Early American Literature

In June 2022, the US Supreme Court issued two stunning opinions that impinge on church/state separation. In Kennedy v. Bremerton School [End Page 719] District, the court ruled that a high school football coach could commandeer the fifty-yard-line to lead students in prayer, a religious ritual that, unsurprisingly, some students experienced as coercive. In Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, the court overturned Roe v. Wade (1973) and the Roe-upholding Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey (1992) by ruling that states could outlaw previability abortions. Notwithstanding the court majority's putative objections to Roe and Casey, the decision was clearly a win for the decades-long, religiously motivated antiabortion crusade and a corollary to the majority-opinion justices' religious beliefs. It shattered many Americans' trust that the court would continue to honor long-standing principles of church/state separation and prompted apprehension that Christian doctrine would further encroach into American law. In allowing states to enforce statutes that affirm the sacrality and inviolability of human life in its earliest stages, Dobbs deprived women not only of health, welfare, and bodily autonomy, as its aftermath has made plainly visible, but also of religious freedom. As Casey stated, "Men and women of good conscience can disagree … about the profound moral and spiritual implications of terminating a pregnancy even in its earliest stages" (qtd. in Dobbs v. Jackson 30). Women who do not regard an embryo as having a soul or as being divinely created—who, guided by their own beliefs and consciences, would choose to end a pregnancy—are now forced, if state law requires, to conform to their fellow citizens' theological beliefs in the most intimate and potentially traumatic of ways, to the point of bearing a rapist's child or dying in childbirth. Together Dobbs and Kennedy declared irrelevant the religious freedom of citizens who do not share certain state-favored Christian beliefs and practices.

These momentous decisions should prompt renewed attention to the United States' contentious history of church-state relations. As a resident of Tennessee, where abortion is banned except to save a woman's life, I read these five titles with keen interest. One or two Supreme Court decisions do not a country make. How did we get here? Collectively, these books make clear that politico-religious tribalism—and the suppression of religious minorities and dissenters—is integral to America's DNA. Following the long historical arc they trace, from the English Reformation through the opening decades of the early republic, we see that religious and political positions were perennially, changingly entangled. Religious positions shaped political ones and vice versa, and often the two were inextricable [End Page 720] and mutually reinforcing. Despite the First Amendment, no sharp historical dividing line can fully separate the British Empire's official Christianity and the United States' supposed secularism. These books tell new and needed stories about religion's enduring significance in early American politics and culture, including endemic threats of religious intolerance and coercion and the dogged, principled effort required to expand the scope of religious freedom.

The North American church/state story begins across the Atlantic, when the English Reformation catalyzed power struggles among Anglicans, Puritans, Dissenters, and Roman Catholics. Evan Haefeli's edited collection Against Popery: Britain, Empire, and Anti-Catholicism offers a dozen expertly researched, geographically wide-ranging perspectives on how antipopery shaped political conflicts from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. More than a quaint synonym for anti-Catholicism, antipopery references a...