience with the cultivation of indigo and rice. Muslim names and religious titles appear in slave inventories and death records and all of this, I should add, was fairly common knowledge at the time. Every so often in the 18th and 19th century press, other enslaved Muslims became celebrities of a sort, most often because they were discovered by white men who were struck by their erudition. The earliest known example of this was a man who at the time was known as Job Ben Solomon and he's now known more often as Ayuba Suleiman Diallo, who was enslaved in Maryland in the 1730s. After an escape attempt, he was like Omar ibn Said, put in a jailhouse and there he met a local judge, who was so taken with him that he wrote a book about their encounter. This is the Memoirs of the Life of Job 1734, by Judge Thomas Bluett. As the judge wrote, "He showed upon all occasions a singular veneration for the name of God, and never pronounced the word Allah without a peculiar accent and a remarkable pause and indeed, his notions of God, providence, and a future state were in the main very just and reasonable." The most famous of these enslaved Muslims who found their way into the American press was probably this man, a man named Abdul-Rahman Ibrahim. In the press of the 1820s, he was known as the Moorish Prince, and he came from an important political family in his homeland of Timbuktu, now in Mali. His plight drew wide attention in the 1820s, with newspaper stories written around the country. Eventually, several well placed supporters including Secretary of State Henry Clay and through him, President John Quincy Adams, helped win his freedom and his eventual relocation to Liberia. Now, before he left, he offered a pointed critique of religion in the country in which he had been enslaved for 40 years. As one newspaper account noted, "He had read the Bible and admired its precepts but added his principal objections are that Christians do not follow them." The story of Islam in early America is not merely one of isolated individuals however. Even being conservative in counting their population, we're talking about tens of thousands of people. To compare them to other religious minorities at the time, we might consider that around 1800 there were some 40,000 Catholics, there were probably four or five thousand Jews. It's entirely possible that there were more individuals with a connection to Islam at that point in American history than Catholics and Jews combined. Now, some of this community tried to preserve the traditions in which they were raised in hope of establishing communities with the same beliefs and practices that had sustained them before enslavement. Evidence of this can be seen in this religious text, written in Arabic in Georgia early in the 19th century and if I'm permitted a plug, I should say that opening this June at the National Museum of American History our exhibit, Religion in Early America will feature this document along with the story of Omar ibn Said. The author of this document is a man named Bilali Muhammad and, like Omar ibn Said, he was born in West Africa, most likely around 1770 and he arrived in the Americas in his 30s. He was purchased at Charleston, South Carolina and brought to a cotton plantation on Sapelo Island off the Georgia coast. Literate and multilingual, Bilali rose to a trusted position on that island, even being allowed to train other enslaved men with muskets for defense of the island during the War of 1812. He seems also to have played a role as a religious leader there. This 13 page document was once thought to be simply his diary but recent scholarships suggest that it actually outlined some of the very basics of Islamic practice. This is how we wash our hands before prayer, this is how we wash our feet before prayer, these are the times at which we pray. Unlike Omar ibn Said, who in his dislocation from anyone who shared his faith, in that dislocation he became open to conversion but Bilali Muhammad, against all odds, seems to have been part of a religious community. Not only were there other Muslims on Sapelo Island who looked to him as their leader, he had 12 sons and seven daughters, all of whom were said to pray by kneeling and bowing facing east on woven mats. It may have been for those 19 children that he wrote these instructions and a further note about these instructions, scholars who work with the document today suggest that the way he uses language speaks of a person who is in the process of forgetting, who is fighting against that forgetting by writing what he can remember. There are short excerpts from known texts, there are repeated lines, and he's trying to get down on paper for the following generations everything he could possibly remember. Yet, despite these best efforts to pass along his traditions, Islam did not long endure there or anywhere else and a clue to what happened can be found in the words of a missionary traveling through the south to preach on slave plantations in the middle of the 19th century, a missionary named Charles Colcock Jones. "Many Muhammed and Africans" he noted, "had found ways to (his word) accommodate Islam to the new beliefs being imposed upon them. God say they is Allah and Jesus Christ is Muhammed. The religion is the same but different countries have different names." Now, this missionary considered this to be evidence of Muslims inability to recognize the importance of religious truths but in fact, it seems to prove exactly the opposite. They understood that their faith was important enough that they should listen for it everywhere, even in a country so distant from the places where they had once heard the call to prayer, even in a nation where only non-Muslins like Thomas Jefferson were able to own a Koran. I mentioned at the outset that this mostly forgotten dimension of American religious diversity changed dramatically around the year 1860. One reason for this is simply time. Omar ibn Said and Bilali Muhammed, the two of the four figures I mentioned who remained in this country, they both died around 1860. A number of dates has been given for the death of each, some before the war and some after but it's clear that neither of them lived to see freedom. They were among the last of the enslaved with memories of their birth countries and so direct connection to the religious traditions they had brought with them passed with that generation. A second reason for the disappearance of Muslims at this point in US history has to do with the consequences of the Civil War. After emancipation establishment of Black churches throughout the south begins in earnest. Houses of worship become focal points for newly liberated communities while missionaries from free Black denominations of the north arrive both to provide support and to convert those who were still outside of the church. Through the decades that follow, Christianity becomes broadly and irrevocably one of the most significant elements of African-American life. The many religious expressions that have been brought together by slavery were now subsumed within a single faith. Yet, the important thing to remember is that the disappearance of religious traditions doesn't always mean the end of their influence. We can hear echoes of early American Islam in fact in early American Christianity and even today, and even in our broader culture, particularly in musical styles borne of the ritual known as the ring shout, the primary ritual experience of early African-American religious observants, which bears some resemblance to Muslim ceremonies and is thought by some scholars to have contributed not just to the common style of worship but to the blues