Transcripts For CSPAN3 Discussion On Religious Freedom In Early America 20150426

Operated on socialist principles, using time money that could be earned with an hour of labor and exchanged for goods that took the same amount of labor to make. At new harmony robert del owens edited the new harmony gazette which took aim at what they called the trinity of evils private property, irrational religion, and marriage, which in their view was based on the other two evils. Like other 19 century utopian experiments, new harmony failed quickly, but Robert Dale Owen continued to pursue his interest in social reform. With the feminist freethinker Francis Wright also born in scotland, he founded a community devoted to educating freed slaves. He wrote the first book advocating for Birth Control alecto to represent indiana in the house of representatives and the 1840s and in that capacity he drafted a bill to create the smithsonian institution. He subsequently sat on his first board of regents and shared the Smithsonian Building Committee which built what we know we now know is the castle across the mall. Later in his life he published two books arguing for the reality of spirit communication between the living and the dead. Journalist Jeff Charlotte has argued that almost every story is a religion story, or can be if you look at it closely enough. If you perus the front page of the Washington Post or New York Times in the last year or so you would be hardpressed not to find a religious story lurking there about the Islamic State or the role of Orthodox Jews in the israeli election or the role of evangelical culture brokers in determining the next Publican Party president ial nominee in the United States. Even the founding of the smithsonian, it turns out, is by some measure a story of religion. Back in the olden days of the and late 1960s sorry late 1970s and early 1980s, when i majored in american studies in college, race, class, and gender were the holy trinity of the discipline. Although i was able to take courses in american religious history, religion was still an outlier in the history guild. Not least of which because so many social scientists were convinced that religion was fated to fade away as modernity advanced. Today and especially since 9 11, religion is very much on the radar of scholars charged with telling the stories of the American People. The American Studies Association has a religion and American Culture caucus. A recent survey of members of the American Historical Association found that religion was the leading subfield among historians, surpassed by cultural history, intellectual history, political history diplomatic history, surpassing all of that. Inside the American Academy of religion, religion in north america is one of its most vibrant specialties, producing cuttingedge research noticed by scholars worldwide, accounting for many recent president s of the academy of religion including the current one. So, why is this happening . Why religion . Why now . Religion has refused to go away either in the United States or in the wider world. Even members of the academy, one of the most secular arenas in american life, are being forced to reckon with it. The Muslim Population of the world has more than doubled over the last century in terms of its proportion of the worlds population from 11 to 23 . There are now christian megachurches with over 50,000 people in attendance each weekend. Incense out the door, as well as houston. The lesson here is that religion matters. The worlds religions obviously matters matter to individuals who pray or submit, but they also change the course of history, moving elections in india and israel. They move militaries around the globe. Religion may or may not make sense to you, but you cannot make sense of the World Without making sense of religion. Here in the United States religion has played an increasingly important role. In politics since the rise of the religious right in the 1980s, but it played a role during the colonial time as well during the revolution. In the social Reform Movements of the 19th century. In the civil war and in progressivism and prohibition in the cold war and the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s. Our understandings of all of these movements is poorer if we fail to attend to the impact of religious ideas, religious people, and religious institutions. A few years ago i got an email from someone working as a curator here at the National Museum of American History. She told me that she and other curators in the museum had seen the garden america tv series and was convinced by the argument that religion mattered in history and asked if i would be interested in coming for a fellowship to advise curators on how to collect religious objects and integrate religion more fully into the exhibitions. I happily accepted the offer and during my wonderful time here i was thrilled to see that the interest in american religious history extended to the new museum director, john gray, and that others were eager and willing to talk with one another about the promises and perils of putting religion on display. This is not an easy task. It is fraught with intellectual and political challenges but it is worth doing and worth doing well if we are to tell accurate and compelling stories about American History. As director gray said, the National Museum here is currently working on a mission sufficient on religion in early america with the heavy lifting being done by David Allison and peter man cell. It is organized around three themes religious freedom, religious growth, religious diversity, and todays symposium is also arranged around those themes. Each of our panels will have three scholars and the moderator either myself or peter. Our goal is to engage in conversations about religious freedom, religious growth, religious diversity from colonial times to the 1840s or so to reflect on the lessons this history might have for us today. Each panel will last for close to one hour, with 15 or 20 minutes at the end for questions. I hope you have questions and if you do, please use the note cards that should have been passed out as you come in. Write your questions down. Shortly before the q a is to begin for each of the panelists Staff Members will come down to collector cards and and we will try to stump the panelists with your excellent questions. At this point i will ask the first panel on religious freedom to come up and take your seats right here. The panelists that we have anywhere is fine. The panelists that we have for our first panel are david, right here next me an associate professor of history at Georgia State university. A cultural and intellectual historian, the author of the myth of american religious freedom which gives you