Notes

Introduction

1. Robert G. Ingersoll, “Individuality,” in Ingersoll, Works of Robert G. Ingersoll (New York: C. P. Farrell, 1900), 1:199.

2. For examples of writers who assert the secularity of the United States at the nation’s birth, see Steven K. Green, Inventing a Christian America: The Myth of the Religious Founding (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015); Frank Lambert, The Founding Fathers and the Place of Religion in America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003); Isaac Kramnick and R. Laurence Moore, The Godless Constitution: A Moral Defense of the Secular State, rev. ed. (New York: Norton, 2005); Kevin M. Kruse, One Nation under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America (New York: Basic Books, 2015).

3. See R. Laurence Moore and Isaac Kramnick, Godless Citizens in a Godly Republic: Atheists in American Public Life (New York: Norton, 2018); Leigh Eric Schmidt, Village Atheists: How America’s Unbelievers Made Their Way in a Godly Nation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016); Susan Jacoby, Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism (New York: Metropolitan, 2004); Christian Smith, “Rethinking the Secularization of American Public Life,” in Christian Smith, ed., The Secular Revolution: Power, Interests, and Conflict in the Secularization of American Public Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 1–96.

4. Jacoby, Freethinkers, 3.

5. Wilfred M. McClay, “Two Concepts of Secularism,” Wilson Quarterly 24 (Summer 2000): 67.

6. Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 8 (second quotation), 25 (first quotation). For writers engaged in a similar interrogation, see Philip Hamburger, Liberal Suppression: Section 501 (c) (3) and the Taxation of Speech (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018); Saba Mahmood, Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016); George Marsden, The Twilight of the American Enlightenment: The 1950s and the Crisis of Liberal Belief (New York: Basic Books, 2014); John Lardas Modern, Secularism in Antebellum America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).

7. McClay, “Two Concepts of Secularism,” 67.

8. For examples of works that point to the essentially or latently Protestant character of American secularism, see Tracy Fessenden, Culture and Redemption: Religion, the Secular, and American Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007); Philip Hamburger, Separation of Church and State (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002). A similar argument, from a slightly different angle, can be found in James E. Block, A Nation of Agents: The American Path to a Modern Self and Society (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002). For books that speak more generally of the long-term effect of Protestantism as a move to secularization, see Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012); Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007). For a helpful, if somewhat polemical, analysis of these overlapping historiographical trends, see Jacques Berlinerblau, “The Crisis in Secular Studies,” Chronicle Review, September 8, 2014, https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-Crisis-in-Secular-Studies/.

9. Walter Lippmann, Drift and Mastery: An Attempt to Diagnose the Current Unrest (New York: Mitchell Kennerley, 1914), 270. For examples of foundational texts in social science that reject ideas and culture in favor of individual or group interests, see, for example, V. O. Key, Politics, Parties and Pressure Groups (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1942); David Easton, The Political System: An Inquiry into the State of Political Science (New York: Knopf, 1953); Heinz Eulau, The Behavioral Persuasion in Politics (New York: Random House, 1963); Heinz Eulau, ed., Behavioralism in Political Science (New York: Atherton Press, 1969). The rise of institutionalist theories challenged but did not displace the basic behavioralist orientation within American social science. For an explanation of those institutionalist theories, see James G. March and Johan P. Olsen, “The New Institutionalism: Organizational Factors in Political Life,” American Political Science Review 78 (September 1984): 734–49; Peter A. Hall and Rosemary C. R. Taylor, “Political Science and the Three New Institutionalisms,” Political Studies 44 (1996): 936–57; and especially Vivien A. Schmidt, “Reconciling Ideas and Institutions through Discursive Institutionalism,” in Daniel Béland and Robert Henry Cox, eds., Ideas and Politics in Social Science Research (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 47–64. My book could be seen as an extended analysis using the conceptual frame of discursive institutionalism. It could be seen also as a study in “critical ideational development,” to use the phrasing of Desmond S. King and Rogers M. Smith. See King and Smith, “ ‘Without Regard to Race’: Critical Ideational Development in Modern American Politics,” Journal of Politics 76 (October 2014): 958–71.

10. Rush Welter, “On Studying the National Mind,” in John Higham and Paul K. Conkin, eds., New Directions in American Intellectual History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), 65 (first quotation), 65–66 (second quotation).

11. Jack N. Rakove, The Beginnings of National Politics: An Interpretive History of the Continental Congress (New York: Knopf, 1979); Daniel T. Rodgers, Contested Truths: Keywords in American Politics Since Independence (New York: Basic Books, 1987). On the Constitution as civic scripture, see Jack N. Balkin, Living Originalism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011), 74–99.

12. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), 222. MacIntyre’s definition of a tradition was first pointed out to me by Elesha Coffman. See Elesha J. Coffman, The Christian Century and the Rise of the Protestant Mainline (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 6.

13. David A. Hollinger and Charles Capper, The American Intellectual Tradition: 1865 to the Present, 7th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 2:xiii.

Chapter One. An Enlightenment Settlement

1. Thomas Jefferson to the Citizens of Albemarle, February 12, 1790, in Thomas Jefferson, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Julian P. Boyd (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950–), 16:179. On Jefferson’s wider concern for liberty and how it affected the political process, see David Sehat, The Jefferson Rule: How the Founding Fathers Became Infallible and Our Politics Inflexible (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2015), 3–38. On the contradictory political thought bound up in the slogan “new order of the ages,” see Michael Lienesch, New Order of the Ages: Time, the Constitution, and the Making of Modern American Political Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988).

2. Jefferson to Isaac Story, December 5, 1801, in Jefferson, Papers, 36:30.

3. Joseph Canning, Ideas of Power in the Late Middle Ages, 1296–1417 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Steven Ozment, The Age of Reform, 1250–1550: An Intellectual and Religious History of Late Medieval and Reformation Europe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), 135–81; Michael Wilks, The Problem of Sovereignty in the Later Middle Ages: The Papal Monarchy with Augustinus Triumphus and the Publicists (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1963); Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957).

4. Morton Borden, Jews, Turks, and Infidels (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984).

5. On the Massachusetts Bay Charter, see Bobby Wright, “ ‘For the Children of Infidels’?: American Indian Education in the Colonial Colleges,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 12 (January 1988): 2. On the colonial connection between slavery and heathenism, including the quotation from the colonial court, see David Sehat, The Myth of American Religious Freedom, updated ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 73–74 (quotation on 73).

6. On Jefferson’s religious beliefs and especially his notion that religion was a private matter, see Dumas Malone, Jefferson and His Time (Boston: Little, Brown, 1948), 1:106–9.

7. On the religious arrangements prior to the U.S. Constitution, see Sehat, The Myth of American Religious Freedom, 13–29.

8. Virginia Constitution of 1776, Declaration of Rights, sec. 16.

9. See editorial note in Jefferson, Papers, 2:547.

10. “A Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom,” in Jefferson, Papers, 2:545–46 (first quotation), 546 (second quotation).

11. Richard Henry Lee to James Madison, November 26, 1784, in James Madison, The Papers of James Madison, ed. William T. Hutchison and William M. E. Rachal (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962–91), 8:149.

12. Petition quoted in Thomas E. Buckley, Church and State in Revolutionary Virginia, 1776–1787 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1977), 74. On the legislative history of the bill in 1779, see editorial note in Jefferson, Papers, 2:547–48.

13. Madison, “Outline A,” in Madison, Papers, 8:197.

14. Madison, “Outline B,” in ibid., 8:198. See also Madison to the Marquis de Lafayette, March 20, 1785, where Madison discusses “the Act for the corrupting Religious system.” Ibid., 8:254.

15. On Madison’s parliamentary moves, see Buckley, Church and State, 107–12.

16. Madison to Jefferson, January 9, 1785, in Madison, Papers, 8:229.

17. Madison, “Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments,” in ibid., 8:295–306.

18. On rights in the Whig political tradition, see Jack N. Rakove, Original Meanings: Political Ideas and the Making of the Constitution (New York: Knopf, 1996), 310–16.

19. Madison, “Memorial and Remonstrance,” 8:299.

20. Ibid., 8:300.

21. Ibid., 8:304.

22. Madison to Jefferson, January 22, 1786, in ibid., 8:473.

23. Ibid. For the legislative emendations to Jefferson’s original bill and an account of its passage, see Jefferson, Papers, 2:545–53 (second quotation on 546).

24. Madison, “Vices of the Political System of the United States,” in Madison, Papers, 9:356.

25. On the concerns over the godlessness of the Constitution, see Isaac Kramnick and R. Laurence Moore, The Godless Constitution: A Moral Defense of the Secular State, rev. ed. (New York: Norton, 2005), 26–45 (quotation on 33–34).

26. Quoted by ibid., 33.

27. Madison to Jefferson, October 17, 1788, in Madison, Papers, 11:297.

28. On Madison’s change of mind, see Sehat, The Myth of American Religious Freedom, 42–45.

29. Joseph Gales, ed., Debates and Proceedings of the Congress of the United States (Washington: Gales and Seaton, 1834–56), 1:451. This source is commonly called the Annals of Congress.

30. Ibid., 1:452.

31. Ibid., 1:757.

32. Ibid., 1:757 (first quotation), 758 (remaining quotations).

33. Ibid., 1:796.

34. Journal of the First Session of the Senate of the United States (Washington: Gales and Seaton, 1820), 77.

35. Ibid., 1:796 (first quotation), 948 (second quotation).

36. Sidney E. Mead, The Lively Experiment: The Shaping of Christianity in America (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), 57. For a more extended discussion of the drafting process, see Sehat, The Myth of American Religious Freedom, 31–50.

37. On the expansion of evangelicalism and evangelical authority, see Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), 257–88, particularly 282–84; Christine Leigh Heyrman, Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt (New York: Knopf, 1997). For an excellent explanation of how the broad Protestant consensus promoted “nonsectarianism” as the source of its cohesion, see Noah Feldman, Divided by God: America’s Church–State Problem—And What We Should Do About It (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2005), 61–64. On the shared general characteristics of the Protestant denominations, see Robert T. Handy, Undermined Establishment: Church–State Relations in America, 1880–1920 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 8–12. On the decline of the Enlightenment with the expansion of Protestantism, see Henry F. May, The Enlightenment in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 307–62. On the interlocking connection of Protestant social thought with the institutional structure of the Protestant establishment, see William R. Hutchison, Religious Pluralism in America: The Contentious History of a Founding Ideal (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 60–65.

38. On the explosive growth of evangelicalism, see Roger Finke and Rodney Stark, The Churching of America, 1776–2005: Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy, 2nd ed. (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2005), 22–24.

39. Sehat, The Myth of American Religious Freedom, 53–59.

40. For discussion about this coalition, see the reference to “the Physicians & [the] Dissenting Clergy,” in Gideon Granger to Jefferson, October 18, 1800, in Jefferson, Papers, 32:228.

41. Jefferson to the Danbury Baptist Association, January 1, 1802, in Jefferson, Papers, 36:258. See also the editorial comments and his more expansive first draft of the letter in ibid., 253–56.

42. Charles I. Foster, An Errand of Mercy: The Evangelical United Front, 1790–1837 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1960), 275–79. See also Ronald G. Walters, American Reformers, 1815–1860, rev. ed. (New York: Hill & Wang, 1997); Paul S. Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820–1920 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978); Clifford S. Griffin, Their Brothers’ Keepers: Moral Stewardship in the United States, 1800–1865 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1960).

43. Lyman Beecher, A Reformation of Morals Practical and Indispensable (Andover, Mass.: Flagg and Gould, 1814), 18.

44. Foster, Errand of Mercy, xi.

45. Madison, “A Proclamation,” July 9, 1812, in James D. Richardson, ed., A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, 1789–1897 (New York: Bureau of National Literature, 1897), 1:498.

46. For more on blasphemy, obscenity, and Sabbath laws, see Sehat, The Myth of American Religious Freedom, 59–69 (quotation on 62).

