Emphasizing Seton’s courage in the face of anti-Catholic prejudice, the story fits both a Catholic template of martyrdom and an American template of achievement in the face of prejudice.

The narrative is not false: Seton converted to Catholicism from her family’s Episcopal faith. And the mistrust she faced reminds us that what is now America’s largest denomination was believed by many at the nation’s founding to be incompatible with American values. But the conventional story of Seton’s life focuses on religious prejudice at the cost of acknowledging the subtler ways that Americans found opportunity and challenge within the new nation’s raucous cacophony of religious possibility.

Seton spent her childhood in a New York City scarred and depopulated by the American Revolution, but bursting with energy, ambition, and ideas. Many educated Americans, including Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, showed little interest in Christian orthodoxy or doctrinal disputes, instead believing religion’s central purpose was the creation of ethical, happy individuals. As a young woman, Seton shared this view, reading contemporary philosophers such as Rousseau and Voltaire and believing that no faith was superior to others. Yet she was also fascinated by the varieties of religious expression that were developing in her city; later she would recall her pleasure in Methodist hymns and in the deliberately plain style of Quaker dress.

Portrait of Elizabeth Seton taken by Charles Balthazar Julien Févret de Saint-Mémin in 1787. Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution.

The future Catholic saint knew nothing of Catholicism, even though the church was growing in numbers and confidence in 1790s New York. In the Anglo-American imagination, the faith had long appeared as the religion of priest-ridden wretches in the service of a Roman conspiracy to destroy liberty. During the colonial era, practical alliances between Native Americans and the French, many of them Catholic, heightened mistrust, and, after the Revolution, challenges remained. New York’s constitution required officeholders to forswear “all foreign ecclesiastical authority” and immigrant Catholics had to renounce allegiance to the pope before they could attain citizenship. John Jay, the first chief justice of the United States, argued that religious liberty for everyone else required the suppression of Catholicism, a faith whose adherents would seek to overthrow constitutional protections.

Yet, as Seton came of age, the power of these views was fading. The Revolution had found Catholic colonists fighting as patriots and a French Catholic king aiding rebellion against an English Protestant one. Manhattan also had a tradition of opting for fractious comity over orthodoxy of any kind, and wealthy Catholics found no bars to their business dealings. Conscious of both mistrust and opportunity, the nation’s first Catholic bishop, John Carroll, crafted a style of Catholicism that adhered to church teachings while studiously avoiding giving offense to Protestant neighbors.

Elizabeth Seton’s conversion to Catholicism began with a turn toward formal Christianity. A happily married mother in her late twenties (she eventually bore five children), she faced the terror of her husband William’s failing health and bankruptcy—not uncommon threats in those turbulent years. When a charismatic new minister arrived at Manhattan’s Trinity Church, Seton’s spirituality for the first time became connected to an institution. The Reverend John Henry Hobart gave richly emotional sermons while also emphasizing the importance of Episcopal traditions and the priesthood—serving up yet another religious possibility in a city that offered many. Seton was moved, attending services as often as she could and, in contrast to her earlier ecumenical views, urging others to do the same. She now thought that religious devotion was not only a way to produce ethical individuals, but also an obligation that required worshipping in a particular way.

When her husband’s health worsened and his merchant enterprise failed, the couple set sail to Italy, hoping that the climate would heal William and that Italian business associates, the Filicchi family, would restore his business. But William died within weeks of their arrival. And the Filicchi family soon introduced Seton to Catholic teachings and to the artistic treasures of Florence’s churches. Her years amidst Manhattan’s diverse religions left her willing to attend Mass, and she found herself drawn to Catholicism’s teaching of transubstantiation and to its culture of saints. When she returned home after six months, it was as a new widow determined to become a Catholic.

Some family members worried she’d been taken advantage of by her Italian hosts. Her sister fussed over the “red-faced” congregants of St. Peter’s Church, presaging the class and ethnic prejudice that would fuel the rise of anti-Catholic nativism during the mass immigration of Irish and Germans that began in the 1840’s.

But many in Seton’s circle were merchants who had done business with and even socialized with wealthy Catholics, and like Seton, they were accustomed to living amidst New York’s many faiths. And Seton’s family, despite their distaste for her choice, kept supporting her financially. When she and her children lost their home, her sister took them in and even bought fish on Fridays so that they could meet Catholic dietary rules.

Eventually, a mix of prejudice and kindness illuminated how estranged Seton was becoming from her old social world. Eager to contribute to her own support, Seton made plans to teach school, and word spread that the Catholic convert might proselytize Protestant children. Two neighbors visited her with diplomacy on their minds, suggesting that Seton simply reassure them she would not seek to convert children to Catholicism, so that they might reassure everyone else.

