Why Does America Have Religious Liberty?

Was the creation of America and American law substantially dependent on social contract theory? What freedoms or obligations would have been gained or surrendered by Americans declaring their independence and submitting themselves to the new governments? Notre Dame’s Vincent Phillip Muñoz considers these questions essential for church/state jurisprudence in his Religious Liberty and the American Founding: Natural Right and the Original Meanings of the First Amendment Religion Clauses. Unfortunately, what the book too often demonstrates is that the list of books that American political theorists study is so short, and the eyes through which they read them so remarkably myopic, that what could be a wonderous view of a vast sky of thinking on the church and the civil magistrate, sometimes even in Muñoz ’s favor, becomes a dim squint at a small and blurry constellation of ideas.