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A historian and ordained Episcopal priest offers everything you need to know for shaping and defending your own beliefs on the role of religion in American life Filled with stories from America’s struggle for religious freedom most readers have never heard before and perfect for fans of Jesus and John Wayne and On Tyranny The 1st Amendment to the US Constitution codified the principle that government should play no role in favoring or supporting any religion, while allowing free exercise of all religions (including unbelief). More than 200 years later, the results from this experiment are overwhelming: The separation of church and state has shielded the government from religious factionalism, and the United States boasts a diverse religious culture unmatched in the world. But changes have been taking place at an accelerating pace in recent years. The current Supreme Court has shifted away from excluding the influence and practice of religion at public institutions and in our laws and policies, and moved dramatically toward protecting the inclusion and promotion of religion in publicly funded undertakings. Moreover, adherents to a Christian Nationalism ideology have grown more vocal and emboldened, and are increasingly moving into positions of power. Randall Balmer, one of the premier historians of religion in America, reviews both the history of the separation of church and state and various attempts to undermine that wall. Despite the fact that the 1st Amendment and the separation of church and state has served the nation remarkably well, he argues, its future is by no means assured.

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Review

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1. Before Reading

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3. Core Argument From Memory

• The book/section in one sentence:
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4. Argument Map From Memory

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Type Into Obsidian

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2. Clean Core Argument

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4. Connections

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5. Clean Pushback

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Retrieval Questions

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Flashcards / Atomic Recall

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24-hour recall notes:

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1 Week Later

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1-week recall notes:

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1 Month Later

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Scratchpad

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Simplified rule

Handwrite

Use handwriting for:

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These are the sections where the benefit comes from struggling to reconstruct the idea.

Type in Obsidian

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These are the sections where the benefit comes from searchability, linking, spaced review, and long-term organization.

Best workflow

Use this order:

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3. Type only the corrected, useful version into Obsidian.
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5. Review those questions later without looking.

Do not type all your handwritten notes into Obsidian. That turns the system into transcription work. Only transfer what is worth preserving, linking, or reviewing.

Notes

Executive Summary

Randall Balmer’s central argument is that the separation of church and state is not a secularist attack on religion but one of the most important achievements in American political and religious history. He calls it “America’s best idea” because it protects both sides: the state is protected from sectarian domination, and religion is protected from corruption by political power.

Balmer’s book is a historical defense of the First Amendment against two distortions: first, the claim that religion should be excluded entirely from public life; second, the claim that the United States was founded as, or should now become, a Christian nation. His position is that the founders created a constitutional order that allowed robust public religion without religious establishment. The genius of the system lies in religious liberty without religious privilege.

[!quote] Jefferson’s Wall
“wall of separation” — Page 7

Balmer’s historical case proceeds through colonial dissenters, Baptists, Jefferson, Madison, Washington, Adams, Mormons, Catholics, public-school conflicts, the Religious Right, and modern Christian nationalism. Across these episodes, he argues that religious establishment usually harms minority faiths, weakens civic equality, and compromises the integrity of religion itself.

Key Concepts

Separation of Church and State

The book’s organizing principle. For Balmer, separation does not mean religion disappears from public life. It means the government may not favor, fund, coerce, or officially identify itself with one religion.

• Protects the common good from religious factionalism.
• Protects faith from being turned into an instrument of the state.
• Prevents political majorities from imposing their religious preferences on minorities.

Establishment Clause

The First Amendment prohibition against government establishment of religion.

[!quote] First Amendment Formula
“make no law respecting an establishment of religion” — Page 10

Balmer treats this clause as the constitutional barrier against state-sponsored religion, public funding of sectarian institutions, official prayers, religious tests, and symbolic government endorsement of one faith.

Free Exercise Clause

The First Amendment guarantee that citizens may practice their religion without government interference, so long as civil law and others’ rights are not violated. Balmer stresses that free exercise and non-establishment are complementary, not contradictory.

Soul Liberty

A Baptist concept central to Balmer’s interpretation. Soul liberty means that every person stands directly before God and must not be coerced by church or state in matters of conscience. Roger Williams, Isaac Backus, John Leland, and George Washington Truett represent this tradition.

Toleration vs. Liberty

Balmer repeatedly distinguishes toleration from religious liberty.

• Toleration implies that a dominant authority graciously permits dissent.
• Liberty means religious freedom is an inherent right, not a concession.

This distinction is crucial to Madison, Leland, and the Baptist tradition.

Religious Pluralism

The colonies were too religiously diverse for a single established church to govern fairly. Balmer argues that the First Amendment emerged not from abstract secular theory alone but from the practical necessity of governing a plural society.

Christian Nationalism

Balmer defines Christian nationalism as the effort to identify the United States with Christianity politically, constitutionally, or symbolically. He argues that it is historically false, theologically weak, and constitutionally dangerous.

Religious Freedom as Rhetorical Weapon

In the later chapters, Balmer argues that some modern conservatives redefined religious freedom from protection of conscience into a claim of exemption from anti-discrimination laws, tax rules, and public accountability.

Key Terms

• Disestablishment — The removal of official state support, funding, or legal preference for a church or religion.
• Established Church — A church formally supported or privileged by government.
• Religious Assessment — A tax used to support religious teachers or churches.
• Sectarian — Tied to a specific religious denomination or tradition.
• Plural Marriage — Mormon term for polygamy.
• Blaine Amendments — State constitutional provisions restricting public funding of sectarian schools.
• Johnson Amendment — Federal tax-law rule barring 501(c)(3) organizations, including churches, from intervening in political campaigns.
• No-Aid Principle — The view that public funds should not support religious institutions.
• Providence — A broad religious term used by founders such as Washington to refer to divine guidance without endorsing a specific creed.
• Majoritarianism — The claim that because a majority holds a view, government may impose or endorse it.
• Christian Nation Amendment — Nineteenth-century proposals to formally identify the United States as Christian.
• Religious Right — A modern conservative political movement that mobilized evangelicals around issues such as schools, tax exemptions, abortion, and sexuality.

Preface

Main Ideas

Balmer opens by arguing that the First Amendment is under serious pressure from modern political and religious movements. He cites efforts to repeal the Johnson Amendment, redirect public money to religious schools, support school prayer, place religious symbols in public places, and weaken the historic Baptist defense of church-state separation.

The preface also establishes Balmer’s personal and scholarly standpoint. He is not writing as a legal scholar but as a historian of American religion. His goal is not technical constitutional analysis but a historical account of how church-state separation developed and why it matters.

Balmer’s core claim is that the First Amendment has served both government and religion well. It prevents religious factionalism from capturing the state and prevents faith from becoming corrupted by political power.

Key Concepts

• The wall of separation is traced back to Roger Williams before Jefferson popularized the phrase.
• The phrase church and state is a shorthand. Balmer emphasizes that American reality is more complicated: many religious groups interact with multiple layers of political authority.
• The book’s main foil is the claim that America “is, and always has been, a Christian nation.”

Supporting Evidence

Balmer points to colonial religious diversity: Puritans, Anglicans, Baptists, Dutch Reformed, Lutherans, Jews, Presbyterians, Catholics, Quakers, Mennonites, Moravians, and others. This diversity made establishment practically difficult and morally dangerous.

Chapter 1. Transatlantic Visionaries

Main Ideas

This chapter presents Roger Williams and William Penn as early architects of American religious liberty.

