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Review
| Church and State in American History: Key Documents, Decisions, and Commentary From the Past Three Centuries, ed. John F. Wilson and Donald L. Drakeman, 3rd ed. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 2003. 438 + viii pp. $50.00, paper; $125.00, hardcover.
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| This third edition of Church and State in American History is a highly polished, wide ranging survey, now updated to include recent court decisions and discussions about civil religion and religious pluralism in America since 1985. The volume is organized around the core theme of religious pluralism, focusing on legal, political, and religious responses to pluralism as they have changed and developed over time. Each section includes a good selection of important documents, along with brief essays explaining their context and importance. |
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The volume begins with a splendid introductory essay that is both lucid and broadly encompassing. In this essay, John F. Wilson and Donald L. Drakeman characterize the first, formative discussions about the relationship between church and state in America as outgrowths of the medieval Christian idea of "two swords" or "two authority structures" governing the temporal and spiritual components of society. They argue that the seventeenth-century men who constructed social orders in America accepted this medieval idea without question, even as they were forced to come to terms with multiple and conflicting views of what properly constituted society's spiritual component. Early on, the reality of multiple churches complicated efforts to conceptualize and adjudicate proper relationships between church and state, and helped to set the American development of church-state relations on different paths than those that might be found in Britain and Europe. |
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In the eighteenth century, James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, and other founding fathers of the United States faced a similar situation of religious dissent and diversity but on a wider, more complicated level. Still holding to the old ideal of temporal and spiritual components governing society, Madison and Jefferson conceptualized churches as voluntary societies whose members banded together as individuals to guide and uphold the spiritual aspects of society. Churchmen, however, were not all quick to embrace this principle of voluntarism. Those invested in established churches were especially recalcitrant, but many came around to its advantages. Indeed, Protestant evangelicals in the antebellum era relied on the principle of religious voluntarism to develop broad-based interdenominational networks that instantiated a de facto establishment of Protestant institutions and values throughout American society. |
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After the Civil War, new patterns of immigration and cultural development altered the face of American society, increasing religious diversity on one hand, while prompting renewed efforts to entrench Protestant hegemony on the other. In the twentieth century, appeals to America's identity as a Christian nation, or at least as a nation governed by Judaeo-Christian values, met with challenges from Americans who embraced other values, as well as from those, like Jehovah's Witnesses, who appealed to the Bible to resist social conformity and government interference in religious life. As a measure of both the increasingly explicit contentiousness of these disputes after 1960, the Supreme Court became the major arbiter in the nation's disputes over the relationships among law, politics, and religion, and the foremost interpreter of the First Amendment's guarantee of religious freedom and prohibition against religious establishment. |
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In the selection and discussion of documents that flesh out this clear and compelling reading of church-state history, editors Wilson and Drakeman aim to reveal underlying assumptions that have shaped relationships between law, politics, and religion in American society and their historical development. This is not a book about ecclesiastical politics, nor does it concern itself with legal documents governing religious institutions. It is not a book that endeavors to survey and comprehend religious themes in American politics, or political themes in American religion, although it certainly touches on a variety of both those themes. Instead, the book focuses primarily on episodes in which all three variables—law, politics, and religion—coincide. In this regard, it focuses especially on episodes where the conceptual underpinnings characterizing relationships among these three factors are most clear. |
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This book will work well as a text in college courses on law, politics, and religion in American history. It will even work well as a text in college survey courses in American religious history, although in such broader courses, teachers would probably want to supplement this text with readings that delve more into the internal dynamics of particular religions, or into the interplay between religion and other aspects of American culture. But the introductory essay in this volume provides such a good and concise overview of core assumptions at work in the history of American religious pluralism that teachers may want to consider the book for use in American religious history courses, as well as for courses dealing more specifically with law and politics in relation to religion. |
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| Florida State University |
Amanda Porterfield |
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