The Founders’ Religious Liberty, Beyond Rakove

In&n bsp;Beyond Belief, Beyond Conscience, Pulitzer-Prize-winning historian Jack N. Rakove returns to the American Founding, this time to explore the “radical significance” of the free exercise of religion. Rakove sets forth his task as “to explain how the quandaries of Religion Clause doctrine are not merely functions of differences in judicial thinking or ideological commitments, but rather reflect conditions and tensions embodied in our historical experience.” The slim volume elegantly and informatively addresses the historical contexts in which religious freedom emerged in Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries, became a constitutional right in late 18th-century America, and then developed in modern American Supreme Court jurisprudence. Insofar as it sets forth the various historical circumstances that allowed religious freedom to become a constitutional right, it offers a nice introduction to the subject. The book, however, does not quite articulate the Founders’ understanding of religious freedom correctly, which limits the work’s merit as an intellectual history and its usefulness to evaluate contemporary originalist church-state jurisprudence.  Read Full Article »