47. Permoli v. New Orleans, 44 U.S. 589 (1845).

48. Sehat, The Myth of American Religious Freedom, 155–80.

49. Ibid., 73–154.

50. Robert Ingersoll, “Interview with Mail and Express,” January 12, 1885, in Robert G. Ingersoll, The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll (New York: C. P. Farrell, 1900), 8:227.

51. Quoted in Sehat, The Myth of American Religious Freedom, 62. Chris Beneke has argued that the relative scarcity of blasphemy prosecution in the nineteenth century means that I have overstated the Christian power and influence in public life. See Chris Beneke, “The Myth of American Religious Coercion,” Commonplace: The journal of early American life, accessed February 4, 2021, http://commonplace.online/article/the-myth-of-american-religious-coercion. It is true that there were fairly few recorded trials for blasphemy, particularly on the appellate level, though Beneke still notes that by his reckoning there was one a year for the first fifty years of the nineteenth century. But the notion that blasphemy was not therefore an enforceable (and enforced) crime is inaccurate. Leigh Eric Schmidt points out that in the 1870s, well after blasphemy prosecutions went into decline, there were frequent instances of blasphemy in the annual jail statistics in Connecticut counties: 2 in 1877, 3 in 1878, 4 in 1879 in New Haven County alone. These are the kinds of records that will not show up in reviews of jurisprudence, but they reveal the kind of state- and local-level coercion that was fairly common, if unevenly exerted, in the nineteenth century. Schmidt also points out that blasphemy was often prosecuted as obscenity, which critics complained was an obscurement of the religious underpinning of the law’s enforcement. See Leigh Eric Schmidt, Village Atheists: How America’s Unbelievers Made Their Way in a Godly Nation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), 197–98.

Chapter Two. The Sociology of Law

1. Adolph Brandeis quoted by Josephine Goldmark, Pilgrims of ’48: One Man’s Part in the Austrian Revolution of 1848, and a Family Migration to America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1930), 202.

2. Frederika Brandeis quoted by Alpheus Thomas Mason, Brandeis: A Free Man’s Life (New York: Viking, 1946), 28.

3. Dorothy Ross, ed., Modernist Impulses in the Human Sciences, 1870–1930 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994). On the fight in the European, and especially German, context between secularists and their religious opponents, see Todd H. Weir, Secularism and Religion in Nineteenth-Century Germany: The Rise of the Fourth Confession (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Helmut Walser Smith, ed., Protestants, Catholics, and Jews in Germany, 1800–1914 (New York: Berg, 2001); Christopher Clark and Wolfram Kaiser, eds., Culture Wars: Secular–Catholic Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Europe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Mark Lilla, The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West (New York: Knopf, 2007).

4. Freund quoted by Mason, Brandeis, 31.

5. Brandeis quoted by ibid., 69.

6. Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 63. See also John Murray Cuddihy, The Ordeal of Civility: Freud, Marx, Lévi-Strauss, and the Jewish Struggle with Modernity (New York: Basic Books, 1974), 8–13.

7. Ernest Poole, “Brandeis,” American Magazine 71 (February 1911): 481.

8. George M. Marsden, The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).

9. Grant Wacker, “The Demise of Biblical Civilization,” in The Bible in America: Essays in Cultural History, ed. Nathan O. Hatch and Mark A. Noll (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 121–38; David Mislin, Saving Faith: Making Religious Pluralism an American Value at the Dawn of the Secular Age (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015), 14–33.

10. Charles W. Eliot, “The New Education,” Atlantic Monthly, February 1869, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1869/02/the-new-education/309049/. See also Laurence Veysey, The Emergence of the American University (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965).

11. On the Langdellian revolution, see Anthony Chase, “The Birth of the Modern Law School,” American Journal of Legal History 23 (October 1979): 329–48; Louis D. Brandeis, “The Harvard Law School,” Green Bag 1 (January 1889): 10–25, esp. 18–22.

12. David Sehat, The Myth of American Religious Freedom, updated ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 60–69.

13. Vidal v. Girard’s Executors, 43 U.S. 127 (1844), at 198.

14. Latter-Day Saints v. United States, 136 U.S. 1 (1890), at 49 (first quotation); Holy Trinity v. United States, 143 U.S. 457 (1892), at 471 (second quotation); Hennington v. Georgia, 163 U.S. 299 (1896), at 304 (third quotation). For more in this vein and for a penetrating discussion of “general religion” in law, see David Sikkink, “From Christian Civilization to Individual Civil Liberties: Framing Religion in the Legal Field, 1880–1949,” in Christian Smith, ed., The Secular Revolution: Power, Interests, and Conflict in the Secularization of American Public Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 311–20.

15. Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., “Book Notices,” American Law Review 14 (March 1880): 234. See also Anthony J. Sebok, Legal Positivism in American Jurisprudence (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), who argues that Langdell saw law as a natural science and that legal realists saw his position as creedal rather than scientific.

16. Brandeis, “The Harvard Law School,” 21.

17. Melvin I. Urofsky, Louis D. Brandeis: A Life (New York: Pantheon, 2009), 49.

18. Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), 3–69.

19. Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., “Ideals and Doubts,” in Collected Legal Papers (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1920), 304 (first quotation), 304–5 (second quotation).

20. Sehat, The Myth of American Religious Freedom, 61, 64–67, 178. Sikkink first pointed out that conservatives’ view of the common law mirrored their conception of God. See Sikkink, “From Christian Civilization to Individual Liberties,” 326–27.

21. Southern Pacific v. Jensen, 244 U.S. 205 (1917), at 222.

22. Holmes, The Common Law (London: Macmillan, 1882), 1.

23. Ibid.

24. Holmes, “The Path of the Law,” Harvard Law Review 10 (March 25, 1897): 469.

25. Ibid.

26. Ibid., 474.

27. Samuel D. Warren and Louis D. Brandeis, “The Right to Privacy,” Harvard Law Review 4 (December 15, 1890): 193–220.

28. Sarah E. Igo, The Known Citizen: A History of Privacy in Modern America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018), 8.

29. Warren and Brandeis, “The Right to Privacy,” 193.

30. Ibid., 205.

31. On the property/contract framework of American law before the 1930s, see Bruce Ackerman, We the People: Foundations (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), 119–30, especially 123–24.

32. On the transformation from property to personality, see Igo, The Known Citizen, 19–22. See also Roscoe Pound, “Interests of Personality,” Harvard Law Review 28 (February 1915): 343–51.

33. Brandeis to Alice Goldmark, February 26, 1891, in Melvin I. Urofsky and David W. Levy, eds., Letters of Louis D. Brandeis (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1971–78), 1:100. He eventually wrote this other article, in which he delivered his famous aphorism, “Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman.” See Brandeis, “What Publicity Can Do,” Other People’s Money, and How Bankers Use It (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1914), 92.

34. Roscoe Pound, Social Justice and Legal Justice (Pittsburgh, 1912), 18.

35. This definition of classical liberalism comes from Mike O’Connor, A Commercial Republic: America’s Enduring Debate over Democratic Capitalism (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2014), 26.

36. Gary Gerstle, “The Protean Character of American Liberalism,” American Historical Review 99 (October 1994): 1043–73, especially 1046–49.

37. See Christopher Cameron, Black Freethinkers: A History of African American Secularism (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2019), 109–18. Cameron defines secularism as a personal rejection of God.

38. On the American bohemians, see Christine Stansell, American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010); Russell Jacoby, The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe (New York: Basic Books, 1987), 27–40.

39. Paul Buhle, Marxism in the United States: A History of the American Left, 3rd ed. (London: Verso, 2013), 46–49, 84 (quotation). On the Jewish component of free thought and political radicalism, see Susan Jacoby, Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism (New York: Metropolitan, 2004), 233–38; David A. Hollinger, “Jewish Intellectuals and the De-Christianization of American Public Culture in the Twentieth Century,” in Science, Jews, and Secular Culture: Studies in Mid-Twentieth-Century American Intellectual History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 17–41.

40. David A. Hollinger, “Ethnic Diversity, Cosmopolitanism, and the Emergence of the American Liberal Intelligentsia,” in Hollinger, In the American Province: Studies in the History and Historiography of Ideas (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 56–73.

41. Walter Lippmann, A Preface to Politics (New York: M. Kennerley, 1913); Walter E. Weyl, The New Democracy: An Essay on Certain Political and Economic Tendencies in the United States (New York: Macmillan, 1912), 1; Floyd Dell, Intellectual Vagabondage: An Apology for the Intelligentsia (New York: George H. Doran, 1926), 107. For a wider exploration of the role of modernism in a variety of domains, see William R. Hutchison, The Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976); Daniel Joseph Singal, “Towards a Definition of American Modernism,” American Quarterly 39 (Spring 1987): 7–26; Dorothy Ross, “Modernism Reconsidered,” in Dorothy Ross, ed., Modernist Impulses in the Human Sciences, 1870–1930 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 1–9.

42. Lippmann, Drift and Mastery: An Attempt to Diagnose the Current Unrest (New York: M. Kennerley, 1914), 203.

43. See Menand, The Metaphysical Club.

44. Ann Douglas, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995), 6; Horace M. Kallen, “Democracy versus the Melting Pot,” The Nation, February 18, 1915, 190–94, February 25, 1915, 217–20; Randolph Bourne, “Trans-national America,” Atlantic Monthly 118 (July 1916), 86–97; Alain Locke, Race Contacts and Interracial Relations, quoted in Louis Menand, Metaphysical Club, 398.

45. James T. Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870–1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).

46. On Brandeis’s shift from assimilationism to cultural pluralism, see Jeffrey Rosen, Louis D. Brandeis: American Prophet (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), 146–51.

47. Leo M. Frank v. C. Wheeler Mangum, 237 U.S. 309 (1915), at 349 (first quotation), 350 (second and third quotations). For Brandeis’s opinion of the case, see Brandeis to Roscoe Pound, November 27, 1914, in Letters, 3:373–74.

48. On Leo Frank and his lynching, see Steve Oney, And the Dead Shall Rise: The Murder of Mary Phagan and the Lynching of Leo Frank (New York: Pantheon, 2003); Nancy Maclean, “The Leo Frank Case Reconsidered: Gender and Sexual Politics in the Making of Reactionary Populism,” Journal of American History 78 (December 1991), 917–48.

49. On the second Klan and its relationship to Protestantism, see Kelly J. Baker, Gospel According to the Klan: The KKK’s Appeal to Protestant America, 1915–1930 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2011); Matthew Avery Sutton, American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014), 128–30; Steven K. Green, The Third Disestablishment: Church, State, and American Culture, 1940–1975 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 24–25, 32.

50. Brandeis, “The Jewish Problem: How to Solve It,” Brandeis on Zionism (Washington D.C.: Zionist Organization of America, 1942), 12–35.

51. Ibid., 15.

52. Brandeis, “True Americanism,” Brandeis on Zionism, 5 (first quotation), 11 (second and third quotations).

53. Philippa Levine, Eugenics: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 55–58.

54. For examples of Brandeis’s behind-the-scenes maneuvering and coordination of responses, see Brandeis to Norman Hapgood, March 14, 1916, in Letters, 4:118–19, and Brandeis to Edward Francis McLennen, April 3, 1916, in ibid., 4:143–44. For a good summary of the entire episode, see Urofsky, Louis D. Brandeis, 430–59.

55. Felix Frankfurter, “Mr. Justice Brandeis and the Constitution,” in Felix Frankfurter, ed., Mr. Justice Brandeis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1932), 50.

Chapter Three. Piers of American Secularism

1. A. H. Macmillan, Faith on the March (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1957), 42–44, 47 (quotations). Macmillan was one of the leaders among the first generation of the Bible Students.

2. Ibid., 48–57, 71–73.

3. David M. Kennedy, Over Here: The First World War and American Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 3–14.