Williams began as a Puritan minister in Massachusetts but was banished for challenging the colony’s close union of church and civil authority. His exile led him to found Providence, Rhode Island, as a refuge for conscience. Balmer emphasizes that Williams wanted separation not because he despised religion but because he wanted to protect the “garden” of the church from the corrupting “wilderness” of worldly power.

Williams’s contribution was radical: he argued that civil government had no authority over conscience. Rhode Island became a “lively experiment” in religious toleration and democratic governance.

William Penn’s Pennsylvania provided a second model. A Quaker with strong English political connections, Penn founded Pennsylvania as a “holy experiment” in religious pluralism. His colony welcomed Quakers, Anglicans, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Baptists, Catholics, Moravians, Mennonites, Dunkers, Schwenckfelders, Swedes, Dutch, Germans, Scots, French, and others.

Key Concepts

• Lively experiment — Williams’s model of civil society without religious coercion.
• Holy experiment — Penn’s attempt to build a pluralistic colony grounded in liberty of conscience.
• Liberty of conscience — The right to believe, worship, or dissent without state punishment.
• Church as garden / world as wilderness — Williams’s metaphor for protecting religion from political contamination.

Supporting Evidence

Balmer uses Williams’s banishment, Rhode Island’s charter, Penn’s colony, and both men’s relatively humane treatment of Native Americans to show that religious liberty was connected to broader ideas of human dignity, democratic consent, and minority protection.

Chapter 2. The Flushing Remonstrance, William Livingston, and King’s College

Main Ideas

Balmer moves to New Netherland/New York and shows how religious diversity created early resistance to religious coercion.

The Flushing Remonstrance of 1657 is presented as one of the earliest American statements of religious liberty. The signers were not Quakers, but they defended Quakers against Dutch Reformed suppression by Pieter Stuyvesant. This matters because it shows religious liberty being defended across confessional lines.

John Bowne’s later appeal to the Dutch West India Company strengthened the principle that conscience should not be forced so long as public order was maintained.

The second half of the chapter focuses on William Livingston, who opposed Anglican attempts to shape King’s College, later Columbia University, into a sectarian institution supported by public lottery funds. Livingston did not oppose education or religion. He opposed the use of public money to privilege one denomination.

Key Concepts

• Flushing Remonstrance — A 1657 petition defending liberty of conscience for religious minorities.
• Public funding and sectarian control — The problem of using state resources to advance a particular religious body.
• Anticlerical republicanism — Livingston’s suspicion that religious establishments corrupt both church and state.

Supporting Evidence

Balmer uses the King’s College controversy to establish an early precedent: public funds should not be appropriated for sectarian education. Livingston’s victory becomes one of the “foundational bricks” in the wall of separation.

Chapter 3. Forging the First Amendment

Main Ideas

This chapter explains how James Madison came to draft the First Amendment despite initially opposing a Bill of Rights. Madison feared that listing rights might imply that unlisted rights were unprotected, and he doubted the practical force of mere “parchment barriers.” Political pressure, especially from Virginia Baptists and Antifederalists such as Patrick Henry and George Mason, forced him to support amendments.

Madison drew from multiple sources: the Virginia Declaration of Rights, state ratifying conventions, the Massachusetts Body of Liberties, the English Bill of Rights, Magna Carta, and Enlightenment thinkers such as John Locke.

Balmer treats the First Amendment’s religion clauses as historically extraordinary because they reject the normal Western pattern of identifying government with a preferred religion.

Key Concepts

• Parchment barriers — Written rights that may fail unless backed by political culture and institutional practice.
• Bill of Rights — The first ten amendments, ratified in 1791.
• Federal vs. state application — The First Amendment originally restricted Congress, not the states. Its application to states came later through the Fourteenth Amendment.

Supporting Evidence

Balmer shows that even after ratification, application remained contested. Examples include congressional chaplains and presidential fast days. Madison later considered congressional chaplains unconstitutional because tax money supported religion. Adams issued national fast days; Jefferson refused, arguing that the president had no authority to direct citizens’ religious exercises.

Chapter 4. George Washington and Divine Providence

Main Ideas

Balmer presents George Washington as personally reserved in matters of doctrine but strongly committed to religious toleration. Washington was baptized Anglican, served as a vestryman, and joined the Masons, but he was not conventionally pious and rarely participated in communion.

Washington’s importance lies in his broad public posture: he sought to be an impartial guardian of religious freedom. During the Quebec campaign, he instructed Benedict Arnold to respect Catholic practices and protect free exercise. In private hiring instructions for Mount Vernon, he said skilled workers could be Muslims, Jews, Christians, or atheists.

[!quote] Washington’s Religious Liberty
“gives to bigotry no sanction” — Page 32

Balmer also explains Washington’s frequent use of Providence. Washington could invoke divine guidance without specifying a sectarian God. This allowed him to express public religiosity without establishing a national creed.

Key Concepts

• Providence — A broad, nonsectarian language of divine guidance.
• Public religion without establishment — Washington modeled civic religious language while avoiding denominational favoritism.
• Religious toleration as military policy — Washington understood that liberty required respect for minority religious practice.

Supporting Evidence

Balmer discusses Washington’s letter to Touro Synagogue, his instructions to Arnold, his inclusive hiring language, and his providential interpretation of the Benedict Arnold/West Point affair.

Chapter 5. John Adams and the Treaty of Tripoli

Main Ideas

Balmer portrays John Adams as religiously serious but theologically unconventional. Adams was raised Congregationalist, became Unitarian, rejected the Trinity, and valued religion as a source of moral order.

The chapter’s major constitutional episode is the Treaty of Tripoli, negotiated under Washington and ratified under Adams. Its famous Article 11 declared that the United States was not founded on Christianity in any official legal sense.

[!quote] Treaty of Tripoli
“not in any sense founded on the Christian religion” — Page 36

Balmer uses this treaty to rebut Christian nationalist claims. The treaty was ratified unanimously by the Senate and publicly printed without major controversy, suggesting that the founding generation did not understand the United States as a legally Christian nation.

Key Concepts

• Unitarianism — A non-Trinitarian Christian tradition associated with Adams and later Jefferson’s religious outlook.
• Treaty of Tripoli — A diplomatic document used by Balmer as evidence against official Christian nationhood.
• Civil religion vs. establishment — Adams valued religion but did not make Christianity the constitutional foundation of the republic.

Supporting Evidence

Balmer contrasts Adams’s support for public religious observance, including fast days, with the Treaty of Tripoli’s explicit denial of Christian legal foundation. This illustrates the ambiguity of early American public religion: religious language was common, but establishment was rejected.

Chapter 6. James Madison and the Baptists

Main Ideas

This chapter is one of the book’s central arguments. Balmer presents Madison as deeply shaped by Baptist persecution in Virginia. As a young man, Madison heard Baptist preacher Elijah Craig preaching from jail. The experience helped turn him into a lifelong opponent of religious persecution.

Madison’s key insight was that religious diversity protects liberty. No single sect could dominate if many sects existed. Balmer connects this to Madison’s broader political theory of factions: pluralism can prevent tyranny.

Madison opposed Patrick Henry’s proposed tax for “Teachers of the Christian Religion.” Henry thought Christianity supported public morality and therefore deserved public support. Madison countered in his Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments that if the state could establish Christianity generally, it could later establish one Christian sect specifically.

