Thomas Jefferson and James Madison are frequently identified as the framers of the religion clauses in the First Amendment, thus making their efforts to establish religious freedom in colonial Virginia relevant to the Constitution's meaning. This interpretive approach first appeared in a Supreme Court opinion in 1878 when Chief Justice Morrison Waite applied the religion clauses to the case of a Mormon official prosecuted under a federal antipolygamy law. For historical background, Justice Waite studied books by church historians Robert Reid Howison and Robert Baylor Semple. There, he encountered narratives of the political activism of the Baptists and Presbyterians who, in conjunction with the efforts of Madison and Jefferson, were responsible for Virginia's statutory commitment to religious freedom. The Chief Justice then grafted Madison's Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments and Jefferson's now-famous “wall of separation” letter onto the Constitution's bare text, an emendation that has endured for well over a century. Church historians Semple and Howison, and the pivotal role they played in the foundation of First Amendment jurisprudence, have been essentially lost from the historiographical record of church-state relations in America, a situation this article seeks to remedy.

There is little reckoning with the development of religions in the United States without confronting the related processes of importation and appropriation. This article explores these processes specifically as reflected in the story of the San Francisco Zen Center. Partaking of an interpretative ethos established by the nineteenth-century Transcendentalists and refined during the 1950s “Zen boom,” the architects of the SFZC's communalism shaped this complicated tradition specifically for disaffected young practitioners seeking an experiential path beyond their middleclass, Judeo-Christian backgrounds. It was during the 1983 scandals surrounding SFZC leader, Richard Baker-roshi, that many of the interpretive lacunae—specifically, a relative inattention to ethical languages—became readily apparent. This article accounts for these scandals historically (by situating them in the history of American appropriations of Buddhism and of the religious disaffection of the post-World War II period) and theoretically (by reading the SFZC's patterns of transmission and interpretation through the category “interpretative double movement). This double movement among practitioners captures the ways in which those in search of an alternative to their religious culture impose their own idiosyncratic values onto another religious tradition, all the while remaining paradoxically within the interpretive confines of the culture they hope to escape. Reading this complicated history—including both its “scandals” and their aftermaths—through such categories sheds light on the ways in which American religious exchanges are enacted and identities constructed.

This article seeks to draw attention to an often overlooked aspect of the social gospel. Rather than explaining social gospelers as theological liberals who took an interest in social problems, as many historians have done, this essay argues that they were possessed of a unique theology, one which welded evangelical ideas of conversion and experiential Christianity with liberal postmillennial hopes. Their devotion to combating social ills should be understood, therefore, not solely as a secular commitment to social justice or a nebulous allegiance to Christian charity but also as a theological obligation tied to evangelical conversion and a repudiation of social sin, a crime as offensive to God as murder or theft. The social gospelers modeled the ideal Christian society upon that of the biblical patriarchs, one in which no distinction between the secular and sacred existed and sanctification guided the Christian's actions in the economy as well as in personal morality. That society, that postmillennial Zion, would come again when all humanity experienced a spiritual conversion and were truly born again as Christians—a transformation not limited to individual salvation but which brought with it a new understanding of the nature of Christian life.