This chapter explores the relationship between democracy and Christianity through the lens of Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. As Tocqueville noted, unlike the European nations of his own day where the forces of democracy and proponents of religion were at odds, the United States in the 1830s is characterized by a harmony between religion and democracy. Tocqueville sees a number of ways in which these two forces may be mutually supportive. First and most importantly, Tocqueville regards Christianity and its affirmation of the equality of all human beings as an important source for democracy. He also finds American religion to be supportive of democratic government in the sense that it counters democratic tendencies toward cultural mediocrity, the tyranny of the majority, the pathologies of individualism, and secular materialism. Not only is Christianity necessary for the formation of democratic governments, in Tocqueville’s view, but their long-term flourishing requires a certain moderation on the part of religious believers. While it might seem that Christianity is the only religion capable of preserving democracy, a closer reading of Democracy in America would suggest otherwise.

Amid an Enlightened era, dissenting religious groups clamored for toleration and/or religious freedom, mobilizing their own campaigns and helping staff with those of the era’s other prominent movements. British Dissenters had long sought repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts, which limited their rights of office-holding and other honors – while American colonists bristled against official churches that had also taken hold in the colonies. The American Revolution led to an upsurge in favor of religious freedom in America that overturned almost all religious restrictions by the 1790s, though British Dissenters’ movements over the same years met reversals from a stronger Establishment.

The eighteenth-century American founders believed that religion is special and deserves special constitutional protection, and that all peaceable faiths must be drawn into the constitutional process and protection. The founders introduced six constitutional principles for the protection of religious freedom – freedom of conscience, free exercise of religion, religious pluralism, religious equality, separation of church and state, and no federal establishment of religion. Since the 1940s, the US Supreme Court has upheld these religious freedom principles in more 170 cases, albeit unevenly of late. Moreover, in recent years religious freedom has come under sharp popular and academic attack, particularly as religious pathologies have come to light and religious freedom claims have clashed with sexual liberty claims. This chapter calls for a return to the first principles of religious freedom for all, at home and abroad, and for a new balance between religious freedom and other fundamental rights claims.

This chapter traces the history of religious property tax exemptions, particularly in the Anglo-American common law and equity law traditions. It analyzes the perennial controversy around religious tax exemption in the history of America, and the constitutional defense of these exemptions that emerged with arguments from history, federalism, separatism, and the social benefits that exempt properties provide at ample state savings. Religious exemptions, however, are under fresh attack today, particularly for religious groups who maintain traditional sexual morality. The chapter reconsiders the constitutionality of such exemptions in light of recent First Amendment cases, and judges these exemptions still to be constitutionally valid and socially valuable, even if subject to legislative repeal.

The conclusion examines some broader questions raised by the analysis. It first discusses the pattern of the normative/empirical inversion noted throughout the book, whereby conditions associated with some desirable outcomes (e.g. separation of powers) are projected back into an account of origins. This is identified as a major obstacle in effective causal analysis. Second, the chapter examines a fundamental underlying concern of the book, the origins of power. Although no answer can be offered, it explains the implications of the book's argument to our understanding of despotic and infrastructural power, perhaps the most influential formulation in social science, as well as to the distinction between direct and indirect rule, which is shaping discussion of the state in varied literatures. Third, the chapter offers some thoughts about how the medieval account I have provided can be reconciled with the early modern accounts that have proved far more influential in explanations of state- and institution-building. I conclude with some shorter thoughts on the implications of the argument on the use of bargaining theory in modern development theory, on the popular notion of land redistribution, and on Huntington's problem of political order and instability.

Examines how personal secularism shapes public opinion where we would expect it to matter: the line between church and state, or public secularism. We explore the nuances in Americans' attitudes on church–state separation, including how both personal secularism and nonreligiosity shape attitudes toward the twin religious protections guaranteed by the First Amendment, protection of religious free exercise and protection from government establishment of religion. Our analysis speaks directly to the current debate over the meaning of religious liberty.

I took the opportunity to come at the problem from a different angle from that of the New Atheists’ anti-theism strategy of attacking religion directly, and argue instead for raising consciousness for religious skepticism through political freedom, namely protecting the rights of believers so that the rights of nonbelievers are equally protected.

Due in part to the influence of Michael McConnell, free exercise exemptionism is generally thought to be compatible with, if not dictated by, the founders’ church-state political philosophy. This article rejects that position, arguing instead that America’s constitutional tradition offers two distinct conceptions of religious liberty: the founders’ natural rights free exercise and modern moral autonomy exemptionism. The chapter aims to distinguish these two approaches by clarifying how they are grounded upon divergent philosophical understandings of human freedom and by explaining how they advance different views of what religious liberty is, how it is threatened, and, accordingly, how it is best protected. The article also attempts to demonstrate how our modern approach expands the protection for religious liberty in some ways but limits it in others.

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.

This chapter distinguishes and explores two historical justifications for the separation of church and state in America. The first separation is a specifically Christian piece of political theology, in large part for the benefit of a Christian civil society. The second separation is a specifically secular position for the benefit of a liberal society that wishes to divest from and repudiate Christianity. This chapter then describes the allure of equality and nondiscrimination as church-state ideals, their ascendancy in late twentieth-century constitutional law, and the sense in which they are believed to have supplanted the first version of separation. This chapter argues that neither equality nor nondiscrimination delivers a valueless perspective on the social and political worth of Christianity. The second separation holds that Christianity is an irrelevant, or even an obnoxious and illegitimate, influence in the making of laws or the structuring of the cultural and political realms. In a society in which Christianity has had such overwhelming predominance, insisting on equality is tantamount to squelching it and is nothing less than an expression of the second separation.