Secularization, Pluralism, and Moral Minimalism: David Sehat Responds to his Respondents

Paul Harvey

Some time ago I posted a very substantive two-part interview with David Sehat, author of The Myth of American Religious Freedom. In the interim, over at David's group blog U.S. Intellectual History, several of his fellows (and some others, including Dan Williams, whose book on the religious right, God's Own Party, has received extensive attention here) have responded to and critiqued David's book. More specifically, the blog has posted responses and critiques from Daniel K. Williams, Andrew Hartman, Ray Haberski, and Christopher Hickman.

That forum has now been completed, with David's response to his critics. Taking the responses, and David's reply, all together, is a great intellectual treat, so I wanted to make sure and provide the links to it here for those of you who don't customarily cruise over to their blog. This is pretty hefty intellectual history, so I wouldn't advise it for beach reading, but for those who complain that U.S. historians are excessively specialized and never take on the big picture or grand narrative anymore, here's your answer (or at least one answer) to that.

I also call attention to this because in his response David provides some of the intellectual/theoretical underpinning behind the structuring of his book -- so this is sort of his short "discourse on method," if you will, or a kind of theoretical appendix. He also uses his response to emphasize a point sometimes lost in discussions of his book, which is how much of the book is actually about religious dissenters who stood outside the moral establishment, poked holes in it, and (to my mind) showed that American religious freedom ultimately was not a myth after all.

Sehat divides his responses up into issues of 1) secularization; 2) pluralism; and 3) moral minimalism. Here's a brief excerpt from the first part, about his understanding of the term "secularization":

Those who have read The Myth of American Religious Freedom will know that the issue of religious authority is a major theme of the book. Religious partisans have long argued that their religion provides the morals to be enforced in law. Another way of saying it is that religious partisans made their religious authority determinative in law and government, sometimes explicitly, sometimes less so. The success of religious partisans in imposing their religious authority on law resulted in a moral establishment, a proxy religious establishment that provided religious authority with the coercive powers of law.

My book focuses on the role of dissenters to the moral establishment—those who objected to the reach of religious authority into law and government. Dissenters were central to the decline of the moral establishment and the secularization of American public life, a secularization that, I must add, is tenuous and seems, in the last several decades, to be moving into reverse. And it is this understanding of secularization that apparently did not come across as clearly as I wished. Williams, for example, thinks that I depict religious liberals as people “who quickly realized that their arguments did not depend upon religious faith and who therefore embraced secular language in advancing human rights.”

But this is not quite what I say, or at least what I intended to say. I sought to say something at once more specific and also stronger: Religious liberals, precisely because of their religious beliefs, were agents of secularization, a secularization that involved the expansion of rights because it meant the decline of religious authority outside the sphere of religious institutions.

Just a short addendum. IN the middle of his response, after a lengthy explanation of how exactly he is using the term secularization (basically, to mean a decline in the public authority of religious institutions, not to mean a decline in individual religiosity), Sehat says that this secularization is "tenuous and seems, in the last several decades, to be moving into reverse.." Just after initially posting this, I came across this piece about Governor Rick Perry (R, Texas) and his call for and imminent leadership in an August 6 "day of prayer and fasting on behalf of our troubled nation." The event is sponsored by (among other groups) the American Family Association -- of which much could be said, but which most recently linked homosexuality to "increasing ungodliness and depravity assaulting our nation" (you know, like all those political sex scandals, Ensign, Weiner, et all -- oh wait, they weren't gay scandals, never mind). Perry described the event, which will be held in a stadium in Houston, as an "apolitical Christian prayer service" which will provide "spiritual solutions to the many challenges we face in our communities, states and nation."

This blog expects Historianess to be there and live-blogging this latest gathering of the erstwhile moral establishment.

The Myth and/or Impossibility of Religious Freedom

Emily Clark

Though I bought it hot off the presses, I didn’t get around to reading David Sehat’s The Myth of Religious Freedom until two months later. Though I know we posted about this book a while back (including a great two part interview with Sehat by Paul Harvey), it’s back on the blog again. This past week, I read Sehat’s book in tandem with Winnifred Sullivan’s The Impossibility of Religious Freedom.

