Strange Gods

by Susan Jacoby

  Seton then went on to found the American Daughters of Charity as, once again, the geography of America made room for religious change. A rich seminarian and another convert to Catholicism, Samuel Sutherland Cooper, purchased land for the sisters in Frederick County, in what is now the town of Emmitsburg, in 1809. Seton founded a tuition-free school for poor girls, and the institution is generally considered the beginning of Catholic education in the United States. Seton herself is now the patron saint of Catholic schools. Ironically—in view of Seton’s descent from Huguenots—the rule for her new order was modeled after the rule for the seventeenth-century Daughters of Charity in France. Neither official biographies of Seton nor her own writings explain exactly how she reconciled motherhood with entering the convent and founding a new religious order, but most of her children would became devout Catholics. Two of her daughters, Annina and Rebecca, died young and were buried by their mother in Emmitsburg. Another daughter, Catherine, also converted to Catholicism, became a Sister of Mercy, and lived until 1891. Elizabeth’s son William had seven children, one of whom became a nun and another an archbishop. The story of how this prominent Episcopal family became a prominent Catholic family at a time of immense prejudice against the Church of Rome sounds like a television miniseries, and it is clear that the first American-born Catholic saint made as powerful an impression on her own children as she did on the religious and charitable institutions she founded.

  America had come a long way in the 172 years separating Hutchinson’s trial from Seton’s founding of a new, important religious institution. Both were affluent (in relation to the societies in which they lived), strong-minded women with energy to spare. The circumstances of Seton’s conversion were far from typically American; her immersion in a distant Italian and Catholic culture, at a time of immense emotional stress, unmoored her from the social constraints of her own society at a crucial point in her life. But even though Seton did lose her older family members and many friends as a result of her conversion, she—unlike Hutchinson—did not have to answer to any government body for her personal religious choice. She did not have to fear an inquisition or imprisonment, much less the stake. Seton’s decisions would have been much more difficult had she not been a woman of high social status, but her life as a convert—however different from the American norm—could only have taken place as it did within the American legal context, which allowed her not only to choose a new religion but to develop a productive, much-admired (if only by her new Catholic friends) life after conversion. In another country, or a century earlier, she might have had to become a martyr in order to become a saint.

  It is unlikely that Seton’s relatives and friends would have reacted any more positively had she originally been a Baptist, a Congregationalist, or a Unitarian. Catholicism meant one thing to most American Protestants, regardless of their theological differences: Catholics believed in the infallibility of a foreign pope, and that idea was inimical to the professed ideals of a newly independent republic.

  As the Catholic population began to grow in large cities in the 1820s and 1830s, anti-Catholic violence occasionally erupted and sometimes centered on suspicions of the church’s proselytizing designs on Protestants. One of the most famous of these incidents took place in Boston on August 11, 1834, when a mob of working-class Protestants burned down an Ursuline convent school that had, ironically, been attended mainly by the daughters of upper-class Protestant Bostonians. (The kind of rigorous education, including classics, provided by the nuns was not readily available for girls in Boston at the time.) Rebecca Reed, an Episcopalian, had decided to convert and become an Ursuline nun in 1832 but had left after six months and written a pamphlet, titled Six Months in a Convent, accusing the Ursulines of forcing their students into Catholicism. The veracity of this accusation seems doubtful, in view of the ease with which the young woman left the convent, but it fed into the history of Old World forced conversion embedded in the minds of most American Protestants. Rumors that another woman was being held against her will led to the burning of the convent, an act condemned by the local (then Protestant-controlled) government. The event was denounced as a “horrible outrage” in the Boston Evening Transcript the next day, and the local government stationed troops and police around several Catholic sites, including the Cathedral of the Holy Cross. However, no troops were deployed on the grounds of the burned convent, and thugs returned to finish the work of destroying the institution’s orchards, gardens, and fences.10 These events, in a city that would, only a few decades later—after the great immigration triggered by the Irish Potato Famine of the 1840s—become a center of Irish Catholic population and political power, should be viewed against the social background of the first large-scale entry of Irish immigrants into the local labor market. Nevertheless, it is significant that the fuse was lit not by a dispute over jobs but by rumors that nuns were recruiting Protestant girls and coercing them into Catholicism.