Key Concepts

• Memorial and Remonstrance — Madison’s classic argument against religious assessments.
• Assessment Bill — Patrick Henry’s proposal to tax Virginians for Christian teachers.
• Freedom over toleration — Madison objected to the idea that liberty was something the state graciously allowed.
• Majority tyranny — The danger that a religious majority may oppress religious minorities.

Supporting Evidence

Balmer highlights the Baptist role in opposing religious assessments. Baptists saw state support for religion as contrary to the gospel and dangerous to conscience. Their alliance with Madison and Jefferson helped defeat Henry’s bill and set the stage for Jefferson’s Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom.

Chapter 7. Thomas Jefferson, the First Amendment, and the Mammoth Cheese

Main Ideas

Balmer uses Jefferson’s famous letter to the Danbury Baptists and the odd story of the Mammoth Cheese to show the alliance between Enlightenment rationalists and evangelical dissenters.

The Danbury Baptists wrote to Jefferson because they supported his defense of religious liberty and hoped he would extend disestablishment principles more broadly. Jefferson’s reply produced the enduring metaphor of a wall of separation between church and state.

The Mammoth Cheese, produced by Baptists in Cheshire, Massachusetts, was a political-theological symbol: dissenting Baptists used a giant wheel of cheese to honor Jefferson as a defender of religious liberty against New England Congregationalist establishment.

Balmer emphasizes the unlikely coalition behind American religious liberty:

• Jefferson: Enlightenment rationalist, deist or Unitarian-leaning, skeptical of clerical power.
• Baptists: evangelical dissenters who wanted to protect conscience and the church from state control.

Key Concepts

• Danbury Baptists — Connecticut Baptists who prompted Jefferson’s wall-of-separation letter.
• Jefferson Bible — Jefferson’s edited version of the Gospels, stripped of miracles and supernatural claims.
• Mammoth Cheese — Symbol of Baptist support for Jeffersonian disestablishment.
• Secular-evangelical alliance — Balmer’s key interpretive framework for the First Amendment.

Supporting Evidence

Balmer shows that Jefferson refused to issue fast-day proclamations because he believed the president had only civil authority. Jefferson’s religious rationalism differed sharply from Baptist evangelicalism, but both sides agreed that government should not direct religion.

Chapter 8. Disestablishment in Connecticut

Main Ideas

This short chapter shows that disestablishment did not happen all at once. Although the First Amendment restricted federal establishment, states such as Connecticut retained religious establishments into the nineteenth century.

Connecticut’s Congregationalist establishment lost power due to social change, denominational growth, political opposition, and religious revival. Dissenting groups objected to having to support Congregational churches or obtain certificates to direct their taxes elsewhere.

Balmer argues that disestablishment ultimately benefited religion. Once churches lost state support, they had to rely on voluntary commitment, revival, persuasion, and institutional vitality.

Key Concepts

• State establishment — Religious establishment at the state level after federal disestablishment.
• Voluntary religion — Religion sustained by persuasion and commitment rather than taxation.
• Second Great Awakening context — Revival energy helped make disestablished religion more dynamic.

Supporting Evidence

Balmer notes that some clergy later viewed disestablishment as the best thing that happened to Connecticut religion because it forced churches to depend on their own resources and on God rather than the state.

Chapter 9. Designating the United States as a “Christian Nation”

Main Ideas

This chapter examines nineteenth-century efforts to amend the Constitution to identify the United States formally as Christian. Balmer frames these efforts as reactions against the Constitution’s secular structure.

After the Civil War, groups such as the National Reform Association sought constitutional language acknowledging Jesus Christ as ruler of the nation. Supporters believed America’s public life should reflect Christianity through Sabbath laws, Bible reading in schools, and Christian moral legislation.

Opponents argued that such amendments would violate the foundational principle of religious liberty and create religious tests. Jewish groups, secularists, Baptists, and other defenders of separation resisted these proposals.

Key Concepts

• Christian Nation Amendment — Proposed constitutional amendment declaring the United States Christian.
• National Reform Association — Organization that promoted constitutional Christianization.
• Religious test — A political or legal requirement tied to religious belief.
• Civil religion escalation — The transformation of general religious language into formal Christian constitutional identity.

Supporting Evidence

Balmer shows that these efforts repeatedly failed, but they reveal an ongoing tension in American history: public Christianity was culturally powerful, yet constitutional establishment remained forbidden.

Chapter 10. School Wars and the Blaine Amendments

Main Ideas

Balmer explains the nineteenth-century public-school battles, especially conflicts involving Catholics and Protestants. Public schools often claimed to be nonsectarian, but in practice they were broadly Protestant: they used the King James Bible, Protestant hymns, and Protestant assumptions about morality and citizenship.

Catholics objected that “public” education was effectively Protestant education. They built parochial schools and sought public funding. Protestants and nativists resisted, fearing Catholic influence and papal authority.

James G. Blaine proposed a federal constitutional amendment to prevent public funds from supporting sectarian schools. The federal amendment failed, but many states adopted similar provisions, now called Blaine Amendments.

Key Concepts

• School wars — Conflicts over Bible reading, public funding, Catholic schools, and Protestant public education.
• Blaine Amendments — State-level bans on public funding for sectarian education.
• Nonsectarian Protestantism — Protestant norms presented as neutral civic religion.
• Nativism — Anti-immigrant, often anti-Catholic political sentiment.

Supporting Evidence

Balmer treats Blaine as morally complicated. The amendments emerged partly from anti-Catholic prejudice, but they also defended the important First Amendment principle that taxpayer funds should not support sectarian education.

Chapter 11. Mormons and the “Divine Origins” of the Constitution

Main Ideas

Balmer uses Mormon history to explore the tension between free exercise and civil law. The Latter-day Saints suffered severe persecution: displacement from New York, Ohio, Missouri, and Illinois; Joseph Smith’s murder; the Missouri Extermination Order; and federal conflict over polygamy.

The central legal issue was whether religious belief could exempt believers from generally applicable law. In Reynolds v. United States, the Supreme Court upheld anti-bigamy law, rejecting the claim that religious doctrine could make each citizen “a law unto himself.”

Balmer then identifies an irony: despite intense conflict with the federal government, Mormons developed a strong theology of the Constitution’s divine origin. The Doctrine and Covenants presents the Constitution as divinely established through inspired founders.

Key Concepts

• Free exercise limits — Religious belief is protected, but not every religiously motivated act is immune from law.
• Reynolds v. United States — Supreme Court case upholding anti-polygamy law.
• Divinely inspired Constitution — Mormon belief that God raised up the founders and Constitution for providential purposes.
• Persecuted minority patriotism — Mormon reverence for a constitutional order that also constrained and punished them.

Supporting Evidence

Balmer traces Mormon conflict from Joseph Smith through Brigham Young, the Morrill Anti-Bigamy Act, the Edmunds Act, the Edmunds-Tucker Act, the Woodruff Manifesto, Utah statehood, and later political controversies involving B. H. Roberts, Reed Smoot, George Romney, and Mitt Romney.

Chapter 12. The Johnson Amendment and the First Amendment

Main Ideas

This chapter examines the Johnson Amendment, which prohibits 501(c)(3) nonprofits, including churches, from intervening in political campaigns.