Sehat tracks the “moral establishmentarians” and the dissenters from this moral establishment through post-Revolution American history. These “moral establishmentarians,” though foiled from having explicit state support for religion, found ways to police American society by making their brand of Protestantism the grounds for morality. If you wanted to cultivate moral, upstanding citizens – religion offered the template for doing so. Blasphemers and Sabbath-breakers were culpable before the Revolution (check out Susan Juster’s essay “Heretics, Blasphemers, and Sabbath Breakers” in The First Prejudice for more), and they would continue to find themselves in court long into the 19^th century. While the liberal justices in Supreme Court of the mid- and later-20^th century would argue for a historically based strict separation between church and state, Sehat offers a history that suggests otherwise. In Sehat’s engaging and persuasive narrative, religious freedom in the US is a historical myth.

The moral establishmentarians of Sehat’s account reminded me of the “evangelical epistemology” Sullivan identifies in her 2005 book on the Warner v. Boca Raton case (in the Warner trial, a handful of plaintiffs claimed the city impinged on their free exercise of religion by removing religious grave decorations in the city cemetery). Those ascribing to the evangelical epistemology of Sullivan’s book understand religion, or “true religion” as they would argue, to be something “private, voluntary, individual, textual, and believed.” Sullivan notes the Protestant bias to this type of definition and nicely contrasts it with the lived religion-style grave décor constructed by the plaintiffs. Statues of the Sacred Heart of Jesus or Mary, a large upright cross, and a vertical Star of David statue – though not officially required on graves by their formal religious institutions – were religious to the family members who used them as grave markers. Ultimately, the judge ruled in favor of the city. Since horizontal, flat religious markers (in moderation) were allowed by city cemetery regulations, the judge didn’t see any intrusion on the plaintiffs’ religious freedoms. Part of the sophistication of Sullivan’s book is her development of the “evangelical epistemology” that seemed to dominate the way the city defined religion. Sullivan herself served as an expert in religion for this case, and the definition of religion she described to the court was different. She noted how in America, religion often exists outside of official institutions and has changed over time in light of lived experiences and practices. The city’s definition of religion evoked an image of people sitting in church pews listing to a preacher, while the plaintiffs’ religion suggested a religious street feste complete with sights, sensations, smells, and sounds.

The notion of religious freedom is much beloved in American society. Its appeal is so strong that it long downplayed narratives of religious intolerance both inside and (still) outside the academy (a concept succinctly and nicely outlined in John Corrigan and Lynn Neal’s documentary history, Religious Intolerance in America). I have become more and more interested in bringing legal issues into my projects. Be it black codes, the Sunday blue laws, or suffrage restrictions - recognizing the role legal issues play in American religious history offers another way to analyze the past. Furthermore, it provides an additional way to argue for our relevance to wider readerships and support our position in the changing collegiate institutional system. American religious history is far from irrelevant. Myth, impossibility, or both – books and arguments like Sullivan’s and Sehat’s further develop our narratives of American religious history by highlighting the complex relationship between American law and American religions.

Myth of American Religious Freedom: Part II

Paul Harvey

Today we continue our interview with David Sehat, author of The Myth of American Religious Freedom.

PH: A good portion of your book is taken up with dissenters -- the abolitionists, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Mormons, freethinkers, and progressive intellectuals in the twentieth century. Time after time, they get beaten down by the moral establishment, yet in the end they more or less triumphed in crafting a new definition of religious freedom. Can you give us briefly one example of how you use dissenters in your book, and how they confronted and, over time, whittled away at the foundations of the moral establishment?

DS: Of all the people I talk about, my favorite is Elizabeth Cady Stanton. As most of your readers know, Stanton was a radical women’s rights activist who argued that the subservient place of women in law grew out of a Christian patriarchy. To make way for the emancipation of women, Stanton was relentless in her criticism of the connection of Christianity to law. According to her opponents, women’s liberation would entail societal degradation, because treating a woman as an individual before the law would undermine the institution of the family, the mechanism for inculcating morals in society. As a result, Christian proponents of the moral establishment placed the obligations of society over the desires of individual women such as Stanton. By contrast, Stanton placed the individual above society. She argued that laws too often required that the individual—especially the female individual—to be “sacrificed to the highest good of society,” which was the fundamental error of the moral establishment. She claimed instead that a society could not suppress the individual and still uphold the highest social good. Only when individuals possessed full freedom would the possibilities of a society be realized.

