Good White Christians: How Religion Created Race And
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GOOD WHITE CHRISTIANS: HOW RELIGION CREATED RACE AND ETHNIC PRIVILEGE FOR IMMIGRANTS IN AMERICA A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Notre Dame in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Philipp Gollner _____________________________________________________ Mark A. Noll, Director Graduate Program in History Notre Dame, Indiana April 2016 © Copyright by Philipp Gollner 2016 All rights reserved GOOD WHITE CHRISTIANS HOW RELIGIOUS IMMIGRANTS SHAPED RACE, ETHNICITY AND PRIVILEGE IN AMERICA Abstract by Philipp Gollner This dissertation explores how religion helped to define the interplay between whiteness, ethnicity and power between 1885 and 1924 in ways that continue to shape the United States. How, I ask, did various European immigrants employ religion to become not merely pale-skinned ethnics, but fully acceptable Americans –good white Christians? Beginning with the encounter of these immigrants with Anglo-American elites in Chicago, I trace a crisscrossing religious network that is American in its focus, but global in its account of immigrants’ and Americans’ sweeping transnational efforts of activism and world-betterment. This dissertation demonstrates that various European immigrant religious groups harnessed the cultural capital and coercive power of white Protestantism by adopting a posture of restless cultural activism and fervent missionary zeal, as well as a view of ethnic boundaries as harmful to proper religion. Philipp Gollner While scholars of race, immigration, and religion have long tended to treat “white religion” as a byproduct of racial and ethnic binaries, I focus on how religion itself contributed to enduring cultural hierarchies. White Protestant “home missionaries” from the U.S. went on recruiting tours to Europe, scouting for racially and religiously “desirable” newcomers. In return, Swiss-German Mennonites rejected spiritualities of quietism and activated their white bodies’ privilege through “civilizing missions” to Chicago immigrants or “the dark races” of India; and a Swedish woman crossed the Atlantic in order to contribute to the project of a Christian nation by fighting Latter-Day Saints in Utah. Religion, then, mapped racial spaces, not just the other way around. And “white religion” in America as we know it today is not simply a concomitant of racial binaries, but a fundamentally spiritual construct – never simply Anglo-Saxon, nor always American-born. This dissertation’s implications extend to the present: despite the contributions of their busy, world-bettering activism to the vitality of religious life in America, the immigrant religious groups I am interested in probably lost what could be a considerable gift to a culture still fraught with racial tensions: the instinct of ethnoreligious minorities that declined to exploit the advantages of their skin pigmentation, but opted instead for a “wise provincialism” – a position on the sidelines of dominant culture. CONTENTS FIGURES ........................................................................................................................................................ iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ............................................................................................................................ iv INTRODUCTION .......................................................................................................................................... 1 CHAPTER 1: “EVANGELIZE-AMERICANIZE:” WHITE PROTESTANTS RECRUIT CHICAGO’S IMMIGRANTS ........................................................................................................ 24 CHAPTER 2: CLAIMING OUR COUNTRY ON THE SALTY LAKE: SAVAGE MORMONS AND A SWEDISH WOMAN ....................................................................................................... 70 CHAPTER 3: TRIBAL OR TRANSCULTURAL: DANES, NORWEGIANS AND THE LIMITS OF ANGLO-PROTESTANT HOME MISSIONS .................................................................. 120 CHAPTER 4: HOW MENNONITES BECAME WHITE: RELIGIOUS ACTIVISM, CULTURAL POWER AND THE CITY ................................................................................... 177 CHAPTER 5: RUSSIAN AT PEACE, GERMAN AT WAR: AN ETHNIC NO MAN’S LAND ON THE PRAIRIE ........................................................................................................................ 233 EPILOGUE ................................................................................................................................................. 278 BIBLIOGRAPHY ...................................................................................................................................... 