Statement from President Truman recognizing the State of Israel – Note his handwritten changes
In our last few posts here at the Spectacle of Toleration blog, we have been discussing “How Christian an Understanding?,” the June 21 event sponsored by the Newport Historical Society. Our first panelist, John Fea, author of Was America Founded as a Christian Nation?,discussed how to ask historical questions and introduced us to different historical figures who supported the separation of church and state. The second panelist, John Barry, author of Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul, showed us that Roger Williams’ ideas about government and politics grew out of his English historical context.
We will now consider the thoughts of the third, and final, panelist: Michael Feldberg. Feldberg is the current executive director of the George Washington Institute for Religious Freedom, a New York City based organization that seeks to teach the public about the historical origins of the separation of church and state, and religious freedom in history in the United States. The institute bases these ideas on a letter which George Washington wrote to the Jewish congregation in Newport, Rhode Island in 1790 which we will explore in greater depth later this summer. Previously, Feldberg was the executive director of the American Jewish Historical Society.
To begin his portion of the evening, Feldberg drew on his experience with the American Jewish Historical Society, noting that at its founding in 1892 the organization tried to determine whether or not Christopher Columbus was Jewish. The institution hoped that if America was founded by someone of Jewish heritage, the United States would be considered a gift from the Jewish people to the world. If Christopher Columbus was a Jew, then the American people would have to rethink their widespread negativity towards Jewish immigrants then coming to the United States in large numbers. In other words, the institution was searching the historical record for a usable past, as many of us tend to do.
Delving into the heart of his argument, Feldberg suggested that the United States was founded to be a Christian cultural homeland, comparing the history of the United States with the history of Israel. He walked us through Israel’s twentieth century history. In 1917, the British government agreed to govern Palestine under a League of Nations mandate, promising a homeland for the Jews. By the 1940s, the British decided to give up the mandate because it could not keep Jews and Arabs from fighting each other, or the Jews from trying to expel the British. The United Nations, the successor to the League of Nations, voted to partition the land into two states. In 1948, Israel declared statehood. Interestingly, when the United States government recognized the sovereignty of Israel, the language of the official document called it “the Jewish state,” but President Truman crossed the phrase out, changing it to the “State of Israel.” Thus, the official documents (at least from America’s perspective), were ambiguous about the founding of Israel’s religious implications. To this day, Israel is still debating whether or not it is truly a Jewish state, though the Jewish homeland argument tends to be more persuasive.
Feldberg suggests that the United States and Israel have much in common as each was founded with help from the British, and as a cultural homeland for Christianity and Judaism respectively. He reminds us that many of the original settlers to the US were Protestant dissidents who came to the British North American colonies because they clashed with the state-controlled churches of Europe. These groups, with the help of the British and then United States government gradually acquired more territory, expanding Protestant faiths and supplanting the Catholic Spanish in Florida, Catholic French in Louisiana, and Eastern Orthodox Russians in Alaska.
So, for Feldberg, America was demographically and culturally a Christian (and specifically Protestant) homeland in its early years. However, he reminds us that the federal government did not necessarily reflect this. While Americans may have primarily been Protestant, the government did not advocate for one faith over another.
Also, throughout the evening, Feldberg was careful to stress that the modern battle of secularism versus religion presents a false dichotomy. He reminds us that many devout religious people (like Roger Williams) were secularists who wanted a separation between the church and government. Others (like many of the late 1700s founding fathers) believed that religion could be a useful tool for creating virtuous and moral citizens, but did not necessarily advocate for any one particular faith.
So, let’s summarize what we have learned not only from Michael Feldberg, but from John Fea and John Barry as well. Fea reminded us that we need to think historically about the past, and traced the history of separation of church and state so that we could see how people used it differently at various points American history. Barry taught us that Roger Williams did not get his ideas about how religion and government should intersect out of the blue, but from English political history. Though a devout Christian, Williams was one of the United States’ strongest advocates for the separation of church and state and set an important precedent. Finally, Feldberg suggested that while the United States may have been a homeland for culturally Protestant Europeans, the federal government does not necessarily reflect, and certainly does not impose, those values. In contrast, much civil legislation in Israel is governed by Orthodox Jewish law.
As we have seen, the past is complicated and questions about religion and the founding of the United States are not easily answered. Although this post concludes our series on the Newport Historical Society event, we will continue to explore religion in history throughout the rest of the summer. So check back in a few days as we start a new series on religious toleration in the history of Rhode Island, and specifically Newport.