a hint on what he might have to say during the panel today. He also wrote a forthcoming book that asks why we are always asking what the founders would do. We have an associate professor of religious studies in American Indian studies at the end here at the university in iowa, the author of choctaw women in a chaotic world. Kathleen is there in the fabulous red athletic top. The Richard Lyman bushman professor of mormon studies in the department of religious studies at the university of virginia. In a prior life she was an attorney in the District Of Columbia before she went on to join our crew of people who think about american religion. She is the author of the politics of american religious identity about the controversy surrounding u. S. Senate denying a seat in the senate representing utah. This is our crew. We will have a conversation for a bit and then we will open up that conversation. I will start with my first, i hope, relatively simple question, which is what we are talking about when we talk about religious freedom in the early public republic. What did religious freedom mean during the time before the revolution and the second great awakening . What is the topic for the panel . Thats the question, isnt it . It meant a lot of things to different people depending on who you are. To James Madison religious freedom was freedom of conscience, the individuals who faced the freedom of what they wished. To other people it meant the ability not to have to pay to support a church that they did not believe in but to still go and be a part of their own church. This corporate versus individual notion of religious freedom. That depended very much on your own religious perspective whether you were a deist, and i would evangelical, or whatever. I would say the religious freedom had a lot to do with the right to practice what one wanted to do. At least permit americans. We are talking about a time where native American People were being pushed off of their land, where heavy missions were going on. Been moved off of their land meant that they could not practice their religions because they were dependent upon the particular plant life and particular animal life. It was that access to both that really impeded their effort and in many ways made the mission more successful as they were struggling to continue to carry out their lives in a they saw that worked best within the world as it operated. That piece of religion isnt really protected under the law is it . This distinction between belief and practice . Its easier to project on the idea of conscious, to protect your right to think something in your head, another thing to protect your right to do something on a piece of land something in particular. Absolutely. Certain Supreme Court decisions have been handed down that protected the right of people to believe what they practiced what not to practice. Most of those were 20thcentury decisions, but there were some in the 19th century during the time we are covering. So definitely the whole interest in obtaining land, that was not protected for native people and one of those cases came out i want to say 1823 the macintosh case, which stated that native peoples were recognized not as owners of the land, but as occupant occupiers. This is the greatest challenges during this time, to work out what kind of freedom would enable the stability of the state will distressing the differences of religion in the world. One of the more dressed as of this time for me is that you have a group of people who want freedom but many of them want the freedom to practice their religion purely. To not be interfered with by the state. These are of course the pure which loom so large in our understanding of our past. They wanted the freedom to be holy. Of course, they were not particularly open to other peoples ways around religion. The quakers were at the other end of the stick, or the rope. You had immediately this diversity of american religions that required them to make peace with one another somehow. They could never really achieve their ideal holiness. The Roger Williams idea of the separation between church and state came to mean something very different. The freedom, again, to be pure, this was a wall the protected the court as a temple from the gentiles and the outsiders. When jefferson comes along, you protect the state from religion. The freedom of the holy versus the necessity of getting along with diversity, and then this gets protected by the laws that begin to develop. By the time you get to enacting laws about religion, because religion is defined in the protestant model of the belief, reading a book and coming to understand they are going to protect conscience and believe. That seems like a seamless cooperation. They are not really ready yet to it knowledge that conscious gets expressed in action, and we would say today, you cant distinguish the body and the mind to this degree. That becomes the struggle for the 19th century. Jefferson famously says, whether you believe in one god or many gods, doesnt pick my pocket, doesnt affect my property rights, or break my leg. It doesnt injure me. You can think whatever you want, but what you do is a different matter. That gets worked out in the 19th century. We have this tension that we have religious freedom but the freedom is obviously not absolute. It is never absolute. Thats true of any law. No freedom americans possess is absolute. That means there is a tension between the way this gets worked out later is between the compelling state interests that can say, look, im really sorry i know you native peoples would like this land, but we need this superhighway to go through your land. It is really important to get out to california. That tension is always there. You are always going to have religious liberty people saying, too much state, too little freedom, and then you are going to have federal states rights people saying, look, lets not have your literary liberty impinged too much. How do you think that tension plays out, david, between the state interests . Who wins in the period we are talking about . I would say the evangelicals win. Im not sure they saw the distinction you are making. For them, religion was the foundation of society, and it created these morals that were the foundation of the state. The state relied on a moral citizenry that needed to be shaped by religion. For the evangelicals who were just taking off in this period and i guess we will be talking about this, it would soon eclipse the other religions. For them, it was this Corporate Division of vision of religious freedom. It was the freedom to be holy. That meant a kind of curtailing of other peoples religious freedom, as expressed by their ability to do things like blaspheme god or open their