CHAPTER FIVE

Stumbling toward Secularism

The Supreme Court’s decisions, in the short term, left many people uncertain. Protestants were especially torn, not because they did not understand the cases but because they could not quite figure out their proper political response. The United States had historically had a Protestant cast to public life. Protestant cultural influence was so great that, as late as 1942, Franklin Roosevelt could say to two advisors, without any sense of shame, that Catholics and Jews lived in the United States only “under sufferance.” The fact that one of the advisors was Catholic and the other was Jewish suggested that Roosevelt thought he was simply articulating an obvious truth.¹

If Protestant religious leaders did not go quite that far, at least not publicly, that was because they had begun to sense their own weakness. Starting in the late-nineteenth century some Protestant modernizers had begun to undertake a series of strategic shifts. The first was a modification of their belief, adapting Christian dogma to the discoveries of science and the historical study of the Bible. These discoveries challenged past beliefs, rendering many specific dogmas untenable and systematically undermining components of Christian doctrine. But because theologians had long acknowledged that an infinite God used metaphor to appear before finite human beings, the challenge left Protestant modernizers only momentarily troubled. God spoke in the Bible in a way that was inexact but keyed to the understanding of the people of the time, they believed. Now that human understanding had changed, the task of theology was to extract the timeless universals from the historical particulars. The obsolete specifics were the accidents of history that did not affect the timeless core of revelation that remained.²

The reconsideration of their doctrine allowed for other shifts, especially a new attempt to make peace with religious diversity. To some extent that meant making their peace with the American religious scene. There had long been a centrifugal force within American spirituality that produced a bewildering congeries of new religious forms. Universalists, Ethical Culturists, Theosophists, Spiritualists, New Thought proponents, Vedantists and other converted Hindus, Buddhists, Quakers of both traditional and Hicksite persuasions, apocalyptic sects such as the Jehovah’s Witnesses—all proliferated in a wildly chaotic religious arena. By the end of the nineteenth century Protestant missionaries had begun to bring back a changed outlook on foreign peoples, offering a perspective at once deeply sympathetic to other cultures and deeply conflicted about the program of Christian civilization at the heart of the missionary enterprise. Other Protestant leaders began to wrestle with an awareness of the world’s religions generated by comparative religion scholars and by events like the World’s Parliament of Religions at the Columbia Exposition in 1893.³

The challenges grew more acute with a demographic transformation of American society that began after the Civil War. The nation had begun to diversify to the point that Protestant Christianity could not simply presume a custodial relationship over American culture and values, Roosevelt’s comments to the contrary. Both Catholics and Jews, who had been in the country from the beginning, began to increase their presence through immigration. Catholics began their first mass migration in the 1840s, fleeing first poverty and then starvation as a result of the Irish potato famine. After the Civil War the migration continued in even larger numbers, with Jews joining Catholics in what historians now call the New Immigration. By the 1890s Jews would constitute a sizable force in American cities, and Catholicism would become the largest single denomination in the United States.⁴

In response, some Protestant modernizers turned to social science in order to reconstruct their own faith. They drew on the emergent field of psychology to reimagine the urgent existential and emotional function that religion served. Because religion was supposed to meet a stable set of human needs, psychologists like the early William James, Edward Diller Starbuck, and George Albert Coe thought that religion emerged in a predictable way across societies. That predictability affirmed the necessity of religion to all civilizations across time and space, even if the specific tenets of religion needed to be reconstructed in the modern era.⁵

Protestant ecumenicals soon began to reach out to modernizers within both Catholicism and Judaism, recognizing people they considered allies in the ongoing effort to reconstruct religion. The resulting liberal alliance affirmed the universal brotherhood of man under the fatherhood of God as the essential religious creed. It worked outside the specific confines of one denomination or religious tradition to find a universal religious sensibility that could serve as a more authoritative basis for their influence on American society. The efforts diluted a specifically Protestant message while attempting to preserve a religious one.⁶

Not everyone made the ecumenical turn. Protestant denominations began to fracture. Fundamentalists, as they called themselves, objected to the liberalizing movement within Protestantism and wanted to hold onto their preeminent place in American life. When they failed to move their colleagues they began to leave the major denominations in the 1920s to start their own organizations, schools, and civil society groups. They would reemerge in the 1940s calling themselves evangelicals.⁷

The split left liberal Protestants even more organizationally compromised, though it also reinforced the tendency to ecumenicism. Having purged the fundamentalists from mainstream Protestant leadership, the big Protestant denominations soon pursued even wider alliances. By the 1930s they brought Catholics and Jews into national power through Roosevelt’s New Deal coalition. They welcomed them to cultural influence under the banner of Judeo-Christianity, a relatively new term that had gained salience in the ecumenical movement. After the Second World War and the traumas of fascism the Protestant ecumenical leadership went still further, seeing in the horrors of the war the necessity of forging pan-religious alliances to create a better world. Their impulse, as the intellectual historian David A. Hollinger has put it, was “to include everyone—all human souls—into a single community of love.”⁸

Yet there were limits to their embrace of diversity. Liberal Protestants worried about the status of religion in American society. The secularization of American life—or the advancement of what Lyman Beecher had called “political atheism”—was not the goal of many Protestant leaders. According to Beecher, if a person assumed that God existed, that God established norms, and that human law was built to enforce those norms certain things followed. The crucial thing was that American politics, culture, and society needed to recognize God’s law and needed to enforce that law. If someone did not recognize the dominion of God in political affairs, Beecher had said, they were guilty of political atheism.⁹

By the 1940s Protestant liberals disagreed with the specifics of Beecher’s theology—strongly so. But they agreed with him that God and religion were the ultimate ground for human society and that religious authority was a necessary component of social cohesion. That made them resist the actions of the court. They sensed that secularization did not require the absolute abandonment of religious belief or adherence, something that contemporary sociologists have more recently pointed out. It involved, more fundamentally, an abandonment of the public authority and social significance of religion. Many people might still believe, but if that belief was not relevant to culture and politics then a secular society could be the only result. As the court encountered the variety and incompatibility of religious authorities within the United States, Protestant leaders began to fret that the justices would seek to constrict the public relevance of religious ideas and thereby render their authority irrelevant to the wider culture.¹⁰

As Charles Clayton Morrison, the editor of Christian Century, put it, the court had adopted a theory of neutrality toward religion that threatened, in effect, to neutralize the cultural power of religious ideals. In that way the court’s supposed evenhandedness toward religion was not what it professed to be. “It is positive,” Morrison explained. “It takes the form of secularism which, when not overtly hostile to religion, is ignorant of it and indifferent to it.”¹¹

In fact, Morrison was wrong. Felix Frankfurter and others in the minority had articulated a positive secularism, but they had not prevailed. The majority of the court articulated, through Robert H. Jackson, a negative secularism or, through Harlan Stone and William O. Douglas, a solicitousness toward public religion in a variety of forms. Yet it was an indication of the softness of Protestant power that someone like Morrison would see the erosion of Protestant cultural authority, articulated by the court, as a creeping toward established unbelief.

Other groups saw the dynamic more clearly. The court’s recognition of the diversity of American religion opened up space for religious groups that had been subsumed under Protestant dominance of public life. The obvious potential benefactor was the Roman Catholic Church.

