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The Myth of American Religious Freedom

2016-01-26T17:47:05Z

Fjcasper:

{{Infobox book
| name = The Myth of American Religious Freedom
| author = David Sehat
| publisher = Oxford University Press
| pub_date = 2011
| pages = 356
| isbn = 0195388763
| image = [[File:mythfreedom.jpg|200px|alt=cover]]
}}

Reading Dr. Sehat's book, “The Myth American of Religious Freedom”, one can hear echoes of Howard Zinn's "A Peoples History of the United States". Where Dr. Zinn tells the history of the United States from, as he puts it, the perspective of its victims, Dr. Sehat tells it from the perspective of its dissenters. In both cases the result is not the history that most of us grew up with, the history that the government of most any nation tends to tell of itself, as Zinn has it, like that of a family, "a giant web of nationhood pretending to a common interest", a history that obscures, ignores, or even denies fierce disagreements and conflicts of interest.

This is the kind of history we find, according to Dr. Sehat, in the prevailing narrative on the meaning of religious freedom, and its role in our history. In what has become tantamount to a kind of orthodoxy, “Religious liberty, we are told, is a hallmark of American democracy. Having been freed from state entanglements, so the story goes, religion flourished in the United States. It became central to reform movements such as abolition and women’s rights that sought to perfect the American project by expanding democracy” (Pg 2).

Dr. Sehat argues that this dominate narrative both obscures what actually happened, and is largely if not wholly responsible for the angry and irresolvable “culture wars” that persist to the present day. Both sides of the contemporary divide advance their cause in terms of three distinct but related myths, each of which flows from this narrative. The first, and perhaps primary myth, is that of church-state separation. Dr. Sehat begins his book with the story of a certain Charles B. Reynolds, a free thinker who was charged and convicted in 1886 by a New Jersey grand jury for the offense of blasphemy. How, he asks, can a man be convicted of such a charge nearly a hundred years after the ratification of the First Amendment? His answer, using original documents that show the protracted debate leading up to the version of the amendment bequeathed to us, is that, contrary to the insistence of today’s liberals, the First Amendment was itself a bitter compromise that did not create the separation advocated by Madison and Jefferson.

This is at least partly because, though the First Amendment prohibited the establishment of an official religion of the State, the moral aspects of the gospel were regarded as so important to the preservation of the State that legal enforcement of the moral code, the moral code of Protestant Christianity, became commonplace throughout much of U.S. history. This is the hub of what Dr. Sehat calls throughout his book “the moral establishment”, meaning the close, cooperative, and coordinated relationship between Protestant Christianity and the State toward the regulation and control of public and private behavior. This was done, moreover, not by persuasive means, but by force of law, and the blasphemy laws are a case in point. It was argued then that blasphemy undercut religion, and religion, in the view of virtually all the Founders, was critical for the support of morality.

The demolition of the second myth more or less follows from the demolition of the first, that religious believers fled the persecution in Europe in order to establish religious tolerance in the United States. If anything, and this is the view of other scholars, they came to establish their own theocracies (See links below). And of course, the collapse of these two myths lead to the collapse of the third myth enjoyed largely by religious conservatives, that American religious liberty is and always has been the cornerstone of American liberty. On the contrary. In many ways, as Dr. Sehat thoroughly documents, the United States was a de facto Christian nation because Protestant Christians had significant control over law and governance and used it to enforce their morality. This reality also undermines a related and more implied myth of conservatives, that the United States was for the most part religiously homogenous. If that were true, as Dr. Sehat points out, the force of law would not have been necessary.

But the other critical point that Dr. Sehat makes concerns the kind of morality that this moral establishment was very inclined to enforce. The churches overwhelmingly supported slavery and the development of Jim Crow that followed it. They systematically engaged the legal system to deny religious freedom to all but Protestant Christians. They overwhelmingly opposed women’s suffrage, and they overwhelmingly aligned themselves with and theologically rationalized the worst abuses of corporate capitalism during the mid 19th and early 20th Centuries. And though Dr. Sehat does not mention this, he might have added that they supported and engaged in the massacre and displacement of Native Americans.

By any measure, this is a pretty sad record of moral commitments on the part of the churches, which helps explain, in part anyway, why Dr. Sehat’s book is so controversial. It is a social and political record that is also mirrored by Dr. Zinn regarding our alleged commitment to the equal rights enshrined in our founding documents. But the reason Dr. Sehat takes this approach to American history is similar to Zinn’s. It is not to condemn the government, or the churches, or romanticize the virtues of the victims, in Zinn's, case, or the dissenters in Sehat’s, but to advance the dialogue on who we want to be as a people and why, based on a broader and more accurate grasp of who we have actually been, and why. And as much as this is laudatory, and even critical to the future health of our country, this is where Dr. Sehat’s book is a bit wanting.

Both sides of this enduring struggle over the meaning and role of religion and the First Amendment tend to at least downplay, if not to ignore or outright deny this history of religious coercion in American politics. Dr. Sehat insists that the reality of this history must be faced if we are to move forward toward the promise of religious freedom for all Americans. He expresses that promise as the capacity to adjudicate between the diverse constituencies and competing ethical claims of our religiously plural culture, and find a moral framework that is acceptable in law. What I take that to mean is that the measure of our commitment to religious freedom consists in the extent to which we protect the rights of minorities, including those who claim no religious convictions or affiliations, and that the role of religion should be, for the most part, persuasive, and not coercive. This is how I understand Dr. Sehat’s reference to Michael Walzers “moral minimalism” over the “moral maximalism” of our history.

But the notion that religion should play an exclusively persuasive role, and indeed, can only play a persuasive role, has been around at least since the Enlightenment and John Locke, and no one questions that these ideas heavily influenced the founders. So, it’s fair to wonder if Sehat’s use of the founders support for the moral function of the gospel makes it appear that they supported the legal enforcement of Protestant moral norms more than they actually did. On the other hand, we know from Gordon Wood in his “Radicalism of the American Revolution” that the founders were on the whole worried and distressed about what could replace religion as an agency of moral restraint. That the country, in Woods’s view, replaced it with little more than a passion for commerce and the dominance of private interests, lends support to the notion that the founders failed to offer a solution to that problem, and lamented the result of it to the end of their days.

Of course, as Dr. Sehat so well documents, science, particularly the social sciences, helped to erode the metaphysical underpinnings of Protestant Christianity, first within academia, and then the courts, which in turn eventually helped to erode the moral authority of the moral establishment. But we should be clear about something important that is everywhere present but sometimes seems obscured in Dr. Sehat’s book. The dissenters were, and are, heard. This is not attributable just to science. It is also a function of an institutional framework that is, on occasion and often inconsistently, morally obligated to listen to dissenters and to change the social and political arrangements accordingly.

Dr. Sehat argues that the fitful inconsistency of the courts in the redress of legitimate dissension is a direct result of our failure as a culture to fully acknowledge just how coercive religion has been. But maybe it is more than that and maybe it will require more than a philosophy of “moral minimalism” to address. Perhaps, rather than a failure to acknowledge the coercive nature of religion, it is a persistent failure of our culture to commit fully to the value or principle of equality that was institutionalized by the Declaration of Independence. This is everywhere implied in the later chapters of Dr. Sehat’s book, particular in chapter 12 and his critique of how the election of Nixon inaugurated the culture wars. Equality is the fault line of the culture wars, as it was of the Civil War, women’s rights, Reconstruction, Plessy, Jim Crow, and Brown.

From the perspective of today’s Christian and social conservatives, equality has become the new tyranny. Perhaps this is what needs to be acknowledged and faced full on, and perhaps our unwillingness to confront this development helps explain why we have developed the culture we now find ourselves in, with conservatives, in this case, lamenting the exiling of religious influence in the public realm and more or less belligerently insisting on restoring it, and provoking the secular response with an equally belligerent insistence that the intrusion of religion in public affairs undermines the very rights it claims to support, which has, in the current climate, the unfortunate virtue of being true.

Perhaps, more than or in addition to a philosophy of “moral minimalism”, we need what we have apparently never really had, an adequate philosophy of and commitment to the meaning of equality, because there seems to be little doubt that we have been on a collision course with it since the ink dried on the Declaration of Independence. If, as J.R. Pole states in the opening paragraph of his “The Pursuit of Equality in American History”, the United States was “the first of any nation in history to base their existence on an abstract moral principle”, maybe it’s time to ask ourselves if we are really willing to follow through on it. Additionally, and perhaps relatedly, we need a broader perspective on and substantive grasp of a “public realm”, a perspective that might be capable of taking moral precedence over the pursuit of private interests that Woods so effectively shows is almost totally bereft of any concern for or limitation by the interests of the body politic considered as a whole. There are, it would seem, many forms of Despotism, and it would appear that the unrelenting and unrelieved pursuit of wholly private interests has become one of them, perhaps the one that is now “our right, our duty, to throw off”, in order to “form a more perfect Union.”

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/americas-true-history-of-religious-tolerance-61312684/?no-ist
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/historyofus/web03/segment2.html

The Myth of American Religious Freedom

2015-12-08T20:31:36Z

Fjcasper:

{{Infobox book
| name = The Myth of American Religious Freedom
| author = David Sehat
| publisher = Oxford University Press
| pub_date = 2011
| pages = 356
| isbn = 0195388763
| image = [[File:mythfreedom.jpg|200px|alt=cover]]
}}

Reading Dr. Sehat's book, “The Myth American of Religious Freedom”, one can hear echoes of Howard Zinn's "A Peoples History of the United States". Where Dr. Zinn tells the history of the United States from, as he puts it, the perspective of its victims, Dr. Sehat tells it from the perspective of its dissenters. In both cases the result is not the history that most of us grew up with, the history that the government of most any nation tends to tell of itself, as Zinn has it, like that of a family, "a giant web of nationhood pretending to a common interest", a history that obscures, ignores, or even denies fierce disagreements and conflicts of interest.