4. Wilson quoted by Cara Lea Burnidge, A Peaceful Conquest: Woodrow Wilson, Religion, and the New World Order (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 66.

5. Ibid., 68 (quotations); Andrew Preston, Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith: Religion in American War and Diplomacy (New York: Knopf, 2012), 233–74.

6. See Leah Weinryb Grohsgal, “Reinventing Civil Liberties: Religious Groups, Organized Litigation, and the Rights Revolution” (PhD diss.: Emory University, 2011), 6–7. In this chapter and the next, I have relied heavily on Grohsgal’s excellent dissertation. I hope it will be published as a book at some point soon.

7. John Reed, Ten Days That Shook the World (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1919); Vladimir I. Lenin, “Socialism and Religion,” in Lenin, Collected Works, trans. and ed. by Andrew Rothstein (Moscow: Progress Publications, 1965), 10:83–84.

8. On the fear about labor and atheist agitators, see Susan Jacoby, Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism (New York: Metropolitan, 2004), 227–45. Heath Carter describes how many workers objected to the notion that they had no religion or the wrong religion and began to push Christian leaders to embrace a more social form of Christianity. See Heath W. Carter, Union Made: Working People and the Rise of Social Christianity in Chicago (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).

9. William R. Hutchison, ed., Between the Times: The Travail of the Protestant Establishment in America, 1900–1960 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

10. Kennedy, Over Here, 79–80.

11. Rutherford, quoted by Macmillan, Faith on the March, 85–86. For an extended articulation of the Bible Students’ rejection of existing church–state arrangements, see Charles T. Russell, The Finished Mystery (Brooklyn: International Bible Students Association, 1917), preface, 247–53, 406–7, 469.

12. For a compelling analysis of the Witnesses’ attraction to the down and out, see James A. Beckford, The Trumpet of Prophecy: A Sociological Study of the Jehovah’s Witnesses (New York: Wiley, 1975).

13. Macmillan, Faith on the March, 86–90.

14. Ibid., 95–99.

15. Ibid., 84–85, 99 (quotations).

16. Schenck v. United States, 249 U.S. 47 (1919).

17. Ibid., at 52.

18. Debs v. United States, 249 U.S. 211 (1919), at 214. See also Frohwerk v. United States, 249 U.S. 204 (1919).

19. Eugene Debs, “Statement to the Court,” Writings and Speeches of Eugene V. Debs, ed. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. (New York: Hermitage Press, 1948), 437.

20. Debs v. United States, 249 U.S. 211 (1919).

21. John Dewey, “In Explanation of Our Lapse” (1917), in John Dewey, The Middle Works, 1899–1924, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1976–83), 10:292.

22. On the bad tendency test, see David M. Rabban, Free Speech in Its Forgotten Years (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997). On Holmes’s initial articulation of the limits of speech, see Samuel Konefsky, The Legacy of Holmes and Brandeis: A Study in the Influence of Ideas (New York: Macmillan, 1956), 192–94.

23. Ernst Freund, “The Debs Case and Freedom of Speech,” New Republic, May 3, 1919, 14.

24. Brandeis–Frankfurter Conversations, Brandeis Papers, quoted by Robert Cover, “The Left, the Right, and the First Amendment, 1918–1928,” Maryland Law Review 40:3 (1981): 374. On the history of working-class radicalism and the fight over free speech, see Laura Weinrib, The Taming of Free Speech: America’s Civil Liberties Compromise (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016).

25. On free speech as a public right, see Bruce Ackerman, We the People: Foundations (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), 124–27.

26. Macmillan, Faith on the March, 100–101.

27. Grohsgal, “Reinventing Civil Liberties,” 80–81.

28. Zechariah Chafee Jr., “Freedom of Speech in Wartime,” Harvard Law Review 32 (June 1919): 957.

29. Ibid.; Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., “The Path of the Law,” Harvard Law Review 10 (March 25, 1897): 469.

30. Chafee, “Freedom of Speech,” 934 (second quotation), 956 (first quotation).

31. Ibid., 960–63.

32. Rabban, Free Speech in Its Forgotten Years, 7.

33. Abrams v. United States, 250 U.S. 616 (1919).

34. Ibid., at 621.

35. Ibid., at 628.

36. Ibid., at 630.

37. Ibid.

38. Brandeis to Holmes, April 23, 1919, in Letters, 4:390.

39. Schaefer v. United States, 251 U.S. 466 (1920).

40. Ibid., at 495.

41. Pierce v. United States, 252 U.S. 239 (1920), at 273.

42. Gilbert v. Minnesota, 254 U.S. 325 (1920).

43. Ibid., at 338.

44. On the ACLU, see Samuel Walker, In Defense of American Liberties: A History of the ACLU, 2nd ed. (Carbondale: University of Illinois Press, 1999).

45. Ibid., 30–34, 52.

46. Paul L. Murphy, World War I and the Origin of Civil Liberties in the United States (New York: Norton, 1979), 153–56.

47. Walker, In Defense of American Liberties, 37–40.

48. Ibid., 40.

49. Ibid., 52–54; Laura M. Weinrib, “Civil Liberties Outside the Courts,” Supreme Court Review (2014): 315–16.

50. Weinrib calls this positive view of government the “progressive vision,” which she contrasts with the “radical vision.” See Weinrib, “Civil Liberties Outside the Courts,” 316–18.

51. Walker, In Defense of American Liberties, 60.

52. On the Protestant fundamentalism of the KKK, see Kelly J. Baker, The Gospel According to the Klan: The KKK’s Appeal to Protestant America, 1915–1930 (Lawrenceville: University Press of Kansas, 2011). On the NAACP’s response, see Walker, In Defense of American Liberties, 62.

53. DeSilver quoted by Walker, In Defense of American Liberties, 62.

54. Ibid., 61.

55. Grohsgal, “Reinventing Civil Liberties,” 87–88; Macmillan, Faith on the March, 120–21.

56. Green, Third Disestablishment, 62; Grohsgal, “Reinventing Civil Liberties,” 14.

57. For an example of the rhetoric, see “Church–State Destroys Religious Liberty,” The Golden Age, September 29, 1920, 711–12 (quotation on 711).

58. “Dry Law is the Scheme of the Devil,” Washington Post, July 22, 1924, p. 3; Grohsgal, “Reinventing Civil Liberties,” 92–101.

59. Grohsgal, “Reinventing Civil Liberties, 14–15, 110.

60. Roger Baldwin, Unpublished Biography (Galley Proofs), Roger Baldwin Papers, quoted by ibid., 178.

61. Ibid., 178–79.

62. Gitlow v. New York, 268 U.S. 652 (1925).

63. Ibid., at 656 footnote 2.

64. Ibid., at 654.

65. Gitlow quoted in Richard C. Cortner, The Supreme Court and the Second Bill of Rights: The Fourteenth Amendment and the Nationalization of Civil Liberties (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1981), 50.

66. “Gitlow’s Trial,” in Alfred Fried, ed. Communism in America: A History in Documents (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 52 (first quotation), 53 (second quotation). For the early history of American communism and its connection to the Soviet Union, see Theodore Draper, The Roots of American Communism (New York: Viking, 1957); Theodore Draper, American Communism and Soviet Russia (New York: Viking Press, 1960).

67. Appeals court quoted by Cortner, The Second Bill of Rights, 54.

68. Gitlow v. New York, at 667.

69. Cortner, The Supreme Court and the Second Bill of Rights, 3–11, 38–62.

70. Chafee quoted by Walker, In Defense of American Liberties, 80.

71. These biographical details come from Neil Richards, Intellectual Privacy: Rethinking Civil Liberties in the Digital Age (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 27–28.

72. Ibid., 28–29.

73. St. Louis Post-Dispatch, July 19, 1927, quoted by Konefsky, Legacy of Holmes and Brandeis, 94.

74. Whitney v. California, 274 U.S. 357 (1927).

75. Ibid., at 376.

76. Ibid., 375 (first quotation), 377 (second and third quotations).

77. Olmstead v. United States, 277 U.S. 438 (1928).

78. Ibid., at 478.

79. On this point, see Richards, Intellectual Privacy, 6–8.

80. Harlan Fisk Stone, “The Conscientious Objector,” Columbia University Quarterly 21 (October 1919): 253–72 (quotations on 263). On Stone’s religious views and training, see Alpheus Thomas Mason, Harlan Fiske Stone: Pillar of the Law (New York: Viking, 1956), 42–61. On Stone’s work with conscientious objectors, see Mason, Harlan Fiske Stone, 100–114.

81. Mason, Harlan Fiske Stone, 114–25, 251–62.

82. Brandeis to Harold Joseph Laski, February 28, 1932, in Letters, 5:497.

83. Holmes quoted by Konefsky, Legacy, 169. For his exploration of what he called the sociological method in jurisprudence, see Benjamin N. Cardozo, The Nature of the Judicial Process (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1921), 98–141.

84. Brandeis to Harold Joseph Laski, February 28, 1932, in Letters, 5:497.

85. Walter Lippmann, A Preface to Politics (New York: M. Kennerley, 1913), 31.

86. Roosevelt, “The Governor Accepts the Nomination for the Presidency,” July 2, 1932, in Franklin Delano Roosevelt, The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt, ed. Samuel I. Rosenman (New York: Random House, 1938–50) 1:649 (second quotation), 659 (first and third quotations).

87. Brandeis to Fannie Brandeis, July 11, 1932, in Letters, 5:505.

88. See David Sehat, The Jefferson Rule: How the Founding Fathers Became Infallible and Our Politics Inflexible (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2015), 131–34.

89. Robert H. Jackson, The Struggle for Judicial Supremacy: A Study of a Crisis in American Power Politics (New York: Knopf, 1941), v.

90. West Coast Hotel v. Parrish, 300 U.S. 379 (1937); National Labor Relations Board v. Jones and Laughlin Steel Corp., 301 U.S. 1 (1937).

91. United States v. Carolene Products Co., 304 U.S. 144 (1938), at 152 note 4. On the importance of the footnote as a marker for future synthesis, see Ackerman, We the People, 119–21.

Chapter Four. The Difficulties of Diversity

1. Joseph F. Rutherford, Liberty: Explained in Seven Bible Treatises (Brooklyn: Watchtower Bible and Tract Society, 1932), 6.

2. Joseph F. Rutherford, “Liberty to Preach,” The Golden Age, March 20, 1929, 387–92.

3. Ibid., 392.

4. Leah Weinryb Grohsgal, “Reinventing Civil Liberties: Religious Groups, Organized Litigation, and the Rights Revolution,” (PhD diss.: Emory University, 2011), 133.

5. A. H. Macmillan, Faith on the March (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1957), 162.

6. “The Empire and the Courts,” The Golden Age, June 22–July 6, 1921, 570.

7. Grohsgal, “Rethinking Civil Liberties,” 186.

8. Boston Post, September 21, 1935, reprinted in The Golden Age, October 9, 1935, 40.

9. Baldwin to Carleton Nichols Sr., October 4, 1935, quoted by Grohsgal, “Rethinking Civil Liberties,” 198.

10. Grohsgal, “Rethinking Civil Liberties,” 198–203.

11. Moyle to ACLU, October 22, 1935, quoted by ibid., 204.

12. Baldwin quoted by ibid., 182.

13. “Model Brief for Flag Salute Cases” (1936), quoted by ibid., 206.

14. Baldwin quoted by ibid., 213.

15. ACLU Press Release, June 1, 1936, in ibid., 206.

16. Quoted by ibid., 217.

17. Ibid.

18. Reynolds v. United States, 98 U.S. 145 (1878).

19. Davis v. Beason, 133 U.S. 333 (1890).

20. Latter-day Saints v. United States, 136 U.S. 1 (1890), at 49. For more on the struggle over Mormonism in the nineteenth century, see David Sehat, The Myth of American Religious Freedom, updated ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 168–73; Sarah Barringer Gordon, The Mormon Question: Polygamy and Constitutional Conflict in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002).