Catholics had long objected to the Protestant cast of public life and had held themselves aloof from what they considered Protestant political institutions. Their suspicion started with the public school. Dating back to the beginning of the public-school system in the 1830s, religious exercises had been an essential component of the day-to-day life of the curriculum. Because the development of the American school system had overlapped with the evangelical awakening, state curricula tended to infuse a basically Protestant ethos into the students as part of their educational goals. Daily religious exercises included Bible reading, recitation of the Ten Commandments, teacher-led prayers, and recitation of the Lord’s Prayer. These religious practices were ostensibly nonsectarian, but in reality they were thoroughly Protestant.¹²

Catholics accordingly had a long list of grievances with the schools. A Catholic did not often read the Bible individually and did not partake in many religious practices outside the priestly mediation of the church. But the schools circumvented Catholic religious authority and assumed the priesthood of all believers, a Protestant concept. The schools also used the Protestant King James Bible rather than the Catholic Douay Bible. They recited the Protestant version of the Ten Commandments, which had a prohibition against graven images that tended to challenge Catholic devotional practices and the cult of the saints. Schools also used the Protestant form of the Lord’s Prayer, which included a final line not usually included in the Catholic one that ascribed kingship and rule to God alone, implicitly undermining the papacy.¹³

The Catholic hierarchy sought various solutions to the problem of Protestant practices. At a minimum it wanted separate devotional services, led by a Catholic priest. Better yet, it wanted the public-school fund divided in order to use a portion to support separate Catholic schools. In 1866 Catholic bishops gathered at the Second Plenary Council of Baltimore, one of the three national meetings of American bishops in the nineteenth century. The Catholic leadership was growing irate and issued a decree condemning public schools. A Catholic child attending such a school risked, they said, “great danger to faith and morals.” The schools promoted, they said, “either a false religion or none at all.”¹⁴

But Catholic leaders were stymied in their efforts. Bitter disagreement and antagonism soon followed. Philadelphia, Boston, and Cincinnati became sites of social conflict. Some of the disputes involved rioting and violence. Catholics were often left unsatisfied or in a worse situation than before. The Catholic hierarchy became convinced that their only option was to withdraw from the public schools. So in 1884, at the Third Plenary Council of Baltimore, the American bishops decided to build a separate Catholic parochial school system. Every parish was required to have a school within two years. All Catholic parents were instructed to send their child to a Catholic school.¹⁵

The commitment to Catholic separatism and conservatism only grew from there. In 1895 Pope Leo XIII released an encyclical on Catholicism in the United States that summarized the main components of the hierarchy’s position. The encyclical rejected church–state separation and noted that any government that endorsed separation was an inferior form of government, even if Catholicism flourished under such a system. Leo warned American Catholics against associating with non-Catholics. And he urged American Catholics to aid the United States by bringing the nation into submission to the church.¹⁶

Leo’s papacy inaugurated a conservative entrenchment in Catholic doctrinal development that rejected any concession to the modern world. In 1907, Pope Pius X extended the barricades. He issued an encyclical denouncing those within the church who sought to update doctrine. These “partisans of error,” who often took their cues from Protestants, were abandoning church teaching under the banner of modernism. To Pius, modernism was flawed in so many ways that it contained a “synthesis of all heresies.” The best that could be done was to resist the modernist trend in contemporary life while upholding spiritual purity and separation. In 1928 Pope Pius XI issued another pronouncement that again denounced religious interaction between Catholics and Protestants as contrary to the supremacy of the church. American bishops applied these rules by prohibiting Catholic parishioners or priests from engaging in goodwill efforts or ecumenical initiatives.¹⁷

By the 1930s, after a round of canon law codification, the impulse toward purity and authority had absolutely triumphed within the church. In the hierarchy’s conception all teaching authority flowed from the Roman pontiff. The hierarchy claimed a sweeping control over the lives of its parishioners and, in principle, over every living person on earth. Catholic law commanded that the faithful not enter into dispute or conference with non-Catholics without permission from the Holy See. It required that children attend schools where nothing contrary to Catholic doctrine was taught. It assumed the right to remove teachers and books from those schools and the right to forbid the faithful to read books. It commanded Catholics to avoid publishing in papers and magazines that were contrary to the Catholic faith. And it set up the church as the sole arbiter of truth in public life, whether a person was Catholic or non-Catholic. To that end, the hierarchy declared it had the power to censor or to prohibit the publication of books, movies, or other media that defended heresy or schism, that undermined morals, that ridiculed the Church, that weakened Catholic discipline, or that defended other sects.¹⁸

In that way the Catholic church worked in two ways at once. It required Catholics to hold themselves apart while at the same time it announced a public authority over everyone.

This conception of Catholic public authority led to far-reaching changes in American life. The most successful was the Motion Picture Production Code in 1930, which applied a rigid standard of public morality to the movies. The League of Decency, which used Catholic parishes as an organizing platform to pressure studios into adopting the code, produced a template for other forms of political action. Soon another Catholic group, the National Organization for Decent Literature, sought to censor print material that Catholics found problematic. Catholic groups were also successful in outlawing birth control in Connecticut and elsewhere during the same period.¹⁹

If anyone wondered where all of this was going, the hierarchy was clear. The goal was to bring about the cooperation between church and state in all the nations of the world. To that end the church signed concordats, or treaties of mutual recognition, with Mussolini’s Italy, Franco’s Spain, and Hitler’s Germany. In the United States, American bishops professed open regard for fascist regimes because they offered special privileges to the Catholic church. Although many of these voices would, after the war, express regret for their support of fascism, they did not recant their political rationale or their overall theological commitments. Italy, Spain, and Germany offered a step toward the final goal, or what Father John A. Ryan called the normal relation between church and state. This normal relation was, he explained, “the union of Church and State,” with the Catholic church overseeing many aspects of public life. Catholics needed to hold themselves separate and apart and therefore pure, awaiting the normal relation to come into effect.²⁰

Unlike Protestants, in other words, Catholics by the 1940s were feeling emboldened and optimistic about their political power. They began to press legislatures to pass laws aiding Catholic education. Partly these laws were a recognition of how large the Catholic school system had become and how difficult it was for the church to support all its children. For much of its existence the system had been possible because priests and nuns administered the instruction. But by the 1940s they faced a squeeze. There were not enough priests or nuns available, which meant that the schools had to hire lay teachers, who were far more expensive. At the same time, the schools were growing rapidly as more children were born and enrolled. In a number of states the Catholic church lobbied legislators to subsidize aspects of the Catholic school system in order to mitigate the financial burden.²¹

It did so on the basis of what became known as the child-benefit theory. The general idea was that these children were as much a part of society as those who attended public school. If the state paid for, say, textbooks or transportation or even salaries for teachers who covered non-religious subjects, then that public support could be said to benefit the child rather than the school. The purposes of education could be preserved without violating the conscience or the free exercise of Catholic citizens.²²

Their argument was persuasive to many in those states with large numbers of Catholics. By 1946 seventeen states and the District of Columbia had passed bills to subsidize public transportation to private schools. The laws overwhelmingly aided Catholic schools.²³

Protestants were alarmed with the development. When combined with the decisions of the court, they began to feel pinched between an encroaching secularism on the one side and an emboldened Catholicism on the other. The pages of Protestant journals became filled with hand-wringing about the appropriate response.²⁴

But Protestants were not alone in their suspicion of Catholic activism. Many intellectuals, of both post-Protestant and post-Judaic varieties, saw Catholicism’s increased public presence as a threat to American freedom. The educational theorist and liberal pragmatist John Dewey thought the public subsidy of Catholic schools risked the public-school system and might lead the United States back, in his words, through “centuries of systematic stultification of the human mind and human personality.” Horace Kallen, the Jewish theorist of cultural pluralism, pled with Catholics to reject, as he put it, the “separatist pull” that led them apart from their “non-Catholic neighbor.” The Catholic separatist impulse, he said, aroused doubts in many people about Catholic loyalty to a pluralist democracy. Their shared suspicions about Catholics led Protestants, post-Protestants, and post-Judaic Jews into a loose, sometimes uncomfortable, alliance.²⁵

All of these developments fed into the court, just as Frankfurter had predicted. Because of the court’s earlier decisions it found itself embroiled in a bitter policy dispute that took on increasingly overt constitutional overtones. It also pulled other groups into the conflict through a transformation of court practice.

The change had to do with amicus curiae, or friend of the court, briefs. Before the 1940s the parties in a legal dispute filed briefs before the court prior to oral argument. The idea was to lay out the issues in a written form that the court could later tease out in person. Occasionally other parties also filed briefs that, in a friendly help to the court, sought to offer a more comprehensive view of the issues. Advocacy was generally frowned upon unless someone was a party to the dispute. But faced with cases that involved large policy questions, groups by the 1940s began to take amicus briefs and turn them into a mechanism of political and legal activism. That made the amicus brief into an instrument of access in a quasi-political process and left the court sorting through serious group conflicts that were normally handled in the political arena.²⁶

The first of many disputes began in New Jersey after that state passed a law allowing parents to be reimbursed for public transportation to private schools. As in other states, 96 percent of schools that benefited from the law were Catholic. A suit by Arch R. Everson, a taxpayer in Ewing, New Jersey, alleged that the law violated the First Amendment’s provision that Congress could establish no religion.