business on saturday if they were jews. Where does that leave religious defenders if in your view we have an evangelical consensus that is emerging after the calvinism the protestants of the colonial period, and you move towards the second great awakening . Evangelicalism becomes the religious impulse. Their sense of religious freedom becomes a Corporate America since. Where does that leave the few americans or Many Americans who dont have to be whooping it up and evangelical revival . In evangelical revival . I think there are two sides to that. Native americans werent seen as dissenters of religion or heretics. They were seen as not religious at all that what they were doing was superstitious or a savage or backwards. When you had native americans converting to christianity, when they continue to practice their traditional ways, then you did have that problem of sliding backwards and more attention needing to be paid to what they are doing to rein them back in so to speak. For me, when i tried to understand what was going on in that period, i think we all have to be mindful that at that time native peoples were still and they are still today, sovereign peoples who did not see themselves as subjects of the British Crown or eventually the United States. They do not see themselves as dissenters or even competing in that sense with the predominant religions of the time. I think there is another group we need to bring in, as well, and that is catholicism. The quickly become demographically the largest a nomination denomination, the Largest Religious Group in america. That said, where i begin reasoning about this is a statement that john adams made to jefferson in their correspondence late in life jefferson is gone during this period when the constitution is being hammered out, and adams is recalling those moments. He says to jefferson, how could this collection of lovely young men, how could they agree . He lists all the religions. Catholics, jews, presbyterians. He said, house protestants and horse protestants. House protestants, your standing church. Horse protestants, evangelicals. He said, they agreed on the general principles of liberty that is habeas corpus. You have to tell me why i am in jail. And the general principle of christianity. He has already included jews in this list. This is an understanding that christianity has some type of leverage on an absolute morality of what everyone can agree on, right and wrong. It becomes the foundation of the state. People want to know, is America A Christian nation . Not in the sense we would speak of it today. They didnt have the selfconsciousness of christianity in particular. It was a universal. You have these general principles of christianity that enlightened folks like jefferson could agree on. That becomes the foundation for a moral order that every society requires when they develop law. When the event evangelicals split from the enlightenment, they believe they have an interest in protecting the diversity. These baptists were being run out of dodge, run out of virginia by the anglicans who were going to become episcopalians. They want to this protection of minority religion. Of course, they arent thinking of people who arent religious. Native peoples are not religious. They are basically going to say that about mormons, and mormons arent religious, because they are bad religions. Therefore, they are not part of this general moral ethic. Blasphemy this destabilizes the state, because it destabilizes the moral order. This is going to be picked up by evangelicals the minute they realize that they need protection as a kind of minority against the state. They are no longer established. Later on in the story . Once you get to 1789 and the bill of rights and is put out to the states for ratification, they no longer have immediate access to the leverage of the state. They must get direct access to the state to use what we would call the Police Powers of the state to enforce this morality. Then you see the great Reform Movement in the 19th century. Lets hear from david on that. David i may want to hear more from you to know if we do disagree. In 1789 when the First Amendment was passed, six states paid churches without a public treasury, and they were frequent free to continue to do so. It didnt immediately shift to this police power, using moral ideals to maintain religious control. Initially, there were some states that continued to do so. My reading of the First Amendment is that it is not particularly meaningful in the religious freedom of the United States precisely because it didnt apply to the states. All the kind of official protections for christianity, the anglicanism of virginia, the congregationalism of new england, all of that was determined at a state level. The First Amendment didnt to all that much. Speak out front so we can hear you on the mic. Nice and loud. David where was i . The difference between the legal structure, the legal order that was established constitutionally, and what david referred to as the flavor and cultural dominance. This is the distinction. The First Amendment did not apply to the states until the 20th century, when the Supreme Court through the 14th amendment applied the bill of rights, the First Amendment specifically, to the states. The states could use money to pay churches. They can establish religion. Massachusetts could be congregational. Massachusetts didnt disestablish until 1833. In practical fact, the whole problem out of which the lemonade of the bill of rights with respect to religion came out of the lemons of pluralism their struggle with pluralism and British Colonial america, it couldnt be fully established as a flavor. They were always battling each other to see who could dominate in a particular geographic region. Everybody failed, due to a variety of reasons, whether it was commercial or demographic. What they considered lemons this pluralism that kept them from the holiness and order they wanted and the states, it became represented in law. We are going to embrace diversity, embrace pluralism as a legal good. The only way we can have peace in this nation is to enable people to act freely with their religion. The states were formally established, and they continued to have you had to say, im a christian or i believe in god david four, im not a catholic. That certainly in certain jurisdictions. As a kind of hangover or allusion that they could have control. And practical fact, you had religious liberty in those states. David is absolutely right. When you get to the 19th century, you still see states cracking down, the primary example in missouri where you had an extermination order against mormons in missouri. When mormons go to washington and say, are you kidding me president van buren