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A worthwhile look at a freedom too often taken for granted. --Kirkus Prize-winning historian Jack Rakove's lucid narrative of how the US Constitution came to acknowledge religion's role in private conscience and public policy brings out the complex religious and intellectual history underlying the development of constitutional doctrine. Rakove shows that a historian's ability to provide context for the way in which successive generations have treated religion in public law can illuminate contemporary controversies and provide 'lessons worth pondering, ' even though history cannot, as Rakove carefully notes, provide the only firm grounding for the decisions we must make today. --Mark Tushnet, William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law, Harvard Law School; author of Taking Back the Constitution Original and illuminating! Jack Rakove paints a vivid portrait of Madison and Jefferson, driven by Enlightenment ideas, acting to disestablish state religion and construct our contemporary notion of religious freedom. Moving elegantly across the Atlantic and through the centuries, Rakove explains how constitutional rights of individual religious conscience and private, voluntary association replaced the far more limited concept of state toleration of religious dissent. The final chapters boldly attempt to integrate this now familiar, once revolutionary concept into our world of expanded government, wide religious pluralism, and elaborate judicial doctrine. --Ira C. Lupu, F. Elwood and Eleanor Davis Professor Emeritus of Law, George Washington University; co-author of Secular Government, Religious People With characteristically sharp insight and good humor, Rakove traces the American history of religious freedom from colonization to today. This wonderful book presents the familiar combination of free exercise and non-establishment as the remarkable and unlikely innovation it was. And as Rakove's expert telling shows: it is all the more precious for that. --Teresa Bejan, Associate Professor of Political Theory, University of Oxford; author of Mere Civility In [Beyond Belief, Beyond Conscience, Rakove] attempts to wrest the Free Exercise Clause away from the lawyers and their vocational focus on language and logic, and offers instead an intellectual history of American religious liberty that explains how its evolutions and quandaries are the product of historical circumstance. - Jeremy Rozansky, Mosaic

A worthwhile look at a freedom too often taken for granted. --Kirkus Prize-winning historian Jack Rakove's lucid narrative of how the US Constitution came to acknowledge religion's role in private conscience and public policy brings out the complex religious and intellectual history underlying the development of constitutional doctrine. Rakove shows that a historian's ability to provide context for the way in which successive generations have treated religion in public law can illuminate contemporary controversies and provide 'lessons worth pondering, ' even though history cannot, as Rakove carefully notes, provide the only firm grounding for the decisions we must make today. --Mark Tushnet, William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law, Harvard Law School; author of Taking Back the Constitution Original and illuminating! Jack Rakove paints a vivid portrait of Madison and Jefferson, driven by Enlightenment ideas, acting to disestablish state religion and construct our contemporary notion of religious freedom. Moving elegantly across the Atlantic and through the centuries, Rakove explains how constitutional rights of individual religious conscience and private, voluntary association replaced the far more limited concept of state toleration of religious dissent. The final chapters boldly attempt to integrate this now familiar, once revolutionary concept into our world of expanded government, wide religious pluralism, and elaborate judicial doctrine. --Ira C. Lupu, F. Elwood and Eleanor Davis Professor Emeritus of Law, George Washington University; co-author of Secular Government, Religious People With characteristically sharp insight and good humor, Rakove traces the American history of religious freedom from colonization to today. This wonderful book presents the familiar combination of free exercise and non-establishment as the remarkable and unlikely innovation it was. And as Rakove's expert telling shows: it is all the more precious for that. --Teresa Bejan, Associate Professor of Political Theory, University of Oxford; author of Mere Civility

A worthwhile look at a freedom too often taken for granted. --Kirkus Prize-winning historian Jack Rakove's lucid narrative of how the US Constitution came to acknowledge religion's role in private conscience and public policy brings out the complex religious and intellectual history underlying the development of constitutional doctrine. Rakove shows that a historian's ability to provide context for the way in which successive generations have treated religion in public law can illuminate contemporary controversies and provide 'lessons worth pondering, ' even though history cannot, as Rakove carefully notes, provide the only firm grounding for the decisions we must make today. --Mark Tushnet, William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law, Harvard Law School; author of Taking Back the Constitution Original and illuminating! Jack Rakove paints a vivid portrait of Madison and Jefferson, driven by Enlightenment ideas, acting to disestablish state religion and construct our contemporary notion of religious freedom. Moving elegantly across the Atlantic and through the centuries, Rakove explains how constitutional rights of individual religious conscience and private, voluntary association replaced the far more limited concept of state toleration of religious dissent. The final chapters boldly attempt to integrate this now familiar, once revolutionary concept into our world of expanded government, wide religious pluralism, and elaborate judicial doctrine. --Ira C. Lupu, F. Elwood and Eleanor Davis Professor Emeritus of Law, George Washington University; co-author of Secular Government, Religious People With characteristically sharp insight and good humor, Rakove traces the American history of religious freedom from colonization to today. This wonderful book presents the familiar combination of free exercise and non-establishment as the remarkable and unlikely innovation it was. And as Rakove's expert telling shows: it is all the more precious for that. --Teresa Bejan, Associate Professor of Political Theory, University of Oxford; author of Mere Civility In [Beyond Belief, Beyond Conscience, Rakove] attempts to wrest the Free Exercise Clause away from the lawyers and their vocational focus on language and logic, and offers instead an intellectual history of American religious liberty that explains how its evolutions and quandaries are the product of historical circumstance. - Jeremy Rozansky, Mosaic

Author Information

Jack N. Rakove is William Robertson Coe Professor of History and American Studies Emeritus at Stanford University. He is the author of six books, including Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution, which won the Pulitzer Prize, and Revolutionaries: A New History of the Invention of America, finalist for the George Washington Book Prize.

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