This is the kind of history we find, according to Dr. Sehat, in the prevailing narrative on the meaning of religious freedom, and its role in our history. In what has become tantamount to a kind of orthodoxy, “Religious liberty, we are told, is a hallmark of American democracy. Having been freed from state entanglements, so the story goes, religion flourished in the United States. It became central to reform movements such as abolition and women’s rights that sought to perfect the American project by expanding democracy” (Pg 2).

Dr. Sehat argues that this dominate narrative both obscures what actually happened, and is largely if not wholly responsible for the angry and irresolvable “culture wars” that persist to the present day. Both sides of the contemporary divide advance their cause in terms of three distinct but related myths, each of which flows from this narrative. The first, and perhaps primary myth, is that of church-state separation. Dr. Sehat begins his book with the story of a certain Charles B. Reynolds, a free thinker who was charged and convicted in 1886 by a New Jersey grand jury for the offense of blasphemy. How, he asks, can a man be convicted of such a charge nearly a hundred years after the ratification of the First Amendment? His answer, using original documents that show the protracted debate leading up to the version of the amendment bequeathed to us, is that, contrary to the insistence of today’s liberals, the First Amendment was itself a bitter compromise that did not create the separation advocated by Madison and Jefferson.

This is at least partly because, though the First Amendment prohibited the establishment of an official religion of the State, the moral aspects of the gospel were regarded as so important to the preservation of the State that legal enforcement of the moral code, the moral code of Protestant Christianity, became commonplace throughout much of U.S. history. This is the hub of what Dr. Sehat calls throughout his book “the moral establishment”, meaning the close, cooperative, and coordinated relationship between Protestant Christianity and the State toward the regulation and control of public and private behavior. This was done, moreover, not by persuasive means, but by force of law, and the blasphemy laws are a case in point. It was argued then that blasphemy undercut religion, and religion, in the view of virtually all the Founders, was critical for the support of morality.

The demolition of the second myth more or less follows from the demolition of the first, that religious believers fled the persecution in Europe in order to establish religious tolerance in the United States. If anything, and this is the view of other scholars, they came to establish their own theocracies (See links below). And of course, the collapse of these two myths lead to the collapse of the third myth enjoyed largely by religious conservatives, that American religious liberty is and always has been the cornerstone of American liberty. On the contrary. In many ways, as Dr. Sehat thoroughly documents, the United States was a de facto Christian nation because Protestant Christians had significant control over law and governance and used it to enforce their morality. This reality also undermines a related and more implied myth of conservatives, that the United States was for the most part religiously homogenous. If that were true, as Dr. Sehat points out, the force of law would not have been necessary.

But the other critical point that Dr. Sehat makes concerns the kind of morality that this moral establishment was very inclined to enforce. The churches overwhelmingly supported slavery and the development of Jim Crow that followed it. They systematically engaged the legal system to deny religious freedom to all but Protestant Christians. They overwhelmingly opposed women’s suffrage, and they overwhelmingly aligned themselves with and theologically rationalized the worst abuses of corporate capitalism during the mid 19th and early 20th Centuries. And though Dr. Sehat does not mention this, he might have added that they supported and engaged in the massacre and displacement of Native Americans.

By any measure, this is a pretty sad record of moral commitments on the part of the churches, which helps explain, in part anyway, why Dr. Sehat’s book is so controversial. It is a social and political record that is also mirrored by Dr. Zinn regarding our alleged commitment to the equal rights enshrined in our founding documents. But the reason Dr. Sehat takes this approach to American history is similar to Zinn’s. It is not to condemn the government, or the churches, or romanticize the virtues of the victims, in Zinn's, case, or the dissenters in Sehat’s, but to advance the dialogue on who we want to be as a people and why, based on a broader and more accurate grasp of who we have actually been, and why. And as much as this is laudatory, and even critical to the future health of our country, this is where Dr. Sehat’s book is a bit wanting.

Both sides of this enduring struggle over the meaning and role of religion and the First Amendment tend to at least downplay, if not to ignore or outright deny this history of religious coercion in American politics. Dr. Sehat insists that the reality of this history must be faced if we are to move forward toward the promise of religious freedom for all Americans. He expresses that promise as the capacity to adjudicate between the diverse constituencies and competing ethical claims of our religiously plural culture, and find a moral framework that is acceptable in law. What I take that to mean is that the measure of our commitment to religious freedom consists in the extent to which we protect the rights of minorities, including those who claim no religious convictions or affiliations, and that the role of religion should be, for the most part, persuasive, and not coercive. This is how I understand Dr. Sehat’s reference to Michael Walzers “moral minimalism” over the “moral maximalism” of our history.

But the notion that religion should play an exclusively persuasive role, and indeed, can only play a persuasive role, has been around at least since the Enlightenment and John Locke, and no one questions that these ideas heavily influenced the founders. So, it’s fair to wonder if Sehat’s use of the founders support for the moral function of the gospel makes it appear that they supported the legal enforcement of Protestant moral norms more than they actually did. On the other hand, we know from Gordon Wood in his “Radicalism of the American Revolution” that the founders were on the whole worried and distressed about what could replace religion as an agency or moral restraint. That the country, in Woods’s view, replaced it with little more than a passion for commerce and the dominance private interests, lends support to the notion that the founders failed to offer a solution to that problem, and lamented the result of it to the end of their days.

Of course, as Dr. Sehat so well documents, science, particularly the social sciences, helped to erode the metaphysical underpinnings of Protestant Christianity, first within academia, and then the courts, which in turn eventually helped to erode the moral authority of the moral establishment. But we should be clear about something important that is everywhere present but sometimes seems obscured in Dr. Sehat’s book. The dissenters were, and are, heard. This is not attributable just to science. It is also a function of an institutional framework that is, on occasion and often inconsistently, morally obligated to listen to dissenters and to change the social and political arrangements accordingly.

Dr. Sehat argues that the fitful inconsistency of the courts in the redress of legitimate dissention is a direct result of our failure as a culture to fully acknowledge just how coercive religion has been. But maybe it is more than that and maybe it will require more than a philosophy of “moral minimalism” to address. Perhaps, rather than a failure to acknowledge the coercive nature of religions, it is a persistent failure of our culture to commit fully to the value or principle of equality that was institutionalized by the Declaration of Independence. This is everywhere implied in the later chapters of Dr. Sehat’s book, particular in chapter 12 and his critique of how the election of Nixon inaugurated the culture wars. Equality is the fault line of the culture wars, as it was of the Civil War, women’s rights, Reconstruction, Plessy, Jim Crow, and Brown.

From the perspective of today’s Christian and social conservatives, equality has become the new tyranny. Perhaps this is what needs to be acknowledged and faced full on, and perhaps our unwillingness to confront this development helps explain why we have developed the culture we now find ourselves in, with conservatives, in this case, lamenting the exiling of religious influence in the public realm and more or less belligerently insisting on restoring it, and provoking the secular response with an equally belligerent insistence that the intrusion of religion in public affairs undermines the very rights it claims to support, which has, in the current climate, the unfortunate virtue of being true.

Perhaps, more than or in addition to a philosophy of “moral minimalism”, we need what we have apparently never really had, an adequate philosophy of and commitment to the meaning of equality, because there seems to be little doubt that we have been on a collision course with it since the ink dried on the Declaration of Independence. If, as J.R. Pole states in the opening paragraph of his “The Pursuit of Equality in American History”, the United States was “the first of any nation in history to base their existence on an abstract moral principle”, maybe it’s time to ask ourselves if we are really willing to follow through on it. Additionally, and perhaps relatedly, we need broader perspective on and substantive grasp of a “public realm”, a perspective that might be capable of taking moral precedence over the pursuit of private interests that Woods so effectively shows is almost totally bereft of any concern for or limitation by the interests of the body politic considered as a whole. There are, it would seem, many forms of Despotism, and it would appear that the unrelenting and unrelieved pursuit of wholly private interests has become one of them, perhaps the one that is now “our right, our duty, to throw off”, in order to “form a more perfect Union.”

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/americas-true-history-of-religious-tolerance-61312684/?no-ist
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/historyofus/web03/segment2.html

The Myth of American Religious Freedom

2015-11-30T15:52:07Z

Fjcasper:

{{Infobox book
| name = The Myth of American Religious Freedom
| author = David Sehat
| publisher = Oxford University Press
| pub_date = 2011
| pages = 356
| isbn = 0195388763
| image = [[File:mythfreedom.jpg|200px|alt=cover]]
}}

Reading Dr. Sehat's book, “The Myth American of Religious Freedom”, one can hear echoes of Howard Zinn's "A Peoples History of the United States". Where Dr. Zinn tells the history of the United States from, as he puts it, the perspective of its victims, Dr. Sehat tells it from the perspective of its dissenters. In both cases the result is not the history that most of us grew up with, the history that the government of most any nation tends to tell of itself, as Zinn has it, like that of a family, "a giant web of nationhood pretending to a common interest", a history that obscures, ignores, or even denies fierce disagreements and conflicts of interest.

This is the kind of history we find, according to Dr. Sehat, in the prevailing narrative on the meaning of religious freedom, and its role in our history. In what has become tantamount to a kind of orthodoxy, “Religious liberty, we are told, is a hallmark of American democracy. Having been freed from state entanglements, so the story goes, religion flourished in the United States. It became central to reform movements such as abolition and women’s rights that sought to perfect the American project by expanding democracy” (Pg 2).