Balmer explains that Lyndon Johnson introduced the amendment in 1954 during a tough Senate reelection campaign. It was not originally aimed primarily at churches but at tax-exempt organizations engaging in partisan political activity against him.

Balmer defends the amendment as consistent with the First Amendment because it preserves a boundary between tax-subsidized nonprofit status and partisan politics. Churches remain free to speak on moral and political issues, but they may not endorse or oppose candidates while retaining special tax benefits.

Key Concepts

• 501(c)(3) — Tax-exempt nonprofit status for charitable, educational, and religious organizations.
• Candidate intervention — Endorsing or opposing political candidates.
• Tax exemption as public subsidy — Balmer treats tax-exempt status as a public benefit that can legitimately carry restrictions.
• Church politicization — The danger that churches become partisan political machines.

Supporting Evidence

Balmer discusses later attempts, especially by Donald Trump and religious conservatives, to repeal or weaken the Johnson Amendment. He argues that removing it would endanger religious integrity by drawing churches deeper into partisan conflict.

Chapter 13. John F. Kennedy and School Prayer

Main Ideas

Balmer links two major church-state issues of the Kennedy era: Catholic presidential politics and school prayer.

First, Kennedy’s 1960 presidential campaign forced him to confront anti-Catholic suspicion. In his Houston speech to Protestant ministers, Kennedy insisted that he was not the Catholic candidate for president but the Democratic nominee who happened to be Catholic. He defended church-state separation as a protection for both Catholics and non-Catholics.

Second, Balmer discusses Engel v. Vitale, the 1962 Supreme Court case striking down a state-composed school prayer. The Court ruled that government may not compose official prayers for public-school children. Public backlash was intense; many Americans thought the Court had expelled God from public life.

Kennedy responded carefully. He did not attack the Court. Instead, he encouraged families to pray at home and churches to take religious responsibility seriously.

Key Concepts

• Engel v. Vitale — Supreme Court case invalidating official school prayer.
• Anti-Catholicism — Suspicion that Catholic politicians would obey the Vatican over the Constitution.
• Private prayer vs. state prayer — Balmer’s key distinction: individuals may pray, but government may not prescribe prayer.
• Kennedy’s church-state liberalism — A public defense of separation from a religious minority’s perspective.

Supporting Evidence

Balmer uses Kennedy’s Houston speech, the school-prayer controversy, Gallup opposition to the Court ruling, and Protestant anxiety over declining cultural dominance.

Chapter 14. “Soul Liberty,” Roy’s Rock, and the Need for More Baptists

Main Ideas

Balmer returns to the Baptist tradition and argues that America needs “real, traditional Baptists” because historic Baptists were among the strongest defenders of religious liberty.

He opens with a modern Florida school-board prayer episode in Okaloosa County. When a non-Christian participant invoked many deities, the Christian majority reacted with outrage. Balmer uses the scene to demonstrate why government-sponsored prayer is dangerous: once the state opens the door to prayer, majorities expect their own prayer to dominate.

Balmer then traces Baptist defenders of church-state separation:

• Roger Williams — Liberty of conscience and the wall of separation.
• Isaac Backus — Opposition to Massachusetts religious taxes.
• John Leland — Alliance with Jefferson and Madison.
• George Washington Truett — Twentieth-century Baptist defense of religious liberty.

The chapter also discusses Roy Moore, the Alabama judge who installed a Ten Commandments monument in a judicial building. Balmer sees Moore’s actions as a clear establishment violation because the state privileged one religious tradition in a public legal space.

Key Concepts

• Soul liberty — The Baptist principle that conscience belongs to God, not the state.
• Majoritarian prayer problem — Public prayer tends to become the prayer of the majority.
• Ten Commandments monument — Symbolic establishment when placed by state authority.
• Traditional Baptist separationism — The older Baptist commitment to keeping church and state apart.

Supporting Evidence

Balmer uses the Okaloosa County episode and Roy Moore’s Ten Commandments monument to show that majorities often mistake religious liberty for the right to impose their own symbols and prayers through government.

Chapter 15. The Battle Cry of “Religious Freedom”

Main Ideas

This chapter explains how the meaning of “religious freedom” shifted during the rise of the Religious Right.

Balmer argues that earlier evangelicals often used majoritarian arguments: because most Americans were Christian, public institutions should reflect Christianity. In the 1970s, however, conservative evangelicals increasingly portrayed themselves as embattled minorities defending religious freedom against government intrusion.

Balmer emphasizes that the catalyst for evangelical political mobilization was not initially abortion but federal pressure on racially discriminatory private Christian schools. After court and IRS action threatened the tax-exempt status of segregated schools, leaders such as Jerry Falwell and Paul Weyrich mobilized evangelicals around the defense of “Christian schools.”

The chapter argues that “religious freedom” was often deployed to defend discriminatory institutions at taxpayer expense. Balmer connects this pattern to later claims involving same-sex couples and contraception coverage.

Key Concepts

• Religious Right — Conservative evangelical political movement formed in the 1970s.
• Segregation academies — Private schools founded partly to avoid desegregated public schools.
• Tax exemption controversy — Federal scrutiny of discriminatory religious schools.
• Religious liberty as exemption — The use of religious freedom claims to avoid generally applicable civil-rights rules.

Supporting Evidence

Balmer discusses Bob Jones University, IRS action, Jerry Falwell, Paul Weyrich, Jimmy Carter’s administration, and later Supreme Court controversies such as Masterpiece Cakeshop and Burwell v. Hobby Lobby.

Chapter 16. The Case Against Christian Nationalism

Main Ideas

The final chapter directly attacks Christian nationalism. Balmer begins with Donald Trump’s promotion of the “God Bless the USA Bible,” which bundled the King James Bible with the Constitution, Declaration of Independence, and Pledge of Allegiance. For Balmer, this fusion of scripture and national documents symbolizes the central error of Christian nationalism.

Balmer argues against Christian nationalism on three grounds:

1. Historical — The United States was not founded as a legally Christian nation. The Constitution contains no establishment of Christianity, and the Treaty of Tripoli explicitly denied that the government was founded on Christianity.
2. Constitutional — The First Amendment forbids religious establishment and protects minority rights against majority religious coercion.
3. Theological — Christianity itself does not require or support state capture. Jesus said his kingdom was not of this world, and early Christians lived under civil authority without seeking theocratic control.

Balmer also argues that Christian nationalism is rooted less in theology than in fear: fear of pluralism, demographic change, loss of cultural dominance, immigration, racial equality, and secularization.

Key Concepts

• Christian nationalism — The fusion of Christian identity with national identity and state power.
• Majoritarian fallacy — The idea that majority religion should determine public law.
• White evangelical anxiety — Balmer links Christian nationalism to perceived status loss.
• Constitutional patriotism — Balmer’s alternative: loyalty to American principles, especially liberty and equality, rather than religious domination.

Supporting Evidence

Balmer uses nineteenth-century Christian nation amendments, Lincoln’s caution, Jefferson and Madison’s writings, the Treaty of Tripoli, Jesus’ statement about his kingdom, and modern Trump-era religious nationalism.

Afterword

Main Ideas

Balmer concludes that separation of church and state was both unprecedented and necessary. The colonies were too diverse for religious establishment to work without conflict. The First Amendment created a framework in which multiple religious communities could flourish without state favoritism.