says, your cause is just, but there is nothing i can do for you. He had bigger fish to fry. David they also played the mormons arentarentareligion card. This is where we had to our religious studies. What is a religion . The courts and executive and judiciary and the legislative branches are working this out. Some people are saying in the debates about polygamy in the 19th century for morgans mormons that mormonism isnt a religion. Today, some people are saying, islam isnt a religion, so we dont have to worry about religious protections for muslims, because that is a political scheme or mormonism is a business enterprise, or native americans are superstitions, not religions. Maybe we can talk about that. How does the definition of religion factor into these debates about how this plays out particularly for minorities or for giving evangelical protestants a privileged position . Do you have any thoughts about this, david . David to me, the key issue is not the definition of religion about the distinction between religious belief and practice. Again, this is being done at the state, not the federal, level. The courts are saying, believe what you want, but you can only do these things, or you cant do these other things. It makes religion into a kind of intellectual enterprise that is deeply protestant, of course. How is it protestant . David if you are catholic, you have the sacramental tradition. You are lighting candles. There are the smells and the incense and the processions into the churches, whereas many evangelicals, that wasnt part of their tradition. You sat back to the puritans you sat in unadorned churches and listened to someone speak for two hours. It was a kind of communion of minds. This distinction allowed evangelicals as they achieved numerical superiority to set the terms by which the rules of society worked. You can say, believe what you want, but these are the rules that govern society. These are the morals that are necessary for the state. It limited the ability of dissenters and traditions to say, by limiting our practice you are limiting our religion. It kind of circumscribed what that meant. Definition question. This, of course, is late 20th, early 21st century. A potentially huge problem for the Supreme Court. To define what religion is is to make a long respecting it. Its crucial. Its the introductory point. David is right about the protestant ethos protestantism finds itself over and over again. It comes into being over this notion and later becomes defined, in terms of soul liberty. It is about the modern individual. Modern individualism is beholden to protestantism. That said, arguably from a religious studies point of view it is a misrecognition on the part of protestants that they dont embody their religion. Think of sunday worship. They just never thought of another day for worship. So, how do you define religion in the beginning . You do define it as a matter of conscience. It is believed, and it is anticlerical. Increasingly, those religions we can speak of native americans, and i will leave it; he to handle that i think of judaism as a religion deeply steeped in practice. Its ritually sacramental, as catholics are. Its those religions that in the 19th and 20th century begin to push back against religion as an ideology only. They begin to change the law and the law begins to have to adapt to that. You cant really say, islam is not a religion. What you have to say today if you want to fight it is, its a religion, but they have a law the debate in tennessee is about sharia law they have a law contrary to ours, and if we let them in, they wont obey our law. It is fundamental to religion in terms of a belief defined by morality. So, it becomes a struggle over how much the law can control religion by the 20th century and i dont know how far you want to get into this. You get into these general principles. You get these notions of, if its a lot and it applies to everyone, we arent going to give exceptions to religion. That is what is being fought out now. The Supreme Court has said, if we take that step, we have truly made a long respecting religion, and we cant do that. We are going to punt and say, legislatures come if you have generally applicable statutes and it comes in to religion, you have to show you didnt intend to discriminate. That is in the vernacular. We are getting to exemptions. We will talk more at the end about how this all plays out today, but do you want to weigh in on this definition question . Im not so sure on the definition question, but going back to the idea about social order, there were mixed views on how to include native americans in the American Social order. Efforts were made by some to do that. One included the 1819 civilization act, which was intended to educate native people into a certain set of beliefs, and many native peoples were very clear. This is a little bit later in the period. They let them know that they welcomed the missionaries into their territory, but only for purposes of education. They told them in very clear terms that they were not interested in their religion. They understood how americans were conceiving of religion in general. Part of what happened is the missionary the civilization act, some of that money was being funneled to Mission Groups who would go in and establish those schools posting children from a very young age, sometimes for extended periods of time without the opportunity to go home. They were losing their language. They were losing their practices. Although they understood that they were not to teach religion, they were teaching reading from the bible or biblical tracts. Eventually, they incorporated those teachings into the School Program on a very military style. There was an attempt to control beliefs. I think americans would be shocked to know that under president grants peace plan, he turned the reservations over particular denominations to run those reservations. This is the other interesting fact excluding the catholics. Think of the catholics and the west and their Mission Activity among indigenous people. This is davids point about it grant excludes the catholics. M turns the reservation structure over to the protestants. The stomach of the nation you ingest these indigenous people, at in some fashion, they come out we will now turn to the better metaphor of the melting pot. They come out changed like us. There was certainly a boatload of racism and that. From their point of view, this is what was necessary for the stability of the nation as identity of the people. David equally interesting and almost scandalous is the turning of the utah territories over to brigham young. [laughter] he loses that job, but he does do that for a time. Thats another example of a religious institution running a