21. Moyle to Rutherford, February 7, 1938, quoted by Grohsgal, “Rethinking Civil Liberties,” 229.

22. Lovell v. City of Griffin, 303 U.S. 444 (1938).

23. Moyle to Rutherford, April 7, 1938, quoted by Grohsgal, “Rethinking Civil Liberties,” 231.

24. Moyle to Rutherford, May 2, 1938, quoted by ibid., 240.

25. Moyle to Rutherford (undated but possibly May 1938), quoted by ibid., 244.

26. Richard C. Cortner, The Supreme Court and the Second Bill of Rights: The Fourteenth Amendment and the Nationalization of Civil Liberties (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1981), 103–4.

27. “Hughes in a Clash on Religious Right,” New York Times, March 29, 1940, 12.

28. Del Dickson, The Supreme Court in Conference (1940–1985): The Private Discussions Behind Nearly 300 Court Decisions (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 392.

29. United States v. Carolene Products Co., 304 U.S. 144 (1938), at 152 note 4.

30. Cantwell v. Connecticut, 310 U.S. 296 (1940), at 310.

31. Ibid.

32. Grohsgal, “Rethinking Civil Liberties,” 254–55.

33. Ibid.

34. Dickson, Supreme Court in Conference, 430 (first quotation), 431 (second quotation).

35. Grohsgal, “Rethinking Civil Liberties,” 252.

36. Minersville School District v. Gobitis, 310 U.S. 586 (1940), 593 (first quotation), 594 (second and third quotations).

37. Ibid., at 601.

38. Ibid., at 604.

39. “The Flag Salute Case,” Christian Century, June 19, 1940, 791 (first quotation), 792 (second and third quotations).

40. Dickson, The Supreme Court in Conference, 431.

41. Grohsgal, “Rethinking Civil Liberties,” 264–67.

42. Dickson, The Supreme Court in Conference, 431.

43. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, “The Annual Message to Congress,” January 6, 1941, in Franklin Delano Roosevelt, The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt, ed. Samuel I. Rosenman (New York: Random House, 1938–50), 9:672.

44. Jones v. Opelika, 316 U.S. 584 (1942), at 597.

45. Ibid., at 610.

46. Ibid., at 611–23.

47. Murdock v. Pennsylvania, 319 U.S. 105 (1943), at 111.

48. Ibid., at 130.

49. Ibid., at 140.

50. Jackson articulated his dissent in a separate case decided at the same time. See Douglas v. City of Jeannette, 319 U.S. 517 (1943), at 181.

51. West Virginia Board of Education v. Barnette, 319 U.S. 624 (1943), at 634.

52. Ibid., at 641.

53. Ibid., at 646.

54. Ibid., at 653.

55. Joan Wallach Scott, The Politics of the Veil (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 15 (quotation), 91–100. On the formation of laïcité during the Third Republic, see Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1976).

56. West Virginia Board of Education v. Barnette, at 654.

57. Ibid., at 658.

Chapter Five. Stumbling toward Secularism

1. Franklin Delano Roosevelt quoted by Kevin M. Schultz, Tri-Faith America: How Catholics and Jews Held Postwar America to Its Protestant Promise (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 10.

2. David Sehat, “A Mainline Moment: The American Protestant Establishment Revisited,” Modern Intellectual History 11 (November 2014): 740–41.

3. Leigh E. Schmidt, “The Parameters and Problematics of American Religious Liberalism,” in Leigh E. Schmidt and Sally M. Promey, eds., American Religious Liberalism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), 7; William R. Hutchison, Religious Pluralism in America: The Contentious History of a Founding Ideal (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 111–38. See also Schmidt, Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012).

4. David Mislin, Saving Faith: Making Religious Pluralism an American Value at the Dawn of the Secular Age (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015), 63–89; David Sehat, The Myth of American Religious Freedom, updated ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 155–68; John T. McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom: A History (New York: Norton, 2003), 91–150.

5. Mislin, Saving Faith, 33–38; Matthew S. Hedstrom, “Reading Across the Divide of Faith: Liberal Protestant Book Culture and Interfaith Encounters in Print, 1921–1948,” in Schmidt and Promey, eds., American Religious Liberalism, 222; Ann Taves, Fits, Visions, Trances: Experiencing Religion and Explaining Difference from Wesley to James (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 253–307.

6. David A. Hollinger, “After Cloven Tongues of Fire: Ecumenical Protestantism and the Modern Encounter with Diversity,” in After Cloven Tongues of Fire: Protestant Liberalism in Modern American History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), 18–55.

7. George Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture, 2d ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).

8. David A. Hollinger, Protestants Abroad: How Missionaries Tried to Change the World but Changed America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), 90.

9. Lyman Beecher, Lectures on Political Atheism and Kindred Subjects (Boston: John P. Jewett, 1852).

10. On the loss of religious authority as the sine qua non of secularization, see Mark Chaves, “Secularization as Declining Religious Authority,” Social Forces 72 (March 1994), 749–74.

11. Charles Clayton Morrison, “Can Protestantism Win America? 3: Protestantism and the Public School,” Christian Century, April 17, 1946, 490. See also Morrison, “Can Protestantism Win America? 2: The Protestant Situation,” Christian Century, April 10, 1946, 458–60; Arnold Nash, “The End of the Protestant Era,” Christian Century, October 30, 1946, 1306–8.

12. On the claim of nonsectarianism, see Sehat, The Myth of American Religious Freedom, 155–58.

13. Ibid., 158–59.

14. For Decree 426 and its translation, see Bernard Julius Meiring, Educational Aspects of the Legislation of the Councils of Baltimore, 1829–1884 (New York: Arno, 1878), 278.

15. Sehat, The Myth of American Religious Freedom, 159–68.

16. Longinqua (1895), in Claudia Carlen, ed., The Papal Encyclicals (Wilmington, NC: McGrath, 1981), 2:363–70.

17. Pascendi Dominici Gregis (1907), in ibid., 5:71 (first quotation), 89 (second quotation). On Pius XI and the American bishops, see Schultz, Tri-Faith America, 33.

18. Stanislaus Woywood, “The Teaching Authority of the Church,” in The New Canon Law: A Commentary on and Summary of the New Code of Canon Law, 7th ed. (New York: Joseph F. Wagner, 1940), 272–92 (especially canons 1322, 1325, 1372, 1382, 1384, 1399, 1401–5).

19. Steven K. Green, The Third Disestablishment: Church, State, and American Culture, 1940–1975 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 37–41; Hollinger, Protestants Abroad, 99.

20. Green, Third Disestablishment, 42–57 (quotation on 51); Hollinger, Protestants Abroad, 99; Samuel Moyn, “Religious Freedom Between Truth and Tactic,” in Winifred Fallers Sullivan et al., eds., Politics of Religious Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 137–38.

21. Benjamin Fine, “Catholic Schools Raise Enrollment to 4,000,000 Peak,” New York Times, May 30, 1952, 1, 75.

22. On the child-benefit theory and the general Catholic argument for public subsidy, see Richard C. Cortner, The Supreme Court and the Second Bill of Rights: The Fourteenth Amendment and the Nationalization of Civil Liberties (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1980), 108–9.

23. Gregg Ivers, To Build a Wall: American Jews and the Separation of Church and State (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995), 17.

24. For an example of handwringing about being caught between two opposing forces, see Morrison, “Protestantism and the Public School,” 492–93. For Protestant distrust of the child-benefit theory, see “The Wisconsin Bus Bill,” Christian Century, October 30, 1946, 1302–3.

25. John Dewey, “Implications of S.2499,” (1947), in John Dewey, The Later Works, 1925–1953, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989), 15:284; Horace Kallen, The Education of Free Men: An Essay Toward a Philosophy of Education for Americans (New York: Farrar, Straus, 1949), 213. For a discussion of the liberal intellectual suspicion of Catholic power and purposes, see McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom, 166–88.

26. Samuel Krislov, “The Amicus Curiae Brief: From Friendship to Advocacy,” Yale Law Journal 72 (March 1963): 694–721; Frank J. Sorauf, The Wall of Separation: The Constitutional Politics of Church and State (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), 205–57.

27. Everson v. Board of Education, 330 U.S. 1 (1947). On the Catholic church’s support, see Green, Third Disestablishment, 107–8.

28. Everson v. Board of Education, at 18.

29. Ibid., at 46–47.

30. Ibid., 23 (first quotation), 23–34 (second quotation).

31. Gladwin Hill, “Methodist Bishops Attack Catholics,” New York Times, May 8, 1947, 26.

32. “Baptists Warned on Liberty Test,” New York Times, May 8, 1947, 22.

33. “Now Will Protestants Awake?” Christian Century, February 26, 1947, 262–64 (quotations on 262).

34. “Supreme Court Decision on Bus Transportation,” America, February 22, 1947, 561. For a more extended theoretical treatment that supports the notion of “Protestant secularism,” see Ann Pelligrini, “Everson’s Children,” in Sullivan et al., eds., Politics of Religious Freedom, 259.

35. “Spellman Charges Protestant Bias,” New York Times, June 12, 1947, 22.

36. Frank L. Kluckhohn, “Cushing Stresses Parents’ Rights,” New York Times, April 10, 1947, 18.

37. Robert C. Hartnett, “Religion and American Democracy,” America, August 23, 1947, 569 (first two quotations), 571 (last quotation). For Catholic criticism of public educators and for their response, see Frank L. Kluckhohn, “N.E.A. Is Assailed before Catholics,” New York Times, April 11, 1947, 18; Benjamin Fine, “Religious Attack Stirs Educators,” New York Times, March 6, 1947, 27, 35.

38. Protestants and Other Americans United, “Separation of Church and State: A Manifesto,” Christian Century, January 21, 1948, 79.

39. Ibid. See also “Protestants United Issue Manifesto,” Christian Century, January 21, 1948, 68; “New Body Demands Church Separation,” New York Times, January 12, 1948, 1, 12.

40. Protestants and Other Americans United, “Separation of Church and State,” 79–82.

41. “K. of C. Criticizes Separation Drive,” New York Times, January 13, 1948, 1, 13 (quotation).

42. “Denies Catholics Oppose Separation,” New York Times, January 26, 1948, 17.

43. “Oxnam Says Cushing Attempted ‘Smear,’ ” New York Times, February 16, 1948, 5 (first quotation); “Indecent Controversy,” Christian Century, February 18, 1948, 199 (subsequent quotations). For the POAU response, see “Indecent Controversy,” 198–200.

44. Sorauf, Wall of Separation, 29–47, 169–70.

45. Ivers, To Build a Wall, 2–3.

46. Leo Pfeffer, “An Autobiographical Sketch,” in Religion and the State: Essays in Honor of Leo Pfeffer, ed. James E. Wood Jr. (Waco: Baylor University Press, 1985), 487.

47. Sorauf, Wall of Separation, 161.

48. McCollum v. Board of Education, 333 U.S. 203 (1948).

49. Rob Boston, “Vashti’s Victory: How a Valiant Illinois Woman and Her Family Won the First Supreme Court Verdict on Religion and the Public Schools Fifty Years Ago,” Church & State, April 1998, 83.

50. Ibid.

51. Ibid., 83–84.

52. McCollum v. Board of Education, 333 U.S. 203 (1948).

53. Pfeffer, “An Autobiographical Sketch,” 493; Ivers, To Build a Wall, 70–78.

54. Ivers, 79–80 (quotation on 79).

55. Ibid., 73.

56. McCollum v. Board of Education, at 212.

57. Ibid., at 231.

58. Ibid., at 239.

59. “Releasing the Time,” Commonweal, March 26, 1948, 581 (first quotation), 582 (second and third quotations).

60. Ibid., 582.

61. “Statement by Catholic Bishops Attacking Secularism as an Evil,” New York Times, November 21, 1948, 63.