and to jazz. Now, in conclusion, I'd like to say that I focused on Islam here because it provides a real stark example of the way religious and cultural practices can be forgotten even if they were once common knowledge but we could tell similar stories of many other traditions and I like to think that like those 6,487 books that were planted here, that have grown into a library of millions, we should believe and we should remember that all the beliefs of our past, even those that have been forgotten, they're part of our common history. Thank you. [ Applause ] >> Well, it's a joy to be back here at the Library of Congress and the Kluge Center and to learn from Ted, and from Sally, and from Peter in these wonderful lectures. I was instructed to give some informal remarks and I guess my distinguished colleagues heard the same instruction but, as good scholars, they have given formal papers. I have come with my bumpkin tuba solo to talk with you a little bit about the period 1940 to 1947, which is the period in which the United States Supreme Court created the modern constitutional law of religious freedom on the strength of the first amendment and its guarantees of no establishment of religion and no prohibition on its free exercise. Before 1940, between 1791 and 1940, only 23 cases arising under the first amendment religion clauses reached the United States Supreme Court and in not one of those cases did the court find an establishment of religion or a violation of free exercise rights. After 1940, 183 Supreme Court cases were heard on the religion clauses of the first amendment and attendant statutory protections of religious freedom, more than half of which were findings of violations of either the establishment clause or the free exercise clause. Clearly, something changed dramatically in the 1940s and I'd like to use a couple of minutes informally to explore a bit what changed, why it changed, how it changed, and then what the significance of that is for us in the 21st century. So, three main changes occur in this period from 1940 and the case of Cantwell versus Connecticut to 1947, and the Supreme Court case of Everson versus Board of Education. The first change is that the Supreme Court, for the first time, applied the first amendment religion clauses directly to state and local governments and created a uniform and universal law of religious freedom enforceable by the federal courts. Secondly, the Supreme Court read the establishment clause guarantee and the free exercise clause guarantee rigorously and attached rather substantial scrutiny to the actions of federal, state, and local government when they were challenged under either the establishment clause or the free exercise clause and that scrutiny gave rise to wins and those wins encouraged ever more litigation in the federal courts. And the third thing that happened is that the Supreme Court proved itself unusually solicitous to marginal groups, highly unpopular religious groups like Witnesses, and Adventists, and pacifists, and atheists and others, who had not fared well at all in state courts or in state legislatures and found very little recourse and protection from the US Congress as well. Three major changes and it's not accidental that these changes occurred in the 1940s as we move toward the creation of a universal national law of religious freedom enforceable by the federal courts. In the first place, we are moving toward a national project in the mid-20th century. Already in the 1930s during the Great Depression, as Congress and eventually the United States Supreme Court after 1937 moved to try to create a national law on many questions of health, safety, welfare, and even morality, even in the face of countervailing state and local governmental concerns. World War II and the budding Cold War underscored that national consolidation project even more as Congress and the White House and the Supreme Court together took leads in reaching national consolidation on the fundamentals that needed to be enforced even in the face of countervailing state and local interests. But most importantly to our project of religious freedom was the 1940s discovery in horror of Hitler's death camps and Stalin's gulags, where all sense of humanity and dignity had been betrayed and a recognition that local bigotry run amuck and unchecked can yield that massive barbaric treatment of a particular religious and cultural people, in particular the Jews, but not only the Jews, gypsies and many others as well. And in response, the United States of America and the international collection of states in the universal declaration seized anew on the idea of religious freedom as a universal good, a fundamental right to be enjoyed by every person, by every people, in all contexts around the world. It became one of the greater four freedoms that Roosevelt lifted up and it was considered essential to the organization of a good society and a democratic policy to have universal protection of religious freedom for all, especially for minorities, especially for those that were unpopular, especially for those that held religious views that had been locally vilified. It was critical that especially the outsiders felt welcome and had the constitutional protection of the first amendment that they could call upon in the federal courts and it was especially considered important that a person could be guaranteed the protection of the federal courts under the first amendment regardless of where she/he lived and therein lay the rub, because we run four square into the constitutional protection of federalism, built into the US Constitution itself as you know, with its division of enumerated powers amongst the federal government but also the guarantee of reserved powers to the states, guaranteed in the 10th amendment, guaranteed in Article IV, and jealously maintained in the century and a half between 1791 to 1940. But furthermore, the first amendment itself was problematic in this regard because it singles out Congress. It says Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. It says nothing about the states. It's not even in the passive voice like the second through ninth amendments where we talk about there should be no illegal searches and seizures or no unjust taking of property which could be read generically to apply to any government, federal or state. Here, the Congress was singled out by the first amendment, Congress shall make no law violating religious freedom. And whatever the intention of the drafters of first amendment religion clauses in 1789 happened to be, or the ratifiers in 1791 happened to be, that language was taken universally to mean that the first amendment religious freedom guarantees applied only to Congress and the federal government leaving the then 48 individual states to govern religion and religious freedom in accordance with their own local state constitutions. Some states were generous in their protections of religious freedom but many states maintained forms of religious establishment, preferencing particular forms of faith, putting in place policies that enacted by coercion certain forms of religious identity, belief, and practice and at the same time put in place a number of encumbrances and abridgements and sometimes deeply prejudicial actions towards religious minorities. So here was the problem, how to create a universal law of religious freedom when the text of the Constitution itself and the very federalist structure of the Constitution seemed to stand in the way. And to accomplish that end, the United States Supreme Court in this fateful set of cases from 1940 to 1947, performed a constitutional magic