The Catholic hierarchy responded immediately to the challenge. As the case made its way through the court system, Francis Cardinal Spellman of New York and Samuel Cardinal Stritch of Chicago committed church resources to help the Ewing School Board defend its position. By the time the case made it to the Supreme Court, the National Catholic Welfare Council had submitted an amicus brief written primarily by the Jesuit priest John Courtney Murray. The brief emphasized the public rather than the sectarian purpose of what Murray called nonprofit, private schools. It also reminded the justices that the First Amendment protected religion, which was what the New Jersey bill did, rather than public secularism. On those grounds, the arrangement ought to be upheld.²⁷

In an opinion that satisfied no one, the court ruled in a five-person majority that the New Jersey law could stand. The opinion, written by Hugo Black, loudly proclaimed a theory of church–state separation that, critics thought, it violated in upholding the law. Black’s ruling read like a history lesson. It offered a tale of persecution that began in Europe, continued in the colonial era of the United States, moved through Madison’s Memorial and Remonstrance, and culminated in the First Amendment as the American solution to the religious conflict that had long plagued Europe. Along the way Black explicitly incorporated the establishment clause of the First Amendment into the Fourteenth, which the court had implicitly done in Cantwell. He acknowledged that the Constitution prohibited all aid to religion, even on a nonpreferential basis. “The First Amendment has erected a wall between church and state,” he wrote. “That wall must be kept high and impregnable. We could not approve the slightest breach.” But in spite of the strident rhetoric, Black swerved in the end to rule that the New Jersey scheme was perfectly permissible. It aided the family rather than the church, and even if it indirectly aided the church it did so only in an attempt to benefit the child in his secular education.²⁸

Writing in a dissent joined by Frankfurter, Jackson, and Burton, Wiley Rutledge noted that the majority’s position made no sense. He agreed with the majority’s declaration of church–state separation and its application of the establishment clause to the states. He concurred that a state could not support religion. But he thought those two principles required striking down the law. The reason was simple logic. According to Rutledge, the child-benefit theory was self-contradictory when paired with Catholic doctrine. Catholics thought, in Rutledge’s explanation, “that the basic purpose of all education is or should be religious, that the secular cannot be and should not be separated from the religious phase and emphasis. Hence the inadequacy of public or secular education and the necessity for sending the child to a school where religion is taught.” Yet in order to uphold the law, the majority had to look past the official justification for Catholic schools while allowing taxpayer support for a basic educational expense that these schools incurred. The series of evasions required to pull that off were, to the minority, unpersuasive.²⁹

Robert H. Jackson, in an opinion joined by Felix Frankfurter, piled on. In the process, he betrayed his own anti-Catholicism. The issue in the case, according to Jackson, was the alien nature of Catholic doctrine to American democracy, which the public-school system sought to support. “Our public school, if not a product of Protestantism, at least is more consistent with it than with the Catholic culture and scheme of values,” Jackson wrote. “It is organized on the premise that secular education can be isolated from all religious teaching, so that the school can inculcate all needed temporal knowledge and also maintain a strict and lofty neutrality as to religion.”³⁰

The public’s response to the court’s decision demonstrated the bitterness to come. Protestants immediately decried the ruling. It seemed part of a wider wedge strategy pursued by the hierarchy. The Catholic church started small by asking the state to subsidize books or transportation. Once the public became used to that idea, Protestants alleged, larger things would follow. Soon the public would be subsidizing the entirety of the parochial school system.

The Council of Bishops of the Methodist Church, the largest Protestant body in the United States, issued a statement expressing support for church–state separation and denouncing the Catholic position. The bishops referenced the church’s political activities around the world, especially in Argentina, Italy, and Spain. They observed that in countries where Catholicism became dominant religious freedom was inevitably curtailed because the Catholic church had specifically rejected it in numerous papal pronouncements. But instead of recognizing the threat, the bishops said, the court’s decision reinforced the power of the Catholic church and so undermined American freedom.³¹

The Southern Baptist Convention echoed the Methodists. It warned that the decision weakened, in its words, “religious liberty and its inevitable corollary, the complete separation of church and state.”³²

“Now Will Protestants Awake?” the Christian Century asked. The decision, the magazine said, “should open the eyes of all American-minded citizens, and especially of Protestant citizens, to the strategy of the Roman Catholic Church in its determination to secure a privileged position in the common life of this country.”³³

Catholics were, ironically, also unhappy with the decision. Although the outcome was good for the church, the court’s rhetoric was troubling. The Jesuit magazine America, the leading Catholic magazine in the United States, rejected talk of a wall of separation between church and state. It led to bad thinking, the magazine said, which was evident in the dissenting opinions. Jackson’s opinion was revealing of the point. It displayed the bias inherent in talk of a wall of separation, America thought, which verbally promoted neutrality while actually supporting Protestantism.³⁴

But Catholics were in a difficult position. Protestants had accurately summarized the doctrinal commitments of the Catholic church. The Catholic hierarchy could not and did not deny those doctrinal commitments. What it could do was to explore Protestant assumptions. Shortly after the decision, Francis Cardinal Spellman, in a commencement speech at Fordham University, complained that the criticism of the church was really a form of anti-Catholic bigotry. “It is assumed that all American people must agree to the dogma that in the sight of God all churches are of equal value,” he said. “From this assumption it is concluded that any American who does not accept this brand of toleration is a heretic from the democratic faith.”³⁵

Catholic leaders said in response that a truly democratic faith and a real commitment to pluralism would allow for multiple kinds of educational systems rather than a suffocating secularism. At a meeting of the National Catholic Education Association in Boston, Archbishop Richard J. Cushing told the crowd, “We must never allow legislators or courts or anti-Catholic spellbinders of the moment to distract attention from the central place of the parent and the home in all democratic and Christian educational theory.” Cushing did not deny that the church wanted more subsidies. But he did not view those subsidies as aids to the church. They helped parents in their democratic and Christian ability to choose.³⁶

Others pressed the issue still further, contending that Protestant rhetoric about church and state obscured the questions at stake. As the Catholic scholar James M. O’Neill put it, the secularist movement worked by appealing to “categorical slogans and unhistorical myths.” Like the advertising industry, Robert C. Hartnett wrote in an essay in America, these slogans operated through the power of suggestion. “You merely keep repeating a few well-chosen words until the public, without any rational grounds or mental operation at all, finds the simple idea implanted in its consciousness,” he said. Meanwhile, an “ominous intolerance” marched behind the rhetorical screen that concealed Protestant self-righteousness.³⁷

Protestants, for their part, decided to mobilize. After several months of trading barbs with Catholic leaders, a group of prominent Protestants formed a new advocacy organization that they called Protestants and Other Americans United for Separation of Church and State (POAU). At their first meeting they issued a manifesto that sought to respond to what they called the specious propaganda put out by Catholic leaders. They agreed with Catholics that, as the manifesto put it, “This is a cultural and spiritual democracy.”³⁸

But democracy, they said, required open debate, which in turn relied upon governmental neutrality in religious matters. The Catholic church, by contrast, wanted more. “This church holds and maintains a theory of the relation of church and state which is incompatible with the American ideal,” the manifesto said. “It makes no secret of its intention to secure for itself, if possible, a privileged position in the body politic. In pursuit of this policy, it has already made such gains that the principle of separation of church and state is in peril of nullification by legislatures and courts, and by federal, state, and local administrations.”³⁹

POAU leaders rejected the accusation, which had yet to be made but that they were confident would come, that their organization was sectarian. It was led by Protestants, who had a preponderance in American society, but it had also reached out to and encompassed Jews, fraternal orders, and those who belonged to no church. It even claimed to welcome Catholics who, rejecting the teaching of their clerical leadership, recognized the freedom of separating church and state.⁴⁰

