| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Mark Douglas McGarvie. One Nation Under Law: America's Early National Struggles to Separate Church and State. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press. 2004. Pp. xii, 256. $38.00.

Debates about religious disestablishment in America have frequently centered on the meaning of the first amendment's establishment clause: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion." Thomas Jefferson, for example, insisted that the first amendment had erected a "wall of separation between church and state." Mark Douglas McGarvie agrees that the Constitution constructed a wall, but he finds its chief masonry in the contracts clause of article one, which was, he suggests, "absolutely crucial to the resolution of the church-state relationship" (p. 12). Moreover, McGarvie ascribes to the Supreme Court's Dartmouth College case (1819) the kind of disestablishing force typically reserved for twentieth-century cases proscribing state aid to religious institutions. There, the Court interpreted the contracts clause to invalidate New Hampshire's attempt to seize control of a private, religious college. By characterizing Dartmouth College as a private institution, according to McGarvie, the Court laid the framework for divorcing religious institutions such as churches and schools from their public role as providers of necessary social services. This divorce inexorably led to separation between religious institutions and government. The Dartmouth College decision thus "privatized religion" and "secularized and expanded the public realm" (p. 188).

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