Theodore Parker and America's religious nativism

We are living in a time of nativism around the globe. Britain just voted to leave the European Union based on Euroscepticism. The Alternative for Germany movement aims to do the same for the EU’s largest remaining nation, while France’s National Front Party and Italy’s Northern League have grown in power over the last decade. And in the U.S., the Republican Party has nominated a candidate whose platform includes building a giant wall on the border. Nationalism is a tricky and malleable concept, and it has often reared its ugly side during moments of economic unrest and popular revolt.

Religion plays a central role in these populist debates, especially in America. Sometimes, religious conceptions of belonging can be a unifying factor that draws people together, like how Protestantism helped Americans construct an image of dissent and chosenness during their fight for independence. But such conceptions can also be used against people, as when anti-Catholicism served as an umbrella for opposing European immigration a century later. Religion offers the tools for both including and excluding, both adoption and alienation. 

One American figure who embodied this tension was Theodore Parker, an abolitionist preacher in Boston before the Civil War. Trained at Harvard to be a Unitarian minister, Parker became involved with the Transcendentalist movement, which called for innovative forms of knowledge and novel forms of authority. He eventually broke away from the Unitarian faith and formed his own successful congregation, preaching to 2,000 Bostonians each week.