territory. Also, the mormon saying, we got run out of missouri and illinois, we want one of those things you call a state. As davis said, you have this states rights theory of religion, and moorman said, we will take one of those. That was one of the reasons why it was hard to get antimormon legislation passed through congress against polygamy because there were a lot of southern legislators who said, before the civil war during slavery, if we can meddle in the domestic relations of marriage, than the northerners can meddle in the domestic relations of slavery. We are not going to go there. You couldnt get consensus against polygamy until after the civil war. Lets go back to this provocative title of your book. You mean like, falsehoods, right . David both actually. Tell us about why american religious freedom is a myth, and we can agree and disagree. David we have in mind a story in which a bunch of people came to the United States, and they were searching for religious freedom. So many people came of so many different kinds that the United States was a uniquely diverse place. Early on, they had to acknowledge this, and a set of structures to acknowledge the many different kinds of belief. Everyone can flourish and be happy. I think thats wrong in all kinds of ways. It is wrong for us because the key moment in that story is the First Amendment. The First Amendment protected religious freedom. Everyone was happy ever after. As i was saying earlier, the First Amendment didnt apply to the states, and all kinds of state regulations about religion were on the state level. The First Amendment didnt change anything from a formal legal perspective. Once there was the growth of evangelicals and they became so powerful, they were able to seize the levers of the state and pass all kinds of laws that supported their moral ideals. Can you give some examples . David for example, i kind of support this one, but this is a good example in the late 18th century, dueling was utterly common. It was part of the honor culture of the period. By the time the 1830s came around, dueling had been outlawed in almost every state. That happened because evangelicals began to grow, and as new states began to form, they began to pressure constitutional committees to constitutionally outlawed dueling as a way of eliminating the honor culture of the late 18th century and making way for this bourgeois moralism that evangelicals supported. They also supported things like sabbath laws. They supported the continuation of blasphemy laws, that you couldnt say things like dont say it. David i wont say it. Insert blasphemy here. They passed laws that made it difficult to divorce. There were divorce havens indiana was an early divorce haven, and you could get a divorce by alleging cruelty rather than just infidelity, which is what the bible said in at least one of the gospels. Intense pressure came on indiana. They reversed. Then it became michigan, and then it became farther and farther away where you can move, lived there for a time, get a divorce, and then you have to move back. That protected the sanctity of marriage as evangelicals saw it. They thought this was absolutely necessary for the preservation of the state and the protection of religion. I tend to focus on the effort to control and the failure of evangelicals to achieve their desire to control. I think david focuses on the control. I think there was frustration in their efforts more, the fact that they had been reduced from a formal expression of the state to being what we would call today the public industry albeit a very powerful one in the sense not only of their demographics and the number of evangelicals who could coalesce. Once everybody got denominationalized, you had presbyterians, methodists, and then you had the mainline that became the great reform agencies in the 19th century. They were nonetheless, at best, a paragovernmental force. They had to work for the agencies of the state in order to achieve their ends. They were no longer the state. Thats an enormous difference. With increasing diversity, they began to weaken and weaken. When they fracture prior to the civil war you are going to see this in the next panel i dont think i would go so far as to say the First Amendment had no impact. It is absolutely true it did not apply to the states formally but the same forces that created the First Amendment and its evaluation of protection of minority religious rights, the sense of freedom of conscience and free exercise, all those philosophical principles around which a variety of people coalesced to create at the federal level the First Amendment were still in play in the states on a social and cultural level. They eventually produced law but i dont see a gap between the late 18th and the mid20th century in terms of how people were struggling for freedom. What do you see the forces were that produce the First Amendment . I see them coming out of new england in terms of the separation of puritans required between magistrates and ministers. That was the most conservative force for the separation of church and state. You certainly have the pluralism of the middle states, and you have your european philosophes like franklin and jefferson who were arguing as a mortal moral matter. All of those forces were present. David madison himself saw the First Amendment as a product of a new england conspiracy, because they had created a godless constitution, and the states of new england paid congregationalist churches out of the public treasury. They were worried that this godless constitution somehow destabilize the role of religion in the state. Jefferson who was in paris says we need a bill of rights. Madison wrote him and said, we dont need a bill of rights. In particular, what would become the First Amendment, that is what you dont want. The people pushing for that our people most concerned about religious power. His problem though was, the constitution was explicitly a grant of power to the federal government, and whatever was not included in that grant of power did not exist as a right. Some people said power is such that power will creep. Therefore, we need a list of what they cannot do. That became the bill of rights. Madison was a phrase, if you have that list of what you cannot do, somehow that would expand the constitution itself. Madison in terms of religious liberties, as i understand him was the most sensitive about minority religious rights because of what he had experienced with baptists in virginia. He wanted to make sure religions were treated equally. I agree he was concerned about the new england, battle sony and forces adamsonian forces, but he was more concerned that having a list of rights would erode the limited powers granted to the federal government. Just