Dr. Sehat argues that this dominate narrative both obscures what actually happened, and is largely if not wholly responsible for the angry and irresolvable “culture wars” that persist to the present day. Both sides of the contemporary divide advance their cause in terms of three distinct but related myths, each of which flows from this narrative. The first, and perhaps primary myth, is that of church-state separation. Dr. Sehat begins his book with the story of a certain Charles B. Reynolds, a free thinker who was charged and convicted in 1886 by a New Jersey grand jury for the offense of blasphemy. How, he asks, can a man be convicted of such a charge nearly a hundred years after the ratification of the First Amendment? His answer, using original documents that show the protracted debate leading up to the version of the amendment bequeathed to us, is that, contrary to the insistence of today’s liberals, the First Amendment was itself a bitter compromise that did not create the separation advocated by Madison and Jefferson.

This is at least partly because, though the First Amendment prohibited the establishment of an official religion of the State, the moral aspects of the gospel were regarded as so important to the preservation of the State that legal enforcement of the moral code, the moral code of Protestant Christianity, became commonplace throughout much of U.S. history. This is the hub of what Dr. Sehat calls throughout his book “the moral establishment”, meaning the close, cooperative, and coordinated relationship between Protestant Christianity and the State toward the regulation and control of public and private behavior. This was done, moreover, not by persuasive means, but by force of law, and the blasphemy laws are a case in point. It was argued then that blasphemy undercut religion, and religion, in the view of virtually all the Founders, was critical for the support of morality.

The demolition of the second myth more or less follows from the demolition of the first, that religious believers fled the persecution in Europe in order to establish religious tolerance in the United States. If anything, and this is the view of other scholars, they came to establish their own theocracies (See links below). And of course, the collapse of these two myths lead to the collapse of the third myth enjoyed largely by religious conservatives, that American religious liberty is and always has been the cornerstone of American liberty. On the contrary. In many ways, as Dr. Sehat thoroughly documents, the United States was a de facto Christian nation because Protestant Christians had significant control over law and governance and used it to enforce their morality. This reality also undermines a related and more implied myth of conservatives, that the United States was for the most part religiously homogenous. If that were true, as Dr. Sehat points out, the force of law would not have been necessary.

But the other critical point that Dr. Sehat makes concerns the kind of morality that this moral establishment was very inclined to enforce. The churches overwhelmingly supported slavery and the development of Jim Crow that followed it. They systematically engaged the legal system to deny religious freedom to all but Protestant Christians. They overwhelmingly opposed women’s suffrage, and they overwhelmingly aligned themselves with and theologically rationalized the worst abuses of corporate capitalism during the mid 19th and early 20th Centuries. And though Dr. Sehat does not mention this, he might have added that they supported and engaged in the massacre and displacement of Native Americans.

By any measure, this is a pretty sad record of moral commitments on the part of the churches, which helps explain, in part anyway, why Dr. Sehat’s book is so controversial. It is a social and political record that is also mirrored by Dr. Zinn regarding our alleged commitment to the equal rights enshrined in our founding documents. But the reason Dr. Sehat takes this approach to American history is similar to Zinn’s. It is not to condemn the government, or the churches, or romanticize the virtues of the victims, in Zinn's, case, or the dissenters in Sehat’s, but to advance the dialogue on who we want to be as a people and why, based on a broader and more accurate grasp of who we have actually been, and why. And as much as this is laudatory, and even critical to the future health of our country, this is where Dr. Sehat’s book is a bit wanting.

Both sides of this enduring struggle over the meaning and role of religion and the First Amendment tend to at least downplay, if not to ignore or outright deny this history of religious coercion in American politics. Dr. Sehat insists that the reality of this history must be faced if we are to move forward toward the promise of religious freedom for all Americans. He expresses that promise as the capacity to adjudicate between the diverse constituencies and competing ethical claims of our religiously plural culture, and find a moral framework that is acceptable in law. What I take that to mean is that the measure of our commitment to religious freedom consists in the extent to which we protect the rights of minorities, including those who claim no religious convictions or affiliations, and that the role of religion should be, for the most part, persuasive, and not coercive. This is how I understand Dr. Sehat’s reference to Michael Walzers “moral minimalism” over the “moral maximalism” of our history.

But the notion that religion should play an exclusively persuasive role, and indeed, can only play a persuasive role, has been around at least since the Enlightenment John Locke, and no one questions that these ideas heavily influenced the founders. So, it’s fair to wonder if Sehat’s use of the founders support for the moral function of the gospel makes it appear that they supported the legal enforcement of Protestant moral norms more than they actually did. On the other hand, we know from Gordon Wood in his “Radicalism of the American Revolution” that the founders were on the whole worried and distressed about what could replace religion as an agency or moral restraint. That the country, in Woods’s view, replaced it with little more than a passion for commerce and the dominance private interests, lends support to the notion that the founders failed to offer a solution to that problem, and lamented the result of it to the end of their days.

Of course, as Dr. Sehat so well documents, science, particularly the social sciences, helped to erode the metaphysical underpinnings of Protestant Christianity, first within academia, and then the courts, which in turn eventually helped to erode the moral authority of the moral establishment. But we should be clear about something important that is everywhere present but sometimes seems obscured in Dr. Sehat’s book. The dissenters were, and are, heard. This is not attributable just to science. It is also a function of an institutional framework that is, on occasion and often inconsistently, morally obligated to listen to dissenters and to change the social and political arrangements accordingly.

Dr. Sehat argues that the fitful inconsistency of the courts in the redress of legitimate dissention is a direct result of our failure as a culture to fully acknowledge just how coercive religion has been. But maybe it is more than that and maybe it will require more than a philosophy of “moral minimalism” to address. Perhaps, rather than a failure to acknowledge the coercive nature of religions, it is a persistent failure of our culture to commit fully to the value or principle of equality that was institutionalized by the Declaration of Independence. This is everywhere implied in the later chapters of Dr. Sehat’s book, particular in chapter 12 and his critique of how the election of Nixon inaugurated the culture wars. Equality is the fault line of the culture wars, as it was of the Civil War, women’s rights, Reconstruction, Plessy, Jim Crow, and Brown.

From the perspective of today’s Christian and social conservatives, equality has become the new tyranny. Perhaps this is what needs to be acknowledged and faced full on, and perhaps our unwillingness to confront this development helps explain why we have developed the culture we now find ourselves in, with conservatives, in this case, lamenting the exiling of religious influence in the public realm and more or less belligerently insisting on restoring it, and provoking the secular response with an equally belligerent insistence that the intrusion of religion in public affairs undermines the very rights it claims to support, which has, in the current climate, the unfortunate virtue of being true.

Perhaps, more than or in addition to a philosophy of “moral minimalism”, we need what we have apparently never really had, an adequate philosophy of and commitment to the meaning of equality, because there seems to be little doubt that we have been on a collision course with it since the ink dried on the Declaration of Independence. If, as J.R. Pole states in the opening paragraph of his “The Pursuit of Equality in American History”, the United States was “the first of any nation in history to base their existence on an abstract moral principle”, maybe it’s time to ask ourselves if we are really willing to follow through on it. Additionally, and perhaps relatedly, we need broader perspective on and substantive grasp of a “public realm”, a perspective that might be capable of taking moral precedence over the pursuit of private interests that Woods so effectively shows is almost totally bereft of any concern for or limitation by the interests of the body politic considered as a whole. There are, it would seem, many forms of Despotism, and it would appear that the unrelenting and unrelieved pursuit of wholly private interests has become one of them, perhaps the one that is now “our right, our duty, to throw off”, in order to “form a more perfect Union.”

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/americas-true-history-of-religious-tolerance-61312684/?no-ist
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/historyofus/web03/segment2.html

The Myth of American Religious Freedom

2015-09-29T21:41:25Z

Fjcasper:

{{Infobox book
| name = The Myth of American Religious Freedom
| author = David Sehat
| publisher = Oxford University Press
| pub_date = 2011
| pages = 356
| isbn = 0195388763
| image = [[File:mythfreedom.jpg|200px|alt=cover]]
}}

Reading Dr. Sehat's book, “The Myth American of Religious Freedom”, one can hear echoes of Howard Zinn's "A Peoples History of the United States". Where Dr. Zinn tells the history of the United States from, as he puts it, the perspective of its victims, Dr. Sehat tells it from the perspective of its dissenters. In both cases the result is not the history that most of us grew up with, the history that the government of most any nation tends to tell of itself, as Zinn has it, like that of a family, "a giant web of nationhood pretending to a common interest", a history that obscures, ignores, or even denies fierce disagreements and conflicts of interest.

This is the kind of history we find, according to Dr. Sehat, in the prevailing narrative on the meaning of religious freedom, and its role in our history. In what has become tantamount to a kind of orthodoxy, “Religious liberty, we are told, is a hallmark of American democracy. Having been freed from state entanglements, so the story goes, religion flourished in the United States. It became central to reform movements such as abolition and women’s rights that sought to perfect the American project by expanding democracy” (Pg 2).

Dr. Sehat argues that this dominate narrative both obscures what actually happened, and is largely if not wholly responsible for the angry and irresolvable “culture wars” that persist to the present day. Both sides of the contemporary divide advance their cause in terms of three distinct but related myths, each of which flows from this narrative. The first, and perhaps primary myth, is that of church-state separation. Dr. Sehat begins his book with the story of a certain Charles B. Reynolds, a free thinker who was charged and convicted in 1886 by a New Jersey grand jury for the offense of blasphemy. How, he asks, can a man be convicted of such a charge nearly a hundred years after the ratification of the First Amendment? His answer, using original documents that show the protracted debate leading up to the version of the amendment bequeathed to us, is that, contrary to the insistence of today’s liberals, the First Amendment was itself a bitter compromise that did not create the separation advocated by Madison and Jefferson.

This is at least partly because, though the First Amendment prohibited the establishment of an official religion of the State, the moral aspects of the gospel were regarded as so important to the preservation of the State that legal enforcement of the moral code, the moral code of Protestant Christianity, became commonplace throughout much of U.S. history. This is the hub of what Dr. Sehat calls throughout his book “the moral establishment”, meaning the close, cooperative, and coordinated relationship between Protestant Christianity and the State toward the regulation and control of public and private behavior. This was done, moreover, not by persuasive means, but by force of law, and the blasphemy laws are a case in point. It was argued then that blasphemy undercut religion, and religion, in the view of virtually all the Founders, was critical for the support of morality.

