Religion and American foreign policy: the story of a complex relationship.

• Author: Ribuffo, Leo

Congressional consideration of the Freedom from Religious Persecution bill introduced by Representative Frank Wolf and Senator Arlen Specter has precipitated a small-scale debate about a little-studied subject: the connection between American religion and foreign relations. If passed, the Wolf-Specter bill will establish an office in the State Department to monitor religious persecution and withdraw "non-humanitarian" aid from countries that fail to meet our standards.(1) Even in the absence of such an office, many Americans have always been concerned about religious freedom abroad and the State Department has intermittently protested persecution since the early days of the republic. The debate on the bill would be enhanced by a historical perspective.

The historical connection between American religion and foreign relations may be explored on four levels. First, to what extent and in what ways have religious beliefs contributed to the widely shared but amorphous assumption that the United States is an exceptional nation with a unique role in the world? Second, to what extent have religious "interest groups" at home and religious issues abroad influenced government foreign policies? Third, to what extent and in what ways have serious religious ideas - including esoteric theological doctrines - affected those interest groups, as well as important international relations theorists and policymakers? Finally, to what extent have foreign involvements affected the domestic religious scene?

Not the least of our conceptual problems is that everyone involved in the contemporary "culture war" homogenizes this country's religious history in one way or another. Whereas the Left tends to view white Protestants as an undifferentiated mass, the center and Right optimistically postulate an ecumenical "Judeo-Christian tradition." That term itself only began to enter our lexicon in the 1940s, when many citizens still routinely referred to "Christian Americanism" or even "Protestant Americanism." Similarly, the label "fundamentalist", now applied promiscuously to groups from Tulsa to Tehran, was coined by a Baptist editor in 1920 to describe one branch of theologically conservative Protestantism.(2)

Although two recent presidents, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, liked to underscore American uniqueness by citing Puritan John Winthrop's admonition to build a "city upon a hill", the relationship between Reformation-era Protestantism and the American sense of mission has never been simple.(3) Almost all white residents of the thirteen colonies on the eve of independence thought Protestantism superior to Catholicism. Even so, Congregationalists and Quakers defined their respective worldly missions very differently. The large German pietist population paid slight attention to inspiring the wider world. Instead of salvation, a small Enlightenment elite spoke of "virtue" in an idiom both cosmopolitan and classical. Especially in these circles, there were doubts as well as hopes concerning the success of the American experiment in republican government. Perhaps most important, from the outset some Americans defined their country's international mission as that of leading the world by moral example, while others favored direct intervention to spread virtuous American ways.

The actions of what we now call religious interest groups can be deemed legitimate by reason of longevity. They were involved in the first and foremost foreign policy decision, whether or not to create an independent country. The rebellious colonists seriously though mistakenly believed that the British planned to reduce them to "slavery", and one sure sign of this for Congregationalists and Presbyterians was the lingering threat of a resident Anglican bishop. From the Quebec Act of 1774, which granted special privileges to French Canadian Catholics, the heirs to Puritanism and the first Great Awakening inferred that the tyrannical Crown was consorting with tyrannical popery. Quakers and Mennonites who refused to serve in the army were subject to fines, confiscation of property, and imprisonment.(4) At the same time, most of the 25,000 Catholics in the thirteen colonies supported independence because they thought, quite rightly as things turned out, that the new republic would grant them greater rights.

The victorious revolutionary coalition began to crack almost immediately. Some of the fissures occurred along religious lines. An incongruous alliance of deists and dissident Protestants ensured that there would be no religious test for federal office and began the process of disestablishing state churches (a process that continued until the 1830s). By the 1790s, no more than 10 percent of the population formally belonged to churches.(5)

Disagreements about both religion and foreign affairs shaped the first party system in the 1790s. The Jeffersonian Republicans, the ancestors of the Democrats, were religiously more diverse, tolerant, and (in terms of government policy) neutral than the Federalists. These sins were compounded by the Jeffersonian tilt toward revolutionary France and against Great Britain, a country the Federalists admired for attempting to spread pure - that is, Protestant - Christianity around the world. These issues came to a head when the United States and Britain went to war in 1812.