Catholics responded immediately. The day after the POAU issued its manifesto, John E. Swift, the head of the Catholic fraternal organization the Knights of Columbus, issued a statement through the Catholic Archdiocese of New York. The POAU, Swift announced, promoted organized bigotry. It also lost sight of the real challenge facing all religious groups, Catholic and Protestant alike. “What the nation urgently needs is a united effort by all groups to check the godlessness which is tearing away the very roots of our American political and social institutions,” Swift announced.⁴¹

The National Catholic Welfare council issued a statement trying to clarify the Catholic position. “We deny absolutely and without qualification that the Catholic Bishops of the United States are seeking a union of church and state by any endeavors whatsoever,” the bishops declared. But the Catholic position was so bound up in its own terms that they strained to articulate the hierarchy’s commitments in a way that could be understood by a non-Catholic. The bishops denied both a union of church and state and a separation of church and state. A variety of Catholic leaders and several encyclicals had stated clearly that the Catholic church sought an orderly cooperation between church and state. The state would remain separate but it must acknowledge the Catholic church as the one true church and defer to its authority. The orderly cooperation between church and state would promote God’s truth in all aspects of life, even as church and state remained distinct. To a non-Catholic this looked a lot like a union of church and state regardless of Catholic protestations.⁴²

Catholic leaders also began to smear the leaders of POAU. Archbishop Richard J. Cushing thought that it was obvious that the POAU, with its talk of separation, was responsible for “a tempest of talk in behalf of communism.” Others alleged that the POAU leaders were “breeders of religious hatred,” “a society of organized bigotry,” and “a reorganized Klan with the ‘new look.’ ” In all cases Catholic leaders complained that Protestants disguised their anti-Catholic bigotry behind high-minded rhetoric in order to conceal their own power.⁴³

Unfortunately for Catholic leaders, the POAU was only one of several groups that began to mobilize against them, and the other groups were harder to critique. The POAU was joined by Jewish groups, including the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the American Jewish Committee (AJ Committee), and especially the American Jewish Congress (AJC), which had been formed by liberal Jews including Louis Brandeis in 1918. In addition, the ACLU continued its work in defending church–state separatism and in resisting the Catholic attempt to divide the public-school fund.⁴⁴

The Jewish groups’ entry in the dispute offered particular challenge, though it was not without internal division. In Everson Jewish groups declined to join the case, even though they opposed state payment for religious schools, for fear that the controversy surrounding the case would spur anti-Semitism. Instead, the groups focused on interfaith and goodwill efforts. But with the mobilization of the Catholic church, Jewish groups reluctantly came to recognize that their interfaith efforts would not gain equality in American public life. They began to move from a focus on public relations to legislative lobbying and litigation in an attempt to secure equal treatment.⁴⁵

The central figure in the shift was a youngish lawyer named Leo Pfeffer. He had been born to a rabbi in Austro-Hungary in 1910, but the family emigrated when he was two years old to the Lower East Side of New York City. He went to public schools where religious exercises were a daily occurrence. The ritual was pretty much the same each time. A teacher, usually a Protestant, read from the Psalms because the entire population of the school was Jewish. That was fine with his parents—or at least tolerable. But when he was in fourth grade the state of New York proposed releasing children for part of the school day to attend religious instruction through a denomination of the parents’ choice. His father, still a rabbi, immediately objected to the infusion of sectarian religion into the schools. He pulled Pfeffer from the school and enrolled him in a Yeshiva.⁴⁶

In time Pfeffer rejected the Judaism of his parents and became an avowed humanist. After college and law school he became the legal advisor to the AJC. By the 1940s Pfeffer had begun to build a network of legal communication connecting the three big Jewish organizations to the ACLU and, to a lesser extent, to the POAU.⁴⁷

Those connections soon became quite useful when a case began to make its way to the Supreme Court. It started a few years earlier when a woman named Vashti McCollum found that her son was to receive religious instruction as part of a release-time program in his Illinois school. The program was built on the kind of instruction that Pfeffer’s father had objected to. Unlike the New York model, it modified the procedure by releasing students for religious instruction that was held on school grounds. The children were divided by Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish faiths and sent to parts of the school to be instructed by religious leaders. Those who declined to participate were sent to study hall.⁴⁸

McCollum reluctantly allowed her son to take part in the Protestant instruction, even though she was a secular humanist. She thought he would receive ethical and moral teaching. But when she saw the materials she realized it promoted a fairly exclusivist form of Protestant Christianity. The next year, when her son moved schools, she decided that he would not participate. Her son’s teacher pressured McCollum to let him take the religious course, telling her that it would help her son fit in.

“You know that I’d do anything to help my boy get along,” she replied, “but I will not let him take something we feel is unconstitutional and undemocratic.” In response, the teacher made her son sit alone in the hall, like punishment, while others were released.⁴⁹

When McCollum found out, she was enraged. After meeting with the school administrators, she realized that they were entirely unsympathetic to her complaints and that she was unlikely to change any of the arrangements. She decided to bring suit, first in state court, where she lost, and then in federal court, where she also lost.⁵⁰

As the case made its way through the courts she started to receive increasing amounts of hate mail. People started calling her house with threats. Halloween pranks turned ominous and somewhat sinister. Her son Jim regularly arrived home with a bloodied nose and torn clothes. By the time the case was appealed to the Supreme Court the abuse had become so regular that the McCollums sent their son to New York to live with his grandparents.⁵¹

The national civil liberties organizations soon became aware of the case. The school board’s position troubled Pfeffer. The board’s attorneys made two assertions. They argued, first, that the First Amendment’s establishment clause applied only to Congress, not to the states. The Supreme Court had already rejected that view in Everson, but given the confused holding of the majority opinion, which proclaimed separation of church and state while signing off on state aid to religious schools, it seemed like a proposition worth testing. Failing that, second, they proposed that the First Amendment did not forbid governmental aid to religion on a nonpreferential basis. It forbade only discriminatory aid to religion.⁵²

To Pfeffer that was a dangerously misguided point of view. So when the court decided to hear McCollum’s appeal shortly after Everson Pfeffer and other civil liberties attorneys leaped into action. Among the Jewish organizations there were serious reservations about joining the case. McCollum’s atheism bothered the ADL and the AJ Committee, who were disquieted by the thought of backing someone who was so obviously irreligious. But Pfeffer convinced them that, given the gravity of the issues involved, they could not remain out of the case.⁵³

When leaders of the other organizations conceded the point, Pfeffer wrote an amicus brief for the National Community Relations Advisory Council (NCRAC), a joint policy-making body created by the major Jewish organizations. So as not to be misunderstood, he began the brief with what amounted to a disclaimer. “We wish to make clear our regret,” he wrote, “that the appellant chose to use the case as a medium for the dissemination of her atheistic beliefs and injected into the record the irreligious statements it contains.” The NCRAC’s support for McCollum, Pfeffer suggested, ought not to be understood as support for her irreligion. But, having renounced irreligiousness, Pfeffer expressed an absolutist commitment to the separation of church and state. The First Amendment, which required separation, ought to have prevented the intrusion of religion into the secular public schools, he alleged.⁵⁴

In this, Pfeffer was following the lead of David Petegorsky, the executive director of the AJC. In a memo to other Jewish organizations before joining the McCollum case he noted that confronting any one of the myriad forms of public Christian observance in the United States held risks. The obvious risk was the possibility that a challenge might make some believe that Jewish groups were indifferent or hostile to religious teaching. But, while taking all-due-care to avoid such a misunderstanding, the fear of being portrayed as irreligious was somewhat overblown. Petegorsky explained, “The attitude of the non-Jewish community towards Jews is only one of the many factors determining the status and security of the Jewish community. A far more important factor affecting that status is the strength and health of the democratic system under which we live. In opposing any impairment of the separation of church and state, we stand firmly on sound and tested democratic principle.”⁵⁵

The decision of Jewish organizations to enter the fray would have a profound effect in the future.

