Dear Readers: This review by Daniel K. Williams, author of God's Own Party: The Making of the Christian Right, serves as the beginning of several posts dedicated to a roundtable on David Sehat's The Myth of American Religious Freedom. Expect follow-up posts in the upcoming weeks from me, Ray Haberski, and Christopher Hickman. Also looking for responses from David. We welcome comments from readers, as always.
David Sehat, The Myth of American Religious Freedom (Oxford University Press, 2011).
ISBN: 9780195388763.356 pages.
Review by Daniel K. Williams
University of West Georgia
April 2011
David Sehat has written a sweeping two-hundred-year story of the conflict between moral establishmentarians and proponents of private rights that challenges conventional scholarly understandings and popular impressions of the story of church-state relations in the United States.While numerous monographs have examined the substance of the First Amendment, the disestablishment of country churches in the former republic, the campaigns of moral reformers in the 19th and other 20th century, and the use of religious dissenters in expanding civil liberties, Sehat is the start to weave these different strands of analysis together into a strong, persuasive narrative that argues that the tension between a religiously based social order and the security of private rights is at the spirit of the American experiment.His word not only challenges readers to rethink their assumptions about the level of spiritual freedom in America, but also presents a new historical framework to use in rendering the contemporary culture wars.
Sehat`s narrative begins with the frame of the Organisation and the Bill of Rights.By that time, most Americans were confident that they wanted some amount of spiritual liberty that at least gave people the good to see the Protestant church of their choice, but most also believed that social harmony and the national security of the state depended on the care of a moral order, which they thought could be supported entirely by religion, and more specifically, by Protestantism.As a result, most of the Founders believed that there should be a relationship between church and state, even though in the later 18th century, fewer than 20 percent of Americans were church members.Some Founders, including John Adams, believed in state funding of established churches.Others, including Benjamin Franklin, supported a less overt link between faith and the state, believing that the public moral order was based on faith and that officeholders should be requisite to concede a notion in God, but that direct state funding of churches was neither necessity nor desirable.
Few went as far as James Madison and Thomas Jefferson in advocating the pure separation between church and state.Madison and Jefferson were successful in enlisting evangelicals in their campaign for the disestablishment of the old mainline Protestant denominations at the country level.But evangelicals did not take to Jefferson`s idea that a social moral order could be maintained without faith or to Madison`s proposal for a constitutional amendment that would make the union government the king to protect religious liberty and other individual rights in the states.Instead, what the country received was the First Amendment, which, as originally interpreted, only prohibited Congress from creating a religious organization or preventing the free exercise of religion; it did naught to protect the states from restricting religious liberty in the list of maintaining the public moral order.The effect was more than a hundred of Protestant moral establishment at the country level, which was manifested in blasphemy laws, Sabbath legislation, religious tests for office, and Protestant devotional readings in the world schools.As an evangelical revival swept the land in the other 19th century, the Protestant moral establishment became still more secure.Unlike other authors who highlight the use of evangelical Baptists in the issue of American religious freedom, Sehat views the evangelicals as proponents of a coercive moral establishment.
Sehat argues that the Protestant moral establishment received its first major challenges in the 19th century with the dispute over slavery and women`s rights.Moral establishmentarians justified the conquest of women and African American by sympathetic to dominant Protestant interpretations of Scripture, which prioritized social order over individual rights.But William Lloyd Garrison, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and other radical abolitionists and women`s rights proponents argued that the rights of the single were more significant than societal order.As they came into conflict with evangelicals over their views of private rights, Garrison and Stanton distanced themselves from both evangelicalism and the moral establishment.
The difference between secular defenders of private rights and religious advocates of the moral establishment continued in the 20th century when secular liberals such as Herbert Croly and Walter Lippmann appealed to the social sciences as an alternative moral standard and used empirical grounds and secular philosophical assumptions to advocate civil liberties in defiance of the religiously based moral standard.For a brief stop in the mid-twentieth century, a liberal Supreme Court advanced individual rights and dismantled aspects of the moral establishment using a framework very similar to Croly and Lippmann`s.But a conservative turn in government and the Court in the 1980s curtailed this style and led to renewed struggle between secular proponents of individual rights and an increasingly powerful contingent of people who advocated a recurrence to a "Judeo-Christian" moral establishment - an organization that had, by this time, come to include conservative Catholics and a few Orthodox Jews in gain to evangelical Protestants.