He also stresses that imperfect historical actors sometimes advanced sound principles. Blaine was shaped by anti-Catholic nativism, but Blaine Amendments still defended the principle that public money should not fund sectarian education. Lyndon Johnson was not primarily motivated by theological purity, but the Johnson Amendment still helped protect churches from partisan capture.

Balmer’s concluding warning is that the First Amendment has been resilient but not self-enforcing. It requires defenders. Historically, Baptists often played that role, but Balmer argues that many modern Baptists, especially after the conservative turn in the Southern Baptist Convention, abandoned their own church-state heritage.

Key Concepts

• Historical contingency — Good constitutional principles can emerge from mixed motives.
• Default Christianity — The tendency to treat Christianity as the assumed norm of American identity.
• Vigilance — The separation of church and state survives only if citizens actively defend it.

Critical Analysis

Methodology

Balmer’s method is historical and narrative rather than doctrinally legal. This is both a strength and a limitation.

Strengths

• Broad chronological sweep: The book connects colonial toleration, founding-era constitutionalism, nineteenth-century school conflicts, Mormon persecution, Kennedy-era prayer cases, the Religious Right, and modern Christian nationalism.
• Strong use of religious history: Balmer is especially effective when showing how minority religious groups — Baptists, Quakers, Jews, Catholics, Mormons — experienced establishment differently from dominant Protestants.
• Clear correction of simplistic claims: The book forcefully challenges the claim that America was straightforwardly founded as a Christian nation.
• Theological nuance: Balmer avoids the crude view that separation is anti-religious. His argument is that separation often protects religion.

Weaknesses and Limitations

• Legal analysis is secondary: Balmer explicitly says he is not writing as a legal scholar. Readers looking for detailed constitutional doctrine, originalist arguments, or Supreme Court jurisprudence will need supplementary legal sources.
• Modern conservative arguments are treated skeptically: Balmer is persuasive in showing how “religious freedom” has been used opportunistically, but he gives less sustained attention to stronger conservative legal arguments about compelled speech, institutional autonomy, or free exercise burdens.
• Christian nationalism is broadly drawn: His critique is forceful, but the category can cover many different positions, from symbolic civil religion to explicit theocratic politics. The book could benefit from sharper typology.
• Less attention to progressive church-state problems: Balmer criticizes both left and right in the preface, but the main argumentative burden falls on the Religious Right and Christian nationalism. Progressive uses of state power against religious institutions receive comparatively less analysis.
• Race is important but unevenly developed: The Religious Right chapter strongly connects evangelical mobilization to segregation academies, but the broader racial dimensions of American church-state history could be expanded.

Strength of Conclusions

Balmer’s central conclusion is strong: American religious liberty has historically depended on both free exercise and non-establishment. His evidence shows that religious minorities often needed separation most, and that religious majorities often redefined liberty as privilege.

His argument is strongest when showing that state favoritism corrupts religion and alienates minorities. It is less complete when addressing modern edge cases where religious liberty claims involve genuine conflicts between conscience, anti-discrimination law, education funding, and administrative regulation.

Biases or Authorial Commitments

Balmer writes as a defender of church-state separation and an opponent of the Religious Right. His commitments are clear. He is not neutral toward Christian nationalism, voucher programs, sectarian public funding, or efforts to repeal the Johnson Amendment.

That said, his position is not secularist in the anti-religious sense. He repeatedly argues that separation protects faith. His historical sympathies are especially with Baptists, dissenters, religious minorities, and founders such as Madison and Jefferson.

Questions for Reflection

1. Why does Balmer argue that separation of church and state protects religion rather than weakens it?
2. How does the distinction between toleration and liberty change the way we understand religious freedom?
3. Was the First Amendment primarily a philosophical achievement, a practical response to pluralism, or a political compromise among competing religious groups?
4. How does Balmer’s account complicate the claim that the United States was founded as a Christian nation?
5. What does the history of Baptists in America reveal about the difference between minority religious politics and majority religious politics?
6. When does a religious freedom claim protect conscience, and when does it become a demand for public subsidy or exemption from neutral law?
7. Is Christian nationalism best understood as a theological movement, a political movement, or a reaction to cultural status loss?

Connections

Influential Thinkers

• Roger Williams — Baptist founder in America; liberty of conscience; wall of separation.
• William Penn — Quaker founder of Pennsylvania; religious pluralism; holy experiment.
• John Locke — Natural rights and religious toleration.
• James Madison — Memorial and Remonstrance; First Amendment architect.
• Thomas Jefferson — Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom; Danbury Baptist letter.
• George Washington — Public religious tolerance; providential language.
• John Adams — Religious morality, Unitarianism, Treaty of Tripoli.
• John Leland — Baptist preacher; ally of Jefferson; opponent of establishment.
• Isaac Backus — Baptist advocate against religious taxation.
• George Washington Truett — Baptist defender of religious liberty.
• John F. Kennedy — Catholic president; Houston speech; church-state separation.
• Jerry Falwell — Religious Right leader.
• Paul Weyrich — Conservative strategist behind Religious Right mobilization.
• Roy Moore — Ten Commandments monument controversy.
• Donald Trump — Modern symbolic fusion of Bible, nation, and politics.

Historical Movements and Episodes

• Protestant Reformation
• Puritan migration to New England
• Rhode Island’s “lively experiment”
• Pennsylvania’s “holy experiment”
• Flushing Remonstrance
• Virginia disestablishment
• Baptist resistance to religious taxation
• First Amendment ratification
• Connecticut disestablishment
• Christian Nation amendment campaigns
• Nineteenth-century public-school conflicts
• Catholic parochial-school movement
• Blaine Amendments
• Mormon conflicts with the federal government
• Kennedy Catholic controversy
• School-prayer litigation
• Rise of the Religious Right
• Christian school tax-exemption controversies
• Modern Christian nationalism

Related Works to Read Next

• Roger Williams, The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution
• John Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration
• James Madison, Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments
• Thomas Jefferson, Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom
• Philip Hamburger, Separation of Church and State
• Steven K. Green, The Second Disestablishment
• Mark A. Noll, America’s God
• John Fea, Was America Founded as a Christian Nation?
• Kevin M. Kruse, One Nation Under God
• Andrew L. Seidel, The Founding Myth
• Daniel L. Dreisbach, Thomas Jefferson and the Wall of Separation Between Church and State

Highlights

Epigraph

• I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should “make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” thus building a wall of separation between Church & State.—Thomas Jefferson, January 1, 1802 (Page iii, Loc 44)

