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Eric Michael Mazur. The Americanization of Religious Minorities: Confronting the Constitutional Order. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. Pp. xxv + 196. $38.00 (Cloth).
Bremer, Thomas S.
Bremer, Thomas S.
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"The First Amendment of the United States Constitution legitimizes American religious pluralism with its provisions for both the separation of church and state and for the free practice of religion. But as Eric Michael Mazur demonstrates, the First Amendment ideals encounter their practical limitations in the experience of religious minorities who challenge the boundaries of acceptable religious practice in American culture. At the same time, however, the struggles of these religious minorities to redefine the limits of religiosity in America also give definition to American identity itself. [2] Mazur’s study seeks to explicate the internal struggles of minority religious communities in the United States over conflicting desires on the one hand to assimilate to and participate in dominant cultural norms, and on the other to maintain their distinctive communal identities. He recognizes the strong identification between Protestant Christianity and American culture that historically has presented a choice to minority religious communities, either to succumb to "vaguely Protestant modes of expression" or to remain non-citizens in the sense articulated by Rousseau (xx). Mazur argues that the efforts of minority religious communities to deal with these dilemmas at the constitutional level have contributed to the erosion of Protestant hegemony in American civic life and to the emergence of a more autonomous American constitutional order based on an ideology of pluralism. The result, according to Mazur, gives advantage to the American constitutional order itself as the sole arbiter of religious conflict in the United States. [3] Mazur traces this historical tendency away from the authority of Protestant ideals toward an ideal of constitutional pluralism by suggesting three options that minority religious communities face. These options he labels in his chapter titles as "constitutional congruence," illustrated by the case of the Jehovah’s Witnesses; "constitutional conversion," typified by the Mormons; and "constitutional conflict," exemplified in the experience of Native American religions. The options involve different approaches to authority in regard to dominant American culture. In the first case, the Jehovah’s Witnesses were able to maintain their own authority while negotiating a separate peace with the dominant constitutional order; they achieved this in the courts with more than fifty cases reaching the United States Supreme Court between 1938 and 1960. For the Mormons, constitutional conversion meant adopting the authority of the dominant culture and joining the mainstream. Thus, the Mormon capitulation on plural marriage in the 1890s not only removed obstacles to Utah statehood, but also paved the way for full assimilation into American culture during the twentieth century"(pg 1)
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2000
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