The demolition of the second myth more or less follows from the demolition of the first, that religious believers fled the persecution in Europe in order to establish religious tolerance in the United States. If anything, and this is the view of other scholars, they came to establish their own theocracies (See links below). And of course, the collapse of these two myths lead to the collapse of the third myth enjoyed largely by religious conservatives, that American religious liberty is and always has been the cornerstone of American liberty. On the contrary. In many ways, as Dr. Sehat thoroughly documents, the United States was a de facto Christian nation because Protestant Christians had significant control over law and governance and used it to enforce their morality. This reality also undermines a related and more implied myth of conservatives, that the United States was for the most part religiously homogenous. If that were true, as Dr. Sehat points out, the force of law would not have been necessary.

But the other critical point that Dr. Sehat makes concerns the kind of morality that this moral establishment was very inclined to enforce. The churches overwhelmingly supported slavery and the development of Jim Crow that followed it. They systematically engaged the legal system to deny religious freedom to all but Protestant Christians. They overwhelmingly opposed women’s suffrage, and they overwhelmingly aligned themselves with and theologically rationalized the worst abuses of corporate capitalism during the mid 19th and early 20th Centuries. And though Dr. Sehat does not mention this, he might have added that they supported and engaged in the massacre and displacement of Native Americans.

By any measure, this is a pretty sad record of moral commitments on the part of the churches, which helps explain, in part anyway, why Dr. Sehat’s book is so controversial. It is a social and political record that is also mirrored by Dr. Zinn regarding our alleged commitment to the equal rights enshrined in our founding documents. But the reason Dr. Sehat takes this approach to American history is similar to Zinn’s. It is not to condemn the government, or the churches, or romanticize the virtues of the victims, in Zinn's, case, or the dissenters in Sehat’s, but to advance the dialogue on who we want to be as a people and why, based on a broader and more accurate grasp of who we have actually been, and why. And as much as this is laudatory, and even critical to the future health of our country, this is where Dr. Sehat’s book is a bit wanting.

Both sides of this enduring struggle over the meaning and role of religion and the First Amendment tend to at least downplay, if not to ignore or outright deny this history of religious coercion in American politics. Dr. Sehat insists that the reality of this history must be faced if we are to move forward toward the promise of religious freedom for all Americans. He expresses that promise as the capacity to adjudicate between the diverse constituencies and competing ethical claims of our religiously plural culture, and find a moral framework that is acceptable in law. What I take that to mean is that the measure of our commitment to religious freedom consists in the extent to which we protect the rights of minorities, including those who claim no religious convictions or affiliations, and that the role of religion should be, for the most part, persuasive, and not coercive. This is how I understand Dr. Sehat’s reference to Michael Walzers “moral minimalism” over the “moral maximalism” of our history.

But the notion that religion should play an exclusively persuasive role, and indeed, can only play a persuasive role, has been around at least since the Enlightenment John Locke, and no one questions that these ideas heavily influenced the founders. So, it’s fair to wonder if Sehat’s use of the founders support for the moral function of the gospel makes it appear that they supported the legal enforcement of Protestant moral norms more than they actually did. On the other hand, we know from Gordon Wood in his “Radicalism of the American Revolution” that the founders were on the whole worried and distressed about what could replace religion as an agency or moral restraint. That the country, in Woods’s view, replaced it with little more than a passion for commerce and the dominance private interests, lends support to the notion that the founders failed to offer a solution to that problem, and lamented the result of it to the end of their days.

Of course, as Dr. Sehat so well documents, science, particularly the social sciences, helped to erode the metaphysical underpinnings of Protestant Christianity, first within academia, and then the courts, which in turn eventually helped to erode the moral authority of the moral establishment. But we should be clear about something important that is everywhere present but sometimes seems obscured in Dr. Sehat’s book. The dissenters were, and are, heard. This is not attributable just to science. It is also a function of an institutional framework that is, on occasion and often inconsistently, morally obligated to listen to dissenters and to change the social and political arrangements accordingly.

Dr. Sehat argues that the fitful inconsistency of the courts in the redress of legitimate dissention is a direct result of our failure as a culture to fully acknowledge just how coercive religion has been. But maybe it is more than that and maybe it will require more than a philosophy of “moral minimalism” to address. Perhaps, rather than a failure to acknowledge the coercive nature of religions, it is a persistent failure of our culture to commit fully to the value or principle of equality that was institutionalized by the Declaration of Independence. This is everywhere implied in the later chapters of Dr. Sehat’s book, particular in chapter 12 and his critique of how the election of Nixon inaugurated the culture wars. Equality is the fault line of the culture wars, as it was of the Civil War, women’s rights, Reconstruction, Plessy, Jim Crow, and Brown.

From the perspective of today’s Christian and social conservatives, equality has become the new tyranny. Perhaps this is what needs to be acknowledged and faced full on, and perhaps our unwillingness to confront this development helps explain why we have developed the culture we now find ourselves in, with conservatives, in this case, lamenting the exiling of religious influence in the public realm and more or less belligerently insisting on restoring it, and provoking the secular response with an equally belligerent insistence that the intrusion of religion in public affairs undermines the very rights it claims to support, which has, in the current climate, the unfortunate virtue of being true.

Perhaps, more than or in addition to a philosophy of “moral minimalism”, we need what we have apparently never really had, an adequate philosophy of and commitment to the meaning of equality, because there seems to be little doubt that we have been on a collision course with it since the ink dried on the Declaration of Independence. If, as J.R. Poole states in the opening paragraph of his “The Pursuit of Equality in American History”, the United States was “the first of any nation in history to base their existence on an abstract moral principle”, maybe it’s time to ask ourselves if we are really willing to follow through on it. Additionally, and perhaps relatedly, we need broader perspective on and substantive grasp of a “public realm”, a perspective that might be capable of taking moral precedence over the pursuit of private interests that Woods so effectively shows is almost totally bereft of any concern for or limitation by the interests of the body politic considered as a whole. There are, it would seem, many forms of Despotism, and it would appear that the unrelenting and unrelieved pursuit of wholly private interests has become one of them, perhaps the one that is now “our right, our duty, to throw off”, in order to “form a more perfect Union.”

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/americas-true-history-of-religious-tolerance-61312684/?no-ist
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/historyofus/web03/segment2.html

The Myth of American Religious Freedom

2015-09-25T14:41:43Z

Fjcasper:

{{Infobox book
| name = The Myth of American Religious Freedom
| author = David Sehat
| publisher = Oxford University Press
| pub_date = 2011
| pages = 356
| isbn = 0195388763
| image = [[File:mythfreedom.jpg|200px|alt=cover]]
}}

Reading Dr. Sehat's book, “The Myth American of Religious Freedom”, one can hear echoes of Howard Zinn's "A Peoples History of the United States". Where Dr. Zinn tells the history of the United States from, as he puts it, the perspective of its victims, Dr. Sehat tells it from the perspective of its dissenters. In both cases the result is not the history that most of us grew up with, the history that the government of most any nation tends to tell of itself, as Zinn has it, like that of a family, "a giant web of nationhood pretending to a common interest", a history that obscures, ignores, or even denies fierce disagreements and conflicts of interest.

This is the kind of history we find, according to Dr. Sehat, in the prevailing narrative on the meaning of religious freedom, and its role in our history. In what has become tantamount to a kind of orthodoxy, “Religious liberty, we are told, we is a hallmark of American democracy. Having been freed from state entanglements, so the story goes, religion flourished in the United States. It became central to reform movements such as abolition and women’s rights that sought to perfect the American project by expanding democracy” (Pg 2).

Dr. Sehat argues that this dominate narrative both obscures what actually happened, and is largely if not wholly responsible for the angry and irresolvable “culture wars” that persist to the present day. Both sides of the contemporary divide advance their cause in terms of three distinct but related myths, each of which flows from this narrative. The first, and perhaps primary myth, is that of church-state separation. Dr. Sehat begins his book with the story of a certain Charles B. Reynolds, a free thinker who was charged and convicted in 1886 by a New Jersey grand jury for the offense of blasphemy. How, he asks, can a man be convicted of such a charge nearly a hundred years after the ratification of the First Amendment? His answer, using original documents that show the protracted debate leading up to the version of the amendment bequeathed to us, is that, contrary to the insistence of today’s liberals, the First Amendment was itself a bitter compromise that did not create the separation advocated by Madison and Jefferson.

This is at least partly because, though the First Amendment prohibited the establishment of an official religion of the State, the moral aspects of the gospel were regarded as so important to the preservation of the State that legal enforcement of the moral code, the moral code of Protestant Christianity, became commonplace throughout much of U.S. history. This is the hub of what Dr. Sehat calls throughout his book “the moral establishment”, meaning the close, cooperative, and coordinated relationship between Protestant Christianity and the State toward the regulation and control of public and private behavior. This was done, moreover, not by persuasive means, but by force of law, and the blasphemy laws are a case in point. It was argued then that blasphemy undercut religion, and religion, in the view of virtually all the Founders, was critical for the support of morality.

The demolition of the second myth more or less follows from the demolition of the first, that religious believers fled the persecution in Europe in order to establish religious tolerance in the United States. If anything, and this is the view of other scholars, they came to establish their own theocracies (See links below). And of course, the collapse of these two myths lead to the collapse of the third myth enjoyed largely by religious conservatives, that American religious liberty is and always has been the cornerstone of American liberty. On the contrary. In many ways, as Dr. Sehat thoroughly documents, the United States was a de facto Christian nation because Protestant Christians had significant control over law and governance and used it to enforce their morality. This reality also undermines a related and more implied myth of conservatives, that the United States was for the most part religiously homogenous. If that were true, as Dr. Sehat points out, the force of law would not have been necessary.