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  Other forms of conversion drew social disapproval from a class perspective entwined with anti-intellectualism. Struggling settlers on the frontier, drawn to the emotional faith purveyed by revivalists, were as appalled by conversions to more intellectual faiths like Unitarianism and Universalism as they were by the overt anticlericalism beginning to be voiced by freethinkers. Cartwright tells the story of what he considered the disastrous conversion of the former Methodist preacher Dr. Beverly Allen, with whom he had boarded during the brief period of his childhood when he learned to read. It seems that Allen had abandoned Methodism for Universalism after shooting and killing a sheriff (for reasons Cartwright leaves unexplained), because Universalism promised that all could be saved. Lo and behold, Cartwright, having undergone his own conversion and become a Methodist minister, was called to the bed of the dying Universalist. “Just before he died I asked him if he was willing to die and meet his final Judge with his Universalist sentiments,” Cartwright recounts. “He frankly said he was not. He said he could make the mercy of God cover every case in his mind but his own, but he thought there was no mercy for him; and in this state of mind he left the world, bidding his family and friends an eternal farewell, warning them not to come to that place of torment to which he felt himself eternally doomed.”11

  This story of a Universalist’s deathbed abandonment of his belief in universal salvation is a reverse twist on the many tales of atheists and freethinkers who were said to have made deathbed conversions to the religion they rejected in life. Actually, the deathbed abandonment of Universalism makes a good deal less emotional sense, since the Universalist was condemning himself, whereas a dying freethinker embracing some undefined form of faith, like Heinrich Heine, was hedging his bets. To exclude only oneself from God’s mercy is surely one of the stranger varieties of religious experience.

  Finally, nineteenth-century American attitudes toward new religions, especially if they were successful and determined proselytizers like the Mormons and the Jehovah’s Witnesses, ranged from suspicion to outright hostility and persecution. It is well known that Mormons, after Joseph Smith saw a vision in a glade in upstate New York in 1823 and received the golden plates with the Book of Mormon from the angel Moroni, were driven out of one place after another until they finally found a home in empty (except of Indians) Utah.*3 Proselytizing Jehovah’s Witnesses—their religion founded by Charles Taze Russell in 1872—were and are considered pests because they still approach people in public places as well as by ringing doorbells. The negative public view of Witnesses turned into serious persecution at the beginning of the Second World War, when their refusal to salute the flag, take oaths, or recite the Pledge of Allegiance would ultimately be vindicated in one of the most important civil liberties cases in American history, West Virginia Board of Education v. Barnette. This 1943 decision reversed a Supreme Court ruling issued only four years earlier, in which the court had upheld the right of schools to expel children who refused to recite the pledge. The earlier decision had led to the expulsion of more than
two thousand Witness children from public schools and was associated with mob violence in which Witnesses were tarred and feathered and assaulted with weapons. In Nebraska, one Witness was even castrated.

  In the Barnette decision, Justice Robert H. Jackson, who later became the lead American prosecutor at the Nuremberg war crimes trials, declared that “if there is any fixed star in our constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.”12

  The long-term hostility to the Witnesses, dating from the nineteenth century, was also partly based on class. They drew many of their converts from the poorer and less educated sectors of the population; in most communities, it was a social disgrace for a family from an accepted religious denomination to lose a relative to what was perceived to be a weird religion operating at the margins of American society. This was as true in the African American community as in predominantly white religious denominations: black Baptists were no more pleased than white Baptists when one of their own defected to this strange new millenarian sect, which promised to save only 144,000 souls.

  Mormonism seemed to be the marginalizing type of new religion at first—particularly because of its practice of polygamy—but the church showed its pragmatism by officially renouncing polygamy as a condition of Utah’s admission to the Union in 1896. Moreover, Mormons—with their American core population concentrated in Utah and Nevada—would become wealthy and politically influential as a result of generations of endogamous marriage and a culture that emphasized the importance of supporting other Mormons financially as well as socially. Although public opinion polls throughout the twentieth century showed continuing prejudice against Mormons—particularly among evangelical Protestants—surveys taken during Mitt Romney’s unsuccessful presidential race in 2012 suggested that anti-Mormon sentiments had diminished considerably. No serious political analyst thought that Romney’s religion played a significant role in his defeat by President Barack Obama.