Stanton laid out the basic question in the debate, which was: which is most basic, the society or the individual? This claim about the importance of the individual and of individual rights in a liberal, democratic society circulated among the many dissenters to the moral establishment in the nineteenth century. But the notion did not finally triumph until the twentieth century, through progressive intellectuals, such as Herbert Croly and Walter Lippmann, and liberal legal theorists, such as Louis Brandeis, who used the Court to enforce individual rights.

PH: You hit liberal justices pretty hard for misusing history, particularly in claiming a strict separationist position on the First Amendment that basically never really existed. In other words, since the "wall of separation" is basically a historical myth, it is a bad idea to use that myth in reasoning in legal cases. How do you think those on the center/left of the spectrum should view your history of the moral establishment in making arguments favorable to their position? Is this akin to Brown v. Board –acknowledge crimes against freedom committed in the past, including by the Court, and just say we need a completely different model than that?

DS: Yes, that’s exactly right. Using bad history does not help public debate and it does not make stable law. Liberals should acknowledge that the past did not feature a harmonious arrangement of freedom that sprang from the minds of Jefferson and Madison. By reframing their arguments away from that bad history, I actually think liberals would strengthen their own position because the most powerful argument for liberal jurisprudence is historical. It goes something like this: Once upon a time, the individual was subject to religious oppression that used the apparatus of the state. But then the Supreme Court realized that the Bill of Rights, which defines the rights of American citizens, should apply to the states because the states were infringing upon the rights of the individual guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment. As the Supreme Court began applying the Bill of Rights to the states, it made a host of questionable historical arguments. But it did so for a still legitimate purpose that is now under attack by religious partisans in the present. The Court sought to free the individual from oppression in order to make the United States into a liberal democracy. We can uphold those rulings while not repeating the same bad history, because acknowledging past Protestant power helps to show why the liberal jurisprudence is necessary.

PH: The latter portion of the book deals with some more contemporary controversies and decisions, and you suggest very strongly that the Roberts Court, when it has the chance, will "continue to aid political conservatives and religious activists in rehabilitating the moral establishment." This is a different argument than I have seen from some other legal scholars, who have suggested that recently the Supreme Court has moved more towards a position of shying away from big religion decisions, because First Amendment law as to what is or is not a "religion" has just become a huge mess of contradictory decisions (as in the one a few years ago allowing for the use of a religious symbol in a public place in one state, but disallowing it in another state). In what ways do you foresee a possibly more activist court under Roberts, and why would it be interested in rehabilitating a moral establishment that has led to so much dissent and conflict over two centuries, as you trace in your book?

DS: It depends upon what you mean by “big religion decisions.” I agree that the Court seems chastened by the daunting (if not impossible) theoretical task of defining religion in a way that is fair and stable and does not violate the establishment clause. But I don’t think that this strongly conservative Court is going to calmly accept past liberal jurisprudence. Part of my argument is precisely that a case doesn’t have to be about “religion” per se to uphold religious power.

Consider two cases. The Court currently has a case before it that involves an Arizona law which funnels money to private religious schools through a complicated tax credit system. I find this an instructive case. In the nineteenth century, Protestants controlled the schools but they lost that control in the mid-twentieth century as the Supreme Court forbade prayer and Bible-reading in schools. When the Supreme Court dismantled religious control over schools, religious conservatives began to advocate the use of public money in private schools. The Arizona law is in that tradition of seeking an end-run around mid-twentieth-century legal decisions. The state claims that the money given to private, often sectarian schools is not public money because an individual donates the money to a school and is then reimbursed by the state through a tax credit (not a tax deduction) on a matching basis up to a certain amount. As a result, Arizona claims, it cannot be considered a violation of the establishment clause. This sounds like money laundering to me, and I would like to think that the Court would strike it down. But the last thirty years has seen the Court ever more comfortable in providing public money to private schools, even private sectarian schools. If the Court upholds the Arizona law, it would be in keeping with the general jurisprudential trend of rehabilitating Christian schools through the use of public money.

The second case that bears watching is the California gay marriage case, which is going to wind up in the U.S. Supreme Court. The Court has been amenable in the recent past to the notion that the law cannot be used to advance private moral norms. In Lawrence v. Texas in 2002, Justice Kennedy used that argument to strike down all anti-sodomy laws in the United States. Moreover, in 1967 when the Court struck down miscegenation laws, it ruled, “The freedom to marry has long been recognized as one of the most vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men.” Putting these two opinions together might suggest that the Court will uphold gay marriage, but it is not at all clear. As usual, the decision seems likely to boil down to Kennedy’s position. He wrote the opinion striking down sodomy law but did not give any indication of his stance on gay marriage. If I had to read the tea leaves (always a dangerous practice), I’m not optimistic that the Court will rule in favor of gay rights because I don’t think it likely that Kennedy will use the same kind of argument that he made in Lawrence. I hope I’m wrong, but should the Court strike down gay marriage, the ruling would, once again, serve as an extension of religious power.

