What is religious freedom? Is it the freedom to worship or otherwise interact with God, gods, or other things and entities as one sees fit? Is it freedom of conscience in terms of the supernatural? If religious freedom also involves the right to live out one’s religion in the public sphere, how far does that right extent? If religious freedom involves the right of churches (and like organizations) as well as individuals, to what extent do they operate independently of state control? Steven D. Smith’s The Rise and Decline of American Religious Freedom is an elegy for an expansive understanding of the “first freedom” protected by the First Amendment.
Smith intends to dismantle what he terms the “standard story” of the history of religious freedom in the United States. In this version of U.S. History, the founders wrote Enlightenment-inspired separationist principles into the Constitution, nineteenth-century Americans departed from them and oppressed a host of religious minorities, liberal justices after 1945 rediscovered the correct interpretation and application of the First Amendment, and evangelical theocrats mounted a failed efforts to return to the bad old days.
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