From the row of first editions in The Jerwood Centre at the Wordsworth Trust, Grasmere, the curator, lovingly takes down one of his favourite items. It is not much to look at, a slim volume still in its original card covers; cheap stained covers that should have been removed and thrown away when it was bound in leather to match the designs of a gentleman’s library. The curator tells the paradoxical tale of an object so ordinary that it has become a rarity; the book whose pages remain untrimmed; the book that can never be read: a first edition of Lyrical Ballads (1798). But Lyrical Ballads has always been a volume of paradoxes, from its contradictory title, to the tensions between poems and prose, to the variable accounts by its two authors of its aims and origins, to the difficulty readers have with grasping how such slight poems can be accorded such high status. Perhaps it is just this sense of it – as something unable to be quite pinned down – that has made this unassuming volume such a major, lasting work of British Romanticism.

Philosophy, like politics or ecology, is a constant presence in the poems of Lyrical Ballads. As Wordsworth and Coleridge openly state in the ‘Advertisement’, some of the poems are written in direct reaction to their contemporaries’ engagement with philosophical thought: ‘the lines entitled Expostulation and Reply, and those which follow, arose out of conversation with a friend who was somewhat unreasonably attached to modern books of moral philosophy’ (LB 4). Other poems that position themselves in direct reference to questions of epistemology, ontology or the status of truth are ‘We Are Seven’ or ‘Anecdote for Fathers, Shewing how the practice of Lying may be taught,’ to mention two of the most obvious examples. In both cases the question revolves around what Andrew Bennett has termed the ‘poetics of ignorance’ of the collection.1 Throughout, Lyrical Ballads has some form of conceptual ambition. Yet that ambition is not clear at all, and that is where the story (or, for others, the trouble) of poetry and philosophy begins in the text.

The sixteen words on religion in the First Amendment have generated voluminous and vociferous scholarly interpretations. These controversies strike at the heart of the role of religion in American public life. How are we to decide which interpretation of the First Amendment is correct? Answers to this question have been laden with presuppositions. This chapter is an interdisciplinary analysis of recent historical, political, legal, and philosophical writing on the First Amendment to illustrate how key presuppositions inform the approach to arguments about the meaning, scope, and intent of the First Amendment. The chapter will first outline the contextual and philosophical problems of interpreting the First Amendment. It will then evaluate the providentialist, secular, and pragmatic presuppositions that have guided scholarly interpretations. Ultimately, the chapter will argue that there has not been a single understanding of the relationship between church and state in America, but that investigating these presuppositions can help us better appreciate the dynamic nature of religion, politics, and jurisprudence in America.

That the language of ‘domestic affections’ and ‘home’ has a much wider register, and ideological reverberation, than a reference to any immediate domicile and family is reflected everywhere in Lyrical Ballads, localised in rural districts though its poetry and prefaces may be. In 1790, Edmund Burke excoriated the French Revolution’s degradation of home and domestic affections in historical and national terms. He celebrated the antithesis to new France in traditional England, where ‘conservation’, ‘transmission’ and ‘inheritance’ of ‘property’ operate on one ‘principle’, founded on the ‘method’ and ‘pattern of nature’. The Burkean state endures as a family settlement, ‘a permanent body composed of transitory parts’, a home for national domestic affection beating ‘in a just correspondence and symmetry with the order of the world’.

The First Amendment’s religious clauses-“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the exercise thereof”-were adopted, somewhat begrudgingly, as an accommodation to the concerns of vocal religious minorities. Yet they also embodied a set of shared principles about church, state, and rights of conscience that had taken firm root in revolutionary America. Whereas “free exercise” had connoted limited grants to specific groups in particular areas, the term now referred to a broad freedom to assemble and preach. There was less consensus about what an establishment of religion entailed. However, the tide had clearly turned against exclusionary privileges. If the resulting constitutional language seemed somewhat ambiguous, it nonetheless clearly encompassed both an enlarged conception of religion and an unequivocal endorsement of liberty.

This chapter investigates the two non-establishment clauses in the U.S. Constitution: the no-religious-test clause in Article VI, and the no-establishment-of-religion clause in the First Amendment. Since religious tests were the clearest manifestation of state sovereignty over religion, their prohibition in Article VI elided any notion of a “Church of the United States” even before the First Amendment. The federal oath-Congress’s first act-no longer required a denial of Catholic beliefs as previous oaths had, yet loyalty remained a prerequisite to securing religious liberty. The chapter then contends that the First Amendment establishment clause was based on what Congress had stated in 1783: that powers in “purely spiritual” matters were “reserved to the several States, individually.” Congress had declared this principle in response to the Holy See’s request for it to approve a Catholic bishop, and had thus renounced one of the rights of patronage that governments traditionally held over ecclesiastical affairs. This context adds to the original meaning of the establishment clause, for simply prohibiting a national church did not necessarily forbid this right of patronage.

This chapter investigates debates around the First Amendment in the nineteenth century. In 1801, President Thomas Jefferson wrote to the Danbury Baptists of Connecticut that the First Amendment built “a wall of separation between Church & State.” Although not central to interpreting the First Amendment in the nineteenth century, Jefferson’s metaphor became the dominant interpretation in twentieth-century jurisprudence. This chapter examines whether citizens, public figures, and the courts endorsed a theory similar to Jefferson’s, and it finds they did not. Instead, the national practice endorsed public Christianity, building upon that faith’s majority status. At the same time, three groups posed definite challenges to this consensus. Freethinkers raised doubts about both Christianity and its socially privileged status. Roman Catholics had to defend their rights to religious practice. Mormon practice of plural marriage, however, went beyond the population’s willingness to tolerate and so was opposed by the power of the federal government.

The meaning and value of religious liberty in the United States is changing dramatically, under the weight of both short-term legal pressures and long-term cultural shifts. Over the last few years, a sharply escalating solicitude for “sexual minorities” has confronted and diminished religious liberty in the law for the millions of Americans who adhere to traditional views about the nature of marriage and the morality of sexual activity. Over the last several decades, Americans have come to understand their own religious convictions through the mediating lenses of subjective experience and individual spirituality, so much so that “religion” has come to be an aspect of personal “identity.” Now it seems that “religious liberty” is one subset among many of an encompassing right of self-definition, which also includes sexual identity. And where these two sides of the “identity” coin come into conflict, “religious liberty” is more often than not the loser. This development is potentially momentous, for what was long described as Americans’ “first freedom” has, in fact, been an axiom of the political culture and a strategic linchpin of the whole of constitutional civil liberties.

This essay argues that religion is a distinctive form of human activity, and offers a philosophical account of what religion fundamentally is (and what it is not), within the context of the free exercise clause of the First Amendment. The first section promotes religion as an action-theoretic concept. The second section presents the claim that atheism can be regarded as a religion. It rejects this claim on the basis that religion cannot be defined as a set of propositional beliefs concerning metaphysics and morality. The third section defends a paradigmatic account of religion as a kind of activity ordered to a concept of transcendence or superior nature, and argues that morally excellent human actions can be identified as religious, but only in a secondary or derivative way. The final section contends with the problem of including act-omissions as instantiations of religious exercise, and proposes a solution with reference to recent arguments implicating two-way powers.