But the other critical point that Dr. Sehat makes concerns the kind of morality that this moral establishment was very inclined to enforce. The churches overwhelmingly supported slavery and the development of Jim Crow that followed it. They systematically engaged the legal system to deny religious freedom to all but Protestant Christians. They overwhelmingly opposed women’s suffrage, and they overwhelmingly aligned themselves with and theologically rationalized the worst abuses of corporate capitalism during the mid 19th and early 20th Centuries. And though Dr. Sehat does not mention this, he might have added that they supported and engaged in the massacre and displacement of Native Americans.

By any measure, this is a pretty sad record of moral commitments on the part of the churches, which helps explain, in part anyway, why Dr. Sehat’s book is so controversial. It is a social and political record that is also mirrored by Dr. Zinn regarding our alleged commitment to the equal rights enshrined in our founding documents. But the reason Dr. Sehat takes this approach to American history is similar to Zinn’s. It is not to condemn the government, or the churches, or romanticize the virtues of the victims, in Zinn's, case, or the dissenters in Sehat’s, but to advance the dialogue on who we want to be as a people and why, based on a broader and more accurate grasp of who we have actually been, and why. And as much as this is laudatory, and even critical to the future health of our country, this is where Dr. Sehat’s book is a bit wanting.

Both sides of this enduring struggle over the meaning and role of religion and the First Amendment tend to at least downplay, if not to ignore or outright deny this history of religious coercion in American politics. Dr. Sehat insists that the reality of this history must be faced if we are to move forward toward the promise of religious freedom for all Americans. He expresses that promise as the capacity to adjudicate between the diverse constituencies and competing ethical claims of our religiously plural culture, and find a moral framework that is acceptable in law. What I take that to mean is that the measure of our commitment to religious freedom consists in the extent to which we protect the rights of minorities, including those who claim no religious convictions or affiliations, and that the role of religion should be, for the most part, persuasive, and not coercive. This is how I understand Dr. Sehat’s reference to Michael Walzers “moral minimalism” over the “moral maximalism” of our history.

But the notion that religion should play an exclusively persuasive role, and indeed, can only play a persuasive role, has been around at least since the Enlightenment John Locke, and no one questions that these ideas heavily influenced the founders. So, it’s fair to wonder if Sehat’s use of the founders support for the moral function of the gospel makes it appear that they supported the legal enforcement of Protestant moral norms more than they actually did. On the other hand, we know from Gordon Wood in his “Radicalism of the American Revolution” that the founders were on the whole worried and distressed about what could replace religion as an agency or moral restraint. That the country, in Woods’s view, replaced it with little more than a passion for commerce and the dominance private interests, lends support to the notion that the founders failed to offer a solution to that problem, and lamented the result of it to the end of their days.

Of course, as Dr. Sehat so well documents, science, particularly the social sciences, helped to erode the metaphysical underpinnings of Protestant Christianity, first within academia, and then the courts, which in turn eventually helped to erode the moral authority of the moral establishment. But we should be clear about something important that is everywhere present but sometimes seems obscured in Dr. Sehat’s book. The dissenters were, and are, heard. This is not attributable just to science. It is also a function of an institutional framework that is, on occasion and often inconsistently, morally obligated to listen to dissenters and to change the social and political arrangements accordingly.

Dr. Sehat argues that the fitful inconsistency of the courts in the redress of legitimate dissention is a direct result of our failure as a culture to fully acknowledge just how coercive religion has been. But maybe it is more than that and maybe it will require more than a philosophy of “moral minimalism” to address. Perhaps, rather than a failure to acknowledge the coercive nature of religions, it is a persistent failure of our culture to commit fully to the value or principle of equality that was institutionalized by the Declaration of Independence. This is everywhere implied in the later chapters of Dr. Sehat’s book, particular in chapter 12 and his critique of how the election of Nixon inaugurated the culture wars. Equality is the fault line of the culture wars, as it was of the Civil War, women’s rights, Reconstruction, Plessy, Jim Crow, and Brown.

From the perspective of today’s Christian and social conservatives, equality has become the new tyranny. Perhaps this is what needs to be acknowledged and faced full on, and perhaps our unwillingness to confront this development helps explain why we have developed the culture we now find ourselves in, with conservatives, in this case, lamenting the exiling of religious influence in the public realm and more or less belligerently insisting on restoring it, and provoking the secular response with an equally belligerent insistence that the intrusion of religion in public affairs undermines the very rights it claims to support, which has, in the current climate, the unfortunate virtue of being true.

Perhaps, more than or in addition to a philosophy of “moral minimalism”, we need what we have apparently never really had, an adequate philosophy of and commitment to the meaning of equality, because there seems to be little doubt that we have been on a collision course with it since the ink dried on the Declaration of Independence. If, as J.R. Poole states in the opening paragraph of his “The Pursuit of Equality in American History”, the United States was “the first of any nation in history to base their existence on an abstract moral principle”, maybe it’s time to ask ourselves if we are really willing to follow through on it. Additionally, and perhaps relatedly, we need broader perspective on and substantive grasp of a “public realm”, a perspective that might be capable of taking moral precedence over the pursuit of private interests that Woods so effectively shows is almost totally bereft of any concern for or limitation by the interests of the body politic considered as a whole. There are, it would seem, many forms of Despotism, and it would appear that the unrelenting and unrelieved pursuit of wholly private interests has become one of them, perhaps the one that is now “our right, our duty, to throw off”, in order to “form a more perfect Union.”

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/americas-true-history-of-religious-tolerance-61312684/?no-ist
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/historyofus/web03/segment2.html

The Myth of American Religious Freedom

2015-09-25T14:39:50Z

Fjcasper:

{{Infobox book
| name = The Myth of American Religious Freedom
| author = David Sehat
| publisher = Oxford University Press
| pub_date = 2011
| pages = 356
| isbn = 0195388763
| image = [[File:mythfreedom.jpg|200px|alt=cover]]
}}

Reading Dr. Sehat's book, “The Myth American of Religious Freedom”, one can hear echoes of Howard Zinn's "A Peoples History of the United States". Where Dr. Zinn tells the history of the United States from, as he puts it, the perspective of its victims, Dr. Sehat tells it from the perspective of its dissenters. In both cases the result is not the history that most of us grew up with, the history that the government of most any nation tends to tell of itself, as Zinn has it, like that of a family, "a giant web of nationhood pretending to a common interest", a history that obscures, ignores, or even denies fierce disagreements and conflicts of interest.

This is the kind of history we find, according to Dr. Sehat, in the prevailing narrative on the meaning of religious freedom, and its role in our history. In what has become tantamount to a kind of orthodoxy, “Religious liberty, we are told, we is a hallmark of American democracy. Having been freed from state entanglements, so the story goes, religion flourished in the United States. It became central to reform movements such as abolition and women’s rights that sought to perfect the American project by expanding democracy” (Pg 2).

Dr. Sehat argues that this dominate narrative both obscures what actually happened, and is largely if not wholly responsible for the angry and irresolvable “culture wars” that persist to the present day. Both sides of the contemporary divide advance their cause in terms of three distinct but related myths, each of which flows from this narrative. The first, and perhaps primary myth, is that of church-state separation. Dr. Sehat begins his book with the story of a certain Charles B. Reynolds, a free thinker who was charged and convicted in 1886 by a New Jersey grand jury for the offense of blasphemy. How, he asks, can a man be convicted of such a charge nearly a hundred years after the ratification of the First Amendment? His answer, using original documents that show the protracted debate leading up to the version of the amendment bequeathed to us, is that, contrary to the insistence of today’s liberals, the First Amendment was itself a bitter compromise that did not create the separation advocated by Madison and Jefferson.

This is at least partly because, though the First Amendment prohibited the establishment of an official religion of the State, the moral aspects of the gospel were regarded as so important to the preservation of the State that legal enforcement of the moral code, the moral code of Protestant Christianity, became commonplace throughout much of U.S. history. This is the hub of what Dr. Sehat calls throughout his book “the moral establishment”, meaning the close, cooperative, and coordinated relationship between Protestant Christianity and the State toward the regulation and control of public and private behavior. This was done, moreover, not by persuasive means, but by force of law, and the blasphemy laws are a case in point. It was argued then that blasphemy undercut religion, and religion, in the view of virtually all the Founders, was critical for the support of morality.

The demolition of the second myth more or less follows from the demolition of the first, that religious believers fled the persecution in Europe in order to establish religious tolerance in the United States. If anything, and this is the view of other scholars, they came to establish their own theocracies (See links below). And of course, the collapse of these two myths lead to the collapse of the third myth enjoyed largely by religious conservatives, that American religious liberty is and always has been the cornerstone of American liberty. On the contrary. In many ways, as Dr. Sehat thoroughly documents, the United States was a de facto Christian nation because Protestant Christians had significant control over law and governance and used it to enforce their morality. This reality also undermines a related and more implied myth of conservatives, that the United States was for the most part religiously homogenous. If that were true, as Dr. Sehat points out, the force of law would not have been necessary.

But the other critical point that Dr. Sehat makes concerns the kind of morality that this moral establishment was very inclined to enforce. The churches overwhelmingly supported slavery and the development of Jim Crow that followed it. They systematically engaged the legal system to deny religious freedom to all but Protestant Christians. They overwhelmingly opposed women’s suffrage, and they overwhelmingly aligned themselves with and theologically rationalized the worst abuses of corporate capitalism during the mid 19th and early 20th Centuries. And though Dr. Sehat does not mention this, he might have added that they supported and engaged in the massacre and displacement of Native Americans.