62. Wilfred Parsons, The First Freedom: Considerations on Church and State in the United States (New York: McMullen, 1948), 141 (first quotation), 155 (second and third quotations); James M. O’Neill, Religion and Education under the Constitution (New York: Harper, 1949); Robert C. Harnett, “The McCollum Case,” America, April 24, 1948, 49–52.

63. “The Champaign Case,” Christian Century, April 7, 1948, 309. On the cultural effect of McCollum and its threat to both Catholics and Protestants, see Ivers, To Build a Wall, 81–83.

64. “Statement on Church and State,” June 17, 1948, reprinted in First Things 26 (October 1992): 32. See also “Church’s Teaching Held Endangered,” New York Times, June 13, 1948, 50.

65. John Courtney Murray, “A Common Enemy, A Common Cause” (1948), in First Things 26 (October 1992): 29–37 (quotation on 32). See also Murray, “Law or Prepossessions,” Law and Contemporary Problems 14 (Winter 1949): 23–43; Murray, “A Statement by Fr. Murray,” American Mercury 69 (November 1949): 637–39, in Bridging the Sacred and the Secular: Selected Writings of John Courtney Murray, ed. J. Leon Hooper (Washington: Georgetown University Press, 1994), 306–8.

66. McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom, 191–206 (quotation on 206).

67. On the Catholic and liberal Protestant concerns about secularism, see K. Healan Gaston, “Demarcating Democracy: Liberal Catholics, Protestants, and the Discourse of Secularism,” in Schmidt and Promey, eds., American Religious Liberalism, 337–58, esp. 343–47, 351–54. On the National Council of Churches, see Martin E. Marty, Modern American Religion: Under God, Indivisible, 1941–1960 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996): 3:272 (quotations). On the resulting sectarian conflict, see Will Herberg, “The Sectarian Conflict over Church and State: A Divisive Threat to Our Democracy?” Commentary 14 (November 1952): 450–62.

68. “Pluralism—National Menace,” Christian Century, June 13, 1951, 701–3.

69. “Poison Three Ways,” Time, May 5, 1952, 57.

70. Sorauf, Wall of Separation, 64–68.

71. Ivers, To Build a Wall, 86–87.

72. ACLU quoted in Sorauf, Wall of Separation, 108.

73. Pfeffer, “Autobiographical Sketch,” 498–99.

74. Ibid., 500 (quotations); Sorauf, The Wall of Separation, 119–20.

75. Sorauf, Wall of Separation, 88–89.

76. “Court Told of Need for Bible Training,” New York Times, February 2, 1952, 9.

77. Del Dickson, The Supreme Court in Conference (1940–1985): The Private Discussions Behind Nearly 300 Court Decisions (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 404–5.

78. Zorach v. Clauson, 343 U.S. 306 (1952), at 312 (first and second quotations), 313 (third and fourth quotations).

79. Ibid., 324 (first quotation), 325 (second quotation).

80. Pfeffer, “Autobiographical Sketch,” 500; Ivers, To Build a Wall, 98–99.

81. Humani generis (1950), in Carlen, ed., The Papal Encyclicals, 4:175–84.

82. Ibid., 176, 182 (quotation).

83. Joseph A. Komonchak, “ ‘The Crisis of Church–State Relationships in the U.S.A.’: A Recently Discovered Text by John Courtney Murray,” Review of Politics 61 (Autumn 1999): 689.

84. Ibid., 687.

85. Joseph McCarthy, “Enemies Within,” in Robert Torricelli and Andrew Carroll, eds., In Our Own Words: Extraordinary Speeches of the American Century (New York: Washington Square Press, 1999), 173.

86. For the sectarian dimension of McCarthyism, see Green, Third Disestablishment, 199–200.

87. C. P. Trussell, “3 on McCarthy Panel Assail Aide for ‘Shocking Attack’ on Clergy,” New York Times, July 3, 1953, 1 (first quotation), 6 (second quotation).

88. “Church Groups Hit Red Clergy Charge,” New York Times, July 5, 1953, 18 (first quotation); Green, Third Disestablishment, 204 (second quotation), 205 (third quotation).

89. Oxnam quoted in “Church Groups Hit Red Clergy Charge,” 18.

90. C. P. Trussell, “Motion on Oxnam Splits House Unit,” New York Times, July 23, 1953, 7.

91. Ibid.

92. Ibid.

93. “Spellman Rebukes Inquiries’ Critics,” New York Times, October 25, 1953, 20.

94. “Church Men Decry M’Carthy’ Inquiries,” New York Times, October 27, 1953, 17.

95. Peter Kihss, “City Police Cheer Talk by M’Carthy,” New York Times, April 5, 1954, 12.

96. Green, The Third Disestablishment, 205–6.

97. Komonchak, “A Recently Discovered Text,” 703. On his relativizing moves toward Leo XIII, see ibid., 692–93.

98. Ibid., 683–84 (quotation on 683).

99. Ibid., 684–85.

100. Ibid. On the recollections of Murray’s friend, see McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom, 208. On the wider effort to open up the church and the embrace of what was called the Nouvelle Théologie, see ibid., 189–215.

101. Paul Hutchinson, “The President’s Religious Faith,” Christian Century, March 24, 1954, 362–67.

102. “President-Elect Says Soviet Demoted Zukhov Because of Their Friendship,” New York Times, December 23, 1952, 16.

103. Ibid.

104. Dwight D. Eisenhower, “Inaugural Address,” January 20, 1953, in Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Dwight D. Eisenhower (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1958–61), 1953:1.

105. On Eisenhower’s religiousness in office, see Andrew Preston, Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith: Religion in American War and Diplomacy (New York: Knopf, 2012), 441.

106. Oxnam, quoted in ibid., 453.

107. Eisenhower, quoted in Hutchinson, “The President’s Religious Faith,” 366.

108. Eisenhower, “Statement by the President Upon Signing Bill to Include the Words ‘Under God’ in the Pledge to the Flag,” June 14, 1954, Public Papers, 1954:563; Sarah Barringer Gordon, The Spirit of the Law: Religious Voices and the Constitution in Modern America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010), 52–53.

109. Will Herberg, Protestant–Catholic–Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1955), 52.

110. Ibid., 15.

111. Miller quoted in Hutchinson, “The President’s Religious Faith,” 367; Martin E. Marty, “The New Establishment,” Christian Century, October 5, 1958, 1177.

112. Marty, “The New Establishment,” 1179. See also Martin E. Marty, “The Remnant: Retreat and Renewal,” Christian Century, November 26, 1958, 1361–65.

113. “Perils of Freedom,” Time, August 4, 1958, 53.

114. Ibid.

Chapter Six. Religion Is Personal

1. John T. McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom: A History (New York: Norton, 2003), 213.

2. Joseph A. Komonchak, “ ‘The Crisis of Church–State Relationships in the U.S.A.’: A Recently Discovered Text by John Courtney Murray,” Review of Politics 61 (Autumn 1999): 686; John Courtney Murray, We Hold These Truths: Catholic Reflections on the American Proposition (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1960), 43.

3. Salinger quoted in Andrew Preston, Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith: Religion in American War and Diplomacy (New York: Knopf, 2012), 502.

4. Fletcher Knebel, “Democratic Forecast: A Catholic in 1960,” LOOK, March 3, 1959, 17.

5. Timothy J. Sarbaugh, “Champion or Betrayer of His Own Kind: Presidential Politics and John F. Kennedy’s ‘LOOK’ Interview,” Records of the American Catholic Historical Society of Philadelphia 106 (Spring–Summer 1995): 58.

6. Ibid., 57–59 (quotation on 59).

7. Ibid., 65.

8. “Two Protestants Find ’60 Queries Proper,” New York Times, April 26, 1960, 28.

9. “Test of Religion,” Time, September 26, 1960, 21.

10. Ibid.

11. “Transcript of Kennedy Talk to Ministers and Questions and Answers,” New York Times, September 13, 1960, 22.

12. McGowan v. Maryland, 366 U.S. 420 (1961).

13. Steven K. Green, The Third Disestablishment: Church, State, and American Culture, 1940–1975 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 250–51.

14. Del Dickson, ed., The Supreme Court in Conference (1940–1985): The Private Discussions behind Nearly 300 Supreme Court Decisions (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 393.

15. Ibid., 394.

16. McGowan v. Maryland, 366 U.S. 420 (1961).

17. Ibid., at 561.

18. Gregg Ivers, To Build a Wall: American Jews and the Separation of Church and State (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995), 107–8.

19. Ibid., 108.

20. Torcaso v. Watkins, 367 U.S. 488 (1961).

21. “Religious Oath Held Unconstitutional,” Christian Century, July 5, 1961, 821; Zorach v. Clauson, 343 U.S. 306 (1952), at 313.

22. The Board of Regents statement was cited in oral argument by William J. Butler. See Engel v. Vitale Oral Argument, April 3, 1962, Oyez, https://www.oyez.org/cases/1961/468. Accessed February 15, 2021.

23. Engel v. Vitale, 370 U.S. 421 (1962), at 422.

24. Green, The Third Disestablishment, 257.

25. Ibid.

26. Ivers, To Build a Wall, 125; Green, Third Disestablishment, 257.

27. Engel v. Vitale Oral Argument, April 3, 1962, Oyez, https://www.oyez.org/cases/1961/468. Accessed February 15, 2021.

28. Ibid.

29. Ibid. See also Anthony Lewis, “Prayer in School Put to High Court,” New York Times, April 4, 1962, 45, 86.

30. Dickson, Supreme Court in Conference, 424.

31. Engel v. Vitale, 370 U.S. 421 (1962), at 435.

32. Ibid., at 437.

33. Ibid., at 445.

34. Anthony Lewis, “Supreme Court Outlaws Official School Prayers in Regents Case Decision; Ruling is 6 to 1,” New York Times, June 26, 1962, 1 (quotations), 16.

35. Alexander Burnham, “Edict Is Called Setback by Christian Clerics—Rabbis Praise It,” New York Times, June 26, 1962, 1 (first quotation), 17 (second quotation); “Spellman Renews Attack on Court’s Decision,” New York Times, June 28, 1962, 17 (third and fourth quotations).

36. Burnham, “Edict Is Called Setback,” 17 (first through fourth quotations); “Spellman Renews Attack,” 17 (fifth quotation); Anthony Lewis, “Both Houses Get Bills to Lift Ban on School Prayer,” New York Times, June 27, 1962, 20. See also Paul Hofmann, “Vatican Regrets Ruling on Prayer,” New York Times, July 22, 1962, 36.

37. Burnham, “Edict Is Called Setback,” 17.

38. Lewis, “Both Houses Get Bills,” 20.

39. Ibid., 1 (first two quotations); “President Urges Court Be Backed on Prayer Issue,” New York Times, June 28, 1962, 17 (third quotation); Alexander Burnham, “Court’s Decision Stirs Conflicts,” New York Times, June 27, 1962, 20 (fourth and fifth quotations).

40. Andrews quoted in Ivers, To Build a Wall, 244 note 74. All other quotations from “The Court Decision—And the School Prayer Furor,” Newsweek, July 9, 1962, 44.

41. For the religious affiliations of the justices, see “To Stand as a Guarantee,” Time, July 6, 1962, 7.

42. John F. Kennedy, “The President’s News Conference,” June 27, 1962, in Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: John F. Kennedy (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1962–64), 1962:510.

43. Ibid., 511.

44. “The Court Decision—And the School Prayer Furor,” 45.

45. “Spellman Scores Ruling on Prayer,” New York Times, August 3, 1962, 21.

46. “Jewish Congress on Church–State,” America, January 10, 1953, 386.

47. “To Our Jewish Friends,” America, September 1, 1962, 665.