Seton was having none of it. She told her neighbors she would like to convert Protestant children to Catholicism and refrained from doing so only because her priest told her not to. It’s hard to imagine a reply better calculated to unsettle her well-meaning visitors.

This friction between Seton and her neighbors is absent from most accounts of her story. It’s an important and telling omission, because a similar absence is common to conventional accounts of early American religion, which tend to describe Christian practice either as simple and uniform, or as part of a pitched battle between prejudice and tolerance.

Seton’s real story showed how much lay in between. Her actions elicited anger not only from people prejudiced against Catholicism, but also from people who felt they were being called upon to be tolerant of intolerance. After all, Seton wanted to proselytize because she believed only Catholics could go to heaven, an exclusivity that offended her family more than her choice of faith itself. More generally, Seton was refusing to keep private what New Yorkers felt must be private, lest social harmony and commerce become impossible.

This needlepoint was completed by a student at the school Elizabeth Seton founded, Saint Joseph’s Academy and Free School. Courtesy of Catherine O’Donnell.

This irenicism was not simply a Protestant view. As Seton unsettled her neighbors, Michael Hurley, a young priest at Manhattan’s lone Catholic parish, was working to overturn the state’s restrictions on Catholic political participation. Like Seton’s Protestant neighbors, Hurley believed that religion was a matter of private conscience and should neither make claims on nonbelievers nor incur public punishment.

Seton was far from alone in her inclination to proselytize; the same religious diversity that made proselytization awkward, also made it likely. During the 19th century flowering of revivals known as the Second Great Awakening, those who were born-again felt a spiritual urgency that separated them from friends and family and often prompted them to try to persuade others of their beliefs. Across the nation, new religious societies were founded and churches planted, and New York City saw an ever-growing number of diverse congregations, some meeting in elegant new buildings, others in storefronts and attics. Within this flowering of expression lurked pain. Constitutional protections did not dull the sting when friends and relatives chose differently from among the profusion of possibilities, especially when their choices implied condemnation of one’s own.

In 1808, Seton left New York for Maryland, where she founded the nation’s first Catholic sisterhood. In the years that followed, she became a successful institution builder and an admired face of a church whose members remained a small minority within the country. Yet she was humbled by spiritual struggles and saddened by loss (including the deaths of two of her three daughters). She continued to believe Catholicism was the safest path to salvation, but no longer felt it was the only one. The cost of proselytization—in sundered relationships and civic mistrust—seemed to outweigh the benefits, not least because Seton no longer believed one person could persuade another to believe anything at all. Living her faith rather than proclaiming it was her ethos. In contrast to her earlier views, she insisted that the school she founded in Emmitsburg, Maryland, accept Protestant girls and not seek to convert them. The ability of her religious community, the Sisters of Charity, to flourish emerged in no small measure because she came to adopt the view of religion she’d once mistrusted—that it should and could be kept within the bounds of civility.

The persistence of anti-Catholicism in the American experience was a challenge for Seton and other Catholics and converts. But it also helped inspire the desire for a saint such as Seton, who was so undeniably American.

Her sainthood recognized the Americanness of Catholics, but her story also should remind us that, since the nation’s earliest days, coexistence has required more than a lack of prejudice against a particular faith. And civility, while essential, is only a general answer to the challenges of pluralism; religious diversity poses its questions specifically.

Expressions of faith—and a desire to promote one’s discovered truth—can feel to one person like the fulfillment of religious liberty and neighborly obligation, and to another like their violation. The nation’s complex religious landscape creates a vibrant civic life in which a Rousseau-reading Episcopalian can one day become a Catholic saint. It also, as Seton learned, creates innumerable invisible borders between competing beliefs and nonbeliefs.

The post Why America’s First Saint Stopped Trying to Convert Her Neighbors to Catholicism appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

These aggressive cultural-religious nationalisms have asserted themselves not only in the U.S. and Europe, but also from Myanmar to the Middle East. Because this is a global phenomenon, it raises the question of whether these nationalisms are related in some way to globalization.

Answering the question requires unpacking a paradox. Globalization is marked by a rapid mobility of peoples, mass migrations, the proliferation of diaspora cultures, and a transnational sense of community facilitated by internet relationships. But despite all these exchanges, religious nationalism—which appears to take an inflexible stance towards local identities—persists, and in fact flourishes, in this global environment. Are these forces—globalism and nationalism—working against each other, as the common wisdom goes, or are they somehow encouraging each other?

To look at that question, we have to explore why local loyalties and parochial new forms of ethno-religious nationalism have surfaced in today’s sea of post-nationality.

One superficial answer is that this moment we are in is an anomaly, and it will soon pass. After all, history is poised on the brink of an era of globalization, hardly the time for new national aspirations to emerge. In fact, some observers have cited the appearance of ethnic and religious nationalism in the former Yugoslavia and the former Soviet Union, Algeria and the Middle East, South Asia and Japan, and among right-wing movements in Europe and the United States as evidence that globalization has not, in fact, reached all quarters of the globe.