By any measure, this is a pretty sad record of moral commitments on the part of the churches, which helps explain, in part anyway, why Dr. Sehat’s book is so controversial. It is a social and political record that is also mirrored by Dr. Zinn regarding our alleged commitment to the equal rights enshrined in our founding documents. But the reason Dr. Sehat takes this approach to American history is similar to Zinn’s. It is not to condemn the government, or the churches, or romanticize the virtues of the victims, in Zinn's, case, or the dissenters in Sehat’s, but to advance the dialogue on who we want to be as a people and why, based on a broader and more accurate grasp of who we have actually been, and why. And as much as this is laudatory, and even critical to the future health of our country, this is where Dr. Sehat’s book is a bit wanting.

Both sides of this enduring struggle over the meaning and role of religion and the First Amendment tend to at least downplay, if not to ignore or outright deny this history of religious coercion in American politics. Dr. Sehat insists that the reality of this history must be faced if we are to move forward toward the promise of religious freedom for all Americans. He expresses that promise as the capacity to adjudicate between the diverse constituencies and competing ethical claims of our religiously plural culture, and find a moral framework that is acceptable in law. What I take that to mean is that the measure of our commitment to religious freedom consists in the extent to which we protect the rights of minorities, including those who claim no religious convictions or affiliations, and that the role of religion should be, for the most part, persuasive, and not coercive. This is how I understand Dr. Sehat’s reference to Michael Walzers “moral minimalism” over the “moral maximalism” of our history.

But the notion that religion should play an exclusively persuasive role, and indeed, can only play a persuasive role, has been around at least since the Enlightenment John Locke, and no one questions that these ideas heavily influenced the founders. So, it’s fair to wonder if Sehat’s use of the founders support for the moral function of the gospel makes it appear that they supported the legal enforcement of Protestant moral norms more than they actually did. On the other hand, we know from Gordon Wood in his “Radicalism of the American Revolution” that the founders were on the whole worried and distressed about what could replace religion as an agency or moral restraint. That the country, in Woods’s view, replaced it with little more than a passion for commerce and the dominance private interests, lends support to the notion that the founders failed to offer a solution to that problem, and lamented the result of it to the end of their days.

Of course, as Dr. Sehat so well documents, science, particularly the social sciences, helped to erode the metaphysical underpinnings of Protestant Christianity, first within academia, and then the courts, which in turn eventually helped to erode the moral authority of the moral establishment. But we should be clear about something important that is everywhere present but sometimes seems obscured in Dr. Sehat’s book. The dissenters were, and are, heard. This is not attributable just to science. It is also a function of an institutional framework that is, on occasion and often inconsistently, morally obligated to listen to dissenters and to change the social and political arrangements accordingly.

Dr. Sehat argues that the fitful inconsistency of the courts in the redress of legitimate dissention is a direct result of our failure as a culture to fully acknowledge just how coercive religion has been. But maybe it is more than that and maybe it will require more than a philosophy of “moral minimalism” to address. Perhaps, rather than a failure to acknowledge the coercive nature of religions, it is a persistent failure of our culture to commit fully to the value or principle of equality that was institutionalized by the Declaration of Independence. This is everywhere implied in the later chapters of Dr. Sehat’s book, particular in chapter 12 and his critique of how the election of Nixon inaugurated the culture wars. Equality is the fault line of the culture wars, as it was of the Civil War, women’s rights, Reconstruction, Plessy, Jim Crow, and Brown.

From the perspective of today’s Christian and social conservatives, equality has become the new tyranny. Perhaps this is what needs to be acknowledged and faced full on, and perhaps our unwillingness to confront this development helps explain why we have developed the culture we now find ourselves in, with conservatives, in this case, lamenting the exiling of religious influence in the public realm and more or less belligerently insisting on restoring it, and provoking the secular response with an equally belligerent insistence that the intrusion of religion in public affairs undermines the very rights it claims to support, which has, in the current climate, the unfortunate virtue of being true.

Perhaps, more than or in addition to a philosophy of “moral minimalism”, we need what we have apparently never really had, an adequate philosophy of and commitment to the meaning of equality, because there seems to be little doubt that we have been on a collision course with it since the ink dried on the Declaration of Independence. If, as J.R. Poole states in the opening paragraph of his “The Pursuit of Equality in American History”, the United States was “the first of any nation in history to base their existence on an abstract moral principle”, maybe it’s time to ask ourselves if we are really willing to follow through on it. Additionally, and perhaps relatedly, we need broader perspective on and substantive grasp of a “public realm”, a perspective that might be capable of taking moral precedence over a pursuit of private interests that Woods so effectively shows is almost totally bereft of any concern for or limitation by the interests of the body politic considered as a whole. There are, it would seem, many forms of Despotism, and it would appear that the unrelenting and unrelieved pursuit of wholly private interests has become one of them, perhaps the one that is now “our right, our duty, to throw off”, in order to “form a more perfect Union.”

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/americas-true-history-of-religious-tolerance-61312684/?no-ist
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/historyofus/web03/segment2.html

The Myth of American Religious Freedom

2015-09-25T14:34:23Z

Fjcasper:

{{Infobox book
| name = The Myth of American Religious Freedom
| author = David Sehat
| publisher = Oxford University Press
| pub_date = 2011
| pages = 356
| isbn = 0195388763
| image = [[File:mythfreedom.jpg|200px|alt=cover]]
}}

Reading Dr. Sehat's book, “The Myth American of Religious Freedom”, one can hear echoes of Howard Zinn's "A Peoples History of the United States". Where Dr. Zinn tells the history of the United States from, as he puts it, the perspective of its victims, Dr. Sehat tells it from the perspective of its dissenters. In both cases the result is not the history that most of us grew up with, the history that the government of most any nation tends to tell of itself, as Zinn has it, like that of a family, "a giant web of nationhood pretending to a common interest", a history that obscures, ignores, or even denies fierce disagreements and conflicts of interest.

This is the kind of history we find, according to Dr. Sehat, in the prevailing narrative on the meaning of religious freedom, and its role in our history. In what has become tantamount to a kind of orthodoxy, “Religious liberty, we are told, we is a hallmark of American democracy. Having been freed from state entanglements, so the story goes, religion flourished in the United States. It became central to reform movements such as abolition and women’s rights that sought to perfect the American project by expanding democracy” (Pg 2).

Dr. Sehat argues that this dominate narrative both obscures what actually happened, and is largely if not wholly responsible for the angry and irresolvable “culture wars” that persist to the present day. Both sides of the contemporary divide advance their cause in terms of three distinct but related myths, each of which flows from this narrative. The first, and perhaps primary myth, is that of church-state separation. Dr. Sehat begins his book with the story of a certain Charles B. Reynolds, a free thinker who was charged and convicted in 1886 by a New Jersey grand jury for the offense of blasphemy. How, he asks, can a man be convicted of such a charge nearly a hundred years after the ratification of the First Amendment? His answer, using original documents that show the protracted debate leading up to the version of the amendment bequeathed to us, is that, contrary to the insistence of today’s liberals, the First Amendment was itself a bitter compromise that did not create the separation advocated by Madison and Jefferson.

This is at least partly because, though the First Amendment prohibited the establishment of an official religion of the State, the moral aspects of the gospel were regarded as so important to the preservation of the State that legal enforcement of the moral code, the moral code of Protestant Christianity, became commonplace throughout much of U.S. history. This is the hub of what Dr. Sehat calls throughout his book “the moral establishment”, meaning the close, cooperative, and coordinated relationship between Protestant Christianity and the State toward the regulation and control of public and private behavior. This was done, moreover, not by persuasive means, but by force of law, and the blasphemy laws are a case in point. It was argued then that blasphemy undercut religion, and religion, in the view of virtually all the Founders, was critical for the support of morality.

The demolition of the second myth more or less follows from the demolition of the first, that religious believers fled the persecution in Europe in order to establish religious tolerance in the United States. If anything, and this is the view of other scholars, they came to establish their own theocracies (See links below). And of course, these collapse of these two myths lead to the collapse of the third myth enjoyed largely by religious conservatives, that American religious liberty is and always has been the cornerstone of American liberty. On the contrary. In many ways, as Dr. Sehat thoroughly documents, the United States was a de facto Christian nation because Protestant Christians had significant control over law and governance and used it to enforce their morality. This reality also undermines a related and more implied myth of conservatives, that the United States was for the most part religiously homogenous. If that were true, as Dr. Sehat points out, the force of law would not have been necessary.

But the other critical point that Dr. Sehat makes concerns the kind of morality that this moral establishment was very inclined to enforce. The churches overwhelmingly supported slavery and the development of Jim Crow that followed it. They systematically engaged the legal system to deny religious freedom to all but Protestant Christians. They overwhelmingly opposed women’s suffrage, and they overwhelmingly aligned themselves with and theologically rationalized the worst abuses of corporate capitalism during the mid 19th and early 20th Centuries. And though Dr. Sehat does not mention this, he might have added that they supported and engaged in the massacre and displacement of Native Americans.

By any measure, this is a pretty sad record of moral commitments on the part of the churches, which helps explain, in part anyway, why Dr. Sehat’s book is so controversial. It is a social and political record that is also mirrored by Dr. Zinn regarding our alleged commitment to the equal rights enshrined in our founding documents. But the reason Dr. Sehat takes this approach to American history is similar to Zinn’s. It is not to condemn the government, or the churches, or romanticize the virtues of the victims, in Zinn's, case, or the dissenters in Sehat’s, but to advance the dialogue on who we want to be as a people and why, based on a broader and more accurate grasp of who we have actually been, and why. And as much as this is laudatory, and even critical to the future health of our country, this is where Dr. Sehat’s book is a bit wanting.

