Dear Readers: This review by Daniel K. Williams, author of God's Own Party: The Making of the Christian Right, serves as the first of several posts dedicated to a roundtable on David Sehat's The Myth of American Religious Freedom. Expect follow-up posts in the coming weeks from me, Ray Haberski, and Christopher Hickman. Also look 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 history of the battle between moral establishmentarians and proponents of individual rights that challenges conventional scholarly understandings and popular impressions of the history of church-state relations in the United States. While numerous monographs have examined the meaning of the First Amendment, the disestablishment of state churches in the early republic, the campaigns of moral reformers in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, and the role of religious dissenters in expanding civil liberties, Sehat is the first 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 protection of individual rights is at the heart of the American experiment. His book not only challenges readers to rethink their assumptions about the degree of religious freedom in America, but also presents a new historical framework to use in interpreting the contemporary culture wars.
Sehat’s narrative begins with the framing of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. By that time, most Americans were convinced that they wanted some measure of religious liberty that at least gave people the right to attend the Protestant church of their choice, but most also believed that social harmony and the internal security of the nation depended on the maintenance of a moral order, which they thought could be supported only 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 late eighteenth century, fewer than 20 percent of Americans were church members. Some Founders, including John Adams, believed in state support of established churches. Others, including Benjamin Franklin, supported a less overt link between religion and the state, believing that the public moral order was based on religion and that officeholders should be required to profess a belief in God, but that direct state support of churches was neither necessary nor desirable.
