Looking under the lid of this wide-ranging conversation, Wenger asks: What are Americans really talking about when they talk about religious freedom? In part, they are invoking one of the United States’s “signal contributions to the larger causes of liberty and democracy around the world.” Equally relevant is the inverse of that question: What are Americans not talking about when we talk about religious freedom? That is, what concerns and issues are typically masked by religious freedom discourse? Race and empire — terms that do not harmonize quite as well with the American Dream — are often just below the surface of national conversations about religious freedom, Wenger finds, explaining that “the most audible varieties of religious freedom talk — the many ways in which people invoke this ideal — helped define American whiteness and make the case for U.S. imperial rule.”
Wenger’s case studies bear out this conclusion. Thus, in the aftermath of the Spanish-Cuban-Filipino-American War, President McKinley’s administration posited religious freedom as nonnegotiable in the United States’s colonization of the Philippines, a way to strengthen Anglo-Protestant claims to racial-religious supremacy. At the same time, religious freedom talk provided a means for racial-religious minorities to reject constructs of Anglo-Protestant supremacy, assert their civilizational credentials, and thus improve their standing in the racial-religious hierarchies of US empire. In the debate over the Philippines, Wenger shows, Catholics refused to accept the Anglo-Protestant logics of religious freedom and the secular modernity that it signified. Instead, they deployed religious freedom talk in order to identify Catholicism as an all-American religion, implicitly claiming for Catholics the civilizational status of white Americans. Religious freedom talk enabled “a new access for Catholics to the privileges of whiteness in American life.”
There are parallels in the Jewish example that Wenger offers in her chapter about the tri-faith movement. Jewish communal leaders who promoted the values of religious liberty during the first half of the 20th century hoped to steer American perceptions of Jews away from the racial category and toward religion:
If the Jews could be defined not as a race or a nation but solely as a religious group — a difference to be protected and even celebrated on the all-American grounds of religious freedom — then perhaps the lingering barriers to full Jewish participation in the cultural and civil life of the nation could finally be removed.
Religion was never a category that entirely fit Jewish self-understanding, which included categories of nation, culture, and race, but it did prove a useful tool. Wenger’s argument here is important: she shows how the case for Judaism as a religion was “forged in and through a rhetoric of religious freedom that must be understood as part of the discursive apparatus of U.S. empire.” As a study of multiple religious groups, Wenger’s book also shows readers how much Jews benefited from the religious liberty discourse, compared with other groups who were not able to leave behind their racialized status.