| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Supreme Court and Religion in American Life, vol. 1: The Odyssey of the Religion Clauses. By James Hitchcock. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. 218 pp. $29.95, ISBN 0-691-11696-2.)

The Supreme Court and Religion in American Life, vol. 2: From "Higher Law" to "Sectarian Scruples." By James Hitchcock. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. 261 pp. $35.00, ISBN 0-691-11923-6.)

Although it is not without flaws, James Hitchcock's two-volume The Supreme Court and Religion in American Life provides a competent survey of the high court's often maddeningly inconsistent handling of cases involving religion. Hitchcock's approach is, at its best moments, refreshingly broad, covering everything from obscure, long-forgotten cases heard by the Supreme Court in the early nineteenth century to the religious beliefs of current justices. (Lest anyone wonder about the religious convictions of Justice Clarence Thomas, we read in Hitchcock's first volume that he publicly affirmed what he has termed "'the wonderful miracle of the Mass,'" p. 104.) In prose that is more prosaic than soaring, the author traverses an enormous amount of ground to provide a concise study that is more of an accessible guide for general readers and students than a pathbreaking work that might provoke serious debate among scholars in the field. Indeed, specialists looking for an evenhanded study of this topic might be put off by the second volume, which is sometimes burdened by both a clear ideological agenda and a caustic tone. (One typical passage concludes that Justice Wiley Rutledge simply "misread the Bible," p. 163, in a 1948 case. Another claims that the "deepest threat to constitutionally guaranteed liberty is now posed by the postmodernist phenomenon of 'deconstruction,'" p. 161.)

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