In the short term, the court was almost entirely persuaded by McCollum’s argument. The 8–1 majority opinion, written by Black, dispensed with the case in a few crisp paragraphs. It referenced the wall of separation language that the court had used in Everson. The court said that school officials had not respected the constitutional barrier between church and state. “Here not only are the State’s tax-supported public-school buildings used for the dissemination of religious doctrines,” Black wrote. “The State also affords sectarian groups an invaluable aid in that it helps to provide pupils for their religious classes through the use of the State’s compulsory public-school machinery. This is not separation of Church and State.”⁵⁶

In a concurring opinion the four justices who dissented in Everson put a finer point on the issue. Written by Frankfurter, it narrated the history of public education in the United States as one of progressive religious confinement. Frankfurter went out of his way to obscure the Protestant history of public schooling and to affirm the public secularity of the school system. That secularity, he thought, allowed it to promote cohesion among a heterogeneous population. “The public school is at once the symbol of our democracy and the most pervasive means for promoting our common destiny,” Frankfurter wrote. “In no activity of the State is it more vital to keep out divisive forces than in its schools, to avoid confusing, not to say fusing, what the Constitution sought to keep strictly apart.”⁵⁷

Stanley Reed was the only dissent in the case. He believed that the court was applying an overly broad interpretation of the First Amendment that was in tension with established religious practices. There were, as he pointed out, “many instances of close association of church and state in American society.” Were they really going to strike down all of those instances?⁵⁸

Reed was not alone in asking the question. Catholics saw their darkest fears realized in the McCollum decision. In rejecting the notion that the First Amendment would allow nonpreferential aid to religion, Catholic leaders saw that separationism yielded secularism, as they had long said. The editors of Commonweal, a journal of Catholic lay opinion, decried that the court would take such a step simply to appease, in its words, “the mother of a maladjusted boy.” “In order to avoid her son’s being laughed at,” the editorial continued, “Mrs. Vashti McCollum and the groups that supported her are attempting to pull down the whole public-school system, Samson-like.”⁵⁹

The court took the step it did, America complained, in seeming ignorance of the consequences. The editors noted the pervasiveness of government support for religion, from chaplains and prayers in Congress, to compulsory religious services in the military and in military academies, to the ritualized invocation of God at the Supreme Court itself. “There must surely be some way in which the citizens of these United States can prevent the Establishment of Atheism in the name of a few dissatisfied persons,” the editorial concluded.⁶⁰

The Catholic hierarchy agreed with America. After the ruling, Catholic bishops released a statement that construed the controversy as one “between secularism and society.” “Human life centers in God,” they said. “The failure to center life in God is secularism—which, as we pointed out last year, is the most deadly menace to our Christian and American way of living.” The statement cited the Catholic social philosophy first put forward by Leo XIII and elaborated by Pius XI that required religion and citizenship to be connected. Secularism broke the connection, separating human law and natural law, eliminating the cooperation of religion and the government. It would pave the way “for the advent of the omnipotent state.” “We, therefore, hope and pray,” the bishops concluded, “that the novel interpretation of the First Amendment recently adopted by the Supreme Court will in due process be revised.”⁶¹

The McCollum case started a cottage industry of Catholic writers denouncing the court. They pretty much all followed the bishops in decrying the court’s desire to quarantine religion from public life. The court based its opinion, the Jesuit Wilfred Parsons announced, on “a constitutional and historical absurdity” that promoted “one particular sectarian ecclesiology”(that is, Protestantism) over others. The deracinated Protestantism of the court eventually cashed out as “an extreme form of secularism in the state.” All of it would soon culminate in a judicial dictatorship, he predicted.⁶²

Protestants also began to reconsider. The court’s decision intimated that many justices were unwilling to permit the cozy connections between Protestantism and the nation’s civil institutions just because they were long-standing. It was becoming clear that the social and cultural preeminence of Christianity, even Protestant Christianity, was on a shaky foundation. The editors at the Protestant Christian Century saw those implications immediately. Although in the main the magazine welcomed the McCollum decision, it noted that “if the total application of this principle is to be made consistent,” it would limit the ability of religious forces “to perform their function in erecting a barrier against the advance of secularism.”⁶³

A few months after the court handed down its decision, a small group of influential Protestant leaders gathered at Union Theological Seminary. They fretted, as they put it, about “the religious foundations of our national life.” The court’s decision had begun to undercut the support structures in a way that they thought needed to be reconsidered. “We believe that, whatever its intention may be, this hardening of the idea of ‘separation’ by the Court will greatly accelerate the trend toward the secularization of our culture,” the group announced.⁶⁴

One of the most surprising attendees at the Protestant meeting was the Jesuit John Courtney Murray. He even addressed the group, and, it turned out, he had much in common with them. Following the McCollum decision he had begun to talk to anyone who would listen about what he saw as the antireligious conspiracy that sought to remove religion from public life. The ruling was, Murray said, “a legal victory for secularism” even if the Supreme Court did not see it that way. In response to the disaster Murray began to call for religious men of all types—Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish—to overcome their divisions in order to unite against the new secular thrust of American law.⁶⁵

But Murray’s position required him to defang the traditional Protestant suspicion of Catholicism. During the meeting at Union, the Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr listened with interest to Murray’s call for a joint response to the court. Yet he noted that the Catholic position on church and state did not usually invite cooperation. Catholic acceptance of special privileges from foreign governments made Protestants uncomfortable. And the record of Catholic defense of fascism also did not inspire confidence. Catholics refused to defend religious freedom even in principle, Niebuhr noted, since it declared that the Catholic church was the one true church. This was hardly the basis for cooperation. Murray privately admitted, “The theory of church and state expressed in Catholic writings on politics could disturb the Protestant mind.”⁶⁶

In spite of these liabilities there was some indication that Murray’s strategy might work. Protestant fear of political atheism aligned precisely with Murray’s worries about secularism. Liberal Protestants had supported the opening up of categories of faith to generate greater freedom of belief. But because many still regarded religious authority as essential to the perpetuation of any society, the secularizing and liberalizing move of the court put them off. Protestants saw no difference between a negative secularism that privatized belief and a positive secularism that sought to establish unbelief. All eroded religious power and authority.

Protestants accordingly began to respond in what Murray viewed as fruitful ways. Some began publishing books with titles like Christianity and the Crisis of Secularism and The Modern Rival of the Christian Faith: An Analysis of Secularism. In 1950, at the first meeting of the National Council of Churches, a large ecumenical body composed of Protestant denominations, the new organization made clear its essential agreement with Murray. The leaders hung a giant sign that extended the length of the dais and proclaimed in huge letters, “This Nation Under God.” Bishop Henry Knox Sherrill, the first president of the National Council, told the attendees that their gathering “marks a new and great determination that the American way will be increasingly the Christian way, for such is our heritage.”⁶⁷

But other Protestants saw the Catholic position on church and state as a stumbling block too big to surmount. The Christian Century, which regularly featured distressed articles about the triumph of secularism, still denounced Catholic invocations of democratic pluralism as a “national menace.” The magazine did not believe that the Catholic appropriation of liberal language could be trusted. It seemed as though the hierarchy was using parts of the political vocabulary for spurious ends.⁶⁸

Jews were also suspicious. Time magazine, in an article on the religious conflict of the era, quoted Rabbi Philip S. Bernstein to explain the dilemma. “It seems,” Rabbi Bernstein said, “that Catholics do not realize the offensiveness to non-Catholics of the Church’s claim to exclusive and final truth.”⁶⁹

Meanwhile, Leo Pfeffer and the AJC were readying the next challenge. In the aftermath of McCollum Pfeffer wanted to move ahead immediately in a steady campaign to remove religion from the public schools. And he wanted Jewish organizations to take the lead.

