Free Exercise

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." Those sixteen words, scratched on parchment in 1789, open the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment. From this spare expression, numberless interpretations have been drawn. The Supreme Court has been vigorously debating the meaning of this text for decades. Legions of students, law clerks, and historians have also dedicated themselves to the task. It has become something of an American pastime. Because of that work, an astounding variety of activities in modern America-from prayer after football games and Bible reading in classrooms, to funding for private religious schools and company healthcare policies, the baking of wedding cakes and the display of the Ten Commandments-have been alternately sanctioned, prohibited, or modified.

Free Exercise is an innovative contribution to both United States constitutional history and the history of religious toleration in the United States. It traces the routes by which Americans arrived at the First Amendment's religious clauses, the cultural currents that shaped their meaning, and the consequences that flowed from them. The book also demonstrates how white women, African Americans, Jews, Roman Catholics, and nonbelievers expanded the application of religious liberty-and illuminated its boundaries.

Each chapter demonstrates how protections for religious freedom were forged from both vague memories and intimate experiences, an emergent respect for individual autonomy and a refusal to materially alter the condition of women and the enslaved. Subsequent chapters examine their relationship to memories of religious violence, free market practices, religious civility, gender and racial exclusion, and unbelief. Each probes what America was at the time and what it was becoming. Free Exercise sheds light on this audacious and deeply flawed effort to reconcile liberty, faith, and equality.