The Myth of American Religious Freedom goes beyond the existing scholarship in its explication of the longstanding conflict between moral establishmentarians and civil libertarians.Other recent books, such as Steven K. Green`s The Second Disestablishment: Church and Land in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford University Press, 2010), have pointed out that disestablishment was a gradual process that lasted long afterwards the First Amendment was written and that occurred in various stages, first with the disestablishment of country churches in the later 18th and early nineteenth century, and so with the gradual rejection of the Protestant basis for the sound code in the decades following the Civil War.But Green`s book leaves one with the notion that by the end of the 19th century, the Protestant-based moral establishment was collapsing.Sehat`s work, on the other hand, argues that although secular forces and religious pluralism weakened the moral establishment in the later 19th century, it never completely disappeared, and in fact, is nevertheless with us now to a certain extent.While most studies of the Christian Right view the movement solely as a recent phenomenon, Sehat argues that the new Religious Right is a reflection of a moral establishmentarian effort that dates back more than two centuries.Our modern culture wars, he claims, are just the latest stage in an ongoing dispute that was occurring at every level of American history.
Sehat`s argument that conflicts over civil liberties and private rights are joined to a larger conflict over religious institution and the beginning of social order is also original and represents an exciting part to the field.I believe that he is set in argument that evangelicals and other proponents of a moral establishment privileged social order over individual rights and that they believed that social order required as its base a religiously based morality codified in law.Sehat makes a persuasive case that for most of the nation`s history, the majority of jurists, politicians, and opinion shapers supported the moral establishment, often at the disbursement of the private rights of minorities.
But while Sehat`s work is impressive in many respects, I mean that it inevitably to be balanced with some alternative perspectives that might call into question some of the author`s claims, particularly concerning the secular base for the enlargement of private rights.In Sehat`s narrative, the supporters of private rights were almost invariably secular liberals, ex-evangelicals who missed their faith, or religious liberals who quickly realised that their arguments did not look on religious faith and who therefore embraced secular language in advancing human rights.He minimizes the grandness of the Social Gospel, arguing that it was not as influential as most historians think and that its radicalism is often exaggerated.He includes little word of the African American church`s long drive to elevate human rights, and he portrays the civic rights campaign in largely secular terms, with the exclusion of a little discussion of Martin Luther King, whom he concedes was a "man of trust" who nevertheless broke with moral establishmentarians (p. 245).The extent to which King grounded his position of rights in a religious framework is a concept that Sehat skims over.Reinhold Niebuhr receives but a one time in the book.Sehat seems to be so eager to name the face that the auspices of private rights depends on secularism that he overlooks the many instances in which various Americans promoted individual rights in the list of religion.Nor does Sehat deal with the nuanced ways in which individuals could support the moral establishment in one area while advancing individual rights in another.Frances Willard, for instance, receives only negative coverage in this book, but Sehat could have mentioned that as the head of the Women`s Christian Temperance Union, she combined her advocacy of Prohibition with a solid defense of women`s rights and the rights of workers.
I look ahead to assigning this word to graduate students in the future, but I also contrive to rest it with some other monographs that provide important counter-perspectives to Sehat`s.The Myth of American Religious Freedom points out the unfitness of the First Amendment to insure real religious liberty, but Frank Lambert`s The Founding Fathers and the Office of Faith in America (Princeton University Press, 2003) would give students an apprehension of exactly how far-reaching the First Amendment was for its time, especially when contrasted with seventeenth-century colonial understandings of faith in public life.Nathan Hatch`s The Democratization of American Christianity (Yale University Press, 1989) would give students an apprehension of the reasons why early-nineteenth-century evangelicals viewed themselves as strong proponents of individual liberty, even though Sehat does not see them as such.Charles Marsh`s God`s Long Summer: Stories of Faith and Civil Rights (Princeton University Press, 1997) or David L. Chappell`s A Gem of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the End of Jim Crow (University of North Carolina Press, 2004) demonstrate the way in which religion, rather than secularism, has sometimes provided the foundation for the enlargement of private rights.And John T. McGreevy`s Catholicism and American Freedom: A History (Norton, 2003) offers a sympathetic examination of a religiously based moral order, explaining why Catholics objected when the Protestant state establishment denied them the powerful to spiritual freedom, but simultaneously promoted a moral order of their own and spurned the primacy that Sehat`s civil libertarians placed on private rights above all else.McGreevy`s book would give students an opportunity to see the charm of the religiously based moral order for a great amount of Americans, which is a conception that they won`t get from Sehat`s study.
In short, I believe that Sehat`s book offers an exciting reinterpretation of significant issues, and it definitely deserves to be read, discussed, and assigned.It is probably one of this year`s most important contributions to the historical survey of American church-state relations.But in sight of its blatant iconoclasm and partisanship, I mean that it is particularly significant to balance Sehat`s views with competing voices.The Myth of American Religious Freedom is provocative and intriguing, and there is no question that it will be of great use to scholars and students in the field, but I mean that the panel is still out on whether Sehat`s path-breaking conclusions will finally be considered classical or just an important counterpoint to the dominant narrative.
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