First Amendment Conflicts

Earlier today I attended a panel discussion at the Unbound Book Festival( http://www.unboundbookfestival.com/panels) on: "Is the First Amendment in Crisis." It was a good discussion and covered a number of topics, but in 2018, a title like that covers a lot of ground, more than the panel could touch on in the time allotted. Not surprisingly it focused on free speech, with some reference to freedom of assembly and protest, but nothing on the other, and increasingly contested part of the Amendment, freedom of religion, which is actually the first part of it:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

There was an interesting bit where Lee Wilkins (MU School of Journalism) began talking about how social media is inherently divisive. This was echoed by David von Drehle (Washington Post). Drehle did make note that this was not a new phenomenon, talking some about the political fragmentation of Victorian newspapers. Had the session lasted longer, perhaps there would have been more on this. What struck me, though, was that there was no discussion of how freedom of religion, and freedom of speech and the press, have helped create the underlying fragmentation and tension that have facilitated the rise of division. I had not considered this before, at least not in this way, and I want to explore it for a moment.

For much of the past half-millennium, religion has been the most divisive force in Europe and America. We were taught at mid-century to think of it as a unifying force, but that is largely illusory, an assumption made possible by the corporate and government-sponsored civic religion of the 1950s and early 1960s. The divide between Black and White Protestantism was always largely ignored. That, in itself, would have given the lie to the portrait of unity. The mid-century revival did manage to paper over some of the differences of Catholicism and Protestantism, and it at least made anti-Semitism unfashionable and publicly unacceptable. What it did not do was to erase the divide that had appeared between liberal and conservative Protestantism decades earlier, a divide that had largely been invisible with the withdrawal of fundamentalists and other conservative Protestants from the public arena after the Scopes Trial.  

I am not an historian of American religion, so what follows may be a bit sketchy and off in some details, though I believe the main outline is correct. Before, during, and after the Civil War, there had been a thriving religious press of newspapers and magazines in this country. These continued to thrive up through at least the First World War. Freedom of press and religion had interacted in these. In their pages, and also in religious conventions and conferences held regularly, as well as in books and seminaries, what amounted to new doctrines were introduced and worked out. New religious movements were emerging. One of these gave rise both to conservative Evangelicalism and to Fundamentalism, while another gave rise to Pentecostalism. Fundamentalism itself was largely the result of Bible conferences and the press, culminating in the publication of an important series of pamphlets (gathered up in book form) during the first part of the World War, called The Fundamentals. These gave their name to the movement. These writings and conferences also began a trend that later grew more important, certain words and phrases began to take on specialized meanings within the group. 

The First World War was a religiously shattering experience for much of the world including the United States. Millennial expectations came into play, as did prophecy, and a real sense that Christianity was under attack in the West from Social Darwinism (with which the Germans were held to be especially enamored) and Bolshevism, and, in the East, by the Ottoman onslaught as the Armenian Genocide and the destruction of many of the oldest Christian communities in the world was revealed. The groups on the Protestant right moved further in that direction, splitting ever more decisively with the liberal Protestants in the mainstream churches. 

The Scopes Trial subjected these groups to public ridicule on a national stage, particularly from the barbed pen of H.L. Mencken. (The Mencken character in Inherit the Wind was played by Gene Kelly in the film version; suffice it to say that it is the least sympathetic role he ever played, and certainly the most cynical.) The ridicule stung, I suspect it still stings today. It also showed how far from the religion and beliefs of the urban elites they had come. These groups moved ever more to the right and largely kept their own counsel. Their thoughts, beliefs, and means of expressing themselves became more insular and difficult for liberal Christians and others to comprehend. It would be decades before they would emerge into the political arena in a meaningful way. 

What I want to point out is that all of this occurred through the interplay of freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and freedom of the press. It is possible it could not have played out in any country outside the British Common Law and constitutional tradition. In the 1600s, such conflict had torn England apart and led to what used to be called the English Civil Wars and are now more commonly referred to as the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, the bloodiest and most tumultuous period in modern British history. The slow emergence of these key freedoms was an evolutionary result of those wars, and their aftermath a generation later, the Glorious Revolution. 

But to return to my main theme, the interplay of these three freedoms both helped created a serious, long hidden or dormant divide in America, but when that divide did become visible, slowly in the 1960s and 1970s, and then became a major preoccupation in the 1980s and after, it was driven by these three freedoms interacting, so that the difference became magnified and solidified. We lived in a world where liberal and conservative Protestants no longer easily understood one another, where liberals could become incensed over Biblical literalism, while conservatives (and even not so conservatives) fumed over John Lennon's lyrics. Television and the other media found them to be good press, and sometimes good comedy (I especially recall a couple of episodes of WKRP built on the differences), but almost always the emphasis was on difference and rarely on reconciliation or understanding. As with most things, pundits found it easy to get good ratings by exaggerating differences and manipulating the biases of audiences. 

If we now find ourselves divided into camps on social media, I would like to suggest that this has a long history, a history rooted in religion as much as politics, of the need for newspapers and television for profits and ratings, and in the difficulty of basic communication that arose from the history of different religious movements, on both left and right, that developed their own meanings for words and phrases, so that free speech itself came to divide instead of uniting us. Social media may be dividing us more, but it magnifies existing fissures; it did not create them.