Preface

• First Amendment is part of the genius of American life. In fact, I consider it to be America’s best idea. It has protected the common good from religious factionalism, and it has ensured the integrity of faith from too close an alliance with the state. (Page xii, Loc 74)
• Most often, however, when historians retrace the steps of religious disestablishment in America their paths lead to Roger Williams, founder of the Baptist tradition in America, and Thomas Jefferson, one of the nation’s founders and the country’s third president. (Page xiii, Loc 84)
• One of the characteristics of the Atlantic seaboard during the colonial period was its religious diversity, ranging from Puritans in New England to Anglicans in the South. In between, groups as diverse as Baptists in Rhode Island, the Dutch Reformed in the Middle Colonies, Swedish Lutherans in Delaware, Jews in New York City, Presbyterians in New Jersey, Catholics in Maryland, and Quakers in New Jersey and Pennsylvania all established a toehold on the religious landscape of colonial America. In addition, Pennsylvania alone sheltered diverse religious minorities such as Lutherans, Mennonites, Moravians, and Schwenckfelders. (Page xiv, Loc 88)
• Amid all this diversity and persecution, some colonists began to warn publicly against the dangers of religious establishment. “It is not to be doubted,” William Livingston, a graduate of Yale, activist in New York politics, and later the first governor of New Jersey, wrote in 1768, that “every man who wishes to be free will by all lawful ways in his power oppose the establishment of any one denomination in America.” Remarking on “the inconveniences and mischiefs of religious establishments,” Livingston concluded: “Religious establishments are very hardly kept from great corruption.” (Page xv, Loc 103)
• seal for the new nation, the committee recommended E Pluribus Unum—out of many, (Page xvi, Loc 109)
• The phrase church and state remains useful, but what we really have is multiple religious movements and organizations confronting several layers and levels of political movements and structures. (Page xvi, Loc 115)

1. Transatlantic Visionaries

• Roger Williams, (Page 1, Loc 137)
• part of the “Great Migration” of Puritans seeking refuge from the religious oppressions of William Laud, bishop of London, and the English Crown. (Page 1, Loc 137)
• Williams sought to protect religion from the depredations of the state, and he saw strict separation as the way to accomplish this. (Page 3, Loc 157)
• Rhode Island would become a laboratory not only for liberty of conscience on religious matters but also for democracy itself. (Page 4, Loc 171)
• In 1681, Penn, a Quaker, secured a royal charter to form “an ample colony… in the parts of America not yet cultivated and planted.” As proprietor, Penn drew on his extensive contacts with religious dissenters in England and Europe to lure “sober people of all sorts” to his “holy experiment” in religious toleration. (Page 5, Loc 184)
• Both Penn’s “holy experiment” and William’s “lively experiment” provided models for the configuration of church and state. (Page 6, Loc 194)
• The governments of both Penn and Williams were notable for their humane treatment of Native Americans. (Page 7, Loc 200)
• The transatlantic visionaries Roger Williams and William Penn bequeathed much to American life, especially their notions about religious toleration and liberty of conscience, which they linked with democracy itself. Those ideas, leavened by John Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration, published in 1689, provided a template for religious disestablishment and the configuration of church and state formulated by the founders in the First Amendment. (Page 7, Loc 204)

2. The Flushing Remonstrance, William Livingston, and King’s College

• When the director-general of the colony, Pieter Stuyvesant, sought to quash religious expressions other than the Dutch Reformed Church, especially the Society of Friends (Quakers), the citizens of Flushing responded on December 27, 1657, with the Flushing Remonstrance, one of the earliest statements of religious liberty in the American colonies. (Page 9, Loc 213)
• Building on New York’s long history of religious diversity dating to the seventeenth century, Livingston’s opposition to the use of public funds for a sectarian school established an important precedent for church–state relations. Livingston, who became the first governor of New Jersey, may have considered it a modest victory at the time, but he nevertheless contributed one of the foundational bricks to the wall of separation between church and state. (Page 15, Loc 270)

3. Forging the First Amendment

• acting on his long-standing suspicion of religious establishments, he wanted to ensure that the new nation would not move in that direction. (Page 17, Loc 284)
• Madison was certainly influenced by Jefferson, a strong advocate for civil liberties, who directed Madison to various Enlightenment sources, including John Locke. (Page 17, Loc 286)
• The new Bill of Rights, like the Constitution itself, did not please everyone. “Many pious people wish the name of the Supreme Being had been introduced somewhere in the new Constitution,” Benjamin Rush wrote in 1789, the year Congress approved the Bill of Rights. (Page 18, Loc 294)
• Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868, initiated that process—but even on the federal level, some confusion remained about exactly where to draw this line of separation between church and state. (Page 19, Loc 304)
• When John Adams, the nation’s second president, declared a national day of fasting, riots broke out among some of the smaller religious groups whose members feared that the government was overstepping its bounds. (Page 19, Loc 309)

4. George Washington and Divine Providence

• In matters of faith, Washington, who was not conventionally religious, nevertheless understood the importance of religious toleration. (Page 21, Loc 329)
• Like other founders, especially Thomas Jefferson, Washington disliked religious factionalism. “Of all the animosities which have existed among mankind, those which are caused by difference of sentiments in religion appear to be the most inveterate and distressing, and ought most to be deprecated,” Washington wrote in 1792. “I was in hopes that the enlightened and liberal policy, which has marked the present age, would at least have reconciled Christians of every denomination so far that we should never again see the religious disputes carried to such a pitch as to endanger the peace of society.” (Page 23, Loc 348)
• Despite his relative lack of piety, however, Washington understood the importance of religious freedom. “The citizens of the United States of America have the right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy worthy of imitation,” he wrote to members of Touro Synagogue in Newport, Rhode Island. “It is now no more that toleration is spoken of as if it were by the indulgence of one class of citizens that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights, for happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves (Page 26, Loc 371)

5. John Adams and the Treaty of Tripoli

• Tunis alone harbored twelve thousand Christian slaves. (Page 30, Loc 407)
• anyone arguing that the United States is a Christian nation would need to explain away both Article 11 of the Treaty of Tripoli as well as the Senate’s unanimous ratification of the treaty. (Page 31, Loc 423)
• Though similar to the 1797 Treaty of Tripoli, the new treaty did not replicate Article 11, likely because Jefferson believed that the First Amendment had already settled—in the negative—the matter of the nation’s supposed Christian origins. (Page 32, Loc 435)

6. James Madison and the Baptists

• lifelong advocate for religious liberty. “That diabolical, hell-conceived principle of persecution rages,” Madison wrote several years later. “There are, at present, in the adjacent county not less than five or six well-meaning men in close jail for publishing their religious sentiments,” he continued. “I must beg you to pity me, and pray for liberty of conscience to all.” Like other founders, Madison considered religion conducive to “the moral order of the world and to the happiness of man,” but he opposed the establishment of religion by the state. (Page 34, Loc 455)
• Madison also recognized the utility of religious diversity. “Freedom arises from the multiplicity of sects, which pervades America and which is the best and only security for religious liberty in any society,” he declared to the Virginia Convention in 1778. “For where there is such a variety of sects, there cannot be a majority of any one sect to oppress and persecute the rest.” (Page 35, Loc 461)
• thought that Mason’s proposal did not go far enough. The notion of toleration, in fact, struck Madison as condescending, even paternalistic, because it inferred that the entity granting toleration—whether religion, government, or an individual—had the authority to grant toleration. Madison disagreed, recognizing that if toleration can be granted, it could also be withdrawn. (Page 36, Loc 474)
• Freedom, Madison insisted in agreement with Leland, was superior to toleration, a principle that Madison and the founders would eventually enshrine into the First Amendment. “I will not condescend to employ the word Toleration,” John Adams reflected many years later. “I assert that unlimited freedom of religion, consistent with morals and property, is essential to the progress of society and the amelioration of the condition of mankind.” (Page 37, Loc 485)
• Madison and Jefferson, both of whom opposed Henry’s designation of Christianity as the state religion, faced an uphill political battle. Fearing that the assembly would quickly pass the bill, Madison prevailed on the legislators to postpone action to allow the proposal to circulate among the people of Virginia. (Page 39, Loc 502)
• Madison himself was hardly silent on the matter. He drafted an argument against Henry’s bill, his Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments, which would become a classic statement of opposition to religious establishment and a defense of religious liberty. “Who does not see that the same authority by which we can establish Christianity, in exclusion of all other religions, may establish with the same ease any particular sect of Christians, in exclusion of all other sects?” Madison asked. The majoritarianism implicit in Henry’s argument that Christianity should receive state support because it was the faith of a majority of Virginians, Madison argued, was perilous because of the fact that “the majority may trespass on the rights of the minority.” Madison’s Memorial and Remonstrance linked religious establishments with the sort of tyranny that the colonists had only recently resisted. “Torrents of blood have been spilt in the old world, by vain attempts of the secular arm to extinguish religious discord, by proscribing all difference in religious opinions,” he wrote. Historically, religious establishments “have been seen upholding the thrones of political tyranny,” he argued; “in no instance have they been seen the guardians of the liberties of the people.” Religion, Madison wrote, “must be left to the conviction and conscience of every man; and it is the right of every man to exercise it as these may dictate.” (Page 40, Loc 517)
• The measure failed, and the following year, on January 16, 1786, Virginia adopted Jefferson’s Statute for Religious Freedom, which ensured that “no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever” and promised that “all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of religion.” (Page 42, Loc 530)
• Years later, Madison reflected on the benefits of church–state separation. Both personal piety and civil society, he wrote in 1819, had been “manifestly increased by the total separation of the Church from the State.” (Page 42, Loc 537)