act that we lawyers call due process incorporation. This will be technical for 30 seconds, check your email. The court looked to the 14th amendment, passed in the aftermath of the Civil War, ratified in 1868, which has as its first guarantee no state shall deprive any person of life, liberty or property without due process of law. We call that the due process clause and the courts said interpreting this term liberty, what is part of the body, the corpus? What is incorporated into the idea of liberty? Well, the first place we will go is to look elsewhere in the constitutional text in the Bill of Rights and other rights provisions set out in the instrument as a whole and among other things, there was a guarantee in the 14th amendment of religious liberty, and what does religious liberty entail? Religious liberty entails no establishment of religion and no prohibition on the free exercise of religion and that little poof you just heard is the completion of the constitutional magic act because suddenly, what is read as Congress shall make no law in effect becomes government of any sort, federal, state, and local government shall make no law establishing religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. The first amendment applies directly to Congress and by extension, other branches of the federal government. The first amendment applies indirectly through the 14th amendment due process clause to state and to local governments alike. You can stop checking your email and now we can get back to the story. Why is this important? All of a sudden not only have we structurally changed the first amendment so that it becomes the universal law that seemed to be necessary in the 1940s in the face of local bigotry run amuck in a highly civilized nation like Germany, but we also now have through rigorous interpretation of those two guarantees, invited the federal courts into the conversation about religious freedom in a way that had never taken place in the prior century and a half of the republic and unfurling in the 1940s forward for the next half century was the rigorous law of no establishment of religion, separation of church and state being one of the organizing axioms as the Supreme Court addressed questions of religious teachers, and texts, and ceremonies, and Bible readings, and symbols in public schools, striking virtually all of them down as a violation of establishment norms perhaps permissible under earlier state constitutions but now under the glaring light of the establishment clause of the first amendment, no longer tenable in a nation dedicated to religious freedom amongst other things, through separation of church and state. Likewise, governments role in religious education, the traditional symbiosis between the two is now severed through a separation of church and state logic. Religious schools are permitted to exist, they provide opportunities for education, but they must do that on their own without aid or cooperation or involvement by government officials beyond basic accreditation. At the same time, the free exercise clause and free speech clauses and sometimes attendant additional constitutional provisions protect people, especially the unpopular in their activities in public life, Witnesses going door to door, going into public parks and public streets, broadcasting the message of Jesus Christ and seeking to win those over to their faith, Adventists and others who had Saturday Sabbatarian concerns that were not being accommodated by legislatures but now are being accommodated under the free exercise clause, Amish living in small agrarian communities who did not want to subscribe fully to the mandatory school attendance laws now protected in their distinctive identities and allowed to pursue their activities without encumbrances by the state and one could multiply examples. From 1940 to 1990, the United States Supreme Court put in place for the world a massive, massive record of how to protect religious liberty aggressively, zealously, for all and vindicating the idea that Mahatma Gandhi made popular that a nation's dedication to religious freedom is measured by how it treats its most hated minorities and in some sense, that record of a half century stood tall and remains an important source of inspiration and instruction to jurists, and judges, and courts around the world to this day. Interestingly, some would say sadly, the Supreme Court in the last decade or two has retreated substantially from that aggressive protection of religious freedom. The court has made it harder to press cases through toughened standing requirements, when you can stand at the bar to press your case has gotten harder to achieve. The court has allowed splits in the lower federal circuits to linger a lot longer with a great deal of confusion amongst parties as to how they're going to be protected in their religious freedom if they live in the third circuit versus the ninth circuit. The court has strongly encouraged state legislatures to take over religious freedom questions through statues and changing those statutes as needed in accordance with local political custom and fashion. The court has shown strong separation of powers logic to again defer to Congress and let Congress do a lot of the work in religious freedom and the court has reduced the free exercise and the no establishment clauses effectively to guarantees of neutrality on the face of the statute itself and neutrality and general applicability in application of the statute. Since 1990, under the free exercise clause and since 2002 under the establishment clause, both of those constitutional guarantees are now wimpy. Justice Thomas on the bench has suggested that these are all perhaps steps along the way to disincorporating the religion clauses from the 14th amendment. Four times in dicta, always in concurrence or dissent, Justice Thomas has said quite boldly it is time for us to go back to a literal reading of the first amendment, especially under the establishment clause that says Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion. We don't have jurisdiction to hear cases coming out of the state and local governments. So far, no justice has signed on to Justice Thomas' opinion but I give you a small anecdote to signal perhaps a danger. A few years ago, I was one of the lectures at the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in Alabama and Justice Scalia was in the audience (that's his circuit) and we happened to sit together at dinner and we had a nice, long conversation about the original understanding of the first amendment and we fussed back and forth about texts that he knows remarkably well and we had a few drinks, and in the course of the evening I said to him, "Justice Scalia, is there anything to this argument of your brother on the court Justice Thomas, that we are thinking of selectively disincorporating the religion clauses from the 14th amendment?" He raises his glass and says, "We're one vote away", which is interesting and it's also in my view deeply troubling. There was a reason in the 1940s to worry about local bigotry run amuck and there is a reason in the 21st century to worry about local bigotry run amuck. We are now awash with xenophobia and nativism. We are now awash with islamophobia and anti-Semitism. Religious communities Christian and non-Christian alike are now facing enormous pressure about the propriety of their existence, their special claims on religious freedom. There's a worry about leaving these things to statutes, leaving these things to state legislatures. There's a worry about letting one of our universal goods of human nature simply disappear through political