Both sides of this enduring struggle over the meaning and role of religion and the First Amendment tend to at least downplay, if not to ignore or outright deny this history of religious coercion in American politics. Dr. Sehat insists that the reality of this history must be faced if we are to move forward toward the promise of religious freedom for all Americans. He expresses that promise as the capacity to adjudicate between the diverse constituencies and competing ethical claims of our religiously plural culture, and find a moral framework that is acceptable in law. What I take that to mean is that the measure of our commitment to religious freedom consists in the extent to which we protect the rights of minorities, including those who claim no religious convictions or affiliations, and that the role of religion should be, for the most part, persuasive, and not coercive. This is how I understand Dr. Sehat’s reference to Michael Walzers “moral minimalism” over the “moral maximalism” of our history.

But the notion that religion should play an exclusively persuasive role, and indeed, can only play a persuasive role, has been around at least since the Enlightenment John Locke, and no one questions that these ideas heavily influenced the founders. So, it’s fair to wonder if Sehat’s use of the founders support for the moral function of the gospel makes it appear that they supported the legal enforcement of Protestant moral norms more than they actually did. On the other hand, we know from Gordon Wood in his “Radicalism of the American Revolution” that the founders were on the whole worried and distressed about what could replace religion as an agency or moral restraint. That the country, in Woods’s view, replaced it with little more than a passion for commerce and the dominance private interests, lends support to the notion that the founders failed to offer a solution to that problem, and lamented the result of it to the end of their days.

Of course, as Dr. Sehat so well documents, science, particularly the social sciences, helped to erode the metaphysical underpinnings of Protestant Christianity, first within academia, and then the courts, which in turn eventually helped to erode the moral authority of the moral establishment. But we should be clear about something important that is everywhere present but sometimes seems obscured in Dr. Sehat’s book. The dissenters were, and are, heard. This is not attributable just to science. It is also a function of an institutional framework that is, on occasion and often inconsistently, morally obligated to listen to dissenters and to change the social and political arrangements accordingly.

Dr. Sehat argues that the fitful inconsistency of the courts in the redress of legitimate dissention is a direct result of our failure as a culture to fully acknowledge just how coercive religion has been. But maybe it is more than that and maybe it will require more than a philosophy of “moral minimalism” to address. Perhaps, rather than a failure to acknowledge the coercive nature of religions, it is a persistent failure of our culture to commit fully to the value or principle of equality that was institutionalized by the Declaration of Independence. This is everywhere implied in the later chapters of Dr. Sehat’s book, particular in chapter 12 and his critique of how the election of Nixon inaugurated the culture wars. Equality is the fault line of the culture wars, as it was of the Civil War, women’s rights, Reconstruction, Plessy, Jim Crow, and Brown.

From the perspective of today’s Christian and social conservatives, equality has become the new tyranny. Perhaps this is what needs to be acknowledged and faced full on, and perhaps our unwillingness to confront this development helps explain why we have developed the culture we now find ourselves in, with conservatives, in this case, lamenting the exiling of religious influence in the public realm and more or less belligerently insisting on restoring it, and provoking the secular response with an equally belligerent insistence that the intrusion of religion in public affairs undermines the very rights it claims to support, which has, in the current climate, the unfortunate virtue of being true.

Perhaps, more than or in addition to a philosophy of “moral minimalism”, we need what we have apparently never really had, an adequate philosophy of and commitment to the meaning of equality, because there seems to be little doubt that we have been on a collision course with it since the ink dried on the Declaration of Independence. If, as J.R. Poole states in the opening paragraph of his “The Pursuit of Equality in American History”, the United States was “the first of any nation in history to base their existence on an abstract moral principle”, maybe it’s time to ask ourselves if we are really willing to follow through on it. Additionally, and perhaps relatedly, we need broader perspective on and substantive grasp of a “public realm”, a perspective that might be capable of taking moral precedence over a pursuit of private interests that Woods so effectively shows is almost totally bereft of any concern for or limitation by the interests of the body politic considered as a whole. There are, it would seem, many forms of Despotism, and it would appear that the unrelenting and unrelieved pursuit of wholly private interests has become one of them, perhaps the one that is now “our right, our duty, to throw off”, in order to “form a more perfect Union.”

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/americas-true-history-of-religious-tolerance-61312684/?no-ist
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/historyofus/web03/segment2.html

The Myth of American Religious Freedom

2015-09-25T14:32:21Z

Fjcasper: The Demythologizing of American History

{{Infobox book
| name = The Myth of American Religious Freedom
| author = David Sehat
| publisher = Oxford University Press
| pub_date = 2011
| pages = 356
| isbn = 0195388763
| image = [[File:mythfreedom.jpg|200px|alt=cover]]
}}

Reading Dr. Sehat's book, “The American Myth of Religious Freedom”, one can hear echoes of Howard Zinn's "A Peoples History of the United States". Where Dr. Zinn tells the history of the United States from, as he puts it, the perspective of its victims, Dr. Sehat tells it from the perspective of its dissenters. In both cases the result is not the history that most of us grew up with, the history that the government of most any nation tends to tell of itself, as Zinn has it, like that of a family, "a giant web of nationhood pretending to a common interest", a history that obscures, ignores, or even denies fierce disagreements and conflicts of interest.

This is the kind of history we find, according to Dr. Sehat, in the prevailing narrative on the meaning of religious freedom, and its role in our history. In what has become tantamount to a kind of orthodoxy, “Religious liberty, we are told, we is a hallmark of American democracy. Having been freed from state entanglements, so the story goes, religion flourished in the United States. It became central to reform movements such as abolition and women’s rights that sought to perfect the American project by expanding democracy” (Pg 2).

Dr. Sehat argues that this dominate narrative both obscures what actually happened, and is largely if not wholly responsible for the angry and irresolvable “culture wars” that persist to the present day. Both sides of the contemporary divide advance their cause in terms of three distinct but related myths, each of which flows from this narrative. The first, and perhaps primary myth, is that of church-state separation. Dr. Sehat begins his book with the story of a certain Charles B. Reynolds, a free thinker who was charged and convicted in 1886 by a New Jersey grand jury for the offense of blasphemy. How, he asks, can a man be convicted of such a charge nearly a hundred years after the ratification of the First Amendment? His answer, using original documents that show the protracted debate leading up to the version of the amendment bequeathed to us, is that, contrary to the insistence of today’s liberals, the First Amendment was itself a bitter compromise that did not create the separation advocated by Madison and Jefferson.

This is at least partly because, though the First Amendment prohibited the establishment of an official religion of the State, the moral aspects of the gospel were regarded as so important to the preservation of the State that legal enforcement of the moral code, the moral code of Protestant Christianity, became commonplace throughout much of U.S. history. This is the hub of what Dr. Sehat calls throughout his book “the moral establishment”, meaning the close, cooperative, and coordinated relationship between Protestant Christianity and the State toward the regulation and control of public and private behavior. This was done, moreover, not by persuasive means, but by force of law, and the blasphemy laws are a case in point. It was argued then that blasphemy undercut religion, and religion, in the view of virtually all the Founders, was critical for the support of morality.

The demolition of the second myth more or less follows from the demolition of the first, that religious believers fled the persecution in Europe in order to establish religious tolerance in the United States. If anything, and this is the view of other scholars, they came to establish their own theocracies (See links below). And of course, these collapse of these two myths lead to the collapse of the third myth enjoyed largely by religious conservatives, that American religious liberty is and always has been the cornerstone of American liberty. On the contrary. In many ways, as Dr. Sehat thoroughly documents, the United States was a de facto Christian nation because Protestant Christians had significant control over law and governance and used it to enforce their morality. This reality also undermines a related and more implied myth of conservatives, that the United States was for the most part religiously homogenous. If that were true, as Dr. Sehat points out, the force of law would not have been necessary.

But the other critical point that Dr. Sehat makes concerns the kind of morality that this moral establishment was very inclined to enforce. The churches overwhelmingly supported slavery and the development of Jim Crow that followed it. They systematically engaged the legal system to deny religious freedom to all but Protestant Christians. They overwhelmingly opposed women’s suffrage, and they overwhelmingly aligned themselves with and theologically rationalized the worst abuses of corporate capitalism during the mid 19th and early 20th Centuries. And though Dr. Sehat does not mention this, he might have added that they supported and engaged in the massacre and displacement of Native Americans.

By any measure, this is a pretty sad record of moral commitments on the part of the churches, which helps explain, in part anyway, why Dr. Sehat’s book is so controversial. It is a social and political record that is also mirrored by Dr. Zinn regarding our alleged commitment to the equal rights enshrined in our founding documents. But the reason Dr. Sehat takes this approach to American history is similar to Zinn’s. It is not to condemn the government, or the churches, or romanticize the virtues of the victims, in Zinn's, case, or the dissenters in Sehat’s, but to advance the dialogue on who we want to be as a people and why, based on a broader and more accurate grasp of who we have actually been, and why. And as much as this is laudatory, and even critical to the future health of our country, this is where Dr. Sehat’s book is a bit wanting.

Both sides of this enduring struggle over the meaning and role of religion and the First Amendment tend to at least downplay, if not to ignore or outright deny this history of religious coercion in American politics. Dr. Sehat insists that the reality of this history must be faced if we are to move forward toward the promise of religious freedom for all Americans. He expresses that promise as the capacity to adjudicate between the diverse constituencies and competing ethical claims of our religiously plural culture, and find a moral framework that is acceptable in law. What I take that to mean is that the measure of our commitment to religious freedom consists in the extent to which we protect the rights of minorities, including those who claim no religious convictions or affiliations, and that the role of religion should be, for the most part, persuasive, and not coercive. This is how I understand Dr. Sehat’s reference to Michael Walzers “moral minimalism” over the “moral maximalism” of our history.

But the notion that religion should play an exclusively persuasive role, and indeed, can only play a persuasive role, has been around at least since the Enlightenment John Locke, and no one questions that these ideas heavily influenced the founders. So, it’s fair to wonder if Sehat’s use of the founders support for the moral function of the gospel makes it appear that they supported the legal enforcement of Protestant moral norms more than they actually did. On the other hand, we know from Gordon Wood in his “Radicalism of the American Revolution” that the founders were on the whole worried and distressed about what could replace religion as an agency or moral restraint. That the country, in Woods’s view, replaced it with little more than a passion for commerce and the dominance private interests, lends support to the notion that the founders failed to offer a solution to that problem, and lamented the result of it to the end of their days.

