The Production of American Religious Freedom

Abstract

The secular liberal commonplace that religion in America is a private concern needing political and legal safeguards presents religious freedom as a static, abstract right that “protects individual choices in a marketplace” (pp. 1–2). This conception is wrong, Finbarr Curtis insists, because “religious freedom” is not a single thing but a “malleable rhetoric” produced by contests within a larger political economy that is anything but a neutral domain in which rational actors choose their faiths without constraint (p. 2). Far from “liberat[ing] people from rules,” the varieties of religious freedom are in fact “forms of government” reflecting historical actors' values and circumstances (p. 168). Curtis develops this argument over six case studies that range across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. New York governor Al Smith, for instance, disputed this norm as privileging Protestant definitions of citizenship, and he articulated a countermodel that allowed full political participation for people who saw their religious identities in communal terms. Contrarily, Malcolm X excoriated it as instantiating racism, denying that it could ever secure equality for blacks. There is a disjuncture between Curtis's goal to highlight how religious freedom has been “contested, challenged, and transformed” and his method, which exposits how particular persons have thought about religious freedom and the contingencies that shaped their ideas (p. 5).