Reviews of Books

Piety and Politics in the New Republic

Religion and the New Republic: Faith in the Founding of America. Edited by JAMES H. HUTSON . (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000 . Pp. viii, 212 . $ 82.50 cloth, $ 26.95 paper.)

Reviewed by Dee E. Andrews, California State University, Hayward

In June 1998, James H. Hutson, chief of the Manuscript Division at the Library of Congress, issued a brief press release to accompany the opening of an exhibit on "Religion and the Founding of the American Republic." At his request, Hutson explained, the FBI Laboratory had recovered several illegible passages in Thomas Jefferson's 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptist Association of Connecticut. The uncovered words, Hutson announced (as he was to write in a subsequent William and Mary Quarterly Forum), revealed that Jefferson's main purpose in responding to the Danbury Baptists was to attack his—and the Baptists'—Federalist enemies. The news set off a small media maelstrom. The Danbury letter, after all, contained the famous passage—elevated to constitutional doctrine in a number of high-profile United States Supreme Court cases—that the religion clause of the First Amendment had built "a wall of separation between church and state." In reinterpreting the letter, Hutson suggested that Jefferson's purpose was political rather than prescriptive, pragmatic rather than principled.1

1

The two volumes under review, both of which went to press before the WMQ Forum appeared, attempt to address head-on the question at the heart of the conflict: how closely related were American religious and civic spheres in the founding era? As Mark A. Noll writes in the anthology ("Evangelicals in the American Founding and Evangelical Political Mobilization Today"), an "appalling lack of precision [characterizes] much contemporary discussion of religion and politics" (p. 139). Hutson's own volume attempts with some considerable success to provide the necessary historical context, but the anthology undermines this intent. The reader is once again reminded that, although Americans often assume that the United States was founded as a religious nation, evidence from the era itself must be interpreted with care.

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