Familiar accounts of religious freedom in the United States often
tell a story of visionary founders who broke from the centuries-old
patterns of Christendom to establish a political arrangement
committed to secular and religiously neutral government. These
novel commitments were supposedly embodied in the religion clauses
of the First Amendment. But this story is largely a fairytale,
Steven Smith says in this incisive examination of a
much-mythologized subject. He makes the case that the American
achievement was not a rejection of Christian commitments but a
retrieval of classic Christian ideals of freedom of the church and
freedom of conscience. Smith maintains that the distinctive
American contribution to religious freedom was not in the First
Amendment, which was intended merely to preserve the political
status quo in matters of religion. What was important was the
commitment to open contestation between secularist and
providentialist understandings of the nation which evolved over the
nineteenth century. In the twentieth century, far from vindicating
constitutional principles, as conventional wisdom suggests, the
Supreme Court imposed secular neutrality, which effectively
repudiated this commitment to open contestation. Rather than
upholding what was distinctively American and constitutional, these
decisions subverted it. The negative consequences are visible today
in the incoherence of religion clause jurisprudence and the intense
culture wars in American politics.
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