This chapter follows Tocqueville in arguing that civic culture must support formal learning in schools and colleges, by providing a social spirit of reflective patriotism. A particular challenge given America’s civic fracture of angry polarization, but also widespread apathy, is to motivate citizens to care about America, citizenship education, and a discursive patriotism; thus, civics now should emphasize stories of American hope and achievement, forging an e pluribus unum out of our pluralism. It then develops the sections: (a) E Pluribus Unum and Civic Hope: Jazz, Constitutionalism, Religious Liberty – with subsections on (i) American Story and Song, Especially Jazz – featuring the Ray Charles version of American the Beautiful, Justice O’Connor and Wynton Marsalis in conversation, and jazz pioneers such as Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Benny Goodman, (ii) The Declaration and Constitution as Achievements of Harmony, and (iii) Religious Liberty and Pluralism as American Harmony, featuring George Washington, Lincoln, and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Sets out the book’s main themes: Milton’s anticlericalism; his enduring concern to maximize liberty of conscience for heterodox godly lay intellectuals; Milton’s republicanism and its relatively minor place amongst his priorities; his political writing to be understood as partisan and polemical, not as philosophy; “follow the particular”; Milton’s multifarious, unsystematic liberty-talk; “strenuous liberty;” Milton’s tolerationist thought as proceeding from the lower ground; Milton’s poetry and prose not politically at odds, but differing in subject matter, audience, and purposes; unrepentant politics of the late poems. Brief discussion of archive and methods; summary of chapters.

This chapter traces the arcs of change that are visible in the interpretation of the First Amendment’s Establishment and Free Exercise Clauses. To a rough approximation, the Supreme Courts over which Earl Warren and Warren Burger presided as chief justice (from 1954 to 1969 and 1969 to 1986, respectively) sought to enforce a “wall of separation” between church and state. That wall has crumbled in the decades since. The current Court has embraced the originalist position that historical understandings define the exclusive Establishment Clause limitations on permissible governmental acknowledgment of and support for religion. Among the outstanding questions is whether the Warren Court’s iconic decisions banning prayer in the public schools will survive. The pattern of decisions under the Free Exercise Clause is complex, with current trends reflecting a reversal of positions by judicial conservatives and judicial liberals alike. Justice Scalia epitomized the views of conservatives of his generation in holding that the Free Exercise Clause does not require the government to exempt either religious organizations or individual believers from generally applicable laws that impede religiously motivated practices. More recently, as the parties seeking exceptions have increasingly included conservative Christians, the conservative supermajority has often supported their demands.

This chapter claims that in the new millennium, religious conservatives succeed in their struggles to control women’s bodies and to turn their private prejudices into public policy through the misappropriation of human rights and by gaining unwarranted religious exemptions. By allegedly demanding the protection of their own rights to religious liberty, conscientious objection, equality, and multicultural accommodations, religious conservatives are reversing the progress in women’s rights and using liberal rights and concepts as a weapon against women. The chapter argues that, contrary to popular belief, the separation between religion and the state cannot protect women’s rights against the religious conservative attack. It compares the religious conservative attack on women’s rights in the USA, where religion is separated from the state, to the religious conservative attack on women’s rights in Israel, where there is no separation between religion and the state, and shows that despite the very different religion–state relations, the religious conservative attack in the USA and Israel is similar in both method and success.

This chapter argues against the common but oversimplified claim that the secularization of the world and the legal separation between religion and the state in liberal states have eliminated the negative effects patriarchal religion can have on women’s rights. The chapter suggests that there are at least five facets of the relationship between religion and the state in contemporary liberal democracies that are crucial to a proper understanding of the ways in which religion–state relations affect women’s rights: (1) institutional differentiation between religion and the state; (2) strong protection of religious liberty; (3) the involvement of religion in politics; (4) the extent of religious involvement in education and social services; and (5) the levels of religious belief of individuals in society. It analyzes each of these facets and shows how their treatment in liberal states allows patriarchal religion to perpetuate and entrench women’s inequality.

While the political aspect of the traditionalist quest for prescriptive Christianity has been central to the story from the start, this chapter examines, first, the complicated way that religious and political norms are intertwined in American history and dependent on whether the Christian community is in a position of power or not. Second, the chapter examines two aspects of Christian identity that are especially important in understanding contemporary American politics: (1) a global Christian identity that understands Christians as those persecuted by godless secular society, and (2) an antignostic identity that understands Christians as those who wage war against “gnosticism,” a term applicable to whatever conservative Christians are currently combatting in the political sphere.

Empire’s embrace of secular governmentality called for a rhetoric of state separation from religion. At the same time, however, the state’s promise of religious autonomy and the ideological underpinnings and administrative exigencies of indirect rule translated into the co-option, regulation, and transformation of religion and religious institutions. In the end, therefore, imperial secular governmentality–in its varied spatial and temporal manifestations–entailed an uneasy truce between the rhetoric of state-religion separation, and the everyday intimacy of religion and state authority. The conclusion argues that that paradox is central to the law and politics of the modern state’s governance of religious difference.