But is this really the case? Is it possible to see these quests for local identities and new nationalisms not as anomalies in the homogeneity of globalization, but as further examples of its impact? In case studies that I have examined, I have found that the paradox of new nationalisms in a global world can be explained, in part, by seeing them as responses to one or more of several globalizing forces.

In many cases the new ethnic and religious movements are direct reactions to globalization—a fear of the “new world order,” as some patriot movements in the United States have put it. Such movements express angst over the loss of identity and privilege in a world that is rapidly becoming multicultural.

Ashin Wirathu, the Buddhist monk in Myanmar who has encouraged violence against the Muslim minority, told me that his stance was simply for the defense of the Buddhist community. “We are a tiny dot of Burmese Buddhist culture at the edge of a sea of Islam,” he said, adding that he did not want his traditions to be forever dashed away. This is a sentiment articulated by Muslims in Iraq and by Christians in the United States as well.

But many of these religious nationalist movements are also responses to a perceived failure in secular nationalism. Though the European Enlightenment touted secular nationalism as the most just and progressive form of political organization for the modern world, this vision is an empty promise in many places. The global political standard—the secular nationalisms of Europe and the United States—look more like vestiges of European colonialism in parts of the developing world.

From Egypt to India, new nationalists have criticized secular leaders for ignoring their cultural heritages and attempting to create imitations of European and American politics for their own gain. The corruption and inefficiency of many of these governments in formerly colonial states does little to assure their citizens that this secular model actually works in their interests. An exasperated follower of the Islamic State in Iraq said to me, “What have we gained from being a secular state?”

This sense of despair over the failures of secular nationalism comes at a time when it as an institution has already been weakened by global forces. Instant, worldwide communication, the erosion of traditional economic boundaries, and the easy mobility of populations across national lines have put secular nation-states under siege.

That vulnerability of the nation-state, in turn, has been the occasion for new ethno-religious politics to step into the breach and shore up national identities and purposes.

These ethno-religious politics come in many forms. Some, like the Islamic State, are transnational and reach across national borders often through the vehicle of cyber networks. Others, like some Christian militants in the U.S., are virulently anti-global, and rail against the “new world order.” In each case, however, while activists may disparage the globalization that has weakened the secular nation-states, it is often that very same globalization that has given the ethno-religious nationalists the opportunity to organize on a transnational scale.

Our current global era is full of ironies and ambiguities, and these movements of new nationalisms and transnationalism are good examples. Though they may appear at first glance to harken to premodern forms of provincial politics, they are in fact postmodern creatures of the global age. Sometime they align with parochial nationalism and sometimes with more transnational ideologies. But in both cases, they stand in a very uneasy relationship with the globalizing economic and cultural forces of the 21st century.

The post How Globalization Engenders Ethno-Religious Nationalism appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I think we’re looking at the wrong part of this question—atheists—when we should be looking at the really interesting part: belief. To understand the difference between believing and not believing, you have to consider how Christians talked about unbelief five centuries ago, when Taylor says it was virtually impossible.

When you do this, you discover that atheism is nothing new, but its meaning has changed. The Protestant leader John Calvin, for instance, declared in 1559 that anyone who suppresses his fear of God and instead follows his own appetites “denies that there is a God.” And, on that basis, Calvin thought his society as chock-full of atheists as ours. On the opposite side of the Reformation, the Jesuit priest Robert Parsons agreed in 1582 that atheists were everywhere, because anyone who puts their worldly affairs above their salvation commits a “secret kind of atheism.” They may say they believe in God, but by their actions “they testify that in their hearts they believe him not.”

Quotes like these are easy to find from across the religious spectrum. Perhaps the most remarkable example comes from the German mystic Sebastian Franck—one of the most important of the so-called “radical reformers”—who insisted that authentic belief is only possible through union with the godhead. He thus forthrightly declared in 1534 that “there is not a single believer on earth.”

If Charles Taylor says that in 1500 it was virtually impossible not to believe in God, but Sebastian Franck wrote in 1534 that there is not a single believer on earth, then obviously we’re missing something. Here’s what we’re missing: Belief has a history, and the thing we call “belief”—our opinion that a proposition is true, based upon our individual judgment—is a relatively recent invention.

Before the seventeenth century, in Western society “belief” was a concept tightly guarded by the church, and it carried very different meanings. To believe the wrong thing, or in the wrong way, was not really to believe at all.

