Few historical subjects cause more disagreement in American constitutional jurisprudence than church–state relations during the nation's founding. In this valuable book, historians and historically minded political scientists and law professors probe beyond these arguments' conventional boundaries.
Beginning with three thoughtful overviews, a foreword by Mark A. Noll, a preface by the editors, and an opening essay by coeditor Daniel Dreisbach examining whom we deem to be founders, the volume presents essays by Edith Gelles on Abigail Adams, Gary Scott Smith on Samuel Adams, William R. Casto on Oliver Ellsworth, Gregg L. Frazer on Alexander Hamilton, Thomas E. Buckley SJ on Patrick Henry, Jonathan Den Hartog on John Jay, David J. Voelker on Thomas Paine, Kevin R. Hardwick on Edmund Randolph, Robert H. Abzug on Benjamin Rush, Mark David Hall on Roger Sherman, and Rosemarie Zagarri on Mercy Otis Warren. The selection has geographical and political balance, and reaches beyond “founding fathers” to include two distinguished American women.
The founders studied here have one large thing in common – their view of the proper relationship between religion and governance. All of them – even Thomas Paine, often arraigned as an enemy of organized religion – sought to undergird constitutional and political arrangements by drawing on religion to bolster the virtue of the republican political community, whether Calvinist Protestantism (Sherman, Samuel and Abigail Adams, Ellsworth, and Warren), Anglicanism or Episcopalianism (Jay, Henry, Randolph, and the dying Hamilton), or uniquely individualist religious views (Rush, Paine, and for most of his life Hamilton). At the same time, these authors capture a remarkable diversity of approaches to the common challenge, showing that Americans of the founding period were as diverse and conflicted in their views of church–state relations as we are today.
Every category of reader will profit from this fine book; its research is admirably wide and deep, and its standard of writing and argument is uniformly high. Readers may ask two further questions. First, how does this book fit with the argument that the leading founding fathers were deists or atheists, insisting on strict separation of church and state for secularist reasons? Though such writers as Christopher Hitchens, Steven Waldman, and Brooke Allen passionately maintain this view, it does not capture the diverse, complex picture of Americans' religious and political beliefs during the founding period – a picture that this excellent book significantly deepens. (Even so, strict separationist views grounded in a devout religious position also had their advocates in this era.) Second, will this book shatter the stale dichotomy between separationist and nonpreferentialist or accommodationist readings of the First Amendment's religion clauses that has persisted since the late 1940s? As an experienced historian who has seen historical inquiry brushed aside in constitutional adjudication all too often, I doubt it. But that question is for litigants, law professors, and judges – not for historians. Though this book likely will not affect the continuing jurisprudential battles over church–state relations, it still enriches our understandings of those issues' complexities in the founding period, and that is achievement enough.
