America and the Outsiders

Laurence Moore's Religious Outsiders and the Making of Americans is a study of American religion that is not considered “mainstream” or “mainline”—Mormons, Catholics, Jews, Christian Science, Fundamentalists, Black churches. The goal is not to fill in a gap. The goal is to challenge the assumption that the “mainline” should function as a norm of American religion. American religion—indeed, Americans— have been made, Moore argues, by outsiders as much as by insiders.

In a concluding chapter, he explains how toleration has arisen not out of high-minded rational motivations but out of frustrated selfishness and self-interest. American religion has followed the pattern Madison laid out concerning political factions in Federalist #10: In a large republic, factions proliferate so much that no one faction can impose its fanaticism on everyone else. To protect their own interests, they all must, grudgingly, protect everyone's.

American religious toleration has the same root: “the full extension of religious tolerance, if indeed full tolerance describes the present state of religious affairs in the United States, was more the product of conditions of pluralism which no one sect had the power to overcome as of an abstract belief in the value of pluralism. . . . A civil religion that guarantees an absolutely unqualified religious liberty to everyone has about the same standing in American life as Madison's realm of the public good. One has no trouble finding it proclaimed and respected, but it owes its existence to the frustration of sectarian interests rather than to the disappearance of selfish ambitions and dark suspicions about the value of someone else's religion” (205).

By the end of the nineteenth century, he observes, the dreams of Philip Schaff and others had been dashed, all those who thought that denominatonalism and sectarianism, while disagreeable in itself, might be a stepping stone to unity. Instead, the sects continued to proliferate. According to Moore, this is not a design flaw or a sign that the American system is breaking down. Fragmentation of churches and constant religious novelty are signs that the system is fully operational. Citing Andrew Greeley, Moore argues that divisions don't go away because they serve a necessary social function: “Americans needed an unusual differentiation of religious persuasions because they had an unusual need for a wise variety of social identities. The separation of church and state in America has not done as much for the virtue of either church or state as its proponents usually claim. It did not much help Americans to find God or public virtue. What it did do was enable them to find themselves” (208).

As a result, “the American religious system may be said to be ‘working' only when it is creating cracks within denominations, when it is producing novelty, even when it is fueling antagonisms. These things are not things which, properly understood, are going on at the edges or fringes of American life. They are what give energy to church life and substance to the claim that Americans are the most religious people on the face of the earth” (208).

When it began, Mormonism was anything but “mainline,” but the Mormon controversy was “central to American culture” as “Americans discovered who they were by locating themselves with respect to it.” In fact, “nothing was more ‘normal' or ‘typical' of American life than the process of carving out a separate self-identification, a goal toward which all the early Mormon enterprise was directed,” and the same can be said, he argues, for Catholics, Unitarians, and others (209; shades of Harold Bloom's claim that Mormonism is the perfect exemplar of American gnosticism).