and the New Republic Faith in the Founding of America. Edited by James H. Hutson. (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. 2000. Pp. viii, 213. $70.00.) In June, 1998, two-day symposium was held at the Library of Congress, chaired by Professor Jarolsav Pelikan, to celebrate the opening of particularly well-done exhibition entitled, Religion and the Founding of the American Republic. This book of seven essays consists of revisions of papers presented by the authors at that symposium (with the exception of Mark A. Noll's contribution, which is, as noted by the editor, an entirely new paper). Conscious of the continuing national debate over the place of religion in the public square, these scholars, who include historians, philosophers, and theologians, explore the role of religion in the founding of the United States. They are advocates for variety of interpretations of both the colonial history and the proper relationship between church and state for our times. John Witte, Jr., Director of the Law and Program at Emory University Law School, analyzes the Massachusetts 1780 Constitution, with particular attention to the vision and work of John Adams, who favored tempered form of religious at significant variance with the Jeffersonian ideal as exemplified in the 1779 Bill for the Establishment of Religious Freedom in Virginia. Adams had concluded that dialectical approach was most beneficial, for it sought to avoid both much religious freedom, which, he judged, led to immorality and lawlessness, and too little, which he saw as a recipe for hypocrisy and impiety. This principle became the premise for the mild and equitable establishment of Protestantism, which Adams saw as compatible and necessary for constitutional democratic government. Witte suggests that while the nation's current religious pluralism no longer allows Protestantism to be such unique cornerstone, the Supreme Court has gone too far in the complete disestablishment of religion, and he calls for the striking of new balance in the necessarily dialectical uestion, in the spirit of John Adams. In The Use and Abuse of Jefferson's Statute: Separating Church and State in Nineteenth-Century Virginia, Thomas E. Buckley, S.J., of the Jesuit School of Theology, Berkeley, convincingly argues that nineteenth-century Virginians had an evolving understanding of the issue of the separation of church and state and, consequently, varying application of the famous statute, highly conditioned by cultural contexts, especially that of Evangelical Protestantism. Simply invoking the Statute or the First Amendment, Buckley contends, fails to automatically solve present-day legal conundrums. Daniel Dreisbach, of American University, also contributes to the contextualization of Jefferson's contribution to the debate by examining the political context at the time he penned the influential metaphor, a wall of separation, in his now-famous letter to the Danbury Baptist Association. Jefferson's interpretation of the matter led him to refuse to proclaim Days of Public Fasting and Thanksgiving, as his predecessors had done, not without political consequences at the time. …
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Jun 1, 2001
Stephanie H Kenen 
