Dilemmas in American Politics
Series Editor L. Sandy Maisei, Colby College
Dilemmas in American Politics offers teachers and students a series of quality books on timely topics and key institutions in American government. Each text will examine a real world dilemma and will be structured to cover the historical, theoretical, policy relevant, and future dimensions of its subject.
Editorial board
Jeffrey M. Berry
Tufts University
John F. Bibby
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
David T. Canon
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Rodolfo O. de la Garza
University of Texas-Austin
Diana Evans
Trinity College
Linda L. Fowler
Dartmouth University
Paul S. Herrnson
University of Maryland-College Park
Ruth S. Jones
Arizona State University
Paula D. McClain
University of Virginia
Karen OConnor
American University
Samuel C. Patterson
Ohio State University
Ronald B. Rapoport
The College of William and Mary
Craig A. Rimmerman
Hobart and William Smith Colleges
Larry Sabato
University of Virginia
David Shribman
The Boston Globe
Walter J. Stone
University of Colorado-Boulder
Books in this Series
To Serve God and Mammon: Church-State Relations in American Politics,
Ted G. Jelen
Money Rules: Financing Elections in America,
Anthony Gierzynski
The Accidental System: Health Care Policy in America,
Michael D. Reagan
The Dysfunctional Congressi The Individual Roots of an Institutional Dilemma,
Kenneth R. Mayer and David T Canon
The Image-Is-Everything Presidency: Dilemma in American Leadership,
Richard W. Waterman, Robert Wright, and Gilbert St. Clair
Checks and Balances? How a Parliamentary System Could Change American Politics,
Paul Christopher Manuel and Anne Marie Cammisa
Can We All Get Along? Racial and Ethnic Minorities in American Politics, Second Edition, Updated,
Paula D. McClain and Joseph Stewart Jr.
From Rhetoric to Reform? Welfare Policy in American Politics,
Anne Marie Cammisa
Two PartiesOr More? The American Party System,
John F. Bibby and L. Sandy Maisel
Making Americans, Remaking America: Immigration and Immigrant Policy,
Louis DeSipio and Rodolfo de la Garza
The New Citizenship: Unconventional Politics, Activism, and Service,
Craig A. Rimmerman
The Angry American: How Voter Rage Is Changing the Nation, Second Edition,
Susan J. Tolchin
No Neutral Ground? Abortion Politics in an Age of Absolutes,
Karen OConnor
Onward Christian Soldiers? The Religious Right in American Politics,
Clyde Wilcox
Payment Due: A Nation in Debt, a Generation in Trouble,
Timothy J. Penny and Steven E. Schier
Bucking the Deficit: Economic Policymaking in the United States,
G. Calvin Mackenzie and Saranna Thornton
Remote and Controlled: Media Politics in a Cynical Age, Second Edition,
Matthew Robert Kerbel
First published 2000 by Westview Press
Published 2019 by Routledge
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Jelen, Ted G.
To serve God and mammon: church-state relations in American politics I Ted G. Jelen
p. em. (Dilemmas in American politics)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8133-9988-2 (pbk.)
1. Church and state United States. I. Title. II. Series.
BR516 .J455 2000
322.10973dc21
00-035935
ISBN 13: 978-0-367-27405-4 (hbk)
In an important sense, I have been working on this book my entire life. It is no exaggeration to say that my life has been characterized by increasing exposure to religious diversity over time. During my forty-eight years as an observer of American religion, I have increasingly come to recognize the role of religion as a source of personal and communal identity as well as of interpersonal and political conflict. My personal and intellectual life has been characterized by increasing exposure to religious diversity, which in turn has shaped the ideas presented in this book.
I spent the first decade of my life in the comfortable ethnic and religious homogeneity of Chicagos southwest side. The citys Garfield Ridge neighborhood was uniformly white, Polish, and Catholic and was dominated by the benign omnipotence of St. Daniel the Prophet parish. My week, and that of everyone I knew, was organized around religious observance: novena on Friday night, confession on Saturday night, and Masses on Sunday morning and the first Friday morning of every month. On Wednesday afternoon, Kinzie Elementary School emptied ninety minutes early, and the Catholic students who were enrolled in public school marched the three blocks to St. Daniels, to take CCD (Confraternity of Christian Doctrine) classes under the supervision of the nuns. I later learned that this practice was upheld by a Supreme Court ruling stating that such released time was not a violation of the Establishment Clause. I played baseball in a league organized by the parish. The older kids went to dances sponsored by St. Danielsapparently designed to minimize the likelihood of an unfortunate marriage.
The Catholicism preached and practiced at St. Daniels was of the pre-Vatican II, nonecumenical variety. St. Daniels was among the last parishes to switch from the Latin Mass to the vernacular (alternating Masses in English and Polish). As a CCD student at St. Daniels, I was taught that Roman Catholicism was the one true Church, and was admonished to pray for non-Catholics. My early religious training emphasized the importance of personal piety and morality. Significantly, the first U.S. presidential election of which I have clear memories is the 1960 election: We regarded the election of John F. Kennedy (the nations first Catholic president) as a triumph of faith as well as politics. Nearly four decades later, my mother is still bitterly disappointed by the (apparently plausible) rumors of JFKs marital infidelity.
My sense of religious consensus and comfort came to an abrupt halt shortly after my tenth birthday, when my family moved from the southwest side of Chicago to the affluent western suburb of Hinsdale. In the fifth grade at Gower Elementary School, I had my first sustained encounters with Protestants and with the new math. Although my experiences with the former were much more positive than with the latter, for the first time I was in the minority and felt like an outsider. For the first two years, I responded to my new environment with a drastic increase in personal religiosity and in the frequency of private religious devotions. Reciting the rosary and reading the Bible became part of my daily routine. My sense of religious alienation proved relatively short-lived, and I soon became quite comfortable in the undemanding Christian ecumenism of Chicagos western suburbs.