48. Ibid., 666.

49. Leo Pfeffer, “An Autobiographical Sketch,” in Religion and the State: Essays in Honor of Leo Pfeffer, ed. James E. Wood Jr. (Waco: Baylor University Press, 1985), 514–17 (first quotation on 515–16, second and third quotations on 516).

50. “To Our Catholic Friends,” America, September 8, 1962, 680.

51. “Is America Trying to Bully the Jews?” Christian Century, September 5, 1962, 1057.

52. “The Main Issue,” America, September 15, 1962, 713; “P.S.—To Jewish Friends,” America, September 22, 1962, 768–69. See also “Religion and Pluralism,” Commonweal, September 1962, 5–6.

53. Sorauf, Wall of Separation, 134.

54. Ibid. See also “Bible Reading Is Growing L.I. Controversy,” Newsday, February 26, 1962, p. 9C.

55. Robert Anton Wilson, “The Passion of Madalyn Murray,” Fact, January–February 1965, 18; “Playboy Interview: Madalyn Murray,” Playboy, October 1965, 61–74.

56. Wilson, “The Passion of Madalyn Murray,” 18–19; “Playboy Interview,” 65.

57. Robert Anton Wilson, “The Most Hated Woman in America,” Fact, March–April 1964, 12 (first quotation), 14 (second and third quotations).

58. “Is the Supreme Court on Trial?” Christianity Today, March 1, 1963, 28.

59. “Court Weighs Religious Exercises,” Christianity Today, March 15, 1963, 31.

60. Ibid.

61. Ibid.

62. Ibid.

63. Dickson, Supreme Court in Conference, 426.

64. Ibid., 427.

65. School District of Abington Township v. Schempp, 374 U.S. 203 (1963).

66. Ibid., at 207.

67. Ibid., at 247.

68. Ibid., at 306.

69. Fred M. Hechinger, “Wide Effect Due: Decisions Will Require Change in Majority of State Systems,” New York Times, June 18, 1963, 1, 27.

70. Sorauf, Wall of Separation, 151.

71. The National Association of Evangelicals and Ockenga quoted by Daniel K. Williams, God’s Own Party: The Making of the Christian Right (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 64 (NAE), 65 (Ockenga).

72. James O’Gara, “Religion and the Court,” Commonweal, July 5, 1963, 391.

73. George Dugan, “Churches Divided, With Most in Favor,” New York Times, June 18, 1963, 29 (quotations). See also Anthony Lewis, “Public Mood Plays a Big Role in Court Rulings,” New York Times, June 23, 1963, 148; Anthony Lewis, “New Judges and Doctrines Alter Character of the Supreme Court,” New York Times, June 23, 1963, 64; “A Tide Reversed,” Time, June 19, 1964, 61.

74. Green, The Third Disestablishment, 293–99.

75. “A Tide Reversed,” Time, June 19, 1964, 61.

76. Leo Pfeffer, “A Momentous Year in Church and State, 1963,” Journal of Church and State 6 (Winter 1964): 36 (first quotation), 38 (second quotation).

77. Dickson, Supreme Court in Conference, 434.

78. United States v. Seeger, 380 U.S. 163 (1965).

79. Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479 (1965).

80. Dickson, Supreme Court in Conference, 800 (first and second quotations), 801 (subsequent quotations).

81. Griswold v. Connecticut, at 484.

Chapter Seven. The Death of God

1. Key quoted by Barry Friedman, The Will of the People: How Public Opinion Has Influenced the Supreme Court and Shaped the Meaning of the Constitution (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009), 260.

2. Ibid.

3. NAACP v. Button, 371 U.S. 415 (1963), at 429 (second quotation), 430 (third quotation), 452 (first quotation).

4. On custodianship, see Elesha J. Coffmann, The Christian Century and the Rise of the Protestant Mainline (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 5–6, 218–19.

5. David A. Hollinger, “The Accommodation of Protestant Christianity with the Enlightenment: An Old Drama Still Being Enacted,” in Hollinger, After Cloven Tongues of Fire: Protestant Liberalism in Modern American History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), 6–7.

6. Andrew Hartman, A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 21.

7. Ibid., 9–37.

8. Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation (New York: Random House, 1967), 44. On the split over Christianity among black intellectuals, see Christopher Cameron, Black Freethinkers: A History of African American Secularism (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2019), especially 119–64; Barbara Dianne Savage, Your Spirits Walk Beside Us: The Politics of Black Religion (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008).

9. Garry Wills, Bare Ruined Choirs: Doubt, Prophecy, and Radical Religion (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1972), 15–37.

10. “Pope John Convokes the Council,” in Walter M. Abbott, ed., The Documents of Vatican II (New York: America Press, 1966), 703.

11. Joseph A. Komonchak, “What They Said Before the Council: How the U.S. Bishops Envisioned Vatican II,” Commonweal, December 7, 1990, 715–16. Komonchak tries to modify the common view that the American bishops were unprepared for Vatican II, but the evidence that he offers tends instead to confirm it.

12. Joseph A. Komonchak, “The Silencing of John Courtney Murray,” in A. Melloni et al., eds., Cristianesimo nella Storia (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1996), 698–701.

13. “Pope John’s Opening Speech to the Council,” in Documents of Vatican II, 715.

14. John Courtney Murray, “Appendix: Toledo Talk,” in Bridging the Sacred and the Secular: Selected Writings of John Courtney Murray, ed. J. Leon Hooper (Washington: Georgetown University Press, 1994), 335.

15. “Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy,” Documents of Vatican II, 137–78.

16. “Declaration of the Relationship of the Church to Non-Christian Religions,” Documents of Vatican II, 660–68 (first quotation on 660, second quotation on 663).

17. Komonchak, “The Silencing of John Courtney Murray,” 701.

18. John Courtney Murray, “The Problem of Religious Freedom,” Theological Studies 25 (December 1964): 512.

19. Ibid., 560.

20. “Declaration of Religious Freedom,” in Documents of Vatican II, 677.

21. Blanshard and Fletcher quoted in John T. McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom: A History (New York: Norton, 2003), 214 (Blanshard), 256 (Fletcher).

22. Gabriel Vahanian, The Death of God: The Culture of Our Post-Christian Era (New York: G. Braziller, 1961), xxxii.

23. Paul Van Buren, Secular Meaning of the Gospel, Based on an Analysis of Its Language (New York: Macmillan, 1963); “Linguistic Analysis: A Way for Some to Affirm Their Faith,” Time, July 10, 1964, 64.

24. Harvey Cox, The Secular City: Secularization and Urbanization in Theological Perspective (New York: Macmillan, 1965), 268.

25. Thomas J. J. Altizer, “Creative Negation in Theology,” Christian Century, July 7, 1965, 864. See also Thomas J. J. Altizer and William Hamilton, Radical Theology and the Death of God (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966).

26. William Hamilton, “The Shape of a Radical Theology,” Christian Century, October 6, 1965, 1219–22.

27. “Christian Atheism: The ‘God Is Dead’ Movement,” Time, October 22, 1965, 62.

28. Williams quoted in ibid; “ ‘New’ Theologians See Christianity Without God,” New York Times, October 17, 1965, 85.

29. “A Letter from the Publisher,” Time, April 8, 1966. For the article, see “Toward a Hidden God,” Time, April 8, 1966, 82–87.

30. See Letters to the Editor, Time, April 15, April 22, and April 29, 1966.

31. Hamilton quoted by Jackson Lee Ice and John J. Carey, eds., The Death of God Debate (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1967), 12. For the letters, see “Letters to William Hamilton,” in ibid., 159–93 (quotations on 161). See also “Letters to Thomas Altizer,” ibid., 194–209. The Ice and Carey book has many more elaborate responses and is a quite useful entry into the midcentury discussion.

32. Bartlett quoted in Ice and Carey, eds., The Death of God Debate, 168. Paul Vitello, “William Hamilton Dies at 87; Known for ‘Death of God,’ ” New York Times, March 10, 2012.

33. For examples of these responses, see the commentary in “Toward a Hidden God” and in Ice and Carey, eds., The Death of God Debate.

34. Paul L. Holmer, “Contra the New Theologies,” Christian Century, March 17, 1965, in The Death of God Debate, 138 (second quotation), 141 (first quotation). See also “On Tradition, or What Is Left of It,” Time, April 22, 1966, 42–43.

35. National Council of Churches, “Separation and Interaction of Church and State,” Journal of Church and State 6 (Spring 1964): 150.

36. David A. Hollinger, Protestants Abroad: How Missionaries Tried to Change the World but Changed America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), 105–6 (quotation on 105).

37. David A. Hollinger, “After Cloven Tongues of Fire: Ecumenical Protestantism and the Modern American Encounter with Diversity,” in Hollinger, After Cloven Tongues of Fire, 36–39.

38. “POAU in Crisis,” Newsweek, October 5, 1964, 102–3 (quotation on 102).

39. See Hartman, War for the Soul of America, 14–15 (quotations on 14).

40. John Courtney Murray, “The Problem of Mr. Rawls’s Problem,” in Law and Philosophy: A Symposium, ed. Sidney Hook (New York: NYU Press, 1964), 32.

41. Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: Norton, 1963), 309.

42. McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom, 222–23.

43. George Dugan, “Foes of Abortion Assailed by Rabbi,” New York Times, February 12, 1967, 61.

44. Gannon quoted by Robert M. Byrn, “The Future in America,” America, December 9, 1967, 710–13 (quotation on 713).

45. “Foes of Abortion Assailed by Rabbi,” 61.

46. “Life in the Dark Age,” Christian Century, May 31, 1972, 624. For a helpful and concise summary of Protestant positions on abortion, with excerpts from denominational statements, see Robert F. Drinan, “Contemporary Protestant Thinking,” America, December 9, 1967, 713–15.

47. Robert F. Drinan, “The Morality of Abortion Laws,” Catholic Lawyer 14 (Summer 1968): 190–98, 264; Drinan, “Contemporary Protestant Thinking,” 715.

48. “The Connecticut Decision,” Commonweal, June 25, 1965, 427–28 (quotation on 427); William F. Buckley Jr., “The Catholic Church and Abortion,” National Review, April 5, 1966, 308.

49. McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom, 245–46, 268; Sorauf, Wall of Separation, 17. See also “A Protestant Affirmation on the Control of Human Reproduction,” Christianity Today, November 8, 1968, 18–19.

50. Sorauf, Wall of Separation, 17.

51. Del Dickson, ed., The Supreme Court in Conference (1940–1985): The Private Discussions behind Nearly 300 Supreme Court Decisions (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 804–13.

52. Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973).

53. Laurence H. Tribe, “The Supreme Court, 1972 Term: Foreword: Toward a Model of Roles in the Due Process of Life and Law,” Harvard Law Review 87 (November 1973): 11.

Chapter Eight. The Personal Is Political

1. On the Leftist disdain for liberalism, see Richard J. Ellis, The Dark Side of the Left: Illiberal Egalitarianism in America (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998); Maurice Isserman, The Other American: The Life of Michael Harrington (New York: PublicAffairs, 2000), 276–77.

2. C. Wright Mills quoted in Andrew Hartman, A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 29; Brian Balogh, “Making Pluralism ‘Great’: Beyond a Recycled History of the Great Society,” in Sidney M. Milkis and Jerome M. Mileur, eds., The Great Society and the High Tide of Liberalism (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005), 159–60.

3. Tom Hayden, The Port Huron Statement: The Visionary Call of the 1960s Revolution (1962; New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2005), 52.

4. MacKinnon quoted in Sarah E. Igo, The Known Citizen: A History of Privacy in Modern America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018), 295; see also Hartman, A War for the Soul of America, 11–14, 29–30; Carol Hanisch, “The Personal Is Political” (1969), in Shulamith Firestone and Anne Koedt, eds., Notes from the Second Year: Women’s Liberation (n.p.; Redstockings, 1970).

