Kathleen Sands, who teaches at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, has given us a dense, meaty book that both frustrates and astounds. It is easy to begin reading and soon give up because of the not always well-digested and occasionally tendentious character of the introduction and first chapter, which attempt to provide an unnecessarily complex theoretical framework. However, persistence will disclose both a narrative and an analysis that will cause students of American church-state religions to view the topic in a most illuminating new way.

Sands's initial task is to try to sweep away the fog that has enveloped the concept of “religion” since it first emerged as a distinctive conceptual category in the West as new exploration made medieval assumptions about human unity problematic. Her ongoing argument with the emergent definitions that came forward, especially in the nineteenth century, tends to regard those definitions as straw men, although she may have a point in suggesting that “common sense” definitions of religion are far behind current scholarly opinion. Her invocation of Foucault has some merit, but she does not provide much of a positive alternative to relativistic attempts at deconstruction. Similarly, she later goes on to problematize what are clearly the “civil religion” positings of the late Robert Bellah without ever mentioning the gentleman's name.

As Sands ventures into the realm of narrative, light—often an intensely bright one—begins to emerge. Much of her subsequent argument invokes the thought of the Founding Fathers in their crafting of the First Amendment to the American Constitution. Here she develops a fundamental and profoundly useful dichotomy in distinguishing between “foundations” and “boundaries” in the often-implicit thought which the nation's early leaders brought to bear on the optimal relationship of religion to the broader social order. De facto American pluralism pointed toward the assumption that religious beliefs, practices, and institutions were essentially a private matter and thus of no concern to the government. On the other hand, though, most of this cohort shared the notion that religion was somehow “the sacred foundation of common life” (9).

Although the particulars of religious belief lay in the idiosyncratic private sphere, the assumed convergent moral implications of all religions were posited as the bedrock of the communal life of the republic.

The implications of this at times contradictory set of assumptions played out as the new nation settled in to sort out its own contradictions, both ideological and demographic. What emerged as an assumedly common foundation turned out to be in effect a rather diluted sort of Protestantism, the nature of which became clearer as challenges were posed by Catholics, Jews, Mormons, and native peoples. These challenges played out in shared institutions such as the public schools, where the King James Bible—assumed heretofore to be noncontroversial—in fact turned out to be an emblem of an increasingly vague and expansive but nevertheless real sectarianism which Catholics interpreted as hostile.

Mormons were in a rather different situation. The Latter-day Saints, who had in early Utah days been free to live according to their own laws, now began to encounter the hostility that the dominant society reserved for deviant groups such as Catholics and slaveholders. Mormon polygamy was for other Americans barbaric and thus not worthy of First Amendment protections. Mormons eventually had to accept the status not of a “peculiar people” but rather of “a people with peculiar beliefs” (132).

Also, in the west arose a confrontation between Theodore Roosevelt and Black Elk, as expressed particularly in their incompatible beliefs about the status of land. For native peoples such as Black Elk, land was “foundational”: it was coextensive with life, as was religion with culture (137). For Roosevelt, on the contrary, land was fungible: the providentialism of “Manifest Destiny” had lost most of its religious content and had devolved into a secular, racist, and Darwinian ideology justifying Euro-American appropriation of traditional Native lands.

Sands then explores the evolution versus creationism controversy that surfaced during the Scopes Trial of 1925. She presents two major insights into this cultural squaring off that has become a staple of the culture wars for nearly a century. First, the biology textbook that Scopes taught, as well as Clarence Darrow's scientific witnesses, were deeply inflected by the pseudoscientific doctrine of eugenics. Although William Jennings Bryan shared the evolutionists’ racial assumptions, the resolution of the issue lay not simply in the conflict between science and religion, but in fact was a matter of epistemology (191). For Bryan, science was confounded with a majoritarianism that posited the superior “common sense” religion of plain-folk Christians over that of cultural and intellectual elites, a still familiar phenomenon.

Sands's final substantive chapter offers an insightful analysis into ongoing controversies over sexual identity that came to a head in 2015 in Obergefell v. Hodges. She argues that the significance of the case, besides its obvious landmark importance in legitimizing gay marriage, which a half century ago could barely be spoken of, was in its bringing to the surface a whole set of assumptions that had previously been tacit. Justice Antonin Scalia framed the issue, in his 2003 dissent in Lawrence v. Texas, when he floridly lamented the incipient slippery slope in which, now that gay behavior had become legal, bestiality and other horrors would inevitably ensue. In Obergefell v. Hodges, Justice Anthony Kennedy shifted the argument to the notion of personal autonomy, which was infringed when the illusory idea of eternal and unchanging moral laws was imposed on the constantly shifting experience of what was essential to marriage.

Sands concludes with the observation that American jurisprudence has been, for some time, in a state of flux, as new conceptions of morality and the empirical transformations of social reality continue to call into question the plausibility of appeals to “eternal verities” as the eternality of those verities comes into ongoing question. She ends with the observation that conflicts over religion ultimately come down to the question of how we can and should live together in a “post-foundational age” (284). Amen, sister.