The British colonial government frustrated European missionaries’ desire to convert Northern Nigeria by curtailing Christian proselytization. This chapter situates missionaries’ tumultuous relationship with the state in the emergence of secularism as an imperial technique of managing religions and religious difference. That technique involved the government’s insistence on its separation from Christian missions, and its indirect rule of the territory through Muslim chiefs. Colonial administrators resolved that paradox–of the state’s rhetoric of separation from Christian missions even while the state remained intimate with Muslim elites–in one of two ways. Some administrators emphasized the superiority of the religious liberty of Muslims over the missionary desire to proselytize; others stressed the imperative for the state to be separate from what remained of the precolonial Sokoto caliphate. As administrators latched on to either argument, so did colonial subjects also deploy either notion to further their agenda. What emerges is a story of a struggle between imperial bureaucrats, Christian missionaries, and Muslim chiefs over the governance of religious difference.

Set in Africa’s most populous Muslim country, the book takes on a paradox: colonial governance in Northern Nigeria entailed indirect rule through Muslim intermediaries and caliphate institutions; yet, the state insisted on its secularity. In unravelling this puzzle, the book offers a provocative account of secularism as a contested yet contingent mode of governing and religious difference. Drawing on detailed archival research, the book illustrates constitutional struggles triggered by the colonial state’s governance of religion and interrogates its legacy in the postcolonial state. The book illuminates the dynamic interplay between law, religion, and power in the political context of the modern state’s unique emergence from colonial processes.

This chapter chronicles the triumph of a Protestant notion of religious liberty at Independence. The Protestant victory took the form of the late colonial state's domestication of an international legal provision—Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Article 18 emerged from the concerted effort of international Protestant ecumenists to protect Christianity from the ravages of secularism, manifesting in restrictions on missions in places like Northern Nigeria, among other things. Protestant ecumenists emphasized two religious liberties: the liberty of the proselytizer to preach and the target audience to convert. Further, Protestant ecumenists argued that the Protestant notion of religious liberty trumped arguments about the empire's need to be separate (or distanced) from Christian missions. By narrating the Protestant effort to neutralize a mission-hostile secularist separation with a mission-friendly notion of religious liberty, the chapter argues that these constitutional ideas take shape in specific contestations. Consequently, the chapter makes a case for apprehending these ideas by closely studying the struggles that galvanize them.

This chapter examines the legacy of the colonial governance of religion. Those struggles have inherited the nation's complex colonial history as an essentialist debate between a Muslim camp advancing a Sharia renaissance agenda and opposed to secularism and a Christian camp opposing the Sharia project and championing the secularist separation of the state from religion. That memory of the colonial experience is borne of both sides' criticism of colonial rule; however, neither the drivers of the Sharia renaissance agenda nor their Christian critics are liberated from the history of imperial rule. Both seek the governance of religion in the manner of the colonial state they despise. As with actors in the colonial state, the postcolonial camps also deploy the notions of secularist separation and religious liberty in fluid ways, belying their arguments about their unconditional fidelity to either idea. The chapter, therefore, argues that imperial secular governmentality, which has survived into the postcolonial state, is far from the untroubled mode of domination it is often criticized as being. It is instead a domain of contestation.

Ever since their seventeenth-century origins, Baptists have represented an array of theological, racial, ethnic, ideological, and political backgrounds and have traversed a number of social, theological, and ecclesiastical roads. The first Baptists came out of the dissenting tradition in England; the persecution they experienced during their early history in America helps explain their enduring support for the separation of church and state. Baptists make the Bible central to their practice, an emphasis central to their disputes over slavery, gender, and sexuality. They value the theological notion of the “priesthood of the believer.” Baptists hold that only people who can publicly profess their Christian conversion can be candidates for baptism. They have varied on who can take the Lord’s Supper; many Baptist churches practice open communion, but some do not. A central tenet of Baptist governance is the autonomy of the local church.

Spinoza developed a method of biblical interpretation which has guided most scholars ever since. It requires an understanding of the scriptural languages, a comparison of different discussions of the same topic (not assuming that Scripture, as the word of God, must be consistent), and an account of the authorship, date, circumstances, and transmission of each book. Renaissance humanists like Erasmus had anticipated some of his method, but Spinoza was more systematic and bolder: not only did Moses not write the Pentateuch, many of the traditional assumptions about the authorship of biblical books were mistaken. A late editor, working on now lost mss. of earlier histories, had compiled them. Spinoza writes mainly about the Hebrew Bible, but also draws challenging conclusions about the New Testament: the apostles didn’t write with prophetic authority; James was right (against Paul) to emphasize works over faith. He also suggests that the apostles probably wrote in Aramaic, so that the Greek text is a translation of a lost original. Like Erasmus, he emphasizes the moral teachings of Scripture and avoids philosophical speculations, of which the doctrine of original sin is probably the most important example. His advocacy of theological minimalism furthered the cause of religious liberty.