5. Igo, Known Citizen, 267–76; Peter Clecak, America’s Quest for the Ideal Self: Dissent and Fulfillment in the 60s and 70s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 211–26.

6. Stanley v. Georgia, 394 U.S. 557 (1969), at 565.

7. Leigh Ann Wheeler, How Sex Became a Civil Liberty (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 7–8 (quotations on 7).

8. Robert Wuthnow, The Restructuring of American Religion: Society and Faith Since World War II (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988).

9. Ibid., 147–48. For the conservative evangelical opposition to civil rights, see Matthew Avery Sutton, American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014), 306–7, 333–41; Daniel K. Williams, God’s Own Party: The Making of the Christian Right (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 69–78. On liberal Christian support of the civil rights movement, see Steven K. Green, The Third Disestablishment: Church, State, and American Culture, 1940–1975 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 320–21; David A. Hollinger, Protestants Abroad: How Missionaries Tried to Change the World but Changed America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), 104, 266–87; Lilian Calles Barger, The World Come of Age: An Intellectual History of Liberation Theology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018).

10. On this overlap, see Anthony Lewis, “Court Again Under Fire,” New York Times, July 1, 1962, 114.

11. Joseph Crespino, “Civil Rights and the Religious Right,” in Bruce J. Schulman and Julian E. Zelizer, Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008), 93.

12. George Dugan, “Churches Divided, With Most in Favor,” New York Times, June 18, 1963, 29. Crespino, “Civil Rights and the Religious Right,” 90–91; Crespino, In Search of Another Country: Mississippi and the Conservative Counter Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 249–50.

13. Crespino, “Civil Rights and the Religious Right,” 92–93.

14. Green v. Kennedy, 309 F. Supp. 1127 (D.D.C. 1970); Green v. Connally, 330 F. Supp. 1150 (D.D.C. 1971). The lower court’s decision was affirmed in Coit v. Green, 404 U.S. 997 (1971).

15. Jonathan Spivak and Tom Herman, “New Policy on Taxes May Not End All-White School Problem in South,” Wall Street Journal, July 13, 1970, 24.

16. Walz v. Tax Commission, 397 U.S. 664 (1970), at 701.

17. Spivak and Herman, “New Policy on Taxes,” 24.

18. On their sense of estrangement from a cultural consensus, see Neil J. Young, We Gather Together: The Religious Right and the Problem of Interfaith Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 2–3.

19. Williams, God’s Own Party, 116–20 (first three quotations on 117, last three on 119). See also R. Marie Griffith, Moral Combat: How Sex Divided American Christians and Fractured American Politics (New York: Basic Books, 2017), 201–39.

20. Sara Dubow, “ ‘A Constitutional Right Rendered Utterly Meaningless’: Religious Exemptions and Reproductive Politics, 1973–2014,” Journal of Policy History 27 (January 2015): 7.

21. Ibid., 4–5 (quotation on 5).

22. Stephen Skowronek, The Politics Presidents Make: Leadership from John Adams to Bill Clinton (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 43–45. See also Stephen Skowronek, “The Reassociation of Ideas and Purposes: Racism, Liberalism, and the American Political Tradition,” American Political Science Review 100 (August 2006): 385–401.

23. On Murray’s suspicion of freedom of conscience, see John T. McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom: A History (New York: Norton, 2003), 265. On this “Catholic pivot” toward freedom of conscience, see Samuel Moyn, “Religious Freedom between Truth and Tactic,” in Winnifred Fallers Sullivan et al., Politics of Religious Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 135–41.

24. Dubow, “A Constitutional Right,” 10–11.

25. Ibid., 15.

26. Ibid., 12–14.

27. Ibid., 1. See also David Sehat, The Myth of American Religious Freedom, updated ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 268–69.

28. Crespino, “Civil Rights and the Religious Right,” 98–99 (quotation on 99).

29. Ibid., 99.

30. Ibid., 99–100.

31. A. O. Sulzberger Jr., “Private Academies Protest Tax Plan,” New York Times, December 11, 1978, A20. See also Crespino, “Civil Rights and the Religious Right,” 100–103.

32. Crespino, “Civil Rights and the Religious Right,” 91 (first and third quotations); Williams, God’s Own Party, 164 (second quotation).

33. Williams, God’s Own Party, 162–64.

34. Falwell quoted in Sehat, The Myth of American Religious Freedom, 265 (first quotation), 265–66 (second quotation); Young, We Gather Together, 3 (third quotation).

35. Robertson quoted in Williams, God’s Own Party, 159.

36. Ibid., 188.

37. On Reagan’s jeremiad, see David Sehat, The Jefferson Rule: How the Founding Fathers Became Infallible and Our Politics Inflexible (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2015), 157–78.

38. Bob Jones University v. United States, 461 U.S. 574 (1983).

39. Ibid.

40. Bob Jones University v. United States, 468 F. Supp. 890 (D.S.C. 1978).

41. Robert Lindsay, “Reagan to Debate His G.O.P. Rivals in South Carolina,” New York Times, January 31, 1980, B8; Crespino, “Civil Rights and the Religious Right,” 104.

42. Crespino, “Civil Rights and the Religious Right,” 103 (first quotation); Williams, God’s Own Party, 189 (second quotation), 190 (third quotation).

43. Howell Raines, “Reagan Backs Evangelicals in Their Political Activities,” New York Times, August 23, 1980, 8.

44. Ibid.

45. Anthony Lewis, “Religion and Politics,” New York Times, September 18, 1980, A31.

46. Ibid.

47. Howell Raines, “Reagan Is Balancing 2 Different Stances,” New York Times, October 4, 1980, 9.

48. Kenneth A. Briggs, “Dispute on Religion Raised by Campaign,” New York Times, November 9, 1980, 31.

49. Ibid.; Williams, God’s Own Party, 192.

50. Ronald Reagan, “Inaugural Address,” January 20, 1981, in Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Ronald Reagan (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1981–89), 1981:2 (second quotation), 3 (first quotation).

51. Bob Jones University v. United States, 639 F2d 147 (4th Cir. 1981).

52. Bob Jones University petition for a writ of certiorari, October 1981.

53. Amicus Brief of the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE), 3; Amicus Brief of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 2.

54. Amicus Brief of the Center for Law and Religious Freedom of the Christian Legal Society, 5; Amicus Brief of the NAE, 9.

55. Bob Jones University v. United States, 461 U.S. 574 (1983), at 583; Genesis 9:22 (RSV).

56. Amicus Brief of Congressman Trent Lott; David Whitman, “Ronald Reagan and Tax Exemptions for Discriminatory Schools,” in How the Press Affects Federal Policymaking: Six Case Studies, Martin Linsky et al., eds. (New York: Norton, 1986), 271 (quotation); Crespino, In Search of Another Country, 258–60.

57. Whitman, “Ronald Reagan and Tax Exemptions,” 271–78 (first quotation on 272, second quotation on 275).

58. Bob Jones University v. United States, 461 U.S. 574 (1983), at 585 note 9.

59. Amicus Brief of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, 40 (first quotation), 41 (second quotation).

60. Del Dickson, ed., The Supreme Court in Conference (1940–1985): The Private Discussions behind Nearly 300 Supreme Court Decisions (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 417–21.

61. Bob Jones University v. United States, at 591 (first quotation), 592 (second through fourth quotations).

62. Beverly LaHaye, Who But a Woman? (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1984), 109–11 (quotation on 109).

63. Robert M. Cover, “The Supreme Court, 1982 Term: Foreword: Nomos and Narrative,” Harvard Law Review 97 (November 1983): 4–68.

64. Igo, Known Citizen, 294–98 (quotation on 297).

65. Larry Gross, Contested Closets: The Politics and Ethics of Outing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 146.

66. William M. Eskridge Jr., Dishonorable Passions: Sodomy Laws in America, 1861–2003 (New York: Viking, 2008), 230–36.

67. Oral argument in Bowers v. Hardwick, Oyez, https://www.oyez.org/cases/1985/85–140. Accessed February 18, 2021.

68. Dickson, The Supreme Court in Conference, 821–25 (quotation on 824).

69. Bowers v. Hardwick, 478 U.S. 186 (1986), at 191.

70. Ibid., at 211 (first quotation), 211-212 (second quotation).

71. Igo, Known Citizen, 299; Deborah Nelson, Pursuing Privacy in Cold War America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 158.

72. James Davison Hunter, Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America (New York: Basic Books, 1991), 42.

73. Hartman, War for the Soul of America, 15–16.

74. Dickson, Supreme Court in Conference, 427.

75. David T. Courtwright, Forces of Habit: Drugs and the Making of the Modern World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001).

76. Carolyn N. Long, “Employment Division, Department of Human Resources of Oregon v. Smith: The Battle for Religious Freedom,” in Leslie C. Griffin, ed., Law and Religion: Cases in Context (New York: Aspen, 2010), 108–9.

77. Ibid., 110–11 (quotation on 111).

78. Ibid., 113.

79. Ibid., 114.

80. Employment Division v. Smith, 494 U.S. 872 (1990).

81. Ibid., at 888 (first quotation), 889 (second quotation).

82. Ibid., at 879.

83. Ibid., at 890. On Scalia’s defense of monotheism, see his dissent in McCreary County v. ACLU, 545 U.S. 844 (2005).

84. Gustav Niebuhr, “Disparate Group Unite Behind Civil Rights Bill on Religious Freedom,” Washington Post, October 16, 1993, A7.

85. Religious Freedom Restoration Act (1993), sec. 2.

86. Robert T. Drinan and Jennifer I. Huffmann, “The Religious Freedom Restoration Act: A Legislative History,” Journal of Law and Religion 10:2 (1994): 531–41 (Solarz quotation on 534).

87. Clinton quoted in Adam Serwer and Irin Carmon, “The Law That Could Sink Birth Control Coverage,” MSNBC, March 21, 2014, http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/birth-control-coverage-stake; Long; “Employment Division,” 123. The court soon voided the federal law as it applied to state and local governments in City of Boerne v. Flores, 521 U.S. 507 (1997).

Chapter Nine. Religious Freedom

1. “Evangelicals & Catholics Together,” First Things, May 1994, 15–22 (quotations on 18).

2. Ibid., 20.

3. John Rawls, “Outline of a Decision Procedure for Ethics,” in Samuel Freeman, ed., John Rawls: Collected Papers (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 1–19; John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971); P. Mackenzie Bok, “To the Mountaintop Again: The Early Rawls and Post-Protestant Ethics in Postwar America,” Modern Intellectual History 14 (April 2017): 153–85.

4. William A. Galston, “Pluralism and Social Unity,” in Chandran Kukathas, ed., John Rawls: Critical Assessments of Leading Philosophers (London: Routledge, 2003), 4:124.

5. See Burton Dreben, “On Rawls and Political Liberalism,” in Samuel Freeman, The Cambridge Companion to Rawls (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 316–25.

6. Rawls, “The Domain of the Political and Overlapping Consensus” (1989), in Collected Papers, 473–96.

7. John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). See also John Rawls, “The Idea of an Overlapping Consensus” (1987), in Collected Papers, 421–48; Charles Larmore, “Public Reason,” in Freeman, ed., Cambridge Companion to Rawls, 368–93.

8. “Evangelicals & Catholics Together,” 18.

9. “Commonweal Interview with John Rawls” (1998), in Rawls, Collected Papers, 619 (first and second quotations); “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited” (1997), in Rawls, Collected Papers, 573–615 (third quotation on 579).

10. “Commonweal Interview,” in Rawls, Collected Papers, 622.

11. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 12. Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998).

12. Adam Liptak, “John Lawrence, Plaintiff in Gay Rights Case, Dies,” New York Times, December 23, 2011, D8.

13. Oral argument in Lawrence v. Texas, Oyez, March 26, 2003, https://www.oyez.org/cases/2002/02–102. Accessed February 18, 2021.

14. Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. 558 (2003).