The court’s turn toward civil liberties, Pfeffer saw, made it necessary for advocacy organizations to control all aspects of the case. Too much was at stake to risk another Vashti McCollum. The right plaintiff needed to be found. The right case with advantageous circumstances needed to be selected. And the case needed to be litigated, from the beginning, with an eye toward appeal. All of it required more active control during the entirety of litigation rather than simply using amicus briefs to direct the legal argument after the case was brought.⁷⁰

To that end Pfeffer consulted with the ACLU, the Public Education Association, and the United Parents Association to find the ideal plaintiff. He also tried to persuade the ADL and the AJ Committee to come aboard, though they were both wary. Eventually he convinced the Jewish organizations, but only with the promise that Pfeffer would find a non-Jewish plaintiff so as to reduce the risk of anti-Semitism.⁷¹

After much searching Pfeffer found Tessim Zorach, the son of the left-wing sculptor William Zorach. The younger Zorach, unlike his father, was an active Episcopalian who had no political rec­ord. The ADL and the AJ Committee approved the choice, as did Pfeffer’s other allies. In his own evaluation a lawyer for the ACLU said, “Zorach may not be the ideal plaintiff, but I believe he comes as close to it as we are likely to find.”⁷²

The ADL and AJ Committee still were uneasy. They did not want Jews being too far in front of the case, and they wanted Pfeffer to get a non-Jewish lawyer to be the public face. Jewish organizations would still build the case, write the briefs, and direct the litigation, but from behind the scenes. Pfeffer obliged by retaining Kent Greenawalt, another Episcopalian.⁷³

Having alleviated their unease, Pfeffer went about building the record. Tessim Zorach was a student in New York City who objected to New York’s release-time program, a later version of the same scheme that three decades earlier had caused Pfeffer’s father to pull him out of the public school. Pfeffer thought that New York’s program was similar in every respect to the one the court struck down in McCollum. The sole exception was that it was held off-campus for those who decided to participate.

To build the record at trial Pfeffer gathered extensive affidavits from students, parents, and former students in New York City schools. All testified about the pressure on children to participate and the divisiveness that resulted from schools’ categorization of children by religious faith. Many students and parents spoke of being ridiculed by classmates and sometimes teachers when they declined to participate. Anti-Semitism was frequent. One former student told Pfeffer that “Jewish students in the class did not participate in release time and the released students assumed that anyone remaining in the school during the released time hours was Jewish, which was not true in my case since I am an Episcopalian.” Another student, who was Jewish, told Pfeffer that her classmates called her “Christ killer” and “dirty Jew.” Pfeffer also introduced social science data and psychological expertise to explain the social pressures and the implicit coerciveness of the program.⁷⁴

But the New York trial judge ruled against Zorach and excluded all of Pfeffer’s affidavits from the appeals proceedings. Lacking the affidavits, Pfeffer had a much harder time showing that the program was coercive in practice. That was not necessarily a problem, given the expansive prior opinion of the court. Still it was not a good sign. Pfeffer pursued the case patiently, moving from the New York courts, to federal circuit courts, to the U.S. Supreme Court.⁷⁵

At oral argument Felix Frankfurter pushed the lawyer for the schools, Charles H. Tuttle, on the administrative mechanics of the program. Tuttle had said that those students who wished to participate left the school for religious instruction. The others were kept at school in a study hall with nothing to do.

Frankfurter asked, “Why aren’t you satisfied to have every child dismissed at 2 o’clock each Wednesday and Friday?” That way those who wished could go to religious instruction and those who did not could do something else. This option was known as “dismissed time.”

“It isn’t a question of my satisfaction,” Tuttle responded. “The question is whether the Legislature is bound to say that ‘dismissed time’ is the only Constitutional alternative.”

But Tuttle sensed that Frankfurter was implying more, so he went on. The release-time arrangement was not, he said, an “organized conspiracy of religious sects.” It was instead a response to parental fears that, in his words, “the momentum of secularism is pushing religion and the church into the backwaters of life.”

He had walked into a trap. Frankfurter pounced.

“So they need public schools to help them accomplish their religious purposes?” Frankfurter asked.

Before Tuttle could answer, Justice Sherman Minton stepped in. “They don’t need the school system,” he said, “they just need their children for a few minutes.”⁷⁶

In conference, the familiar divide emerged.

On one side, Frankfurter reiterated that religious instruction during school time was a sectarian project that violated what he saw as the nation’s historical commitment to secularism. On the other side, Stanley Forman Reed, the sole dissenter in McCollum, defended his position that there was nothing wrong with the release-time arrangement. The program continued the blending of religion and the state that had long characterized American history. The rest of the justices were somewhere in the middle. But they clearly leaned toward Reed.⁷⁷

The resulting decision was a total departure from the earlier rulings. William O. Douglas, writing for a six-person majority, ruled that the release-time arrangements could stand. But to explain the ruling he had to go through some gymnastics. He denied any tension between his opinion and the court’s earlier holdings. “There cannot be the slightest doubt that the First Amendment reflects the philosophy that Church and State should be separated,” he began. “The First Amendment, however, does not say that, in every and all respects there shall be a separation of Church and State.” To explain this mind-bending contradiction, Douglas announced that the Constitution required that church and state remain separate but friendly. “We are a religious people,” he explained, “whose institutions presuppose a Supreme Being.” There were many religious aspects to government. The release-time system was simply one of those aspects.⁷⁸

The dissenters were incredulous. It was now clear that the majority of the court had no firm opinions at all on church and state. They had been, in effect, stumbling toward secularism. Jackson lambasted the court’s opinion as unwilling to recognize the coercion of the arrangement that it now upheld. The scheme operated in two stages. First, the children must attend school as mandated by the law, a coercive mechanism. Second, they could be released but only if they would go to religious education. During the release time the school functioned “as a temporary jail for a pupil who will not go to Church.” Jackson could hardly bear to refute the majority opinion. It had no coherent position to refute, consisting more of emotional sloganeering than legal reasoning. “Today’s judgment will be more interesting to students of psychology and of judicial processes than to students of constitutional law,” he concluded.⁷⁹

Pfeffer was deeply disturbed, partly because the court did not seem to recognize just how much the release-time program fed anti-Semitism. He had not been expecting that the court would so decisively depart from its earlier rulings. Now that program had received court approval. It also created an organizational problem for him. After the decision the ADL and the AJ Committee decided that they had been right all along. They declined to participate in any more litigation.⁸⁰

The whole debacle left Pfeffer to work in state courts, looking for an adequate vehicle to return to the Supreme Court. But his wait would be a long one. The court did not decide another establishment clause case for the rest of the decade.

The court’s ruling and subsequent silence demonstrated the confused, even perilous, state of religion in American public life at midcentury. Religious leaders complained constantly of a creeping secularism in American life. They used that complaint to inject religion more deeply into the schools and other American institutions. The justices on the court, who tried to regulate this dynamic, faced sharp criticism and accusations of antireligious bias that made them pull back when they went too far. But the more prominence that religion gained in public life, the greater the chance of sectarian conflict over morals, mores, and the precise contours of institutional control. That conflict led to calls to privatize religious difference, which had the effect of advancing the secularization that religious leaders had decried.

Part of the dilemma was the state of the Catholic church. It had come into its own over the previous thirty years as a serious force in American life. But the church paired its newfound prominence with a variety of positions that critics found both reactionary and undemocratic. Many of its commitments were both old and had been constantly reaffirmed. And the church showed signs of burrowing more deeply into its position. In 1950, Pope Pius XII released an encyclical, Humanis generis, that confirmed the confrontational posture of the Catholic hierarchy that often led to sectarian conflict.⁸¹

Pius’s suspicion toward change was deep and directed as much within the church as outside of it. The encyclical acknowledged that the church was facing unparalleled challenges in the modern world. It recognized that some people within the church responded by attempting to accommodate contemporary realities. Their concessions usually assumed a posture of what Pius called eirenism, or an attempt to suppress or massage doctrinal animosity for the sake of Christian fellowship or to jointly address a common enemy. The pope rejected their posture, stating that the Catholic church needed to proclaim the whole truth and to confront all error so that, as the encyclical put it, “the dissident and erring can happily be brought back to the bosom of the Church.”⁸²

The all-out confrontation with error moved through all levels of Catholic organization in an attempt to quash dissent, but it soon moved outward to address American life as a whole.

