Bounds of Their Habitation

by Paul Harvey

  Applying that doctrine to the case at hand, they found that, since “the word ‘religion’ is not defined in the Constitution,” searchers must look elsewhere for its meaning, and particularly to the meaning the founders intended to convey. In doing so, the court noted the government position that laws were meant to govern actions and practices, “while they cannot interfere with mere religious belief and opinions, they may with practices.” Suppose, for example, that an American religion called for human sacrifice. Obviously, the government would have the right to interfere and prevent such a practice, regardless of the private beliefs of those involved. The same for a woman who desired to practice sati and throw herself on the funeral pyre of her deceased husband. Here, the court’s chosen examples, drawn from Mormonism and Hinduism, indicated how the justices conceived of religious practices outside the norm. Permitting plural marriage, they concluded, would be equivalent to making the “professed doctrines of religious belief superior to the law of the land, and in effect to permit every citizen to become a law unto himself. Government could exist only in name under such circumstances.”

  In short, the government had no business prescribing or proscribing belief, but it could regulate conduct provided that the laws were applied to all citizens equally. Much later, in the 1980s, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia employed similar reasoning in a case regarding peyote use by members of the Native American Church who were also employed by the State of Oregon (discussed further in chapter 7). The state, he said, had the right to prohibit peyote use even by card-carrying members of a church for whom that was their central sacrament, because the law was generally applicable to all and neutral in intent.

  In making its decision, the court certainly was not thinking about ring shouts among ex-slaves, or the ghost dances among Lakotas, or Mexican American Catholic festivals in the Southwest. Yet the principle it articulated defined dominant American thinking about what the boundaries of religion were. Religious belief per se could not be regulated, but social behavior and legal norms arising from those could. Religious customs were the best barometer of religious freedom. The construction of an urban bourgeois order entailed the creation and enforcement of norms of public respectability, the ways people should act in the public sphere, in ways which discouraged practices that invoked spirits. While a ritual such as the African American ring shout was not specifically forbidden by law, religious norms and denominational leaders pushed it to the outskirts of acceptable religious behavior.

  The same was the case for many customs of Latino Catholics (and, to a lesser degree, Italian Catholics), although, in their case, the home or domus-centered nature of their religions provided a natural place of refuge. In other cases, religious customs deemed threatening, particularly those of Native peoples, led to direct conflict, most famously in the Ghost Dance Tragedy at Wounded Knee in 1890 but repeated in a large number of lesser-known cases as well. In many ways, the late nineteenth century saw the apogee of the de facto Protestant establishment. Its cresting paralleled the coming of freedom for African Americans after the Civil War and the influx of Catholic and Jewish immigrants from lands both familiar and strange. The result was a period of a nascent and embattled pluralism emerging through the cracks of the de facto establishment.

  ASIAN RELIGIONS IN POST–CIVIL WAR AMERICA

  As congressional leaders debated various wordings of what became the Fourteenth Amendment, they began to grapple with what was becoming a more multicultural America. Race issues had been dominated by the struggle over slavery and the place of black people. Later in the nineteenth century, they more centrally involved Indians, Asians, and Latinos. Only admitted as a state in the Union in 1850 and before that property of Mexico and before that the Spanish Empire, Californians first defined discussions of what the place would be for nonwhite peoples in a multiracial America. In drafting the Fourteenth Amendment, Republican congressional leaders faced objections from Californians that, in trying to make citizenship more universal, they might inadvertently enfranchise or otherwise provide the benefits of being citizens to “heathen” Chinese, just then starting to arrive in sizable numbers as laborers in the West. Historically, citizenship had been restricted by race; the nation’s first citizenship law in 1790 ensured that the “free white person” was the fundamental unit defining full citizenship rights in the young Republic. Republican leaders sought to extend those benefits, and access to the franchise, to black men as well. They saw this as a fulfillment of Lincoln’s call for a “new birth of freedom.” Should the new constitutional amendments be written, or construed, too broadly, however, to all men for example, then a whole new class never envisioned by many Republicans as citizens would be empowered.

  Democratic opponents of racial equality pointed out the discrepancy in California. Republicans desired to extend suffrage to African American men but deny it to Chinese and others. John S. Hager, a future senator from the state, expressed the common view that “I believe this country of ours was destined for the Caucasian—our own white race.” He asked, “Must we not concede there are distinctions which we can neither conceal or deny?” Just as there were many houses in the Father’s mansion, so “it might also be said in our Father’s family there are many races or species of mankind. We cannot change it by legislation. . . . For man cannot cover what God has revealed.” The California legislature subsequently roundly rejected approving the Fifteenth Amendment, which prohibited restricting voting rights according to race, color, or previous condition of servitude. The Republican view, as expressed by a senator from New Jersey, was “not that a man must be a Christian to be a voter, but that it was not our duty to extend the rights of naturalization and citizenship to a pagan and heathenish class.”