PH: Getting to the bottom line: in 3 or 4 sentences, can you tell us what is the single most important takeaway point you want people to get from your book?

DS: I think it is time that we stopped celebrating ourselves. And by “we” I mean both liberals and conservatives. This nationalist self-celebration has generated a debate on religion in public life whose most notable feature is a pervading sense of falsity. By looking squarely at the religious coercions of the past and the multiple limits of religious freedom, I’m hoping that we can have a new conversation—both a more honest conversation and a more productive one—on a better historical foundation.

Thanks for the stimulating questions, Paul, and thanks again for reading the book.

The Myth of American Religious Freedom: Interview with David Sehat

Paul Harvey

In the tradition of this blog of posting author interviews from recently published important works in our field (when we're not thinking about zombies, or finding paeans to Sarah Palin on YouTube), I'm pleased today and tomorrow to post a two-part interview with David Sehat, author of the new book The Myth of American Religious Freedom, just out with Oxford.

We've blogged about the book in pre-release before, and I made some false promises to put up a post about Sehat's book together with Sally Gordon's The Spirit of the Law. Sadly, that post will have to wait until the tsunami of the semester calms down a bit, but I believe putting those two books together provides a most stimulating narrative (complementary on some points, contrasting on others) of the intellectual (Sehat) and social (Gordon) history of the concept of religious freedom. In the meantime, here is part one of our interview with David Sehat. You may follow more of his thoughts from his book over at U.S. Intellectual History, where he is a contributor and has recently posted great stuff based on the book, and also check out his recent entry at the Huffington Post, which contains an extensive summary of some of the major themes of the book.

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Interview with David Sehat, Part I

Paul Harvey (PH): David, the central phrase in your book is "moral establishment," and you argue that for much of American history we have had a "moral establishment that connected religion and the state." Can you briefly define what you mean by this term for our readers, and why you have chosen to make it central to your book?

David Sehat (DS): Paul, thanks for reading the book and for interviewing me.

When I began researching this book, I was reading the letters and writings of a nineteenth-century agnostic named Robert Ingersoll. My intention was to write a book about American freethought or American agnosticism as a way of showing the informal power of Protestant Christianity. But as I read Ingersoll’s papers, I came across a case (he was a lawyer) that puzzled me. In 1886, he unsuccessfully defended a man named Charles B. Reynolds, who was being tried on two counts of blasphemy. I was stumped: How could a man be convicted of blasphemy nearly one hundred years after the passage of the First Amendment? As I went deeper into the case, my confusion grew. I discovered that blasphemy law existed for much of the nineteenth century, even if its enforcement was erratic. According to its proponents, criticizing Christianity or any elements of Christianity undermined the public foundation for morals. I also discovered that blasphemy was similar to many other kinds of law in that Protestant Christian ideas received the formal protection of law, which was a surprise to me. In other words, the judgments in this case, and many others, only made sense if Christianity was something like an official religion that relied upon the protection of the law.

To make sense of what was going on, I borrowed the idea of a “moral establishment” from the legal scholar John Witte Jr. Taking Witte’s concept further than he might have intended (and probably not in a way that he would agree with), I claim that the moral establishment involves the use of law to perpetuate Christian morals in society. The more I researched, the more I saw that this moral establishment was one of the chief mechanisms throughout American history by which Protestant Christian partisans maintained religious power over society in often illiberal ways.

PH: You spend a good amount of time criticizing positions on the left and on the right of our current politics, in terms of how they employ religious history to make their favored points about religion/state issues (and moral issues generally). What do you think each side gets basically wrong about history, and if you were anointed Historical King, what would you tell your subjects about how to use history properly in framing arguments about present-day concerns?

