Books like Religion and the Founding of the American Republic

This is the book that first piqued my interest in the often contentious relations between church and state in American political and constitutional history, and it inspired my lifelong study of this topic. Although not without its problems, Robert L. Cord’s book offered a bracing critique of the U.S. Supreme Court’s mid-20th-century version of “history,” which the justices said confirmed the founders’ intent to erect a “high and impregnable” wall of separation between church and state.

The book questioned the foundations of the Court’s church-state jurisprudence and invited readers to reconsider the founding generation’s prudential and constitutional views on church-state relations.

This is perhaps the most talked-about book of the last generation on church-state relations. It offers a sweeping survey of the conceptions and rhetoric of church-state separation in American political and legal traditions from colonial times to the mid-20th century.  

Philip Hamburger challenges the notion that “separation of church and state,” as developed in 20th-century jurisprudence, is a fundamental American principle deeply embedded in the nation’s political and constitutional traditions. Rather, he argues, the rhetoric of separation emerged from the cynical politics of late-18th-century disestablishment battles and was picked up in the next century by nativists seeking to marginalize Catholics (while preserving Protestant hegemony) and by liberals intent on establishing a secular polity. I read few pages in this book that failed to prompt reflection or challenge long-held assumptions.

This is a thoughtful, balanced study of the history, traditions, controversies, theories, and jurisprudence that shaped the American experiment in religious liberty. Originally published by John Witte, Jr., an eminent scholar of law and religion, this book is now in its 5th edition with two co-authors. In that lively experiment, Witte writes, all religious faiths “had to stand on their own feet and on an equal footing with all other faiths,” free from coercion by or the support of civil government.

Drawing on theological, political, legal, and comparative sources and methods, the authors masterfully distill a complex and controversial story into a lucid and engaging narrative. I frequently pull this book off the shelf for basic information, commentary, and insights on the “essential rights and liberties” of religion in America.

Mark David Hall’s engaging book revisits the persistent myth that the American founding was a strictly secular project. He investigates, among other topics, whether the American founders were, as is often claimed, all deists who framed a strictly secular or even “godless” Constitution. Did the founders, he asks, erect a high wall of separation between church and state, thereby restricting religion’s role in public life? 

These are not questions of merely academic interest; rather, as Hall explains, they have implications for law and public policy today. His insightful book compels lay readers and seasoned scholars alike to reconsider conventional views regarding religion’s role in American history and political tradition.  

In The Florentine Magnates we looked at Florence’s magnates, the powerful ruling class. Now we get a look at the people they lorded it over—the “popolo minuto” or the little people. We see them struggling, never able to get far enough ahead to get through a bad harvest, a year of terrible weather, or an epidemic with any security. Both church and commune recognized the need to come to the assistance of the masses of poor; this book tells us how they went about it and how successful they were (or weren’t). It deftly traces the role of religious confraternities in Florence’s charitable institutions. It’s been described as “one of the most detailed analyses of charity in late medieval Italy.”

Based largely on interviews conducted by Barnett in the 1980s, this book remains the standard text on the Confessing Church in Nazi Germany. Barnett situates the Confessing Church’s experience within the broader context of the Protestant Churches, which comprised two-thirds of Germany’s population in the Nazi era. Initially formed in response to the German Christian movement’s attempts to Nazify Christianity, the Confessing Church remained committed to the theological integrity and structural independence of the church. Yet Barnett argues that the Confessing Church was not a resistance movement against Nazism itself. Some were arrested and lost their lives, some made compromises with the Nazi regime, and some were antisemitic themselves. Their overlapping and clashing actions complicate the overall portrait of the Confessing Church. A distinctive feature of Barnett’s narrative is the attention given to women—church secretaries, wives of clergy, and the many women who played a greater role in maintaining the… show more.

In my opinion, Bill Taylor is the greatest living American historian of Mexico. He has written big books and small books, all brilliant, all canonical, and his latest is no exception. In this labor of love, he traces the lives of two charlatans wandering the Mexican countryside, living and suffering by their wits, usually impersonating priests. The stories, in themselves, go nowhere: our two lowlife protagonists bounce from town to town, jail to jail, and never learn a thing or reach an epiphany; but taken together they paint a picture of Spanish American society as exceptionally mobile, and dysfunctionally unstable. Marked by displacement, dislocation, and immigration, New Spain gave birth to the picaresque novel, rooted in an abiding sense that nothing was ever as it seemed. This is Taylor’s real reward: a glimpse at two unpolished, real-life pícaros in the historical record.

Huener has produced a definitive study of the Catholic Church in western Poland under German occupation. Identified by the Germans as the Reichsgau (district) Wartheland or Warthegau, it encompassed 45,000 square kilometers (roughly the size of Vermont and New Hampshire) with a “population of more than 4.9 million, including approximately 4.2 million Poles, 400,000 Jews, and 325,000 Germans.” Of this demographic, 3.8 million were Catholic and ninety percent were ethnic Poles. The German Reich incorporated the territory even though its borders remained guarded and not easily crossed. It included 1,023 parishes, served by 1,829 diocesan priests, 277 male religious, and 2,666 women religious.

Before World War II ended, the German occupiers would close more than ninety-seven percent of the churches, dissolve all Catholic organizations, deport, or imprison most women religious, and arrest more than 1,500 priests, of whom 815 they murdered directly or indirectly. In eighteen succinct and exceptionally well-written… show more.

I read this book years ago in high school, and my eyes were opened. The hero, Julien Sorel, is—like I was when I read the novel—naïve, confused, trusting, inexperienced, and prone to awkwardness and error. In short, I could relate to someone in circumstances (boarding school!) where I desperately needed someone who was highly imperfect with whom I could identify.

It might have been the first time I read an adult book where I felt I might actually meet the main character one day, walking down the street or even in the hallway.

Talk about a badass. In 1956, 16-year-old Ellery Schempp protested his school’s mandatory prayer and Bible-reading period by reading silently from the Koran. He was kicked out of class and sued his school district, insisting that the First Amendment barred it from promoting a particular religious creed. Eventually, in Abington v. Schempp, the Supreme Court agreed. But along the way, kids called Schempp and his family “Commies” (it was the 1950s, remember) and his principal tried to get Tufts University to rescind its admission offer to him. Earlier this year, the Supreme Court permitted a football coach and devout Christian to pray on the field after games. It’s worth asking what would have happened if—like Schempp—the coach was reciting a Muslim prayer instead.