For one thing, belief was understood to be certain rather than merely probable: To think something 99 percent likely was to disbelieve it rather than believe it. Medieval theologians distinguished sharply between “belief” and the very different, corrupt faculty called “opinion.” Thomas Aquinas, for instance, writing around the year 1270, defined “opinion” as an “act of the intellect inclined to one alternative while retaining respect for the other,” a kind of probabilistic calculus. By this definition, opinion might sometimes contain some truth, but it always contained falsehood, so opinion could never be a religious virtue. Belief, by contrast, was virtuous because by definition it was assured.

Likewise, ancient Christian doctrine held that to believe was to yield to authority rather than to form your own views. Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, and the most influential Christian theologian of the later Roman Empire, made this the fundamental definition of belief in 391: When we believe, we believe someone else. By this logic, belief left little or no room for evidence or argument. As Lactantius, advisor to the Emperor Constantine, wrote around 310, “If you believe, why then do you require a reason, which may have the effect of causing you not to believe? But if you require a reason, and think that the subject demands inquiry, then you do not believe.”

Of course, by these arguments, wrong belief could easily be dismissed as not really belief at all. It was instead merely a kind of opinion, the result of trusting in some profane evidence or argument rather than the perfection of God and the church. Aquinas, for instance, wrote that anyone who does not “believe in a God as we understand it in relation to the act of faith”—like Muslims and Jews—does not believe that God exists at all.

This strict framework, widely available in the philosophical and theological writings of the Middle Ages, was weaponized by the Protestant Reformation. With the fragmentation of Western Christianity, “belief” became a way of asserting exclusive possession of rare and valuable truths, and the rival churches proved unwilling to grant belief-status to their enemies.

Protestants doubled down on the authoritarian implications of medieval belief, arguing that “believers” were not those obedient to the church but the tiny minority whom God chose to save, the elect. As John Calvin wrote in 1560, “there remaineth nothing else for the rest but the reproach of atheism.” Catholics, by contrast, argued that Protestantism was a negative rather than a positive religion, not a belief system at all but a subtraction from the beliefs of the church.

The brand-new word “atheist” emerged for the first time in the middle of the sixteenth century, almost simultaneously in every European language, as a way of signaling this new controversy. The Reformation thus filled the world with “unbelievers,” not because many people failed to believe in God by our definition of the term—they did not, and they were unamused to be defamed as atheists by their opponents—but because increasingly narrow definitions of belief made the condition such a rare one.

This stranglehold on belief was broken in the early Enlightenment, not at first by arguments against religion, but by religious men and women attempting to break free from the authoritarian control of their own churches. The French philosopher Blaise Pascal, an adherent of the Catholic subgroup known as Jansenists, found himself in the uncomfortable position of trying to remain a Catholic while opposing the pope. When the Jansenists were required by Rome to repudiate the writings of their founder, Pascal’s response (published posthumously in 1670, eight years after his premature death) was to reframe belief itself as independent of authority: “So far from making it a rule to believe a thing because you have heard it, you ought to believe nothing without putting yourself into the position as if you had never heard it. It is your own assent to yourself, and the constant voice of your own reason and not of others, that should make you believe.”

From a very different perspective, the English empiricist philosopher John Locke completely rejected the notion that “opinion” and “belief” were two different things. After first defining “probability” as likeliness to be true based upon arguments or proofs, Locke wrote in 1689, “The entertainment the mind gives this sort of propositions is called belief, assent, or opinion.”

In this novel framework, “belief” is made accessible to all—it is made free—because belief is merely human judgment, without pretension to absolute or indubitable truth. Opinion is raised up to a new level, while religious belief is knocked down a peg. In this brave new world, I might believe a religious doctrine in much the same way I believe that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, or that the sun is part of the Milky Way galaxy: I judge it to be true based upon whatever evidence I find most probative.

This framework reached the shores of North America most famously in Thomas Jefferson’s 1786 act establishing religious freedom in Virginia. There Jefferson wrote, “Our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions any more than our opinions in physics or geometry.” This statement would have been literally nonsensical in the sixteenth century—religion was not considered the stuff of opinion at all (neither, for that matter, was science, but that is a different story). But by the end of the eighteenth century, belief was so transformed that Jefferson’s statement had become a truism.

And so, we have arrived at how “atheism” could have become so reasonable or respectable a position that 11 percent of the American public might avow it. That is, as belief itself was redefined as merely individual judgment, atheism became a kind of belief, rather than the absence of belief. It is simply a judgment, no more or less legitimate than any other opinion based upon evidence and argument, and in that sense, it is parallel to the other kinds of beliefs people hold.

But we are also now in a position to see that asking how atheism became possible is not the most interesting question. The problem is, the question takes belief itself for granted, as a default position from which some fall occurred. Our persistent attention to atheism obscures the fact that the biggest transformation in the history of religion in the West was not the rise of unbelief but the transformation of belief itself.

The post Religious Belief Was a 17th-Century Invention appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.