DS: I see both the Left and the Right as misguided in their understanding of the past. Both regard American religious history as a history of freedom that is threatened by the policies of the other side. But I don’t see U.S. history as a history of religious freedom. Instead, I see U.S. history as predominantly one in which Protestant Christians used law and politics to maintain religious power. That is evident in the case of blasphemy laws, but also in a host of other laws and practices that survived for much of U.S. history. It was only in the mid-twentieth century that the Supreme Court began dismantling this connection between religion and the state in order to mitigate religious power and to protect the individual. The Court’s actions caused religious conservatives to mobilize for the restoration of their past power, thus beginning the culture wars of the last fifty years.

So my problem with much of the political debate over the role of religion in public life, especially when that debate invokes history, is that the various parties are simply enacting the culture wars rather than using history to frame their arguments in a meaningful way. As a result, the history is bad on all sides. Liberals are too tendentious when they claim a separation of church and state in the past. To them, I say that Christianity was so thoroughly entwined with law and government that Protestant Christianity had significant power through its connection with the state. And I have to say that when conservatives claim that the United States was a Christian nation in the past, in a certain sense they are right. But I also have a problem with religious conservatives, because the past was not the Christian utopia that some of them claim. Christians relied upon law to protect their religion. And what law involves, above all else, is the coercive capacities of the state. So if we say that the United States was a Christian nation in the past, we must also say that it was a coercively Christian nation.

At bottom, I think all discussions about religion in public life have to acknowledge this past of religious coercion so that, while addressing present day concerns, we can be sure that we do not go back to that coercive past.

PH: I have often used the phrase "de facto establishment," or "de facto Protestant establishment," in classes, to suggest something of the informal Protestant establishment of the 19th century (the phrase you use in the book is "informal religious establishment," which you then go on to critique as wrong). In effect, your book suggests that my phrasing is wrong, because it fails to capture the legally coercive nature of the moral establishment. So, can you tell me how, in classroom setting, I should explain to students how and why we had effectively a legal establishment even after the First Amendment said we couldn't have one?

DS: Perhaps we can introduce more concepts than just “legal establishment.” First, we have to explain to students that the religion clauses of the First Amendment did not apply to the states until 1940. The Bill of Rights, for much of American history, applied only to the federal government: at the time when the First Amendment was ratified, six states still paid churches out of the public treasury and continued to be free to do so under the Frist Amendment. To put it most clearly: students need to understand that the First Amendment is really beside the point when we are talking about religious establishments and religious power prior to 1940.

Second, we can explain to students what exactly we mean by an “establishment.” As I mentioned earlier, I rely on John Witte Jr., who argues that there are three components of the American religious establishment: institutional, ceremonial, and moral. Institutional establishment is when states pay churches with public funds. Ceremonial establishment is when states incorporate an homage to God as part of their public ritual ceremonies (like swearing on a Bible or saying “So Help Me God” in the oath of office). And moral establishment is when states draw upon the moral ideas of Christianity (or Protestant Christianity) to craft their laws. When states finally decided to stop paying churches—in other words, when they did away with institutional establishment—there were still two other components of the American religious establishment in place.

I think the moral establishment is the most important because it enabled Protestant Christians to use the idea of morality to establish a special place for their religion in law. As a result, Catholics, Jews, Mormons, and freethinkers, along with a host of others who purportedly failed to demonstrate proper moral norms, faced an active and state-sponsored discrimination that grew out of Protestant legal control.

PH: The American Missionary Association (AMA) was one of the primary institutional expressions in the nineteenth century of what you call the "moral establishment." Yet its vision for southern blacks after the Civil War, "education for citizenship," eventually gave way to what you call the "white Southern vision of the moral establishment . . . in which maintaining moral order, in this case with a decidedly racial cast, overcame the black argument for individual and equal rights." Do you see this as a case where the center of the moral establishment could not hold? Or I'll put the question another way, paraphrasing Randolph Bourne's famous question to John Dewey about the support of progressive liberals for World War I: if the moral establishment was so dominant, and so (as you frequently suggest) coercive, then how was it so weak as to not be able to prevent the coming of the Civil War, or do anything about the horrific carnage of the Civil War (except to give it religious meaning)?

DS: This is a great question, thanks for asking it. I don’t want to claim that the moral establishment was all-powerful or even powerful enough to stop the Civil War. I want to make the opposite case: the issue of slavery split the moral establishment, with southern proponents claiming that slavery was an institution for the perpetuation of Christian society and northern proponents seeing slavery as a state-sponsored concession to evil and, therefore, not within the moral establishment. This split allowed for a host of dissenters, mainly radical abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison and women’s rights proponents such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, to challenge the moral establishment by rejecting the idea that religious sensibilities should have a central place in public policy debates.