The internal process began with John Courtney Murray, who in many ways seemed to be the target of Pius’s encyclical. Murray had long believed that church doctrine had not caught up to modern realities or had really accepted, in a full-fledged sense, the aspirations of American political democracy. “Many Americans believe that the Catholic Church is prepared to support democracy only provisionally, and on the grounds of expediency,” he pointed out in a 1950 memo, “until what time she acquires sufficient power within society to do away with the forms and institutions of democratic government, and introduce some form of dictatorship subject to authoritarian, ecclesiastical control.”⁸³

Murray thought that such a view was mistaken but understandably so. The church had a long history of papal pronouncements against religious liberalism, against socialism, and against modernity. Murray fretted that secularists increasingly held sway in American life, that Protestants were estranged from Catholics through the past Catholic pronouncements, and that the hierarchy’s rejection of modernism risked, as Murray put it, “a progressive alienation of the American mind from the Catholic Church, with consequent damage to the apostolic activity of the Church.”⁸⁴

Other events tended to confirm Murray’s apprehension. The same year that Pius released his encyclical and that Murray wrote his memo, Senator Joseph McCarthy gave his “Enemies Within” speech on Lincoln Day. The speech is remembered for McCarthy’s accusation that 205 people in the State Department were known members of the Communist Party. But his wider purpose was to reframe the Cold War not as a geopolitical conflict between empires or rival economic systems but as “a final, all-out battle between communistic atheism and Christianity.”⁸⁵

McCarthy’s speech proved to be the start of an extended campaign against nonconformists in American life. He used the categories of Christianity in the effort. McCarthy brought a variety of actors, writers, and cultural workers into public disrepute by accusing them of having communist sensibilities, hauling them before a special Senate investigative committee, and then denouncing them when they appeared.

Beneath his method was the familiar Protestant–Catholic divide, barely submerged. It is not too much to see in McCarthy’s program an application of Pius’s call to confront error. McCarthy himself was Catholic. Much of the support for McCarthy came from American Catholics in the Midwest. The hierarchy supported McCarthy almost uniformly. Although America and Commonweal both immediately spoke out against him, they were largely alone among Catholic journals. And by the time of the Zorach decision McCarthy was making the sectarian nature of his program more overt. He began to edge toward public criticism of liberal Protestants as a group of communist fellow travelers.⁸⁶

Soon the criticism became explicit. In July 1953 a McCarthy aide denounced the Protestant clergy to the press as “the largest single group supporting the Communist Party.” After fierce blowback, McCarthy tried to modify the criticism by noting that “the vast majority” of Protestant leaders were loyal. But he did not deny that Protestant clergy were the largest single group of Communist supporters.⁸⁷

Protestants condemned McCarthy’s campaign, which revealed, in the National Council’s words, “a degree of stupidity and misrepresentation which can be reached only in an atmosphere of suspicion, distrust, and fear.” The Presbyterian Church of the USA dismissed McCarthy as nothing more than a sore Catholic. The Christian Science Monitor ran a story stating flatly that “the open Roman Catholic attack on communism spearheaded by Senator McCarthy actually is directed as much against Protestantism at home as it is against the Kremlin abroad.” Robert J. McCracken of the prominent Riverside Church in New York City noted that McCarthy was “a member of a church that has never disavowed the Inquisition, that makes a policy of censorship, that insists on conformity.” Those dynamics, McCracken said, were at the heart of McCarthyism.⁸⁸

The most damning response came from the prominent Methodist bishop G. Bromley Oxnam, who simply observed, “No Protestant nation has been seriously infiltrated by communists.” The same could not be said of Catholic nations.⁸⁹

Oxnam’s statement enraged McCarthy’s supporters, not least because it made the United States into a Protestant rather than a Catholic country. On the floor of the U.S. House, Representative Donald Jackson (R-CA) said in response, “The Bishop serves God on Sunday and the Communist Front the rest of the week.”⁹⁰

That accusation led to an eight-hour appearance by Oxnam before the House Un-American Activities Committee. He used the occasion to defend Protestant liberalism and to critique Catholicism by implication. “Free man must discover concrete measures through which the ideals of religion may be translated into the realities of world law and order, economic justice, and racial brotherhood,” he told the committee. Those were vital components of Protestant ethical thought, he said, but he denied that such commitments made him a communist.⁹¹

The testimony turned into a big win for Protestant clergy. At the end of the hearing the committee passed a motion that declared, “This committee has no record of Communist Party affiliation or membership by Bishop Oxnam.”⁹²

Still, that was not the end of it. A few months later Francis Cardinal Spellman waded into the debate by defending McCarthy’s methods in a speech in Europe. “No American uncontaminated by communism has lost his good name because of Congressional hearings on un-American activities,” he said. “However, there are individuals who have seriously compromised themselves by a flat refusal to state whether they are now or have been communists. It is impossible for me to understand why any American should refuse to declare himself free of Communist affiliation, unless he has something to hide.”⁹³

Two days later, at a conference titled “The Church and the World Order,” four hundred Protestant leaders expressed their dismay at Spellman’s endorsement of McCarthy. The instantaneous Protestant response showed the depth of Protestant alarm and outrage.⁹⁴

Spellman refused to back down. Less than two weeks later, at a surprise appearance before six thousand Catholic policemen and guests, he again stated his endorsement of McCarthyism and implied, again, that critics of McCarthy were communists. At the same meeting, McCarthy himself addressed the crowd. In response to his remarks he received what the New York Times described as “repeated and roaring ovations.”⁹⁵

Yet some in the hierarchy began to have doubts. McCarthy had long since grown reckless. A few weeks later Bishop Bernard J. Sheil of Chicago denounced McCarthy, the first such statement by any member of the Catholic clerical leadership after nearly four years of McCarthy’s campaign. It was the start of a stampede away from McCarthy, as the ship seemed to be sinking. Soon McCarthy would be disgraced and face censure by the Senate. The censure finally calmed tensions on the surface.⁹⁶

But the entire episode validated Murray’s point. The way that Catholic leaders lined up behind obviously illiberal political tactics damaged Catholic prospects in the United States. That those same leaders could point to a variety of doctrinal and papal statements as a justification for their position made their actions difficult to critique. To get around the dilemma Murray began to urge church leaders to think about what he called historical factors that had shaped doctrine. Pope Leo XIII’s pronouncements against liberalism and church–state separation at the end of the nineteenth century needed to be understood in the temporal context of Jacobin democracy and the subsequent development of nineteenth-century French liberalism. Likewise, Pius XI’s pronouncements against modernism in the early twentieth century needed to be understood in light of the theological disputes of the time. Understanding the historical context of papal pronouncements relativized them, Murray implied, so that Catholic leaders could determine, as he put it, what is “principle and what is contingent application of principle, what is permanent demand and what is legitimate temporary expedience.” In that way Catholic doctrine could develop.⁹⁷

Murray’s strategy essentially followed nineteenth-century Protestant liberalizers. He assumed that there was an eternal truth in all ecclesiastical pronouncements but that those truths had been expressed or encoded in response to local developments that did not necessarily apply across time and space. The trick was to extract the eternal from the particular, which also had the benefit of allowing the interpreter to discard past pronouncements that no longer made sense.