to try to find a little consensus, it seems like there is some consensus among scholars of the early republic that this myth that you say, this happy tail that i noticed you said in a singsong a way [laughter] there is some consensus that that story is inadequate, that it is too pollyanna, and end there is one story that i take kathleen to be presenting, which is we get the bill of rights religious freedom, but very quickly, we get a kind of informal quasireligious establishment that is able to make sunday be the day of rest, because that is the day it is for most christians. That malfunctions in the way that now functions in a europeanish way, bringing together the church and state that might scandalize the aclu today, and in your view, even that view is too pollyannaish. We do continue to have a europeanstyle religious establishment that we only see if we look to the states, that we dont see if we emphasize the federal government. Is that fair, that there is a kind of consensus there . Whether its formal, in your somewhat minority view, or whether its informal, but either way, we dont get the robust as robust religious freedom as we would imagine. Kathleen i would say thats always the case. I would argue that religious liberty, like any liberty for the United States, standing as it does for freedom hints at the enormity of the burden of slavery it is always a process. Religious liberty, like every other liberty we have established, is a work in progress. Every generation is adding to that. Sometimes, it is a regress, but to quote king, to quote arcs, these arcs of time, america is on an arc. I wasnt as disappointed by the 19th century as david was. I wouldnt have expected them to immediately produce freedom. It is only because religion itself is changing, and so the law must adapt to religion and to people as they evolve. We will never be done with the bill of rights. David is just a naive utopian . Kathleen absolutely. You are the real idealist. Do you want to defend yourself . [laughter] david im tempted to take it. I think my objection is that the story of religious freedom, even the tempered one, that it took a while but we got there kathleen we havent gotten there yet. David i think i tend to think that that is too close to a story of national selfcongratulation, and i distrust those stories. Those are easy stories. They are stories that make us feel good about ourselves but maybe act badly. When i look back over the past i want to tell not a story of national selfcongratulation but a story of failure limits on freedom and intellectual confusion and contradiction. I think that is the story of the early republican period. Do you want to i actually would like to ask them a question, if they can respond to this. I am interested in this state versus federal power. For native peoples at this time, it is state power that is causing a lot of problems in terms of their religious freedom, and even for those missionaries who were working among them the case of the cherokee where two of them were imprisoned and for native peoples, there is the hope among those who understand the constitution to some extent that the federal government can intervene and protect their rights. The federal government, of course concedes to state rights. For native peoples, it is confusing. In some ways, it is a myth, and yet they are still striving to work with that. Even in the late 19th century if we talk about the lakota spirit dancer, ghost dance, you have one of the leaders talking about religious freedom and saying, your own people, if they go up on a hill in white robes and profess whatever, you let them do it, but you are not letting us do this ceremony. It is a continuing issue for native peoples. In the time we have left before we go to questions, just a reminder if you have questions you want to ask, you can ask them on this side. We will do those in a few minutes. In each of these panels, we want to talk a little bit about how the past impinges on the present. A lets turn to this question of has religious freedom changed over the course of American History . How is it different today than when what it was in the past . Im thinking about doug laycock a scholar of the First Amendment, who has argued five or six cases in front of the Supreme Court. He has written recently that hes worried religious liberty is under threat because it is increasingly seen as a sort of license to discriminate, particularly against gays and lesbians that you can appeal to religious freedom and say in my religion, i think homosexuality is a sin. I should be exempt from this law or that law. Hes worried in some ways religious liberty might be going away, or in the legal community, some people are saying, what is so great about religion . Why does religion get to have this special freedom . Why is it more important than the freedom of speech or other freedom . Maybe we could hear from each of you briefly about what your sense is of how this early story impacts where we are now . I would say it continues to have a heavy impact for native American Peoples. Im thinking in terms of let me see if i can get my thoughts together let me pass for a minute. Let me think about this. David kathleen a smithsonian anthropologist very, very famous, studied the ghost dance and he was aware of this crisis of recognition of indigenous religious practices. You know what you need to do. Youve got to become a denomination. They got together, and they created the Native American Church in order to get what we call standing in other words the right to be considered eligible for religious liberty protection. Like becoming a citizen, you have to do certain ways. And religions, you have to do certain things to be recognized and working get the benefits of american law. This gets back to your point. What that anthropologist was talking about and what the Native American Church tried to do and what the latterday saints tried to do is to meet the unwritten requirements for recognition, not so much definition in the way we would talk about in the academy, but what america is willing to recognize as eligible for the benefits of the First Amendment. Religions must obey the law. People who argue for what i would call a radical freedom like david does dont recognize that by definition religious liberty subordinates religion to the state. How could it be otherwise . Religion is subordinate to the state in the United States. They must obey american law. They must act for the common good, and they must tolerate other religions. Religions must meet that test it i would argue islam has to meet that test. I have trouble respecting an argument about sharia, i confess, and i dont see the danger in sharia that others do. I dont think we will get to that parade of horribles some