At the Law & Liberty site this morning, I review a new documentary on the history of religious freedom in America, “Free Exercise.” The film shows how minority religious communities–Catholics, Mormons, and others–have changed America over time. But, I argue, America has changed minority religions as well. Here’s an excerpt:

ike the Quakers, who went from being bottle-breaking radicals to sober citizens, Catholics and Mormons themselves changed in ways that made them less threatening to the American majority. One major point of contention between the Catholic Church and the wider American society had to do with religious liberty itself. The nineteenth-century Church was the Church of the Syllabus of Errors (1864), a papal document that condemned freedom of conscience and the separation of church and state as dangerous heresies. America’s Protestant majority saw this document and the values it espoused as hostile to fundamental American commitments. In the 1928 campaign, The Atlantic published an open letter questioning whether a Catholic like Smith could serve as president, citing the Syllabus and other papal pronouncements on church and state.

A hundred years later, though, and largely through the efforts of American Catholics like Fr. John Courtney Murray, the Second Vatican Council adopted Dignitatis Humanae, a document that specifically endorses religious liberty as a civil right. Catholic scholars have argued that Dignitatis Humanae and the Syllabus of Errors can be interpreted consistently with one another and that, from a theological perspective, there was no change. However theologians understand the situation, though, after Dignitatis Humanae, something had indeed changed as a practical matter. A major point of tension between the Catholic Church and American culture had disappeared, largely because of American influence.

Or consider the LDS Church. A primary source of conflict between Mormons and the wider American society in the nineteenth century had to do with plural marriage, the issue in cases like Reynolds and Davis. In 1890, however, the LDS Church officially ended the practice—making it possible for Utah to be admitted as a state six years later. Practically speaking, Mormonism changed in a way that made it much less threatening to the wider American public. Mormons conformed to social convention, and relations between the LDS Church and other Americans have been better ever since.

What causes religions in America to move toward the mean over time? Some argue that the Lockean ideology that underlies our First Amendment is designed to encourage religious moderation—to minimize religious “enthusiasms” that threaten social peace. If that’s the case, Lockeanism certainly seems to be working. Or perhaps another factor explains things. Two hundred years ago, Tocqueville wrote about the strong pressures for social conformity that exist in the United States, where he observed “little independence of mind.” Whether as a result of ideology or social norms, or both, the pattern is apparent.

You can read the full essay here.