293 ii FIGURES Figure 1: Mormon polygamy creating a new race. Reprinted from John D. Sherwood, The Comic History of the United States… (Boston: Fields, Osgood, 1870), 451. From Reeve, Religion of a Different Color, 177. ............................................................ 74 Figure 2: Commemorating John Erik Forsgren and his brother, a bust sponsored by U.S. Latter-Day Saints stands in downtown Gävle, Sweden. Photo: Philipp Gollner, March 2015 ................................................................................................................ 78 Figure 3: Modin's 1902 autobiography "Det gjorde Gud," ("God did it") ....................... 89 Figure 4: “The Devil's Slide,” Morgan County, Utah. Public Domain. ................................ 94 Figure 5: Peter Christian Trandberg commemorated at Valensgård, Bornholm, Denmark. Public Domain. .................................................................................................... 124 Figure 6: The Mennonite Publishing Company (Herald of Truth), Elkhart, Indiana, ca. 1900.............................................................................................................................................. 182 Figure 7: M. S. Steiner, undated. Mennonite Church USA Archives. Notice the not-so- Mennonite choice of coat and bowtie. ........................................................................... 188 Figure 8: Mennonite Home Mission, Chicago, Circa 1900. Mennonite Church USA Archives ...................................................................................................................................... 215 Figure 9: Russian German family on a beet field near Sterling, Colorado. German Congregational Zion Church Archives, http://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/german-congregational-zion- church-zion-united-church-christ (accessed March 10 2016) ........................... 245 Figure 10: Ebenezer German Congregational Church, Portland, Oregon, 1892. Reproduced from Eisenach, A History of the German Congregational Churches.260 iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS It has been quite the journey. And it’s a joy to thank those who walked with me. Most of all, I am indebted to Mark Noll who supervised this dissertation. I would not have spent five years at Notre Dame had it not been for him, his willingness to reach out to an unfamiliar Austrian back in 2008, and his example of clarity, charity, hard work and humility in writing, research, teaching and life. All torturedly grandiose teutonic sentence structures that remain are mine alone. Tom Tweed has shared time, opportunities and wisdom in profession and life with great generosity. This dissertation’s bigger picture, and the doors that opened while writing it owe much to him. Rebecca McKenna’s unique insights set my work in broader historical context and connected it to larger questions of identity, migration and American history. Darren Dochuk joined the team half-way through and connected important dots between this dissertation, current scholarship, and my calling as writer and teacher. Overall, the University of Notre Dame has provided the best home a graduate student could wish for. Karen Graubart, John Deak, Scott Appleby and Dan Graff have modelled a rare combination of intellectual curiosity, professional ambition and warm collegiality that I will draw from the rest of my career. I took the first strolls to explore this project as a Master’s student during a whirlwind year at the University of Chicago. I remain deeply grateful for the careful attention and intensive guidance of Kathleen Conzen, who supervised my thesis, iv Catherine Brekus and Richard Weyhing. Finally, I could not have thrived at Chicago or Notre Dame without the endless curiosity in America’s religious life and tribal peculiarities, and the gift to laugh about it, instilled by Michael Hochgeschwender at the University of Munich and John Muether at Reformed Theological Seminary Orlando, my unlikely first stop in the new world. Over the years, quite a few colleagues and friends have showed more interest and care for me and my work than I sometimes thought was warranted, through comments on drafts of this project, crucial insights on its connection to present and future professional opportunities or conversations on the conference circuit. They are, in no particular order: John Roth, Heath Carter, Felipe Hinojosa, Theron Schlabach, Kate Bowler, Steve Nolt, Tobin Miller Shearer, Chris Cantwell, John Schmalzbauer, Kathleen Flake, Spencer Fluhman, Oliver Scheiding, Jennifer Graber and Ed Blum; as well as my fellow graduate students at Notre Dame and participants of our Colloquium on Religion and American History, particularly Ben Wetzel, David Komline, Billy Smith, Danae Jacobson and Julia Feder. Thanks to them, the feeling of doing irrelevant or lonely work never haunted