Unfortunately for Murray, many people rejected his views. More problematic still, he could not historicize Pius XII’s call to confront all error, since the call had been issued quite recently. As he tried to solve that puzzle, Murray’s enemies began to circle. Alfredo Cardinal Ottaviani of the Holy Office, the supreme doctrinal body in the Vatican, condemned Murray’s “liberalizing thesis” and his corresponding call to open up and to develop Catholic doctrine. The next year Ottaviani initiated a process to have Murray’s views scrutinized by the Holy Office itself.⁹⁸

To do so, Ottaviani had to explain the error of Murray’s position. He summarized Murray’s thinking in four compact propositions. First, he wrote, Murray held that the Catholic confessional state was not the universal ideal. Second, Murray argued that full religious liberty is a political ideal that the church ought to support. Third, Murray maintained that the democratic state had done its duty when it offered a guarantee of full freedom of religion. It need not grant the truth affirmed by the Catholic church. Fourth, Murray claimed that Leo XIII’s renunciation of religious freedom did not apply in a modern democratic state. Though succinct, it was an accurate account of Murray’s stance.⁹⁹

Many people within the hierarchy were repulsed. Ottaviani had the Holy Office reject each of the propositions. By 1955, as the condemnation moved forward, Murray’s Jesuit superiors ordered him to cease all work on church–state issues in anticipation of an official papal condemnation. After the order of silence came down, a friend remembered Murray combing his bookshelves with an air of dejection to find anything that had to do with church and state. Those books had to go back to the library. Only innocuous ones could remain.¹⁰⁰

Yet the sectarian strife had surprising effects within public culture. Politicians who had been calling for a renewed role for religion had to find a way around the disagreement. A common response was to affirm the importance of religion in general without offering any specifics. President Dwight Eisenhower took the lead.

Eisenhower was not an obvious spokesperson for the public role of religion. He had been raised as part of the River Brethren until his early teens, when his mother (and possibly his father) turned to the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Eisenhower himself moved away from religion until he ran for president in 1952. Then, under the pressures of the campaign, he made nearly constant reference to religious ideas and affirmed at every turn the importance of spiritual strength in the battle against communism.¹⁰¹

His gestures toward religion continued even after the election. In a Christmastime address in 1952 Eisenhower explained his point of view. The battle against communism, which he promised to continue, was “a struggle for the hearts and souls of men—not merely for property or even merely for power.”¹⁰²

To explain his thinking, Eisenhower recounted a conversation he had had back in the Second World War with the Soviet marshal Georgi Zhukov about the differences between the Soviet and the U.S. political systems. The deeper they went, Eisenhower said, the more at a loss they had been to find common ground or even to communicate. Every subject yielded another disagreement that terminated in the gulf between “the Bolshevik religion” and what Eisenhower considered the American one. American religious fervency really supported all aspects of American life, he thought, just like the Bolshevik rejection of God supported communism. The recognition of the essentially religious nature of the conflict required a commitment on the part of the American people to God as the foundation of the American political system. After all, as Eisenhower said, “Our form of Government has no sense unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith, and I don’t care what it is. With us of course it is the Judo-Christian [sic] concept.”¹⁰³

At his inaugural address a month later he continued the theme. He stood on the dais of the Capitol, looked out over the crowd, and said, “I ask that you bow your heads.” He then offered a prayer, the first time in American history that a president prayed prior to his inaugural address.¹⁰⁴

Once in the White House, he worked to install public religious observance throughout his government. He joined a church and was baptized, the first time a president had been baptized while in office. He required all cabinet meetings to begin with prayer, another first. Soon he was the first to preside over a National Prayer Breakfast.¹⁰⁵

Critics wanted to know what it all meant. G. Bromley Oxnam decried the “danger of developing a holy war against Communism” as a consequence of sanctifying the U.S. government.¹⁰⁶

But Eisenhower was unmoved. About a year into his first term, facing continuing questions, he further laid out his position. His solicitousness toward religion was really about how to support political equality and how to perpetuate democracy. It was an old issue, as he acknowledged. “The Magna Carta, our Declaration of Independence, and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man were certainly nothing less than the attempt on the part of men to state that in their government there would be recognized principles of the equality of men, the dignity of man,” he said. But how could one uphold the equality of men? Men were obviously not equal. The equality of man was, he said, “a completely false premise, unless we recognize the Supreme Being in front of whom we are all equal.”¹⁰⁷

Others took his idea and ran with it. It needed to be institutionalized in some way. There had already been a variety of attempts to recognize the notion that God established the foundation of the U.S. political system. The most prominent was an attempt to modify the pledge of allegiance to include the words “under God.” Instead of the usual wording, which went, “one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all,” the idea was to say, “one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”

Eisenhower apparently did not know about the proposal. But a few months after his speech on religion and equality, he was sitting in church when the Reverend George Docherty endorsed the inclusion of “under God” as befitting the religious commitments of the United States. Eisenhower agreed with his call, and a legislative push immediately formed. Four months later Eisenhower signed the bill into law. He thought the additional language was quite significant. As he said in a signing statement, the reference to God rightly affirmed “the transcendence of religious faith in America’s heritage and future.” “In this way,” he continued, “we shall constantly strengthen those spiritual weapons which forever will be our country’s most powerful resource, in peace or in war.”¹⁰⁸

Yet critics were not convinced. Looked at in one way, Eisenhower’s campaign might suggest an increase of religion in public life, even a kind of religious revival. But looked at another way, it exposed the internal secularization characteristic of Protestant liberalism, a deracinated form of ecumenicism that had no substantive content whatsoever. Eisenhower’s high level of generality was necessary to keep religion in public life, given the threat of sectarian conflict that had emerged since the end of the Second World War. The public affirmation of religion worked only if a person brought forth no specifics to cause disagreement.

It made for an odd religious situation, as people at the time recognized. In 1955, for example, the Jewish sociologist Will Herberg published his classic book, Protestant-Catholic-Jew, seeking to make sense of the religious position at midcentury. According to Herberg, Protestants, Catholics, and Jews composed the three religious identities that formed the building blocks of American religious life. But the public religion that he observed in American cultural and political institutions did not quite match these identities. The public religious idea seemed to be broadly shared and was acknowledged by many, but it was a pretty mushy concept. When Herberg forced himself to articulate its tenets, all he could muster was that American public religion stood for “spiritual values” at the heart of American democracy, “the fatherhood of God and brotherhood of man, the dignity of the individual human being, etc.”¹⁰⁹

The vagueness left Herberg uncertain about how to characterize the moment. “The religion which actually prevails among Americans today has lost much of its authentic Christian (or Jewish) content,” he wrote. “Americans think, feel, and act in terms quite obviously secularist at the very time that they exhibit every sign of a widespread religious revival. It is this secularism of a religious people, this religiousness in a secularist framework, that constitutes the problem posed by the contemporary religious situation in America.”¹¹⁰

Protestants themselves acknowledged as much. Some, such as the Yale religion scholar William Lee Miller, complained of the emptiness of Eisenhower’s religious pronouncements. “President Eisenhower, like many Americans, is a very fervent believer in a very vague religion,” he said. Others, often in the pages of the Christian Century, began to speak of a post-Protestant era. The Lutheran minister and journalist Martin E. Marty pointed to the “secular national religion that now is flowering” as evidence that Protestantism no longer had a privileged position in the United States.¹¹¹

For Marty, the post-Protestant era was a liberation. “Protestantism, in the interests of truth and strategy, should begin to learn to enjoy the luxury of its minority status in a pluralistic post-Protestant society,” he wrote. There was freedom to be found in renouncing a custodial obligation for the nation. If the United States was no longer a Protestant country, Marty noted, then Protestants ought to mount a strategic retreat in order to cultivate a more authentic religious voice that worked beyond the categories of Cold War politics.¹¹²

Others feared the consequences of such a retreat but could find no obvious way forward. In a 1958 study sponsored by the Fund for the Republic, a group of scholars representing Protestants, Catholics, and Jews announced that Eisenhower’s national religion actually posed a significant peril to the nation. William Lee Miller, one of the leaders, told Time that people ought to reject “the widely prevalent and intellectually debilitating relativism” and “the belief in believing, the faith in faith.” But what did that leave?¹¹³

The problem, as the Catholic layman William Clancy explained to Time, was that the official Washington piety had to draw upon an ever-narrowing national consensus about religious and moral principles. Separationists were working through the courts to suppress real religious ideas by labeling them as sectarian. At the same time, the Catholic leadership, as Clancy put it, “act as though the last few centuries had never happened.” In that toxic mix, the public role of what he considered authentic religion could only grow slighter and secularism could only increase.¹¹⁴

As it turned out, Clancy’s apprehensions were right on the money. The conflict between religious groups left little choice for governing authorities other than mealymouthed platitudes or, better still, the relegation of religion to the private sphere. And once the latter option became politically viable, the secular settlement arrived.