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Essays on the Persecution of Religious Minorities by David Thomas Smith

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Essays on the Persecution of Religious Minorities by David Thomas Smith Essays on the Persecution of Religious Minorities by David Thomas Smith A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Political Science) in the University of Michigan 2011 Doctoral Committee: Professor William R. Clark, co-chair Professor Anna M. Grzymala-Busse, co-chair Professor Robert J. Franzese, Jr. Professor Andrei S. Markovits Professor Robert W. Mickey i Acknowledgements Throughout the last six and a half years I have benefited enormously from the mentorship and friendship of my wonderful dissertation committee members: Bill Clark, Anna Grzymala-Busse, Andy Markovits, Rob Mickey and Rob Franzese. I assembled this committee before I even knew what I wanted to write about, and I made the right choices—I cannot imagine a more supportive, patient and insightful group of advisers. They gave me badly-needed discipline when I needed it (which was all the time) and oversaw numerous episodes of Schumpeterian “creative destruction.” They also gave me more ideas than I could ever hope to assimilate, ideas which will be providing me with directions for future research for many years to come. But these huge contributions are minor in comparison to the fact that they taught me how to think like a political scientist. I couldn’t ask for anything more. All of these papers had trial runs in various internal workshops and seminars at the University of Michigan, and I profited greatly from the structured feedback that I received from the Michigan political science community, faculty and grad students alike. Thanks to everyone who was a discussant for one of these papers—Zvi Gitelman, Chuck Shipan, Sana Jaffrey, Cassie Grafstrom (twice!), Ron Inglehart, Ken Kollman, Allison Dale, Pam Brandwein, Andrea Jones-Rooy, Rob Salmond and Jenna Bednar. My apologies to anyone I might have missed. My early research into Mormonism, something I initially knew nothing about, was made far less daunting by the generous ii help of Brad Kramer, Allen Hicken, Dan Magleby, Josh Gubler and Abe Gong. The conversations I had with these colleagues were far more valuable than any book I read or data I collected. I was fortunate to have some critical interactions with leading scholars in the political economy of religion, especially Larry Iannaccone, Tony Gill, Roger Finke, Carolyn Warner, Carrie Miles and Colleen Berndt. I thank them for taking an interest in my work and providing me with a wealth of useful ideas and information. Thanks also to David Manwaring and James Sparrow for corresponding with me and getting me out of some dead ends. Many thanks to Rick Hall for securing much needed funding during my final semester at Michigan that enabled me to finish this project. My gratitude to and awe of my graduate school colleagues in Ann Arbor knows no bounds, and I look forward to many years of future conversations and collaboration with them. For all the help they gave me thanks especially to Richard Anderson, Matias Bargsted, Janna Bray, Sarah Croco (I am no longer mathematically illiterate!), Papia Debroy, Charles Doriean, Katie Drake, Kate Gallagher, Cassie Grafstrom, Krysha Gregorowicz-Heavner, Shanna Kirschner Hodgson, Liz Hudson, Ashley Jardina, Andrea Jones-Rooy, Nathan Kalmoe, Dan Katz, Shaun McGirr, Jennifer Miller-Gonzalez (an amazing friend), Neill Mohammad, Pat O’Mahen, Spencer Piston, Paul Poast, Michelle Pritchett, Michael Robbins, Joel Selway, Khuram Siddiqui, Derek Stafford, Jess Steinberg, Michio Umeda, Claire Whitlinger, Alton Worthington, Jessica Wyse and Jon Zelner. This is not an exhaustive list and I am grateful to everyone I ever talked to in grad school. Finally, thanks to my parents Brian and Sue and my brothers Stephen and Michael. A mere nine thousand miles never got in the way of your love and support. iii Table of Contents Acknowledgements………………………………………………....ii Chapter 1. Introduction…………………………………………….......1 2. The State Responds to Religious Charisma: The Mormons in the Nineteenth Century…………………………………….4 3. Voting to Repress: The 47th Congress and the Mormons….40 4. Violent Civil Society: The American Legion, the State, and the Persecution of Jehovah’s Witnesses…………………...72 5. Proselytism and Persecution: The Case of Jehovah’s Witnesses in Europe……………………………………..166 6. Conclusion………………………………………………203 iv Chapter 1: Introduction The four papers in this dissertation all arise from the observation that tolerance of minorities, even in liberal democracies, is uneven and conditional. In any given regime, some minorities get persecuted while others do not. I was inspired but also dissatisfied by recent scholarship that systematically explores the general propensities of regimes to repress or to tolerate (Davenport 2007, Grim and Finke 2007) without addressing the question of why some groups seems so much more prone than others to be repressed or tolerated. Thus my project is concerned with incidents of religious persecution at the hands of state actors who generally uphold norms of religious freedom or at least tolerance. Religion