people describe. Nevertheless, 21st century we are now aware of this religious force in our nation. They have been here for generations and should be recognized, as well. They will need to show that they will obey american law act for the common good, and that is being redefined into terms of secularism in the 20th. Act for the common good. Be tolerant of other religions. Dont run around cutting peoples heads off and allow them to vote. That kind of test is bubbling under the surface as we look at the question of exemptions. What kind of exemption from the common good . The law allows for exemptions. Different kinds of exemptions characterized the 20th century in american law. Supreme court has thrown up its hands and said, the exemptions are now overcoming the rule. We are going to punt too generally applicable statutes. Those three philosophical, nonlegal, informal forces are in play. Do they obey the law . Do they act for the common good . Are they good citizens, and are they tolerant . At some level, these protections are not absolute. Think of speech, for example. We are all charlie. We allow terrible cartoons terribly disrespectful cartoons of religion in this nation because we expect people in a Pluralistic Society to pull up their socks and take it. Realize what breaks your leg and what doesnt. We are going to have to decide between these claims for human dignity, which is what is at stake in many of the gay rights and religious liberty. Those are two very important principles, and we are in the process of reconciling them. To me, that is what the constitution is about. It describes a process not a result. That is why it has lasted so long. David, did you want to weigh in on that . David i think it does continue to impinge but not directly. This early period were talking about is a period of protestant, evangelical ascendancy. They were able to create a mechanism through the state and the Police Powers of the state and they subsequently lost that. They lost that in the mid20th century through a series of Supreme Court cases and the demographic transformation of the United States after 1965. Now what we are seeing is the bereavement and grief of lost. You mentioned the role of evangelicals in the rePublican Party. I see that role as essentially one of trying to use the rePublican Party to get back what theyve lost. I dont know if that will be successful. I hope its not successful because i think that would be not free enough, basically, but we still sort of working out those same kind of forces and conflicts that existed in the earlier period. Can i briefly make a comment . I will be real brief. I do want to go back and say that i think there are still a lot of issues that have to do with place and practice when it comes to religion for native americans. It reminds me of what a wellknown legal scholar and theologian used to tell people who studied native american religions or who were working on behalf of them as friends of the court. It will never work for native americans to argue based on religious freedom that every time a case has been argued based on the First Amendment theyve lost it. They have to look to other amendments or other interests of the United States in order to win their core courses court cases. For example, looking at environmental laws, water rights laws, going to issues like that even though we are not dislocating people like we did at the time of the american revolution, we still have dislocations. I think the 20th century removal of primarily navajo people from big mountain, although some hopi were relocated too, not based on religion in their arguments for the religious right to be able to access those places, didnt get them anywhere. I think the issue is so great for native peoples. I believe it was in 1978 the American Indian religious freedom act was passed to protect their rights. Obviously, someone was considering the lack of protection for native peoples under the constitution. Ok, great. Thank you so much. We are going to turn to some questions from the audience here and the audience online. I think this first one is for david. Im going to read it with exasperation because that is how its written. Why do you persist in denigrating the Founding Fathers and the bill of rights . They were trying. [laughter] i actually wrote that. I would ask you to read the whole card. Im going to take the liberty of reading it the way i read it. [indiscernible] section 16. He expressly includes [indiscernible] what do you think of that . David section 16 of the virginia bill of rights, in which he does expressly include religion, is extraordinary and also singular. That is the important thing to remember. When that was written it was remarkable in that few other states had it. In fact, many other states had the exact opposite. If you were a jew, you couldnt vote. They had questions about whether jews, turks, and infidels could be u. S. Citizens. Turks being muslims. David in a certain sense, im not criticizing the Founding Fathers, so much as i am being true to them and their accomplishments. If you sat down with many of the Founding Fathers, for example, john adams, and said, you are in favor of radical religious diversity, he would say, no, im in favor of christianity. I am in favor of massachusetts maintaining its congregationalist establishment so that everyone who is a citizen of massachusetts needs to support the congregationalist church. I think that is what they wanted , at least in some states, and that is the nature of their accomplishment. Thank you. Another question is, how did the focus on religious freedom affect other kinds of freedoms in early america . For example, freedom for women and freedom for slaves. What is the relationship between this religious history weve been telling and the social history that would head us towards gender and race questions . Kathleen i would say, very briefly, the first answer is, none, but then there is another answer thats indirect. That is to say, certainly, the history of black churches and the kind of institutional stability and identity and cultural and legal force they had as institutions was a major point of leverage for africanamerican rights in this country. You could also people have argued that the evangelization of the slave proposition population enabled them to find an expression. There were mixed messages. Nonetheless, it provided them in expression for their humanity in a deeply dehumanizing system that allowed them to experience on the psychological, human level and articulate their peer ship with their christian masters. With respect to women, the first answer holds to some extent with africanamericans. It provided a way they had to organize as the nominations. Women participated in that organization. That