calculus. That, from any person of good faith and good will, is troubling. Thank you. [ Applause ] >> Thank you, thank you John, thank you Peter, thank you Sally. I know I promised a five minute stretching break but I'd like to rescind that offer if no one objects because these eloquent words and thoughts are so in our minds now and I think we also would lose some organization coherence if we all went out and stretched. So if no one objects, I think we should talk a little bit as a panel, five or 10 minutes and then open it up to questions. I'm sure you all have them. Three spectacular talks, thank you so much, I learned so much from each of them. I want to say a few questions first and then I'll keep talking and I want to end with a question for John but for Sally, I will never think about disestablishmentarianism in Virginia the same way. Thank you, that was profoundly enlightening. I thought during your lecture about New England and I don't think the same paradigm holds- >> No. >> In New England. Gordon may want to enlighten us on that topic but it seems to me to the extent there is proslavery thought in the pulpit in New England it's more from the established urban churches and that the radical evangelicals of rural New England are pretty antislavery so that's something we might get into. With Peter, I have done research in exactly this topic. I've looked at Jefferson's copy of the Koran here, which is a fascinating volume to hold including its so beautifully preserved, the pages are so pristine that one comes away with some curiosity about whether he ever actually opened his copy of the Koran, because it doesn't look like he did except for the little ownership markings and I wanted to ask if new digital means of scholarship are helping you to find these little known Islamic examples, because you found newspaper clippings and we are seeing, we've seen in science for some time but more and more in the humanities that the power of very powerful searching tools are just throwing out more and different kinds of data that don't fit with our big theory so maybe we can come back to that. But then with John, and I'm sorry to do this in kind of reverse order, I learned so much about the 1940s from you and about the four freedoms and those four freedoms have always been very strong in my mind as a former presidential speech writer and in the Clinton White House we certainly looked to FDR and to Eleanor Roosevelt as very important examples. In the 1990s, we were reliving a lot of the 50th anniversaries of events in the 1940s and I remember writing the remarks for the 50th of the universal declaration of human rights but I'm wondering, a more narrow scholarly question for our scholarly audience which is did scholarly work on Thomas Jefferson, which he was in a very positive light in these decades in the 30s and 40s more so I would say than he has been in, in the last 20 years, but was that affecting the thinking of the Supreme Court, did Frankfurter and Brandeis in particular lead this intensification of protection of different kinds of religions on the court, and was there some vestigial memory of the problems in the wake of World War I, the government's heavy hand suppressing different kinds of minorities in the late teens and early 20's? Did memories of all those flavor the courts thinking in the 1940s? That was more than 20 years since those events, but here in Washington people remember things for a long time, so can I begin with that question and then I hope you two will jump in also. >> I'll defer to Sally because she's written a book on this but I can say a word or two while she warms up her answer. I think among the justices of the bench, Justice Black is probably the one that was most enamored of the story of Jefferson, Justice Jackson as well. Justice Black and Jackson, very different ways were reading Jefferson, were reading about the letter to the Danbury Baptist Association of 1802, were reading some of the narratives, rather panegyrical narratives about Jefferson of the day and saw him and saw the Virginia story so ably told by Sally Gordon, saw the Virginia story as prototypical of and indeed representative of the story of the first amendment and Justice Black in his long recitation in Everson v Board of Education and the majority opinion and then repeated opinions over the next 25 years repeats that Virginia story and sees it as emblematic of the necessity of a new way of thinking about the establishment clause as a strict separation of church and state guarantee, and a new way of thinking about the federal courts role in insuring separation of church and state even at the micro level of a local school board's decision about how they're going to teach in their classroom and it was quite clearly thought to be a necessary condition for the protection of religious freedom and it had as its complimentary guarantee the free exercise clause, which at the same time was being rigorously protected. Not to forget, that the bill for the establishment of religious freedom is mostly about free exercise protection, freedom of conscience, and freedom of expression, and freedom of movement, and freedom from all matter of coercion and that side of the Jeffersonian puzzle is also very much part of the jurisprudence. Justice Black is only one of many on the court, Justice Brandeis clearly is an important figure in that story too and we see this string of cases, 17 in total from 1940 to 1953, where the Supreme Court using Jeffersonian separatists and free exercise logic is in the business of creating this new law of religious freedom in direct and dramatic ways. People debate back and forth where Justice Black got his separatism, whether Jefferson is simply window dressing for preconceived ideas that he received as a member say of the Ku Klux Klan where separation of church and state was a mantra, people worry a little bit about some of the nativist inspiration for that appetite for separatism and the anti-Catholic ways in which it was being directed. There's no evidence in Justice Black's opinions in my view, to warrant those suspicions but there's a lot of speculation in the biographies about him. Philip Hamburger's Separation of Church and State book is a good recent example of that, which makes folk a little anxious about the easy story that's generally told about Black, Everson and the separationist project but Professor Gordon will have much better things to say. >> I don't think so, that was pretty amazing. The smoke going up as Black's children burned his papers after his death, at his instruction, have always raised suspicions but I totally agree with exactly what John said. The one thing I would add is that Frankfurter was not especially solicitous of religious minorities in fact, quite the opposite and his opinion in a Jehovah's Witness case in 1940 was called his Fall of France opinion. He was so worried about making Americans civically unified that he tossed the Jehovah's Witnesses under the bus and it should be noted that several thousand Witnesses died in concentration camps in Germany, Austria and so on as well. And then three years later when his decision, the majority decision in the first case was reversed in an opinion by Justice Jackson, Frankfurter was so brilliant. He literally wrote a list of the stuff that was going to be on the table if we allowed theology to change the way we ran the legal system. School prayer, Bible reading, funding for parochial school I mean, you just go through the laundry list and he got it all right, and in 1991, Scalia's '91 Smith? >> 90. >> 90, he quoted Frankfurter's dissent in the Barnett case and the majority in Gobitis