was the original arena in which ideas of state tolerance were formulated and tested; religious toleration is at the core of the historical development of liberalism both as an idea and as a political regime. But even the foundational philosophical document of religious toleration, John Locke’s A Letter Concerning Toleration, comes with a substantial list of groups that are not to be tolerated. Locke warned against tolerating any Church that “is constituted upon such a bottom that all those who enter it so ipso facto deliver themselves up to the protection and service of another prince,” by which he meant to exclude Catholics. He also explicitly ruled out tolerance of atheists, because “promises, covenants, and oaths, which are the bonds of human society, can have no hold upon an atheist.” When modern states make exceptions to religious tolerance they may use different 1 language and different categories for exclusion, but the broader principle is the same—there are some criteria by which particular groups, even those recognized as genuine religions, are not entitled to the protection the state extends to other religions. States may no longer try to interfere with religious beliefs, but they will repress and persecute some religious groups that they see as threats to secular order. These criteria vary dramatically not only between countries, but over time within countries, and they are applied very inconsistently. Determining why some religious groups are persecuted in otherwise non-persecuting regimes requires working out the conditions under which political actors come to see religious groups as secular threats, and the means by which they can convince others that the persecution of one group can be reconciled with an overall system of tolerance of minorities—that the rights of some can be undermined without undermining the rights of all. Identifying these conditions and mechanisms is, broadly, the goal of all four of the papers in this dissertation. 2 Bibliography Davenport, Christian (2007). State Repression and the Domestic Democratic Peace. New York: Cambridge University Press. Grim, Brian J., and Roger Finke (2007). “Religious Persecution in Cross-National Contexts: Clashing Civilizations or Regulated Religious Economies?” American Sociological Review, 72. Locke, John (1689). A Letter Concerning Toleration. 3 Chapter 2: The State Responds to Religious Charisma: The Mormons in the Nineteenth Century Introduction The Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints, which Tolstoy famously designated as “the American religion,”1 is also one of the few religions with the distinction of having been violently persecuted in the United States. Between the appearance of Joseph Smith’s Book of Mormon in 1830 and Smith’s murder in 1844, the Mormons were chased out of New York, Ohio and Missouri at gunpoint by neighbors enraged over their aggressive proselytism and what they saw as the outright fraudulence of Joseph Smith. The Mormons’ flight from Missouri in 1838 was prompted by a bloody series of skirmishes with well-organized opponents; Governor Lilburn Boggs responded with an extraordinary, quasi-genocidal executive order declaring that the Mormons had “made war upon the people of this state” and “must be exterminated or driven from the state if necessary for the public peace.” A few years after the Mormons fled to Illinois and established a thriving city, an anti- Mormon mob lynched Smith with the assistance of a local militia. Facing the prospect of more violence and coercion, most of the remaining Mormons undertook a long, hazardous journey to 1 See Bloom (1992), p. 97 4 Utah under the leadership of Brigham Young in 1847, believing they would be beyond the reach of any hostile authority in the United States. The federal government initially encouraged the move, seeing the Mormon exodus as an opportunity to establish an American presence in the western territories newly captured from Mexico. In return for Mormon allegiance to the United States, the Fillmore Administration appointed Brigham Young Governor of Utah Territory. Relations soured when the Mormon leadership’s practice of plural marriage became public knowledge in the early 1850s, leading to the Buchanan Administration’s brief invasion of Utah in 1857 (widely known as “Buchanan’s Folly.”) The abortive invasion was followed by a series of increasingly aggressive Congressional actions designed to force the Mormons to conform to American anti-bigamy laws. These culminated in the Edmunds Act of 1882 and the Edmunds-Tucker Act of 1887, which forbade Mormons from voting, holding elected office or serving on juries, and authorized the federal government to confiscate Church property, including temples. These last measures induced the Church leadership to abandon polygamy in 1890, though it continued in secret for a while; Congress held up the seating of Senator Reed Smoot for seven years over the issue of whether the Mormon leadership was still allowing plural marriages to take place at the turn of the century.2 The story of how a nation of people who prided themselves on their religious liberty came to persecute the Mormons is controversial and complicated.
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