The Rise and Decline of American Religious Freedom / / Steven D. Smith.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Harvard University Press Complete eBook-Package 2014-2015
• VerfasserIn: Smith, Steven D.,
• Place / Publishing House: Cambridge, MA : : Harvard University Press, , [2014]; ©2014
• Year of Publication: 2014
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (240 p.)

Familiar accounts of religious freedom in the United States often tell a story of visionary founders who broke from centuries-old patterns of Christendom to establish a political arrangement committed to secular and religiously neutral government. These novel commitments were supposedly embodied in the religion clauses of the First Amendment. But this story is largely a fairytale, Steven Smith says in this incisive examination of a much-mythologized subject. The American achievement was not a rejection of Christian commitments but a retrieval of classic Christian ideals of freedom of the church and of conscience. Smith maintains that the First Amendment was intended merely to preserve the political status quo in matters of religion. America's distinctive contribution was, rather, a commitment to open contestation between secularist and providentialist understandings of the nation which evolved over the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century, far from vindicating constitutional principles, as conventional wisdom suggests, the Supreme Court imposed secular neutrality, which effectively repudiated this commitment to open contestation. Instead of upholding what was distinctively American and constitutional, these decisions subverted it. The negative consequences are visible today in the incoherence of religion clause jurisprudence and the intense culture wars in American politics.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Prologue. The Standard Story and the Revised Version -- 1. American Religious Freedom as Christian- Pagan Retrieval -- 2. The Accidental First Amendment -- 3. The Religion Question and the American Settlement -- 4. Dissolution and Denial -- 5. The Last Chapter? -- Epilogue. Whither (Religious) Freedom?, -- Notes -- Acknowledgments -- Index