Of course, as Dr. Sehat so well documents, science, particularly the social sciences, helped to erode the metaphysical underpinnings of Protestant Christianity, first within academia, and then the courts, which in turn eventually helped to erode the moral authority of the moral establishment. But we should be clear about something important that is everywhere present but sometimes seems obscured in Dr. Sehat’s book. The dissenters were, and are, heard. This is not attributable just to science. It is also a function of an institutional framework that is, on occasion and often inconsistently, morally obligated to listen to dissenters and to change the social and political arrangements accordingly.

Dr. Sehat argues that the fitful inconsistency of the courts in the redress of legitimate dissention is a direct result of our failure as a culture to fully acknowledge just how coercive religion has been. But maybe it is more than that and maybe it will require more than a philosophy of “moral minimalism” to address. Perhaps, rather than a failure to acknowledge the coercive nature of religions, it is a persistent failure of our culture to commit fully to the value or principle of equality that was institutionalized by the Declaration of Independence. This is everywhere implied in the later chapters of Dr. Sehat’s book, particular in chapter 12 and his critique of how the election of Nixon inaugurated the culture wars. Equality is the fault line of the culture wars, as it was of the Civil War, women’s rights, Reconstruction, Plessy, Jim Crow, and Brown.

From the perspective of today’s Christian and social conservatives, equality has become the new tyranny. Perhaps this is what needs to be acknowledged and faced full on, and perhaps our unwillingness to confront this development helps explain why we have developed the culture we now find ourselves in, with conservatives, in this case, lamenting the exiling of religious influence in the public realm and more or less belligerently insisting on restoring it, and provoking the secular response with an equally belligerent insistence that the intrusion of religion in public affairs undermines the very rights it claims to support, which has, in the current climate, the unfortunate virtue of being true.

Perhaps, more than or in addition to a philosophy of “moral minimalism”, we need what we have apparently never really had, an adequate philosophy of and commitment to the meaning of equality, because there seems to be little doubt that we have been on a collision course with it since the ink dried on the Declaration of Independence. If, as J.R. Poole states in the opening paragraph of his “The Pursuit of Equality in American History”, the United States was “the first of any nation in history to base their existence on an abstract moral principle”, maybe it’s time to ask ourselves if we are really willing to follow through on it. Additionally, and perhaps relatedly, we need broader perspective on and substantive grasp of a “public realm”, a perspective that might be capable of taking moral precedence over a pursuit of private interests that Woods so effectively shows is almost totally bereft of any concern for or limitation by the interests of the body politic considered as a whole. There are, it would seem, many forms of Despotism, and it would appear that the unrelenting and unrelieved pursuit of wholly private interests has become one of them, perhaps the one that is now “our right, our duty, to throw off”, in order to “form a more perfect Union.”

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/americas-true-history-of-religious-tolerance-61312684/?no-ist
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/historyofus/web03/segment2.html

Early America/Colonial History

2015-09-22T17:21:27Z

Fjcasper:

==Book Summaries==
* Anderson, [[Crucible of War|Crucible of War: The Seven Years' War and the Fate of Empire in British North America]], 2000
* Axtell, [[The Invasion Within|The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America]], 1985
* Bailyn, [[The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson]], 1974
* Bilder, [[The Transatlantic Constitution: Colonial Legal Culture and Empire]], 2004
* Breen, [[The Marketplace of Revolution]], 2005
* Bushman, [[From Puritan to Yankee|From Puritan to Yankee: Character and the Social Order in Connecticut]], 1980
* Bushman, [[The Refinement of America|The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities]], 1993
* Calloway, [[One Vast Winter Count|One Vast Winter Count: The Native American West before Lewis & Clark]], 2006
* Calloway, [[The American Revolution in Indian Country|The American Revolution in Indian Country: Crisis and Diversity in Native American Communities]], 1995
* Cronon, [[Changes in the Land|Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England]], 1983
* Dayton, [[Women Before the Bar|Women Before the Bar: Gender Law and Society in Connecticut]], 1995
* Dubois, [[Avengers of the New World|Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution]], 2004
* Eccles, [[France in America]], 1972
* Hancock, [[Citizens of the World|Citizens of the World: London Merchants and the Integration of the Atlantic Community]], 1997
* Hoffman, [[Princes of Ireland, Planters of Maryland|Princes of Ireland, Planters of Maryland: A Carroll Saga, 1500-1782]], 2002
* Isaac, [[The Transformation of Virginia 1740-1790]], 1982
* Kerber, [[Women of the Republic]], 1980
* Kramer, [[The People Themselves: Popular Constitutionalism and Judicial Review]] (2004)
* Kulikoff, [[From British Peasants to Colonial American Farmers]], 2000
* Kupperman, [[ Settling with the Indians|Settling with the Indians: The Meeting of English and Indian Cultures in America]], 1580-1640, 1980
* Lemon, [[The Best Poor Man's Country|The Best Poor Man's Country: A Geographical Study of Early Southeastern Pennsylvania]], 1972
* Morgan, E, [[American Slavery, American Freedom]], 1975
* Morgan, E, [[The Visible Saints]], 1975
* Morgan, P, [[Slave Counterpoint|Slave Counterpoint, Black Culture in the Eighteenth Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry]], 1998
* Newman, [[Parades and the Politics of the Street: Festive Culture in the Early American Republic]] (1997)
* Pybus, [[Epic Journeys of Freedom|Epic Journeys of Freedom: Runaway Slaves of the American Revolution and their Quest for Global Liberty]], 2006
* Rakove, [[Original Meanings – The Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution]], 1996
* Roeber, [[Palatines, Liberty, and Property|Palatines, Liberty, and Property: German Lutherans in Colonial British North America]], 1998
* Rorabaugh, [[The Alcoholic Republic|The Alcoholic Republic: An American Tradition]], 1981
* Sehat, [[The Myth of American Religious Freedom ]], 2011
* Slauter, [[The State as a Work of Art: The Cultural Origins of the Constitution]], 2009
* Usner, [[Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy]], 1992
* White, [[The Middle Ground|The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region]], 1991
* Wood, [[The Radicalism of the American Revolution]], 1992

File:Mythfreedom.jpg

2015-09-22T16:59:40Z

Fjcasper:

The Myth of American Religious Freedom

2015-09-22T16:58:42Z

Fjcasper: Created page with "{{Infobox book | name = The Myth of American Religious Freedom | author = David Sehat | publisher = Oxford University Press | pub_date = 2011 | pages..."

Early America/Colonial History

2015-09-22T16:44:24Z

Fjcasper:

==Book Summaries==
* Anderson, [[Crucible of War|Crucible of War: The Seven Years' War and the Fate of Empire in British North America]], 2000
* Axtell, [[The Invasion Within|The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America]], 1985
* Bailyn, [[The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson]], 1974
* Bilder, [[The Transatlantic Constitution: Colonial Legal Culture and Empire]], 2004
* Breen, [[The Marketplace of Revolution]], 2005
* Bushman, [[From Puritan to Yankee|From Puritan to Yankee: Character and the Social Order in Connecticut]], 1980
* Bushman, [[The Refinement of America|The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities]], 1993
* Calloway, [[One Vast Winter Count|One Vast Winter Count: The Native American West before Lewis & Clark]], 2006
* Calloway, [[The American Revolution in Indian Country|The American Revolution in Indian Country: Crisis and Diversity in Native American Communities]], 1995
* Cronon, [[Changes in the Land|Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England]], 1983
* Dayton, [[Women Before the Bar|Women Before the Bar: Gender Law and Society in Connecticut]], 1995
* Dubois, [[Avengers of the New World|Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution]], 2004
* Eccles, [[France in America]], 1972
* Hancock, [[Citizens of the World|Citizens of the World: London Merchants and the Integration of the Atlantic Community]], 1997
* Hoffman, [[Princes of Ireland, Planters of Maryland|Princes of Ireland, Planters of Maryland: A Carroll Saga, 1500-1782]], 2002
* Isaac, [[The Transformation of Virginia 1740-1790]], 1982
* Kerber, [[Women of the Republic]], 1980
* Kramer, [[The People Themselves: Popular Constitutionalism and Judicial Review]] (2004)
* Kulikoff, [[From British Peasants to Colonial American Farmers]], 2000
* Kupperman, [[ Settling with the Indians|Settling with the Indians: The Meeting of English and Indian Cultures in America]], 1580-1640, 1980
* Lemon, [[The Best Poor Man's Country|The Best Poor Man's Country: A Geographical Study of Early Southeastern Pennsylvania]], 1972
* Morgan, E, [[American Slavery, American Freedom]], 1975
* Morgan, P, [[Slave Counterpoint|Slave Counterpoint, Black Culture in the Eighteenth Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry]], 1998
* Newman, [[Parades and the Politics of the Street: Festive Culture in the Early American Republic]] (1997)
* Pybus, [[Epic Journeys of Freedom|Epic Journeys of Freedom: Runaway Slaves of the American Revolution and their Quest for Global Liberty]], 2006
* Rakove, [[Original Meanings – The Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution]], 1996
* Roeber, [[Palatines, Liberty, and Property|Palatines, Liberty, and Property: German Lutherans in Colonial British North America]], 1998
* Rorabaugh, [[The Alcoholic Republic|The Alcoholic Republic: An American Tradition]], 1981
* Slauter, [[The State as a Work of Art: The Cultural Origins of the Constitution]], 2009
* Usner, [[Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy]], 1992
* White, [[The Middle Ground|The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region]], 1991
* Wood, [[The Radicalism of the American Revolution]], 1992
* Sehat, [[The Myth of American Religious Freedom ]], 2011