kind of experience and then bears fruit in seneca falls seneca falls being . Kathleen the womens rights conference. I think it gave them an identity, but it didnt directly i dont believe somebody could see it another way the law itself didnt directly relate. David i guess our disagreement extends here just a little bit. Elizabeth caddy stanton in the aftermath of the civil war briefly proposed an alliance between the Womens Movement and the free thought movement, because in her sensibility, it was the religious ideas of many of the evangelical protestants that surrounded her that was the chief impediment to women gaining rights and gaining freedom. She believes that the Womens Movement was the kind of leading edge of the d christian eyes asian dechristianization of the United States. Kathleen hence the womens bible. As for the law itself, religious liberty itself, i dont think it had an effect on the womens rights movement. How about the story that abolitionism is fueled by evangelicals who come to believe that their reading of the bible is saying, jesus is about love and we are ignoring the Old Testament . What do you david that is true, yet again there was a split in the Abolitionist Movement in 1840 in which the evangelicals withdrew from the major Abolitionist Society. The major Abolitionist Society aligned abolitionism with womens rights. Evangelicals were opposed to that alignment precisely because they thought, you are making abolition about individual rights. It is not about individual rights. It is about corporate morality. What we are trying to do is eradicate the sin of slavery. There were large sections of the Abolitionist Movement that were quite hostile to womens rights, and there were equally large sections of the Abolitionist Movement that were quicker or free thought that detested evangelicals because they thought, they just dont get the individual Rights Program of abolitionism. We will move to the easiest question of the morning. Was the United States founded as a christian nation . We are now going to settle this question once and for all. [laughter] i want to go back to the previous question if i can just for a moment. Will try to be brief on this one, too. For most native peoples who occupied the territory east of the mississippi river, they were matrilineal societies. Those women were involved in the religious lives of their communities. With the missionaries coming into the area and with government policy, i would say the women were losing rights not trying to gain rights in that time period, as the u. S. Was trying to shape them into the model southern woman, if you will, or the american woman. Its not that their practices disappeared, but they really had to go underground, which did contribute. Practices were not transmitted as easily from generation to generation. On the one hand, you do have that. What is interesting for me is that during this time per of the fighti for womens rights, what you getods american white women moving to the southwest to try to learn from pueblo women about the National Natural rights of women and to reshape the discussion east of the mississippi. David thats very interesting. Was this country founded on christian principles . To a great part, yes, i would say the United States of america was, but it was to the exclusion of the vast population of native peoples who were occupying the territory here. Although we have scholars who can talk about the influence of the iroquois people in the development of the constitution and whether that would extend to the First Amendment, im not sure. It certainly raises an interesting area of discussion. David i would say i would change the question slightly. You are not allowed to do that. [laughter] david was it founded as a christian nation describes a level of intentionality that im not sure im not sure uncomfortable with. I would rather say, it was a christian nation, and the founding of the nation did not change it as much as we might think. There were various forces that perpetuated its status as a christian nation, and that it no longer is. The fact that we have a godless constitution doesnt really matter that much to you . David doesnt matter. Kathleen i too would want to know what the question means to the questioner. I am making all kinds of assumptions. I would respond that this nation was founded with those first three words. It was specifically founded with three words we the people. Who are the people that were there in the america that came to be, including the west coast . America was founded as a people nation defined by those people are. As their definition of religion has changed, so has and constitution did not refer to a specific theistic religion. Religious values informed so much of what brought it into being, but i would say no. Its simply too narrow to think of it as a christian nation, either in what it looked like or what was on their minds. With that, we are done with this first panel. I want to thank all three of you for this fun and engaging discussion. I want to thank all of you for your questions. We are going to take a 10minute break, which will not be 11 minutes. Feel free to get up and walk around. We will be back for our second panel in 10 minutes. Thank you very much. [applause] [captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2015] [captioning performed by national captioning institute] which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. Visit ncicap. Org] you are watching American History tv. 48 hours of programming on American History every weekend on cspan3. Follow us on twitter cspanh istory for information on our schedule of upcoming programs and to keep up with the latest history news. At the International Consumer Electronics Show in las vegas earlier this year, we spoke with university of california San Francisco cardiologist dr. Michael bluhm about developments in medical technology and the future of medicine. Dr. Bluhm you have to bring together these two organizations, these two dnas and cultures to get the place where we need to meet. We are not going to invent these sensors, and we are not going to build huge databases. That is what they are going to do. They dont know anything about clinical process or about doing clinical trials, discovering what really works in biological systems. We are working on these novel partnerships, marrying the two up. Monday night at 8 00 p. M. Eastern on the comedic caters on each week, real america brings you archival films that help tell the story the 20th century. 45 years ago on a full 11, 1970 apollo 13 blasted off in what was to be the Third Mission to bring them to the moon. The crisis left the 13 astronauts stranded in space. Attempting to transit onto the moon. It is rather odd to it floating like this