  Given that so many American religious prejudices are class-based, the financial success of the Mormon community may have played a more important role than any other factor in diminishing feelings against a religion that is still extraordinarily secretive about its practices. Today, the official Mormon Church has more than thirteen million members worldwide—with more outside than inside the United States. Missionary service, as many Americans learned for the first time from Romney’s biography, remains part of every young Mormon man’s religious obligation, but that service almost always takes place abroad. After their controversial beginnings, Mormons did not make the mistake of the Jehovah’s Witnesses by practicing in-your-face proselytizing that offended Americans of other denominations.

  Thus, the American majority’s negative reaction to the three largest new religions founded in the nineteenth century was based not so much on arcane theological differences as on violations of widespread social norms. Regarding Mormons, the issue was polygamy. For the Witnesses, until their unwillingness to honor their country symbolically came to the fore, the issue was simply their refusal to mind their own business with regard to the religion of their neighbors. Christian Science, founded by Mary Baker Eddy in the 1870s, was something of a special case. When this religion—which rejected and still does reject contemporary science-based medicine—was founded, medicine had relatively little to offer in the way of cures. As the efficacy of medicine improved throughout the twentieth century, conversions to Christian Science began to fall. A religion that might have seemed reasonable to many people at a time when doctors knew little more than their patients about either the real causes of or remedies for disease began to look like fringe lunacy in a country and century that witnessed medical advances such as the near eradication of the scourge of polio.

  The first commandment, which emerged in the early republican era, for exercising the Constitution’s guarantee of religious liberty would seem to be: “Thou shalt not bug thy neighbors about adopting whatever loony theology thou art perfectly free to profess.” This unwritten commandment was and is a source of persistent tension within American society, since proselytizing, for many believers, is an integral part of their practice of religion. But the tension did not negate the huge difference between the young American republic and the rest of the world—a founding document mandating that citizens of the United States be allowed to follow their consciences regardless of majority opinion. That this fundamental principle has been violated many times makes it more, not less, important. The legal underpinning for the right to choose one’s faith, or no faith at all, continues to enable both the unusual American approval of religious conversion and the fierceness with which Americans sometimes turn against religions suspected of covertly or overtly undermining that freedom.

  * * *

  *1 Lincoln probably borrowed these books from a neighbor and Dartmouth College graduate, Dr. John Allen, who had moved west for health reasons and founded a debating society in New Salem for young men. At that point in Lincoln’s life, he certainly could not have afforded to order costly books from eastern publishing centers.

  *2 Felix Mendelssohn used this scene, with lyrics drawn from the King James Bible, to powerful dramatic effect in his oratorio Elijah, which had its premiere in 1846 in Birmingham, England. One can only wonder whether Heine, who mocked Mendelssohn for his role in the revival of Bach’s Christian music, would have liked Elijah any better.

  *3 The story of why no one but Smith ever actually saw Moroni’s golden plates makes for hilarious reading. When Smith dug up the golden plates in 1827, he was supposedly warned by Moroni not to let anyone else see them. He did, however, allow his mother to look at a pair of glasses with precious gems where the lenses would normally be. The purpose of the gems was to help Smith translate the Book of Mormon into English from the “reformed Egyption.” Rumors about the golden plates made their way around the community of Palmyra, and Smith and his wife eventually fled to Harmony, Pennsylvania, supposedly hiding the plates in a barrel of beans. Even Smith’s wife, Emma, never actually saw the plates—though she did take dictation of the text from her husband.

