Kevin Schultz's Tri-Faith America is an engaging exploration of the rise and the consequences of a mid-20th century ideal: Protestant, Catholic, and Jew, each equally American, united in the brotherhood of man and the fatherhood of God. Schultz rejects the charge that the tri-faith ideal was simply a vapid and vacuous affirmation of religion in general in the context of the Cold War. Such criticism has been around since Will Herberg's 1955 classic, Protestant-Catholic-Jew, which criticized the secular superficiality of the concept. Schultz instead situates the triumph of tri-faith America as an important transitional step in the emergence of American liberal democracy, a process that began with the economic reforms of the New Deal and culminated in the civil rights movement.
Part One charts the rise of the ideal, which was certainly a departure from the past. In the 19th century, if you asked many Protestants about the American religious character, they would have responded that it was a Protestant nation. Proponents of the tri-faith ideal rejected this exclusivism and broadened the nation's heritage to encompass more, if not all, of the American people. Schultz focuses in particular on the National Conference of Christians and Jews, an ecumenical organization that, more than any other, was responsible for the emergence of the tri-faith concept. The National Conference of Christians and Jews argued that the Judeo-Christian tradition promoted a “unity without uniformity” that provided the foundation for “the American way of life” (58).
In fact, the tri-faith ideal contained multiple meanings. Schultz notes that at their most expansive ecumenical moments, tri-faith promoters offered the Judeo-Christian tradition as a robust form of religious thought and practice rooted in a common set of theological texts; Judeo-Christianity possessed fully elaborated normative commitments and theological distinctions that rivaled more sectarian conceptions of religious life. Alongside this understanding existed another, softer meaning of the tri-faith concept. In this second meaning, Judeo-Christianity allowed for the equal participation of differing groups in American public life without the loss of sectarian identity. Consequently, the concept contained a strong tension from its beginning, pitting a shared monotheism among the three religious traditions with a commitment to cultural pluralism and religious difference.
While recognizing the ambiguity of the concept, Schultz believes that the tri-faith ideal ultimately cashed-out in cultural pluralism. Part Two of the book uses several case studies to explore the ideal's lived effect. He begins with a chapter on suburbanization after World War II. The usual narrative of this period is that white ethnics first moved out of their urban enclaves into the suburbs where they found themselves in the vanilla whiteness of a rising 1950s middle-class and, in the process, shed their ethnic identity. But Schultz points out that this deracination was not exactly total. Religious communal affiliation continued in the suburbs, so Catholics played ball with Catholics, nonreligious Jews discovered that the locus of suburban Jewish life was the synagogue, and Protestants tried to effect an uneasy peace with their new neighbors.
This “communalism in a time of consensus,” in Schultz's phrase, proved particularly problematic in the public schools and ultimately showed cracks in the unity-within-diversity ideal. After all, the postwar period featured not only ecumenical religions but also a resurgent Protestantism invested in the notion of Protestant America. Schultz focuses on the discomfort among some liberal Protestants in working with the Roman Catholic Church, an institution they viewed as an autocratic, medieval throwback. These Protestants sought to maintain the long control that they had historically enjoyed over public schools. For their part, Catholics either wanted money for their own schools or, short of a divided public school fund, some kind of religious schooling within public schools. By contrast, Jews sought the complete secularization of public schools. After an uneasy back and forth, a coalition of Catholics and Jews united against Protestant control and pushed the courts to enact a complete secularization of public schooling. But as the courts began to enact school secularization, Catholics grew alarmed and bailed on the coalition.