15. Ibid., 590 (first quotation), 591 (second quotation).

16. Katherine Q. Seelye, “Conservatives Mobilize against Ruling on Gay Marriage,” New York Times, November 20, 2003, A29.

17. Ibid.

18. David D. Kirkpatrick, “Conservatives Using Issue of Gay Unions as a Rallying Tool,” New York Times, February 8, 2004, 16.

19. Ibid.

20. David Grann, “Where W. Got Compassion,” New York Times Magazine, September 12, 1999, 62–65. For the deeper history of animosity toward state-based welfare, see Alison Collis Greene, No Depression in Heaven: The Great Depression, the New Deal, and the Transformation of Religion in the Delta (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 2–3, 7.

21. Grann, “Where W. Got His Compassion,” 65.

22. “Bush Would Back Constitutional Ban on Same-Sex Marriage,” CNN.com, December 17, 2003, http://www.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/12/17/bush.gay.marriage/.

23. Adam Nagourney, “ ‘Moral Values’ Carried Bush, Rove Says,” New York Times, November 10, 2004, A20; Daniel K. Williams, God’s Own Party: The Making of the Christian Right (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 261.

24. Daniel Cox and Robert P. Jones, “America’s Changing Religious Identity,” PRRI, September 6, 2017, https://www.prri.org/research/american-religious-landscape-christian-religiously-unaffiliated/; “America’s Changing Religious Landscape,” Pew Research Center, May 12, 2015, https://www.pewforum.org/2015/05/12/americas-changing-religious-landscape; “ ‘Nones’ on the Rise,” Pew Research Center, October 9, 2012, http://www.pewforum.org/2012/10/09/nones-on-the-rise/; “7.5 Million Americans Have ‘Lost Their Religion’ Since 2012,” Huffington Post, March 13, 2015, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/03/13/americans-no-religion_n_6864536. Accessed February 18, 2021.

25. “Understanding Religion’s Role in the 2006 Election,” Pew Research Center, December 5, 2006, https://www.pewforum.org/2006/12/05/understanding-religions-role-in-the-2006-election/. Accessed February 18, 2021.

26. “Changing Attitudes on Same-Sex Marriage,” Pew Research Center, May 14, 2019, https://www.pewforum.org/fact-sheet/changing-attitudes-on-gay-marriage/. Accessed February 18, 2021.

27. Diana B. Henriques, “As Exemptions Grow, Religion Outweighs Regulation,” New York Times, October 8, 2006, https://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/08/business/08religious.html.

28. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007).

29. Susan Jacoby, Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism (New York: Metropolitan, 2004); Sam Harris, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason (New York: Norton, 2004); Daniel Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (New York: Viking, 2006); Sam Harris, Letter to a Christian Nation (New York: Knopf, 2006); Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006); Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (New York: Twelve, 2007).

30. Taylor, A Secular Age, 22.

31. Ibid., 38.

32. Ibid., 145 (first quotation), 376 (third quotation), 506 (second quotation).

33. Charles Larmore, “How Much Can We Stand?” New Republic, April 9, 2008; John Patrick Diggins, “The Godless Delusion,” New York Times, December 16, 2007, https://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/16/books/review/Diggins-t.html.

34. Templeton Prize biography, Templeton Foundation, http://www.templetonprize.org/laureate-sub/taylor-press-release/. Accessed February 18, 2021.

35. Charles Taylor, Templeton Prize Press Conference, http://www.templetonprize.org/laureate-sub/taylor-press-conference-statement/. Accessed on February 18. 2021.

36. A Secular Age Book Forum, The Immanent Frame, https://tif.ssrc.org/category/book-blog/bookforums/secular_age/. Accessed February 18, 2021.

37. Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 1–17.

38. Saba Mahmood, Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), 1–22. See also Saba Mahmood, “Can Secularism Be Other-wise?” in Michael Warner et al., eds., Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010), 282–99.

39. Peter G. Danchin, “Religious Freedom in the Panopticon of Enlightenment Rationality,” in Sullivan et al., eds., The Politics of Religious Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 240–52 (quotation on 243).

40. Philip Hamburger, The Separation of Church and State (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002). See also his Liberal Suppression: Section 501(c)(3) and the Taxation of Speech (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018).

41. Jon Meacham, “The Decline and Fall of Christian America,” Newsweek, April 13, 2009.

42. Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, 565 U.S. 171 (2012).

43. Ibid.

44. Ibid.

45. Ibid., at 189.

46. Ibid., at 193–94.

47. Ibid., at 195.

48. “The Ministerial Exception,” New York Times, January 12, 2012, https://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/13/opinion/the-ministerial-exception.html.

49. Robert Pear, “Obama Reaffirms that Insurers Must Cover Contraception,” January 20, 2012, https://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/21/health/policy/administration-rules-insurers-must-cover-contraceptives.html.

50. Dolan quoted in ibid.; United States Conference of Catholic Bishops Ad Hoc Committee for Religious Liberty, “Our First, Most Cherished Liberty: A Statement on Religious Liberty,” March 2012, https://www.usccb.org/committees/religious-liberty/our-first-most-cherished-liberty. Accessed February 18, 2021. See also Samuel Moyn, “Religious Freedom between Truth and Tactic,” in Sullivan et al., Politics of Religious Freedom, 138–40.

51. National Association of Evangelicals quoted in Pear, “Obama Reaffirms that Insurers Must Cover Contraception”; Evangelicals and Catholics Together, “In Defense of Religious Freedom,” First Things, March 2012, https://www.firstthings.com/article/2012/03/in-defense-of-religious-freedom.

52. Evangelicals and Catholics Together, “In Defense of Religious Freedom.”

53. Elizabeth A. Castelli, “The Bishops, the Sisters, and Religious Freedom,” in Sullivan et al., Politics of Religious Freedom, 228.

54. Sullivan, “The World That Smith Made,” in Sullivan et al., Politics of Religious Freedom, 235.

55. Laurie Goodstein, “Obama Shift on Providing Contraception Splits Critics,” New York Times, February 14, 2012, https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/15/us/obama-shift-on-contraception-splits-catholics.html.

56. Adam Serwer and Irin Carmon, “The Law That Could Sink Birth Control Coverage,” MSNBC, March 21, 2014, http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/birth-control-coverage-stake. Accessed February 18, 2021; “Hobby Lobby Should Not Be Subject to Religious Liberty Protections,” Press Release, March 25, 2014, https://nadler.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=391250. Accessed February 18, 2021.

57. Serwer and Carmon, “The Law That Could Sink Birth Control Coverage.”

58. Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores Inc., 573 U.S. 682 (2014).

59. Micah Schwartzman, Richard C. Schragger, and Nelson Tebbe, “The New Law of Religion: Hobby Lobby rewrites religious-freedom law in ways that ignore everything that came before,” Slate, July 3, 2014, https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2014/07/after-hobby-lobby-there-is-only-rfra-and-thats-all-you-need.html.

60. Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores Inc., at 702, 739 (quotation), 757 note 19.

61. Ibid., at 739–40.

62. Serwer and Carmon, “The Law That Could Sink Birth Control Coverage.”

63. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 12.

64. Dana Liebelson, “Inside the Conservative Campaign to Launch ‘Jim Crow-Style’ Bills Against Gay Americans,” Mother Jones, February 20, 2014, https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/02/gay-discrimination-bills-religious-freedom-jim-crow/.

65. Ponnuru quoted in Valerie Bauerlein and Jon Kamp, “Social Conservatives Try New Tack with State-Level Efforts on Religious Freedom,” Wall Street Journal, April 13, 2016, https://www.wsj.com/articles/social-conservatives-try-new-tack-with-state-level-efforts-on-religious-freedom-1460504840; Obergefell v. Hodges, 576 U.S. 644 (2015).

66. “Presidential Candidate Donald Trump Rally in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina,” C-SPAN, December 7, 2015, https://www.c-span.org/video/?401762–1/presidential-candidate-donald-trump-rally-mount-pleasant-south-carolina. Accessed February 18, 2021.

67. Elizabeth Dias, “‘Christianity Will Have Power,’” New York Times, September 8, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/09/us/evangelicals-trump-christianity.html.

68. Erik Ortiz, “What Is the Johnson Amendment that Trump Wants to ‘Destroy’ ?” NBC News, February 2, 2017, https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/what-johnson-amendment-trump-wants-destroy-n716046.

69. Amanda Taub and Max Fisher, “Trump’s Immigration Order Tests Limits of Law and Executive Power,” New York Times, January 30, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/30/us/politics/trump-immigration-muslim-ban.html.

70. Ali Vitali, “Trump Signs ‘Religious Liberty’ Executive Order Allowing for Broad Exemptions,” NBC News, May 4, 2017, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/trump-signs-religious-liberty-executive-order-allowing-broad-exemptions-n754786.

71. Ibid.

72. “President Donald J. Trump Stands Up for Religious Freedom,” May 3, 2018, https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefings-statements/president-donald-j-trump-stands-religious-freedom-united-states/. Accessed February 18, 2021. See also Emma Green, “Health and Human Services and the Religious Liberty War,” The Atlantic, May 7, 2019, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/05/hhs-trump-religious-freedom/588697/.

73. Trump v. Hawaii, 585 U.S. ____ (2018), https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/17pdf/17–965_h315.pdf.

74. Ibid.

75. “Attorney General William Barr on Religious Liberty,” de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IM87WMsrCWM. Accessed February 18, 2021.

76. Ibid.

77. Ibid.

78. Ibid.

79. Ibid.

80. Phillip Shenon, “ ‘A Threat to Democracy’: William Barr’s Speech on Religious Freedom Alarms Liberal Catholics,” The Guardian, October 20, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/oct/19/william-barr-attorney-general-catholic-conservative-speech.

81. Katherine Stewart and Caroline Fredrickson, “Bill Barr Thinks America Is Going to Hell,” New York Times, December 29, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/29/opinion/william-barr-trump.html.

82. Adam Liptak, “Supreme Court to Consider Limits on Contraception Coverage,” New York Times, January 17, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/17/us/supreme-court-contraception-coverage.html.

83. Erica L. Green, “Religious School Choice Case May Yield Landmark Supreme Court Decision,” New York Times, January 21, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/21/us/politics/supreme-court-religion-school-vouchers.html.

84. Adam Liptak, “Civil Rights Law Protects Gay and Transgender Workers, Supreme Court Rules,” New York Times, June 15, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/15/us/gay-transgender-workers-supreme-court.html.

85. Sarah Pulliam Bailey, “Christian Conservatives Rattled after Supreme Court Rules against LBGT Discrimination,” Washington Post, June 15, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/religion/2020/06/15/bostock-court-faith-conservatives-lgbt/.

86. Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue, 591 U. S. ____ (2020).

87. Ibid.

88. Linda Greenhouse, “The Supreme Court Upheld Trump’s Muslim Ban. Let’s Not Forget That,” New York Times, January 28, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/28/opinion/supreme-court-muslim-ban.html.

89. Adam Liptak, “Supreme Court Upholds Trump Administration Regulation Letting Employers Opt Out of Birth Control Coverage,” New York Times, July 8, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/08/us/supreme-court-birth-control-obamacare.html.

90. Ibid.

91. Michael W. McConnell, “On Religion, the Supreme Court Protects the Right to Be Different,” New York Times, July 9, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/09/opinion/supreme-court-religion.html.

92. Linda Greenhouse, “The Many Dimensions of the Chief Justice’s Triumphant Term,” New York Times, July 16, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/16/opinion/supreme-court-roberts-religion.html.

Afterword

1. Stephen Skowronek, “The Reassociation of Ideas and Purposes: Racism, Liberalism, and the American Political Tradition,” American Political Science Review 100 (August 2006): 400.

2. Skowronek was the first to make the point that American politics was entering a semipermanent state of preemption. See Stephen Skowronek, The Politics Presidents Make: Leadership from John Adams to Bill Clinton (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 442–46.