  Several redrafts of the amendment later, the national Fourteenth Amendment extended citizenship rights to “all persons born or naturalized” in the United States, providing just the leeway needed to deny citizenship to those neither born here nor eligible for naturalization. Only fourteen years after the Fourteenth Amendment, Congress subsequently passed the first of several Chinese Exclusion Acts, making it more clear than ever who enjoyed the protections of U.S. citizenship. Writing for the American Home Missionary Society in 1885, the well-known minister and pioneer social gospeler Josiah Strong expressed the common view that Anglo-Saxon control of the United States was God’s will. The role of American Christians was to assimilate the feeble races of the world. This meant Christianizing immigrants in order to Americanize them and prepare Americans for the work of saving the world.

  Missionaries responded to the scientific racism of the late nineteenth century with their own language that blended and conflated conversion and assimilation. They insisted, for example, that the Chinese, with the aid of missionaries, would be assimilable. William Speer, a Presbyterian minister in San Francisco, was an early defender of the rights of Chinese immigrants, underneath the broader argument that Chinese, like all humans, could be Christianized, Americanized, and assimilated. This was a common stance of mid-nineteenth-century missionaries.

  His argument came to some grief when, in 1876, Chinese American businessmen brought to the city Fung Chee Pang, who drew crowds to his lecture on Confucianism. The San Francisco Chronicle warned the missionaries and defenders of immigrants against turning over the West Coast to the “dominion of the worst form of paganism in the attempt to convert an inconsiderable few of the benighted heathen to the gospel of Christ.” An account of the conversation with Pang parodied the Emerson and Thoreau school of interpretation: “Talk no more of ‘feasts of reason’ and a corresponding ‘flow of soul,’ but wrestle with the history, the doctrines, the sayings of the grim old Confucius,” the paper wrote, introducing an extended discussion of the “beatitude of Mongolian classics, ethics, morality, and religion.” By the late 1870s, the formerly strong mainstream Protestant position in favor of immigration came under sustained and successful attack. Pro-immigration ministers came to be seen as those who would “Mongolize the la
nd in a vain missionary effort to bring the Chinaman to a knowledge of the true God.” Disputing the part of the verse of Acts 17:26 which said that God had made of one blood all nations, critics suggested that “it is the economy of Providence that man shall exist in nationalities, and that they shall be divided by the antipathies of race.”

  By the 1870s, ministers increasingly swam with the growing tide of anti-Chinese sentiment. Some argued that God had protected America for its experiment in liberty. That opportunity was not to be wasted by old evils, idolatry, immorality, and clannishness that came with equal immigration. Chinese immigration was “exposing our whole country and its policy to volcanic eruptions of heathen hosts and abominations.” Already “reeling under the burden and force of European debasement,” would America now fall under that from Asia? By protecting California, those espousing immigration restriction were also protecting America from an unassimilable heathenism.

  Chinese Americans converted by missionaries and Protestants working on the West Coast continued to offer arguments based on the possibilities for Christianization, Americanization, and assimilation. Born in 1849, Jee Gam made his way to the West Coast in 1863, where he settled in the Bay Area. As a young man, he began working as a house servant to a Congregationalist minister in Oakland; Jee Gam himself converted and by 1870 began working to distribute Bibles to the Chinese settled in the Bay Area. He became a member of the First Congregationalist Church of Oakland. He later was ordained as a Congregationalist minister himself, and he used his position to advance his concepts of Christianity, civilization, and Chinese American political and social rights.

  Portrait of Congregationalist Jee Gam

  Source: N. R. Johnston’s Looking Back from the Sunset Land, 1898.

  Given the emphasis of white Americans on denying citizenship and basic rights (including voting and testifying in court against whites) to Chinese Americans based on racial and religious arguments, Jee Gam countered with his own life and message as an example of the universalism of Christianity. Speaking out against the Geary Act of 1892, which extended the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 for another decade and required all Chinese to register or be deported after one year, Jee Gam proclaimed that “I am not any less Chinese for being a follower of Christ,” for “my love to Jesus has intensified rather than belittled my love for my native country.” But by the 1890s, having spent thirty years in the United States, he felt himself an American first. He called Chinese exclusion “un-American, barbarous and inhuman. It is unchristian, for it is contrary to the teaching of Christ.” Gam was proud of his sons and daughters; he taught them American patriotism. Thus, it was all the more painful to see unjust and discriminatory laws such as the Geary Act, one which “dishonors America as well as injures my countrymen and native land.” The Act withdrew “sacred rights” such as those found in the Declaration of Independence, by specifically requiring of the Chinese measures required of no other nationality in the United States. For Jee Gam, Christianity was inclusive of all: “The beggar can have it as well as the king. The poor can have it as well as the rich; and the negro, the Indian and the Chinaman.”

