David T. Smith (@dtsmith_sydney) is a senior lecturer at the United States Studies Centre and the Department of Government and International Relations at the University of Sydney. His new book, “Religious Persecution and Political Order in the United States” came out two weeks ago, right at the beginning of the current controversies about the treatment of Muslims in the U.S., which have culminated in Donald Trump’s proposal to bar all Muslims from traveling to the U.S. I carried out an email interview with him.
HF – One of the key themes of your book is that there’s a big difference between popular prejudice towards religious minorities and government discrimination against them. Sometimes the government acts to protect minorities that are the target of widespread fear. Sometimes, however, the government helps persecute religious minorities that stirred up far less national unrest. Why does the government sometimes try to stop the persecution of religious minorities but sometimes aids and abets the persecutors?
DTS – For the state, the choice depends on who is the greater threat, the group getting persecuted or the group doing the persecuting?
When Americans suspect a religious group is undermining their country’s free, democratic political order, they demand—often violently—some radical action against that group.
Sometimes state actors will agree, seeing religious minorities as threats to political order and their own authority. The Mormons were forced to flee Missouri and Illinois by militias who feared Joseph Smith’s growing power. In the 1850s, the Republican Party equated Mormon polygamy with slavery. By the 1880s the majority of Democrats in Congress agreed with them, and together they passed measures to deny voting rights to Mormons and even seize Mormon temples.
In the 1940s, police and sheriffs in hundreds of towns allowed mobs to assault Jehovah’s Witnesses as they handed out pamphlets in the streets. The assailants weren’t hoodlums but respectable citizens, often led by members of the American Legion, who were deeply offended by the Witnesses’ refusal to salute the American flag. The beatings ended when the United States entered the war, and the federal government began jailing Jehovah’s Witnesses for refusing to perform national service.
In those cases, the people doing the persecuting were well-connected to local or national political power. The groups getting persecuted were little-understood, and perceived as not buying in to the political order that united the country.
Anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic persecution were different. In the nineteenth century, nativist opponents of Catholicism accused the church of excessive secrecy, occult rituals, and stirring up uneducated immigrant mobs. Political elites, however, saw the anti-Catholic “Know Nothings” as even worse. They were organized in secret societies that mimicked the outlandish rituals they attributed to Catholicism. On election days, they commanded unruly street gangs. Even where the Know Nothings became an electoral force, they faced such entrenched resistance from the state that they could achieve little politically.
In the early 20th century, anti-Semitism was very widespread. But while the upper classes that dominated politics practised their own forms of anti-Semitic exclusion, they were disturbed by the form it took under rabble-rousers like Father Coughlin and Gerard Winrod. Popular anti-Semitism was closely associated with right-wing anti-capitalism, which was directed as much against banks, industrialists and the federal government as it was against Jews. The FBI closely monitored domestic anti-Semites and effectively protected American Jews, even as the government shut the door to Jews fleeing persecution in Europe.
Read the full piece at The Washington Post.
- Publication Type:Other Writing
- Publication Date:12/08/2015