The causes of the war, which are still hard to rank in order of importance, were essentially secular and psychological: free trade in wartime, British impressment of American sailors, and a craving for territory in the West. Once the conflict began, however, rival religious factions offered their own distinctive interpretations of events. Federalist Congregationalists and Presbyterians reiterated their admiration for British Protestantism, damned Napoleon as an autocratic ally of Pope Plus VI, and characterized impressed sailors as runaway Irish Catholics unworthy of sympathy. Even President James Madison's proclamations of national fast days were deemed theologically deficient because he recommended but did not require participation. Pro-war Baptists and Methodism denounced the autocratic Church of England, hailed Madison as a friend of religious liberty, and noted that the Pope was allied with Britain and imprisoned by Napoleon. Although no Protestant spoke well of the Pope, there were few denunciations of American Catholics, in part because they already served disproportionately in the armed forces.(6)

These political and religious battles occurred within a larger consensus of opinion that the United States should expand its territory, trade, and power. In his patriotic American Geography, published in 1789, Rev. Jedidiah Morse looked forward to the "largest empire that ever existed [including] millions of souls . . . West of the Mississippi." Even before that, Rev. Ezra Stiles said in 1783 that the example of the United States would spread the "empire of reason" and thus hasten the establishment of God's kingdom on earth. George Washington, less conventionally devout than these Congregationalists, had the precedent of ancient Rome in mind when he predicted that the American "infant empire" would soon grow and mature.(7)

Manifest Destiny

Although the war of 1812 ended in a draw, and the British burning of the White House might have given pause, Americans came out of the conflict with a heightened sense of mission. Between 1810 and the 1850s, most wanted to expand the country's boundaries. With the exception of Quakers, Mennonites, and some Unitarians, they expressed few qualms about using force to do so.

The Democratic publisher and diplomat John O'Sullivan caught the prevailing mood when he coined a famous phrase in 1845. The American claim to Oregon was "by right of our manifest destiny to overspread and possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us for the great experiment of liberative and federative self-government entrusted to us." "Manifest destiny" coincided with a second Great Awakening that energized Protestantism, precipitated numerous theological disputes, and produced new faiths such as Seventh-Day Adventism and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Yet theology per se had slight impact on the expansionist consensus. As O'Sullivan's declaration suggests, the rhetoric of manifest destiny exuded more Enlightenment republicanism than sectarianism. Claims to the continent were based on what historian Norman Graebner calls "geographic predestination." Within the expansionist consensus, debate centered on geopolitical and racial questions. Did the Rocky Mountains or the Pacific Ocean represent the "natural limits" of the United States? Would the great bay at San Francisco facilitate trade with Asia? Would Canada ultimately throw off British "slavery" and join the United States? Could the republic absorb the "mongrel race" of Mexicans? And most important, would the new territory be slave or free soil?(8)

Yet religious concerns related to foreign policy remained. In addition to the second Great Awakening, the pre-Civil War expansion coincided with a surge of non-Protestant immigration, a strong nativist response, and the creation of a second party system that arrayed Jacksonian Democrats against the culturally more conservative Whigs. In this context, Democratic expansionists attributed manifest destiny to an ecumenical Providence partly because the bulk of Catholic and Jewish immigrants supported their party. On the other hand, the prominent Whig nativist, Rev. Lyman Beecher, issued a famous "plea" to save the American West from the "slavery and debasement" of Catholicism. Despite nativist fears that they would aid the papist enemy, Catholic soldiers, including at least two generals, helped to defeat Mexico in the 1840s. Democratic President Franklin Pierce considered establishing diplomatic relations with the Papal States. Unfortunately, Archbishop Gaetano Bedini, sent by the Pope to discuss the issue, was driven...