My narrative here tries to answer the same question that many other writers have sought to answer: why did this moment of liberalism and individual rights during Reconstruction prove so evanescent? I suggest that this liberal moment came into being through the division of the moral establishment over the issue of slavery, a division that gave proponents of individual rights the upper hand. The AMA, the dominant organization of the northern moral establishment after the Civil War, did in certain respects favor individual rights but, ultimately, its low view of black racial capacity meshed with that of the southern moral establishment. The moral establishment came back together after the Civil War around their desire for denominational harmony and their suspicion of black rights—in other words, around a shared distrust of individual rights. This allowed establishment proponents to again maintain their collective (and, in this case, racist) moral norms and undermined the Reconstruction moment of liberal individualism.

[2nd half of interview will be posted tomorrow; stay tuned!]

After Pluralism

Paul Harvey

For those (looking in the mirror here) inclined to refer to "pluralism" a little too easily as an unqualified good, standing apart from history, here's an important new work calling for attention to the concept, and to what come after what was supposed to be the end of history: Courtney Bender and Pamela Klassen, ed., After Pluralism: Reimagining Religious Engagement. It's an edited collection of essays from across nations and disciplines, and features some top-flight folks in American religious studies; Table of Contents is here, excerpt of the book is here. Winnifred Sullivan is featured in the work, discussing de facto "naturalized" religious establishments and the law; Tracy Leavelle and Michael McNally weigh in with contributions on the complexities and perils of pluralism and Native American "religious freedom." A brief excerpt from the intro suggests some of the challenges the book takes on:

The details of European and North American cases reveal greater complexity and complication, if not contradictions, in the formations of pluralism. In the United States, for example, a secular state that is presumed to neither encourage nor discourage religious identity unites some variants of religious plurality as admissible under law while excluding other religious groups as insufficiently tolerant. At the same time, the idioms of tolerance, multicultural or religious celebrations, simultaneously depoliticize and depublicize particular religious interests. In the face of these normative paths to “religious” recognition, scholars must acknowledge and inquire further into the processes by which gaining religious recognition in the United States requires that groups take a seat at a multireligious table. The stories told in this volume call attention to a growing recognition that the varying cultures of religious pluralism in which we live are always directed toward and galvanized by multiple fields of knowledge and power.

Myth of American Religious Freedom: Now Published

Paul Harvey

We've blogged here before about David Sehat's The Myth of American Religious Freedom, which I had the privilege of reading in pre-release. The book is now out, with Oxford, and it's a real intellectual treat which is sure to spark discussion and debate. Previously I promised to blog about it along with Sarah Gordon's Spirit of the Laws, and I still intend to do that, when I can steal the time to engage the works at the level they require. Anyway, here is more about the book, cross-posted from U.S. Intellectual History:

The Myth of American Religious Freedom

Dear Readers: I'm delighted to announce the early release of my book, The Myth of American Religious Freedom. Here is the jacket copy from OUP:

In battles over religion and politics in America, both liberals and conservatives often appeal to history. Liberals claim that the Founders separated church and state. But for much of American history, David Sehat writes, Protestant Christianity was intimately intertwined with the state. Yet the past was not the Christian utopia that conservatives imagined either. Instead, a Protestant moral establishment prevailed, using government power to punish free thinkers and religious dissidents.

In The Myth of American Religious Freedom, Sehat provides an eye-opening history of religion in public life, overturning our most cherished myths. Originally, the First Amendment applied only to the federal government, which had limited authority. The Protestant moral establishment ruled on the state level. Using moral laws to uphold religious power, religious partisans enforced a moral and religious orthodoxy against Catholics, Jews, Mormons, agnostics, and others. Not until 1940 did the U.S. Supreme Court extend the First Amendment to the states. As the Supreme Court began to dismantle the connections between religion and government, Sehat argues, religious conservatives mobilized to maintain their power and began the culture wars of the last fifty years. To trace the rise and fall of this Protestant establishment, Sehat focuses on a series of dissenters--abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, socialist Eugene V. Debs, and many others.

Shattering myths held by both the left and the right, David Sehat forces us to rethink some of our most deeply held beliefs. By showing the bad history used on both sides, he denies partisans a safe refuge with the Founders.