7. Thomas Jefferson, the First Amendment, and the Mammoth Cheese

• Jefferson had long been suspicious of religious establishment. Many of the colonies had persisted in their taxation of citizens to support an established church, but Jefferson disagreed, arguing that “to compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors, is sinful and tyrannical.” (Page 47, Loc 580)
• The “wall of separation” metaphor can be traced to Roger Williams, founder of the Baptist tradition in America, who sought to protect the “garden of the church” from the “wilderness of the world” by means of a “wall of separation.” (Page 48, Loc 589)
• In an 1803 letter to Benjamin Rush, Jefferson wrote: “To the corruptions of Christianity I am indeed opposed; but not to the genuine precepts of Jesus himself. I am a Christian, in the only sense he wished any one to be; sincerely attached to his doctrines, in preference to all others; ascribing to himself every human excellence; & believing he never claimed any other.” Some years later, he wrote: “I am a real Christian, that is to say a disciple of the doctrines of Jesus.” (Page 48, Loc 597)
• Jefferson considered the “experiment” in religious freedom that he had helped to create in the new republic and pronounced it good precisely because it had proved conducive to political order and stability. (Page 50, Loc 610)
• “And we have experienced the quiet as well as the comfort which results from leaving everyone to profess freely and openly those principles of religion which are the inductions of his own reason, and the serious convictions of his own inquiries.” (Page 50, Loc 613)
• Put simply and directly, religion has flourished in America precisely because the government (for the most part, at least) has stayed out of the religion business. (Page 51, Loc 620)
• From Monticello, more than a decade after he had left the White House, Jefferson reflected on the great American experiment of separating church and state. “Our country has been the first to prove to the world two truths, the most salutary to human society, that man can govern himself, and that religious freedom is the most effective anodyne against religious dissension,” he wrote. (Page 52, Loc 633)

8. Disestablishment in Connecticut

• Connecticut and Massachusetts, clung to religious establishments. (Page 53, Loc 641)
• Disestablishment, Beecher added, was “the best thing that ever happened to the State of Connecticut. It cut the churches loose from dependence on state support. It threw them wholly on their own resources and on God.” (Page 55, Loc 658)

9. Designating the United States as a “Christian Nation”

• The National Reform Association’s efforts to amend the Constitution failed. Even Roman Catholics, against whom some of the “Christian amendment” agitation had been directed, affirmed the First Amendment; the Second Plenary Council, meeting in Baltimore in 1866, declared, “Church and State, therefore, are entirely distinct and separate according to our fundamental laws.” (Page 61, Loc 715)
• Congress soon passed a joint resolution adding the words “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance, which Eisenhower signed on June 14, 1954. (Page 63, Loc 744)
• In 1956, a resolution by the Eighty-Fourth Congress designated In God We Trust as the national motto. The following year that motto was added to the national currency. (Page 64, Loc 751)

10. School Wars and the Blaine Amendments

• On December 7, 1875, Ulysses S. Grant first proposed a constitutional amendment barring the teaching of religion in public schools. (Page 68, Loc 786)
• The persistence of Protestant bias in common schools led Catholics to form their own, parochial schools. Soon thereafter, Catholic voices began clamoring for taxpayer funds, in part to counter what Hughes had characterized as “double taxation.” (Page 71, Loc 816)
• Unfortunately, in 2020 the Supreme Court, its conservative majority newly fortified with two Donald Trump appointments, reversed course in Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue, not only weakening the establishment clause but also opening the way for the nullification of Blaine amendments across the country. Writing for the 5 to 4 majority, John G. Roberts, Jr., the chief justice, prepared the way for public funding of private education, including sectarian schools. “A state need not subsidize private education,” he wrote. “But once a state decides to do so, it cannot disqualify some private schools solely because they are religious.” (Page 72, Loc 833)

11. Mormons and the “Divine Origins” of the Constitution

• The story of the Mormons in the nineteenth century is one of relentless persecution, displacement, and adjustment. Local opposition forced Smith and his followers from Fayette, New York, to Kirtland, Ohio, in 1831. The following year, Smith was tarred and feathered, allegedly for making passes at a teenage girl. The failure of the Kirtland Bank in 1837 further antagonized non-Mormon (“ gentile”) neighbors, and Smith increasingly cast his eyes on Missouri as a new home for his fledgling religion; Smith himself finally left Ohio for Missouri in 1838. (Page 74, Loc 846)
• Rumors had begun to circulate in Nauvoo about Smith’s polygamist practices, and when the Nauvoo Expositor published some of these claims in its first and only edition, June 7, 1844, Smith ordered the press destroyed. Locals were enraged, and Smith surrendered to the authorities in Carthage, Illinois, on June 25. Two days later, a mob of approximately two hundred stormed the jail and murdered Smith and his brother Hyrum. (Page 76, Loc 861)

12. The Johnson Amendment and the First Amendment

• on July 2, 1954, he proposed an addition to the tax code that prohibits tax-exempt organizations from openly supporting political candidates. (Page 83, Loc 933)
• Leaders of the Religious Right in recent years, however, have been pushing for a repeal of the Johnson Amendment. They argue that pastors should be able to make political endorsements from the pulpit without jeopardizing their churches’ tax exemptions. The fact that they cannot now do so, they argue, represents an infringement on their religious freedom and freedom of speech, both protected by the First Amendment. (Page 84, Loc 940)
• the bottom line is that taxpayers in any given community effectively subsidize religious groups by paying extra taxes to support municipal services such as police protection, firefighters, parks, snow removal, road maintenance, and the like. (Page 85, Loc 952)
• To state it plainly, tax exemption is a form of public subsidy. All the Johnson Amendment requires is that, in exchange for that subsidy, the beneficiaries refrain from partisan politicking. (Page 86, Loc 958)
• But there is another reason why the Johnson Amendment is a good idea and should not be repealed. Religion has flourished in the United States as nowhere else in the world precisely because the government has stayed out of the realm of religion, and vice versa. Despite the Religious Right’s persistent attempts to circumvent it, the First Amendment is the best friend that religion ever had. It ensures that there is no established church, no state religion, and that religious groups can compete for adherents on an equal footing. And evangelicals in particular, by the way, have historically fared very well in the free marketplace of religion established by the First Amendment. (Page 86, Loc 967)

