On the subject of religious liberty in America, there are four indispensable, foundational texts: Jefferson’s 1786 statute (“Our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions, any more than our opinions in physics or geometry”); Madison’s 1785 “Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments” (“The Religion of every man must be left to the conviction and conscience of every man”); Article VI of the Constitution (“No religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States”); and the First Amendment (“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”). These are at once statements of political philosophy and legal documents; philosophers argue about them within a specific intellectual tradition, and legal scholars read them to trace precedent. Martha Nussbaum takes both of these approaches in “Liberty of Conscience: In Defense of America’s Tradition of Religious Equality” (Basic; $28.95). But because these documents long ago rose to the status of American scripture, another way to read them is to conduct an exegesis, which is more or less what Garry Wills does in “Head and Heart: American Christianities” (Penguin; $29.95). Politicians tend to use them genealogically, naming their authors as forebears or, as the case may be, glaringly omitting them. (“My faith is the faith of my fathers,” Mitt Romney declared in a speech last December, skipping over Jefferson and Madison in favor of Brigham Young, John and Samuel Adams, and the seventeenth-century Puritan dissenter Roger Williams.) The legal, the exegetical, the genealogical—each centers on the Founding Fathers: What did they intend? What did they mean? What would they make of us?
History is after all only a pack of tricks we play on the dead,” Voltaire once quipped. The Founding Fathers had their own pack of tricks: they turned their backs on the past. If they had meekly inherited the faith of their fathers, they would have written a constitution establishing Christianity as the national religion. They did not. Nearly every American colony was settled with an established religion; Connecticut’s 1639 founding document explained that the whole purpose of government was “to mayntayne and presearve the liberty and purity of the gospell of our Lord Jesus.” In the century and a half between that charter and the 1787 meeting of the Constitutional Convention lies an entire revolution, not just a political revolution but also a religious revolution, as Frank Lambert, a historian at Purdue, argued in his 2003 study, “The Founding Fathers and the Place of Religion in America.” Far from establishing a religion, the Constitution doesn’t even mention God. At a time when all but two states required religious tests for office, the Constitution prohibited them. At a time when most states still had an official religion, the Bill of Rights forbade the federal government from establishing one.