God in America Alongside the Myth of American Religous Freedom

Paul Harvey

I'm working up a more coherent response to the God in America series, and hope to have that up soon. Over at Killling the Buddha, Nathan Schneider is live-blogging the series (last part is tonight), with Stephen Prothero (a major commentator on the series) and others joining in the fun, so check that out if you want to chat about the show while watching it.

For those of you (I'm talking to you pesky scholars here, especially, but others will be interested) annoyed at something of fundamental importance missing in the series, or of the treatment given to some individual or episode, make sure to check out the full website accompanying the series. It's full of detail, and presents a more complex and satisfying narrative than is possible in a documentary that, of necessity, has to distill and narrate in very broad strokes. For those of you wanting to use clips from the film for class, the author interviews, background stories, and further narrative provided in the "study guide" available at the website will be indispensable in enriching students' understanding. As some have noted here, this is basically a series about religion and public life (that's the subtitle to the series, in fact), but it could certainly be used as a springboard to lead students to explore other avenues of religious expression (music, art, interior experiences, religion and the body, and numerous others) that the film does not attempt to cover at the same level it devotes to the "intersections" of religion and public life.

As it happens, I'm watching the series while having just finished David Sehat's forthcoming book (out this January from Oxford) The Myth of American Religious Freedom, and Sarah Barringer Gordon's The Spirit of the Law: Religious Voices and the Constitution in Modern America. If God in America is basically a story of religious liberty and freedom and their effects on religion in public life (and is at times, as John Fea writes below, a pretty Whiggish version of that story), Sehat's and Gordon's books taken together tell a story of the coercive nature of what Sehat calls the "moral establishment," and the struggles of religious dissenters (including in David's book the abolitionists, Stanton and early feminists, Mormons, progressive intellectuals, and others; and in Gordon's book everyone from the Jehovah's Witnesses to Elijah Muhammad to Beverely LaHaye and the Concerned Women of America to gay religious activists arguing on behalf of same-sex marriage) to articulate a fundamentally different vision of freedom than that establishment wanted to allow. Taken together, both of them present a kind of intellectual and social history of how people dealt with the abstract concept of religious freedom from the Founders down to the 2000s. They are both dealing with a basic contrast in what Gordon calls legal (or "technical") constitutionalism versus popular constitutionalism, and with the broad forces that have fundamentally altered constitutional "regimes" in different periods of American history. I hope in the future to post here an author interview with Sehat, and further thoughts of my own on the social history of what "religious freedom" has meant in American history, a subject I aim to write a book about one of these days.

I've blogged a bit before about Gordon's work, which is out and available from Harvard (having now read the book, I commend it to you wholeheartedly; apart from the intellectual content, it's really a fun read, and to say that it covers a "big tent" of fascinating and often ornery and cantankerous characters is putting it mildly).

As for Sehat's book, he's been producing a series of blog posts over at U.S. Intellectual History, where he outlines and develops some of his themes. His posts are a real intellectual treat, so check them out as a preview of the book; here's a brief description from Oxford:

In the battles over religion and politics in America, both liberals and conservatives often appeal to history. Liberals claim that the Founders separated church and state. But for much of American history, David Sehat writes, Protestant Christianity was intimately intertwined with the state. Yet the past was not the Christian utopia that conservatives imagine either. Instead, a Protestant moral establishment prevailed, using government power to punish free thinkers and religious dissidents. In The Myth of American Religious Freedom , Sehat provides an eye-opening history of religion in public life, overturning our most cherished myths. Originally, the First Amendment applied only to the federal government, which had limited authority. The Protestant moral establishment ruled on the state level. Using moral laws to uphold religious power, religious partisans enforced a moral and religious orthodoxy against Catholics, Jews, Mormons, agnostics, and others. Not until 1940 did the U.S. Supreme Court extend the First Amendment to the states. As the Supreme Court began to dismantle the connections between religion and government, Sehat argues, religious conservatives mobilized to maintain their power and began the culture wars of the last fifty years. To trace the rise and fall of this Protestant establishment, Sehat focuses on a series of dissenters--abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, socialist Eugene V. Debs, and many others. Shattering myths held by both the left and right, David Sehat forces us to rethink some of our most deeply held beliefs. By showing the bad history used on both sides, he denies partisans a safe refuge with the Founders.

It's been a fascinating exercise comparing and contrasting the vision presented in these two wonderful books alongside the (mostly) more optimistic story spun out in the film. It's sort of an exercise in narrative and counter-narrative. More on that in the coming days.