  18

  REMAKING THE PROTESTANT AMERICAN COMPACT

  IN THE EARLY REPUBLIC, the American religious marketplace consisted primarily of competitive proselytizing among various Protestant denominations—although the emporium was expanded by an infusion of Catholics after the Irish Potato Famine of the 1840s. But religious pluralism began to emerge on a much larger and more recognizably modern scale as a result of massive immigration from Europe between 1880 and 1924. During those transformative decades, the arrival of some twenty-four million immigrants—their ranks swelled by huge numbers of Slavic and southern Italian Catholics and Russian and Eastern European Jews—permanently altered the ethnic and religious composition of the United States. The American population more than doubled, from 50.1 million in the 1880 census to more than 106 million in 1920. The impact was felt most strongly in the nation’s largest cities. In New York, sixty thousand Jews made up just 4 percent of the population in 1870. By 1920, 1.64 million Jews accounted for 29 percent of city residents in the five boroughs. One-third of the nation’s Italian immigrants lived in the New York metropolitan area. The pattern was similar, in varying degrees, in all of the nation’s large cities. In Chicago, for instance, the percentage of Polish-born immigrants—both Catholic and Jewish—increased nearly sixfold between 1890 and 1920.1

  What was not understood or predicted at the time was the extent to which the new immigrants would transform the American religious landscape, not only by their sheer numbers but by the willingness of their children and grandchildren to cross religious and ethnic boundaries when they chose marriage partners. In their native lands, legally as well as culturally mandated boundaries had kept the future immigrants to America safely inside communities where, as the milkman Tevye says in Fiddler on the Roof, “everyone
knows who he is and what God expects him to do.” But these expectations, mandated by both God and God’s presumed representatives on earth, would be much less clear on the other side of the ocean.

  It is not that Americans in the early twentieth century—whether of recent immigrant stock or with roots dating from the colonial era—generally held positive views of religious conversion, or that they greeted marriages outside a family’s traditional faith with anything approaching equanimity. A century earlier, the descendants of New England Puritans had been shaken when Congregationalists morphed into Unitarians—whether because of inward changes in belief, marriage to someone of a more liberal Protestant faith, or a combination of both. A Protestant family in cosmopolitan (by the standards of much of the rest of the country) New York, as can be seen from the reaction to Elizabeth Seton’s conversion in the early nineteenth century, could be outraged by the transformation of a respectable Episcopal widow into a respectable Catholic nun. And the young nation’s older, established Protestant denominations were always uneasy about the emotions unleashed by evangelical revivalism. But conversion in the decades before the great post–Civil War influx of immigrants nearly always took place within a Protestant and Anglo-Saxon context: even when a Protestant took the unusual step of converting to Catholicism, such conversions were not numerous enough to effect any basic change in the nation’s religious and social framework. By the latter decades of the nineteenth century, however, the stage was set for conversions that would reshape the Protestant American compact.

  Consider the home life of a Prussian-born Jewish immigrant couple, Gustav and Tina Ruben Gumpel, in Bridgeport, Connecticut, in the late nineteenth century. The Gumpels had lived on Manhattan’s Lower East Side before moving to Bridgeport, where Gustav was a kosher butcher and (possibly) a rabbi.*1 Their youngest daughter, identified as Deborah on her 1887 birth certificate, converted to Catholicism in 1908 and then went on to marry a housepainter named Thomas O’Connor. The O’Connors were, by all accounts, devout Catholics, and their son, John, became a priest and, eventually, a bishop, and cardinal. When New York’s Cardinal John Joseph O’Connor died in 2000, no one, including the cardinal himself (according to surviving family members) knew that his mother had been born Jewish. O’Connor apparently did know that his mother was a convert, but, according to a spokesman for the Archdiocese of New York, he assumed that she had converted from Lutheranism. “It wasn’t a secret,” said Joseph Zwilling, communications director for the archdiocese.2 Actually, it was a secret—as much a secret as my father’s Jewish background was throughout my childhood. (Cardinal O’Connor’s idea that his mother had converted from Lutheranism is reminiscent of my father’s tale of converting to Catholicism from Episcopalianism.) In any event, the story of O’Connor’s Jewish heritage broke in the spring of 2014, when his eighty-seven-year-old sister, Mary O’Connor Ward-Donegan, wrote a personal essay for the publication Catholic New York about her mother’s family. “The basic fact is, my mother was Jewish,” she said. “That means my two brothers were Jewish, my sister was Jewish, and I am Jewish. Of that I am very proud.” (She was referring not to her faith—she is a Catholic—but to the Jewish tradition that Judaism is matrilineally transmitted.)