For the next two chapters, Schultz unpacks the wider tensions within the tri-faith concept that were revealed by the public school fracture. As a first example, he charts a determined struggle during the 1950s to remove discriminatory admissions requirements — such as the demand that students be white and Christian (or Protestant) — for joining a college fraternity. Schultz reveals a tension in the tri-faith ideal between individual rights, which would require the eligibility of all men regardless of religion or color, and freedom of association, which both the National Interfraternity Council, an umbrella organization for the fraternities, as well as many Catholic and Jewish fraternities supported as an important expression of communal solidarity. The discriminatory requirements were eventually rejected, but not without conflict or loss by Catholic and Jewish fraternities, who feared the demise of group solidarity. Schultz then completes the narrative of fracture with another disagreement over whether or not a question about religious affiliation ought to be included on the 1960 census: it wasn't, to the dismay of Catholics and the elation of Jews, as the government bowed to the notion that a person's religion is not the government's business.
If the book had ended there, I would have said that it was a powerful and subtle re-interpretation of a familiar concept in 20th-century United States history. But in the final chapter, “From Creed to Color,” Schultz moves to a more contestable and unconvincing claim. The chapter begins with the 1963 conference on religion and race, which was the first time that ecumenical leaders substantially addressed the nearly decade-long civil rights movement. Although Schultz admits that ecumenical leaders came late to the table, he still argues that the language of Tri-Faith America “softened the ground” for civil rights (175). “By providing a language and an audience,” Schultz claims, “the image of Tri-Faith America helped make possible the civil rights movement of the 1960s” (182). The tri-faith conception “created a language of civil rights [that] leaders could tap into” while also “making American pluralism an accepted part of the nation's identity” (185). Yet consider: the conference took place nine years after Brown v. Board of Education, eight years after the Montgomery bus boycotts, and three years after the sit-ins in Greensboro. And Schultz's contention seems to fly in the face of the rest of the book. By giving the tri-faith vision more substantive content than he has shown in any of the preceding chapters, Schultz turns a sensitive account of historical tensions and ironies into a celebration of ecumenical religion.
“By the early 1960s,” Schulz maintains, “it was clear that some of the staunchest supporters of racial civil rights had emerged from the religions within America's religious triangle” (191). In this he is surely correct, but only in a limited way. By trumpeting the role of Tri-Faith America in the civil rights movement, Schultz unintentionally minimizes the role of black Americans, who he admits were largely left out of the Tri-Faith image. He also minimizes the role of secularists in the longer civil rights struggle, particularly communists during the 1930s. This, in turn, leaves him unable to account for the high percentage of secularist Jews in the movement, many of whom had been involved in anti-discrimination organizations that had a history of criticizing racial discrimination while the National Conference of Christians and Jews and other proponents of tri-faith America consciously turned away from the dilemmas of race and focused instead on religious toleration.
Ultimately, the persistent uncertainty about the coherence of the tri-faith ideal undermines Schultz's triumphal narrative. By the end of the book, he struggles to account for the abrupt collapse of ecumenical religion, as many Catholic and Jewish religious organizations dwindled and mainline Protestantism went into demographic free-fall. Meanwhile, evangelicals, who take up very little space in the book even although they had been around since 1943, surged in numbers as conservative religion of all kinds grew. As they did so, conservative Christians began to utilize the language of Judeo-Christianity in their own battle against secularization. This transformation in the concept suggests that the most important thing about the tri-faith ideal was its malleability and its vapidity. Emerging at a time in which fascism was the enemy, the tri-faith ideal shifted seamlessly to communism once the Cold War began. During the 1970s, the enemy merely shifted again, with conservative Christians using the language in their battle against secular humanism. “Because of the term's historical flexibility,” Schultz explains, “those opposing the religious right had a difficult time making the case that these conservatives were distorting the true meaning of the phrase” (201).
Yet the ultimate — and most compelling — lesson of the book is not that conservatives have gotten the “true” meaning wrong. If the frequent fractures in the tri-faith coalition show anything, it is that there was no true meaning to the term in the first place. But for all my discomfort with this last chapter, I want to be clear: Schultz has written a very good book. By tracing the genealogy and consequences of this important concept, he offers a work filled with contradiction, irony, and unintended consequence. It exemplifies good intellectual history.