  Others joined Jee Gam in joining their Christianity to political activism, particularly in condemning anti-Chinese sentiment and legislation. Chan Hon Fan, head of a Methodist mission to the Chinese in Portland, attacked local white clergyman for their racist sentiments, saying that they had “become great stumbling blocks before a race of benighted souls whom Jesus came to save.” Others reminded white Protestants of a basic rationale: converting Chinese in the United States would build up a ready-made mission force to return to China with the word. Ultimately, the arguments failed to persuade a broader public fearful of the consequences of Asian immigration, intent on protecting labor rights for white men, and concerned for the Christian future of America’s soul.

  INDIAN RACE AND CITIZENSHIP IN THE ERA OF THE DAWES ACT

  The same impulse that drove abolitionism and egalitarian ideals of citizenship after the war fed directly into Indian policy. The result, however, was social policy with catastrophic consequences, intended and unintended.

  With the end of the Civil War, northerners grew fascinated by the drama of cowboys, Indians, and expansion into lands controlled by “wild” Indian tribes. Missionaries, philanthropists, and legislators bought into the motto: “kill the Indian, save the man.” Jesus in this environment became an agent of imperialism. Soldiers, missionaries, and politicians teamed up to take land, but give Native Americans in return the white Jesus. They were to lose their old souls and replace them with those of the Christian citizen. As the American Missionary Association’s Charles W. Shelton put it, “The Indian must go down. Extermination or annihilation is the only possible solution of the question. . . . You can send to the Indian the rifle and exterminate him in this way . . . or we can send to the Indian the gospel of Christ, this great power of civilization, and through its influence exterminate the savage, but save the man.”

  Members of the Indian Rights Association, founded in 1882 by white proponents of civilizing “the Indian,” thought it impossible for the Indian as a tribal member to survive the “aggressions of civilization.” But, they suggested, his “individual redemption from heathenism and ignorance, his transformation from the condition of a savage nomad to that of an industrious American citizen, is abundantly possible.” Since Christ touched the individual, he could refashion souls and citizenship at once. As one leader claimed in 1893, Indians could only be “redeemed from evil” by breaking up the “mass” and as “we get at them one by one, as we break up these iniquitous masses of savagery, as we draw them out from their old associations and immerse them in the strong currents of Christian life and Christian citizenship, and as we send the sanctifying stream of Christian life and Christian work among them, they feed the pulsing life-tide of Christ’s life.”

  The Dawes Act of 1887 was the critical instrument of breaking up tribal lands and ways and replacing them with an American Christian individualism. Written by Massachusetts Senator Henry Dawes, the act divided tribal lands into individual “allotments.” Male heads of families received 120 acres and sales of leftover “surplus” lands funded Indian boarding schools. The best known of these schools, such as Carlisle and Pratt, uprooted Native children from widely scattered locales. Often wrested forcibly from their families, the children were punished in the schools for “talking Indian,” dressing in traditional clothes, or engaging in “heathenish” practices. The Dawes Act was the legislative culmination of a lengthy discussion about how to implement the philosophy of kill the Indian, save the man. And notably, the act emerged from the same kind of idealistic impulses that had shaped policies of education and citizenship during the Reconstruction. Like the freedman, the Indian could become a citizen; both were members of child races who could be instructed to grow into full adulthood, so the reasoning went.

  In the final decades of the nineteenth century, a new messianic challenge emerged to the implementation of such measures of assimilation and Christianization: the ghost dance. It promised salvation for Indian peoples stripped of lands and traditional practices. Its visionaries prophesied the return of the buffalo and the punishment of whites for their sins. The modern dances originated among the Bannock and Shoshones in southern Idaho, found their way to Nevada by the 1870s, and became a deep part of Indian life among a variety of groups in the Rocky Mountains and upper plains.

  The Paiute Prophet Wovoka became its most spectacular representative, and his religious innovations reflected his mixed cultural and racial heritage. Wovoka’s Paiute father died when he was a teenager. He then was raised by David Wilson, a white farmer, in Nevada. He took the name Jack Wilson. In the late 1880s, suffering from illness and despair, he experienced a series of transformative visions. He took from his native background ideas about controlling the weather, beliefs in dreams and visions, and practices of ritualistic dances. From his white father’s Presbyterianism, Wovoka drew resurrection images of the dead i
n heaven and the leading role of a charismatic preacher figure.

  In January 1889, near to the time of a solar eclipse, Jack Wilson/Wovoka had a near-death experience and a new revelation. Soon, Wovoka came to be seen as, one white testified, “a Simon pure, yard wide, all wool Christ . . . who advised peace and performed miracles which made all people feel good.” Ethnologists of the age saw him as fitting the Plains Indians idea of waneika, a Christ “returned to Earth to benefit Native Americans and to punish whites on a second sacrificial go-around.” Wovoka rejected direct connections of himself to “the Messiah.” Yet on a photograph of himself taken in 1917, he wrote, “I am the only living Jesus there is. Signed, Jack Wilson.” Wovoka claimed the mantle of a prophet preaching the rituals necessary for pan-Indian renewal. One Western agent explained, “He tells them he has been to heaven and that the Messiah is coming to earth again and will put the Indians in possession of the country.”