The Religious Roots of the First Amendment. By Nicholas P. Miller. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. xviii + 250 pp. $35.00 cloth.

Abstract

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)The Religious Roots of the First Amendment . By Nicholas P. Miller . New York : Oxford University Press , 2012. xviii + 250 pp. $35.00 cloth.Book Reviews and NotesAnyone who remembers Rodney Dangerfield also remembers his on-stage persona's elusive quest for respect. Anyone having even casual familiarity with the modern secular academy knows that for scholars of American religion, especially those who are believers themselves, Dangerfield's frustrations can seem uncomfortably familiar. George Marsden made the case forcefully in the late 1990s (The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship [New York: Oxford University Press, 1998]). But unlike the comedian's character, who never quite grasped the link between wanting respect and earning it, religious historians over the last two decades have generated a block of scholarly capital that cannot be ignored. A variety of interpretive purposes has guided the work of such notables as Marsden, Mark Noll, Nathan Hatch, and Grant Wacker, but their collective demand that religious ideas be taken seriously is impressively augmented by Nicholas P. Miller's study of Protestantism's role in shaping the First Amendment.While more than a generation ago historians Bernard Bailyn and Gordon Wood waged a spectacularly successful campaign to place ideas at the center of our understanding of America's Revolutionary and Constitutional past, Miller argues that religious ideas were largely orphaned in the process. Taking as his focus the principles that shaped the founding generation's understanding of First-Amendment freedoms, Miller contends that longstanding scholarly battles to attribute the framers' inspiration to either classical liberalism or republicanism ignores their most important intellectual and cultural resource: the influence if dissenting Protestantism on the colonial and Revolutionary intelligentsia and, most significantly, on the broader American population.Especially important to Miller is upending the well-worn argument that religious leaders became champions of freedom only as secular reasoning subsumed their religious principles or as increasing cultural diversity compelled them toward pragmatic toleration. Such an assumed adversarial relationship between religion and reason, Miller contends, obscures what was in fact a cooperative venture in which historic Protestant principles actually led the charge. In other words, Miller offers a First Amendment derived substantially from religious principles, not in spite of them.His argument rests on historic Protestant commitments to the right of private judgment in matters of faith. He locates the wellspring of this principle in the early work of Martin Luther, citing the theologian's Address to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation (1520) as being far more influential than his later flares against seditious heresies following the 1524 Peasants' Revolt. Most significantly, Miller sidelines Luther's magisterial Protestant heirs and contends that dissenting Protestant sects made this spiritual individualism politically viable. Quakers and Baptists--not Puritans, Presbyterians or Anglicans--became the primary transatlantic carriers of this tradition to America with Roger Williams, William Penn, and John Locke equipping dissenter principles for much broader cultural and political duty.Dissenters' emphasis on the right of private judgment as the personal, spiritual route to biblical truth gave rise to liberty of conscience as its secular expression, one that ultimately became serviceable in more conservative Protestant enclaves, as well as among the central players in the nation's Constitutional founding, chiefly James Madison. …