extensively for justifying throwing this all back out to politics so it's really interesting to watch the way the Holocaust certainly and World War II played out in Supreme Court doctrine, it could go in such radically different ways. >> Am I off base in thinking about the memory of post-World War I dissent? I mention it because of the big World War I exhibit here which you'll see tomorrow but is that too distant a memory in the 40s, does too much water float under the bridge by that point? >> Certainly Jackson and the biographers of Jackson make pretty clear that he was inspired to do something constitutionally in response. Clearly, Justice Cardozo in the Palko and subsequent cases before 1940, that the groundwork for Cantwell and its progeny, he was concerned about protecting fundamental liberty as he called it, against these national and local intrusions and he educes especially in the Palko opinion some of these instances of oppression, even by the national government. And clearly, as we're thinking through the post-incorporation case law, it was not uncommon in amicus briefs and sometimes in direct argument to remember the travesties against the outsiders, to remember the [inaudible], to remember the internment camps in Hawaii and elsewhere that were not part necessarily of the National Press Register. There's certainly no political favor in bringing those up but they were part of the inspiration. Bigotry was not a theoretical concern that was driving the court, it was real, it was palpable, it was tragic, and it was not going to be countenanced in the United States. >> Peter, maybe I can repeat the question I asked and then didn't quite give you the chance to answer but what about data methods? How are you finding these incredibly interesting newspaper articles and life stories? >> Well, the book that I wrote that I drew much of this research from is the book you mentioned in your introduction, One Nation Under Gods. It retells American history from the point of view of religious minorities and the beginning of my research process were newspaper archives and specifically digital newspaper archives because you can find an incredible amount of material in a very short time as compared to microfiche. I love to come to the Library of Congress but it's much more convenient to find these things at home so that was really the beginning of my process, reading newspapers through the 18th into the 19th century and I mentioned in my closing statement that you can find many other stories similar to the story of Islam in early America and the newspapers are a great place to start. They often warrant stories being written with future scholarship in mind so there's a lot of reading between the lines that needs to be done but you can find these accounts, you can find these individual lives and build out from there. So for example, in addition to finding a great deal of information about these celebrity early Muslins in America, I found what I believe is the first dedication of a Chinese temple in San Francisco in 1852. I believe that during the research of that book, I unearthed that for the first time, and you can't find that unless you go back and read history as it was written at the time in the press, so it's really, for my work I couldn't do it without it both in my written work and now the work I do for the museum. So many resources are also fully digital now and available to find them including for example, the wonderful collection of the Library of Virginia where I was able to find the famous Virginia 10,000 name religious freedom petition and then make arrangements to include that in our upcoming exhibit as well. >> Those used to be at the Library of Congress website. They migrated about six months ago, devastating. >> Did you begin your research in the Chronicling America database of American newspapers? >> I believe that it's America's Historical Newspapers, as far as I remember the name of the database and I actually began that research at Washington College. While I was there, I had the good fortune of being a Patrick Henry Writing Fellow at Washington College in 2011 to 2012, when I was able to fully devote myself to researching that book. >> Is there still a leaky sink on the second floor of my old house? [ Inaudible Question ] >> There's a microphone. >> Thanks so much for the contributions, which I have enjoyed enormously. I also write this topic with respect to Africa so I want to set this conversation in a large comparative perspective and in doing so, I will flip the coin on these representations, I will go another route. First, I'll argue that in spite of the rhetorics and division this is not messy enough, this is not messy, messy, not as troubling when you set it in a comparative perspective, Sudan, India, Nigeria, so this is not messy enough. I have not seen enough blood and killing and that so that's one set of argument when we set this conversation in a big umbrella. Then comes the second one, what is driving what? The way the conversation is set up is it politics that is actually driving the religion, not the religion driving the politics or we can make the argument that that kind of division is problematic that I've just made because we can do it that way. But my third biggest issue is how, when we set it in comparative perspective, from the [inaudible] of India, Nigeria, Sudan and others, they attribute the success of this country to the [inaudible] values of religion and language. That's the way we read it from the other side, that this place is very successful because there's a commonality around the use of English, around Christianity, around the framing of an identity. It is much easier to frame an American nation's [inaudible] around some kinds of notions of religious consensus which you won't find say, in Nigeria. That's the way we frame it on the other side of the Atlantic that you people are so successful and so lucky because you agree to certain, this is not about [inaudible], that you agree to setting [inaudible] values, that you can have some small fights but there's at least a consensus that you'll speak English, that you are Christian, and that there's a template for capitalism to function. There's a function for the nation state to function. There's a template for the legal system that you described to function. [Inaudible] Sharia there will be no justice, no Supreme Court that can resolve some of these things that you've just resolved so I'm just trying to take your data and look at it from the other side of the coin, not that I'm trying to make any sense reading it differently. Thank you. >> Thank you very much for your comments and for inviting us to be messier when we take things in a wider perspective. We extraordinarily underestimate the luxury we have in this country to be able to broker our hardest disputes through generally peaceable legal means and when we have fundamental questions that are at stake, we have authorities to whom we can turn to help resolve those disputes and methods by which recompense can be done, reconciliation can be achieved, and parties can go on and we take that for granted in a way that many places around the world, even sophisticated cultures of much greater ancient pedigree don't have that same luxury and we look around the world to the 110, to the 198 nation states and independent territories have high levels of religious persecution of some, whether Christians, or Muslims, or indigenous peoples, or groups or sects within the same. We have 149 civil wars going on around the world, according to the Carter Center, many of them never, ever each the headlines of the national papers let alone the international