13. John F. Kennedy and School Prayer

• The plaintiffs, supported by the American Civil Liberties Union, were identified as two Jews, a Unitarian, an atheist, and a member of the New York Society for Ethical Culture. (Page 89, Loc 989)
• In a 6 to 1 decision, the Supreme Court agreed that the prayer was a prescribed religious activity and therefore violated the establishment clause of the First Amendment. As Hugo Black wrote in his majority opinion, “It is no part of the business of government to compose official prayers for any group of the American people to recite as a part of a religious program carried on by government.” Public reaction to the decision was overwhelmingly negative; a majority of Americans—85 percent, according to a Gallup poll—objected to the ruling. (Page 90, Loc 993)
• Blanshard warned against the pernicious influence of the Roman Catholic hierarchy, adding that the church “uses the political power of some twenty-six million official American Catholics to bring American foreign policy into line with Vatican temporal interests.” (Page 91, Loc 1007)
• The Supreme Court did not outlaw prayer; it outlawed prescribed prayer in a public setting. We have an easy remedy, the president said, “and that is to pray ourselves.” He continued, “And I would think that it would be a welcome reminder to every American family that we can pray a good deal more at home, we can attend our churches with a good deal more fidelity, and we can make the true meaning of prayer much more important in the lives of all of our children. That power is very much open to us.” (Page 93, Loc 1027)
• Kennedy’s statement following the Engel decision applies equally to the Abington ruling. The Supreme Court did not outlaw Bible reading in public schools any more than it outlawed prayer in public schools. Students, on their own, can do both. The Supreme Court merely decided, in deference to the establishment clause of the First Amendment, that the state cannot mandate such activities. As a federal court ruled in rejecting a challenge to a school district that had, in accordance with the Engel decision, forbidden public prayer, “The plaintiffs must content themselves with having their children say these prayers before 9 a.m. and after 3 p.m.” (Page 95, Loc 1043)

14. “Soul Liberty,” Roy’s Rock, and the Need for More Baptists

• What does all this have to do with Baptists? Roger Williams, founder of the Baptist tradition in America, believed in religious toleration and liberty of conscience. Having been persecuted and banished from Massachusetts for his religious convictions, Williams determined that Rhode Island would be a haven of toleration. He also warned that too close an association between church and state would be detrimental to the integrity of the faith, that the “wilderness of the world” would encroach on the “garden of the church.” (Page 98, Loc 1075)
• According to Truett, Baptists recognized that enjoying religious liberty for themselves entailed defending it for others. “A Baptist would rise at midnight to plead for absolute religious liberty,” he declared, “for his Catholic neighbor, and for his Jewish neighbor, and for everybody else” And in a final salvo that might have anticipated the chicanery of Roy Moore, chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, seven decades later, Truett declared, “Christ’s religion needs no prop of any kind from any worldly source, and to the degree that it is thus supported is a millstone hanged about its neck.” (Page 100, Loc 1097)
• All of these—liberty of conscience (“ soul liberty”), separation of church and state, respect for the rights of minorities—were bedrock Baptist principles, jealously guarded by generations of Baptists… until 1979. With the conservative takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention in June 1979, the largest Protestant denomination in the United States abandoned its historic role as watchman on the wall of separation between church and state. The denomination’s new leaders, adopting a majoritarian ethic, began to silence dissenting voices—on doctrinal matters, especially the ordination of women—but on political issues as well. Working hand in hand with the newly emergent Religious Right, these folks who called themselves Baptists began to level the wall of separation between church and state, calling for state support of religious schools, the enactment of legislation narrowly informed by religious interests, and the display of religious symbols in public spaces. (Page 101, Loc 1106)

15. The Battle Cry of “Religious Freedom”

• Weyrich’s genius lay in his ability to shift the terms of debate from a defense of racial discrimination in evangelical institutions to a supposed defense of religious liberty, all the while conveniently ignoring the fact that tax exemption is a form of public subsidy. Suddenly, evangelicalism, arguably the most influential social and religious movement in American history, adopted the posture of a persecuted minority. All protestations about a “moral majority” notwithstanding, leaders of the Religious Right began to argue that their institutions were under assault by a “secular majority.” (Page 109, Loc 1187)
• Religious Right has cleverly reversed field, abandoning majoritarianism in favor of the rhetoric of victimization—and, in so doing, have found a sympathetic audience in an increasingly conservative Supreme Court. (Page 111, Loc 1203)

16. The Case Against Christian Nationalism

• During the War of 1812, for instance, Timothy Dwight, president of Yale, bemoaned the absence of references to God and Christianity in the nation’s charter documents. One of the Confederacy’s criticisms of the Union was the lack of Christian language in the Constitution, so the South took pains to declare that the Confederate States of America was a Christian enterprise. This in turn prompted the formation of a group calling itself the National Reform Association to propose a constitutional amendment designating the United States as a Christian nation, crediting “the Lord Jesus Christ as the Ruler among the nations.” (Page 113, Loc 1216)
• On January 1, 1802, responding to a letter from the Baptists of Danbury, Connecticut, the third president quoted a portion of the First Amendment together with his interpretation: “I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between Church & State.” (Page 115, Loc 1243)
• The First Amendment, America’s best idea, prohibits the establishment of any religion, and when Patrick Henry introduced a bill designating Christianity as the favored religion in Virginia, James Madison led the charge against it, and the legislation was defeated. Barton and his right-wing compatriots also like to assert that the founders themselves were evangelical Christians. This is so ludicrous that I’m tempted not to dignify it with a response. Many of the founders were deists, who understood God as a remote and disinterested entity. John Adams recoiled at the notion of Jesus as incarnate deity, which he thought was “the Source of almost all the Corruptions of Christianity.” Jefferson himself excised references to Jesus’ divinity and miracles from the New Testament; this expurgated version, published posthumously, has come to be known as the Jefferson Bible. (Page 116, Loc 1248)
• For people who claim the Bible as their sole authority—and who seek, many of them, to translate what they call “biblical principles” into the civil and criminal law—the New Testament itself provides ample refutation to any scheme of Christian nationalism. Jesus himself, according to the Gospel of John, declared, “My kingdom is not of this world,” and St. Paul instructed the early believers to be subordinate to civil authorities. (Page 119, Loc 1284)
• We are not a majoritarian society, where the majority dictates to everyone else, and that is the fundamental flaw of Christian nationalism, whose advocates seek to encode what they consider “Christian” principles. The First Amendment’s proscription against religious establishment was a blow against majoritarianism and an assurance that all religious convictions (including no religion at all) would be guaranteed “free exercise.” That’s a far cry from asserting that the United States is and always has been a Christian nation. (Page 121, Loc 1306)

Afterword

• As Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote in her final opinion on church–state matters: “Those who would renegotiate the boundaries between church and state must answer a difficult question: Why would we trade a system that has served us so well for one that has served others so poorly?” (Page 127, Loc 1355)