papers, people being savaged so your point is very well taken. We have an extraordinary luxury here that we shouldn't underestimate. Secondly, we should also recognize that one of the critical foundations for the protection of democratic order, constitutional law, democratic governance more generally is that we protect religious freedom not just for Christians, but for all and in some ways religious freedom once protected provides the foundation for the protection of many other kinds of freedoms for individuals and groups, speech, and press, and assembly and various kinds of associational rights that a person can have and the protection of religious groups whether Christian or non-Christian, provides the foundation for the variety of other associational protections and I think it's critical that we recognize religious freedom as a first freedom, a foundational freedom whose evaporation in some sense is a chiseling away of the cornerstone of many other constitutional rights that we enjoy. And the third thing I would say is, with due respect, that we have never privileged Christianity. It's interesting that we have had the establishment clause that says no establishment of any religion and we've always had pluralism as in some sense the genius of the American experiment and the recognition that even at the time of the founding, that Catholics, and Protestants, and Jews, and others who had slaughtered and slandered each other with a vengeance in prior decades were welcome into the Constitutional Convention discussion and welcome into the ratification of the Bill of Rights and welcome in the deliberation about what religious freedom means in the courts. There are now more than 1,240 registered religious groups in the United States, increasingly diverse in their non-Abrahamic form. I think that's to be celebrated, not to be lamented and I think it's part of the genius of what the American experiment has unleashed constitutionally. >> Gordon and then Manuel next. >> I might add the luxury that we might have was the consequence of 200 years of pretty bitter fighting in the west where the 30 Years War was just as bloody as what's going on in the Sudan or elsewhere today. I had two points, one has to do with Jefferson. He was very important in 1943, because it was the 200th anniversary of his birth and the memorial that is on the tidal basin was built with great democratic support and FDR was in love with Jefferson so that becomes part and of course, I think in the 1947 decision, I think it's Black who first time uses Jefferson's words wall of separation if I- >> No. >> No? >> 1879. >> 1879 is the first? >> Yeah, yeah. >> Doesn't Black use it in '47 though? >> He does. >> Right and so it gets picked up because of Jefferson but I have a question for Sally, or a point. You know, I think the situation in the 80s and early 90s is a little bit more ambiguous than you're making. I think there's an awful lot of proslavery thinking among the lower orders but at the elite level- >> Right. >> I'll give you one piece of evidence which is very confusing. The Board of Visitors in 1791 to the College of William and Mary offers an honorary degree to Granville Sharp, who is the leading British abolitionist at the time. Now, why would all these slaveholding plantars honor Granville Sharp in that way? I think that raises a problematic, I think by after the Haitian Revolution, then everything changes. >> Right. >> But up to I think in the late 80s, middle 80s and early 90s, I think you still have a lot of the plantars who are aristocratic slaveholders. >> That's a great point and if only I could point to the stuff on the cutting room floor but one of the key elements behind say, Presbyterian and eventually Methodist proslavery was their distrust of the Church of England, especially Granville Sharp, Beilby Porteus, so Sharp's support of Somerset's case, of course Somerset was taken from Virginia by his owner Stewart and so that was very personally felt in Virginia and then second, Beilby Porteus gave this amazing antislavery sermon in 1783, at Lambeth Palace and that was reprinted everywhere in Virginia so part of Coke's problem was that they thought he was a Church of England Priest which in fact, he was and then he also became a Methodist Bishop which made him a schismatic member of two, anyway. But yes, very definitely they did not trust the Church of England and William and Mary is, and Granville Sharp, were Anglicans so there's this class level of distrust and you're absolutely right, I take your point. >> I think wall of separation was a phrase also used in the 17th century by Roger Williams in our state, well, not yet. >> The garden in the, you mean Rhode Island? >> Yeah, yeah. >> Well, it comes out of the Bible. >> It does. >> Ephesians 2:14, wall of separation, and it has a long exegetical history in pre-American settlement theology so it's not a phrase that's invented by Jefferson or Anabaptists or others before them. >> I think he's using it as he's trying to define his- >> As a legal term. >> As a legal term, right. Manuel did you- >> First of all, let me thank all of you for this incredible panel that shows how wonderful scholarship can be in a time where scholarship is doubted. Mm-mm, here it is. Now, I want simply a very small point to convey to John particularly, the comment that is usually heard in Europe, particularly France but not only in France that while America has developed starting in the 1940s not before, a very important comprehensive system of protecting religious minorities, on the other hand in the practice of everyday life meaning workplace, political institutions, civic life, not so much protected the right to have no religion meaning to declare oneself atheist and not have any religious practice. This has been sanctioned in terms of not providing jobs, in terms of marginalizing people sometimes violently attacking, so the right to atheism which by the way is the majority of the population of France is either agnostic or atheist, is not so respected in America because by definition America has always been a religious country from the very beginning of American history. So, what is your reaction to this kind of opinion that I hear all the time? >> It's the law on the books and the law in action, to be sure. We're very generous in respecting the religious freedom of all but there are certain groups that we constantly vilify, Native American Indians, Scientologists, Wiccans, increasingly today Muslims, intermittent episodes of anti-Semitism, anti-Judaism. We do have our laundry list of social pariahs and sometimes the courts are blind to their plight. I will say with respect to atheism, the Supreme Court rather early in a case of 1961 called Torcaso versus Watkins, upheld the free exercise right of an atheist to refuse to swear an oath that educed God. He could give an alternative form of demonstrating his veracity, the court concluded and did so on the strength of the free exercise right of that individual and the worry about establishing a theism from which he would become a victim. And so the court rather early was in the vanguard really around the world in thinking of western constitutional values of protecting atheism but that's a hard sell when the Cold War logic was very much about we are the great Christian nation and those atheistic communists out there are doing their thing and that case gets lost in the ensuing decades of Cold War logic, but it's early for many important signposts of a generosity towards people of faith and of no faith and the protection they should enjoy under the free exercise clause and increasingly, I think in the 21st century we've come to recognize demographically that the nones on various religious demographics, the nones are getting bigger and bigger especially in the younger generation and their plight and the protection of their plight, I think is going to be an important part of our story going forward. The hard question I think, that we have to face is whether atheism and none are the same thing. It's one thing to have an affirmative belief in the non-existence of God as an atheist has, it's another thing simply to be abstaining from any religious participation and any religious involvement or ideas and the European Court of Human Rights has, under the European Convention Article IX, the notion of thought, conscience and belief and it's a grab gab that allows for the religion of atheism and the none to be combined in zealous protection for what we would call religious freedom. We don't have that textual luxury in the United States and we have religion and we are jealous about protecting sincere, good faith idiosyncratic, newly acquired understandings of the faith but there is a presumption of faith there and I think the hard question becomes well, is the protection of religious freedom as Jefferson himself said to Madison, is the protection of religious freedom as soon as you establish one form of faith, you automatically begin to disenfranchise those of non-faith. And the analogous questions now are beginning to emerge, does the protection of religious freedom, the privileging of those who have faith inevitably begin to compromise the status, the rights, the entitlements that those who have no faith don't enjoy. Now, there's a couple of answers to that. One is that free exercise of religion rights are also balanced by a no establishment guarantee that says yes, there is free exercise of religion but you're going to have to do it on your own. We cannot establish religion but we can establish nones. Number two, there is free speech and free association and free press, and general equal protection and due process liberty rights that folk of no faith can enjoy. Folk of faith can enjoy them too and the question is, is that enough for those who do not have a faith claim along the way? Those are big questions that we're going to have to face in the next 25, 30 years as we think through the balances of free exercise or religious freedom jurisprudence and interestingly, the Supreme Court has deferred those questions to the political process by making free exercise rights effectively now statutory rights, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, the Religious Land Use and Institutional Persons Act, and then the 21 states that have their own Religious Freedom Restoration Acts and there, there's a little bit more fuzziness about what gives you the ground for pressing a religion claim and already there, we're both politicizing the question and we're dealing with slippery linguistics. >> On the question of veracity of original sources, I believe John Quincy Adams is the only President who did not use a Bible. He put his hand on the Constitution. >> Right, great that you mentioned that. >> I didn't see you, I'm sorry. >> A great history book just newly published by Leigh Schmidt called Village Atheists about the history of persecution and protection of atheists in the US, really fun to read. >> If I could add one note on the nones, I think it's this phenomenon of the religiously unaffiliated that we're living in now, part of it is we're in a moment of shifting categories. You look at the huge numbers on the nones and the religiously unaffiliated, many of them believe in God and so I've often wondered if none should actually be called some of this, and some of that, and some of that because they are in the process of redefining the affiliations they're choosing and the existing categories often they don't belong there. What comes of that we'll know in a generation. >> Yes? >> Thank you so much for a great panel. I had sort of a more specific question. Was there any discussion of disestablishment or free exercise during the debates of the 14th amendment and did they call on any of those debates when discussing the due process incorporation in the 1940s, and were there discussions in Congress, were there discussions in the ratification debates, or is this something that just was not part of the discussion at all? >> It really didn't appear. There was tons of concern about women voting, about lifting the veil of the marriage bed, about all kinds of things but no, life, liberty and property were not infused with religious. It's really, really interesting. Great question. >> Why don't we take you and the Samiara [phonetic] so two final questions and then we'll call it a day. >> Thank you all for a wonderful panel. A couple of comments [inaudible], on the 1815 letter from Jefferson, I would suggest that his primary association at that stage of his life on clergy and politics would not have been anything Virginian, it would have been the influence of the New England clergy during the 1790s and especially in his presidential campaigns, that would have been his deeply felt frame of reference at that point. Also, yes it's certainly true that the Granville Sharp honorary degree is fascinatingly a complicated question and there were ideas percolating in the 1780s but a few years ago, as you probably know, there was an assertion that Virginia had a moment when it came close to abolishing slavery in the 1780s. I think that has been chipped away at recently but I do also think that what you have discovered, uncovered, recovered with your work on this subject really does cast that into doubt in fascinating and important ways not least because of the dimensions of class, and social hierarchy that correlated with religious affiliation. I really don't think that we're going to be able to say they were anywhere near abolishing slavery if the account that you've given today becomes more widely known, so I wanted to thank you for that and ask for any comment that you might have. >> Thank you, I think in addition to the New England clergy I would add New York, Pennsylvania, some parts of Maryland, New Jersey, I think there are many, many people outraged not only by his infidelity meaning his lack of faith but also his relationship with Sally Hemmings and that really is widely known by the very, very early 19th century and you can read all kinds of, the [inaudible phrase] and you know, I mean just really, really remarkable how deep that was and how deeply it wounded Jefferson, you're right. And then, in terms of the abolition of slavery, I do think the work that's been done recently by Polly Brewer, Alan Taylor, even Claire Priest in the law field have very definitely shown that for example, the Manumission Statute produced a more compliant slave population because people were hoping to be manumitted and of course rarely were but it is also true that one of the reasons Coke could cause so much trouble is that he'd appear in town and some people would start manumitting so it was both because some people were really moved by the thought that they were preventing the return of the Messiah and many more reacted violently against that. So yes, I think I'm feeling my way along as you rightly point out, with the rest of the historiography. Thank you. >> I've been thinking about the New England clergy this week because I'm trying to imagine their shock. Of course, we can't project their thinking into the future but to know that a major speech was given this week on the subject of religious pluralism and separation of church and state by the head of the Roman Catholic Church, who gave a very important speech in Cairo a few days ago and how that would have been inconceivable to the New England world view in the 17th or 18th century. Samira, do you want to ask our last question? >> First, I wanted to say regarding Peter and John's comments about the religious nones, as someone who has spent a lot of time studying multiple religious belonging and that growing population, yes rah rah, I think definitely the some of this and some of that is a really excellent way to think about if not all nones many of them, and I'm really curious to see how that works out in the legal framework but if you will excuse me for asking a question of a cultural historian of American religion moving into thinking about religion and law for my second project, I'm wondering John if you could say a couple of things about disestablishment both in terms of what it looks like and how debates about it have functioned, I'm thinking about when I started graduate school a little bit more than 10 years ago, Georgia was having a terrible drought and our governor had prayer meetings on the front steps of the capitol to pray for rain. I'm sure that this came up in your classes as it did in mine and so you know, what is that? How does that relate to legal understandings of disestablishment? And the second question is, this question of government versus corporation right, we see the religious freedom of the individual changing as corporate personhood is allowed to exert power and I understand the difference between government and large corporate entity but I'm wondering about the practical ramifications in terms of the American citizen and how those rights and what the legal precedent around those rights are likely to be given the cases still pending and of the last couple of years. >> I've spoken an awful lot so I'll let Peter jump in on the none question and I'm going to also ask Sally to jump in on the disestablishment stuff. She's really the expert on it, writing a fabulous 19th century book. If there's any time left, I'll address your questions directly but I've talked too much so Peter? >> Oh, so I construct my own work on the so called nones that it seems to me that well, in the writing I've done with it I've tried to make a parallel with earlier moments of personal disestablishment, of the desire of individuals not to be associated with any particular religious institution. And there's a wonderful sermon by George Whitfield where he's preaching I think in Philadelphia and he's channeling the voice of Father Abraham in heaven and he's asking who they have there, are there Lutherans there, are there Methodists there, are there Anglicans there and Father Abraham says through Whitfield, "We don't know those names here" and so that's an earlier moment of talking about none-ness, none of those things. And so, I wonder if at a certain point when we look back at this moment of disaffiliation, that's the world I was looking for not personal disestablishment but personal disaffiliation, will it look like something similar and will we realize that this is another moment that might be called an awakening by some future generation because it's giving rise to a new set of categories that we can't guess at yet. >> I really enjoy your question and I'd love to talk about corporate personhood but also, on the nones, I'm just starting work now on this very, very important movement in the late 1830's which I have to think of another name because they call themselves the come-outers [laughter] which means something so different now but by the tens of thousands they left organized religion over their silence on slavery and you very rapidly saw- >> In the south as well as the north? >> Oh yes, oh yeah, and you very rapidly saw for example, schisms appearing within Baptists and Methodists from whom many of these people had come out as it were, because they became more and more concerned that if they did not embrace a more negative attitude towards slavery they would lose the rest of their people. I mean, tens of thousands of just Methodists in just New York so I think it's worth thinking about the ways that Peter's point about a massive shift in attitude may be expressed in disaffiliation and yet itself be deeply religiously motivated. And then, the only other thing I wanted to say before learning from John is that I've also been so interested by the fact that the first really common non-government corporations in American history were religious corporations. Those are the first, the first general incorporation statute was written in 1784, for religious organizations and so one of the things to think about is the longstanding and very deep relationship between corporate status and all kinds of religious entities. You can't hold property securely as a religious organization unless you incorporate and that's been true for more than 200 years. It's really interesting how deep that goes. >> Let me just speak to your question about the role of religious ceremony. I'll start with an anecdote. Right in the middle of the heyday of strict separation of church and state, there was a poster that appeared in a California public school and the poster read, "In the event of a nuclear attack, the prohibition against prayer in public schools will be temporarily suspended." [Laughter] And it speaks to a question about the role of religious ceremony and authentic religious ceremony in some instances in times of crisis and need and the recognition that when 9/11 occurs we go to the National Cathedral and hear religious officials pray and discourse about some of the fundamentals. In times of real Force Majeure, there is new cooperation between religious and political officials in seeking to alleviate those that have suffered. In times of great crisis like the Civil Rights Movement when we're seeking to bring our African-American friends into full communion in America, politicians and clerics link arms walking towards the achievement of some good and I think there's some power in that, that Robert Bellah calls the power of civil religion or what Emil Durkheim way back when called the necessary religious elements of communal life. And I think the Supreme Court in fits and starts over the last 40 years has come to realize that the establishment clause really can't rise to or descend to intrusion on or reinvestigation of those kinds of forms of what the court calls ceremonial deism, that there is a place for some of this [inaudible] and that the establishment clause isn't designed to second guess or third guess that nor to give an individual dissenter from that religious expression a kind of heckler's veto that would stymy the expression of those forms of religious ceremony, sometimes authentic and rich and textured in their expression. I happen to find that a congenial read and I happen to think Bellah got this right and I think it speaks to ideas that Benjamin Franklin had way back when in his first discussions of public religion with a CK on public by the way, when he's thinking through about the necessity of having some kind of common belief, some kind of common values which sit atop the particular sectarian expressions of values and the corporations that gather around it in worship and property holding and more. And, as Chief Justice Burger said in the case of Lynch v Donnelly, it's far too late in the day to impose such a crabbed reading of the establishment clause that would allow the Supreme Court to unearth those practices. I think on that one, the chief got it right. >> John, Peter, Sally, thank you for an extraordinary panel. [ Applause ] >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at loc.gov.

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