In some respects, Tisa Wenger's Religious Freedom: The Contested History of an American Ideal is an ambitious project. For decades, historians have been writing about the meaning of religious freedom in the United States, and, as Wenger herself admits, “there is nothing new about the idea that religious freedom is a defining element of the modern secular democracy or about American Protestant claims to a unique affinity with this freedom” (11). It is hard to imagine a novel approach to this well-trodden topic, particularly in the wake of studies by Winnifred Sullivan, Tracy Fessenden, and David Sehat that have dispelled the myth of a beneficial, natural progression of religious freedom in America, chiefly for the nation's non-white non-Protestants. Contrary to that conventional wisdom, religious freedom was always a fluid and malleable concept, frequently defined and manipulated by white Protestants to maintain their cultural hegemony.

That said, Religious Freedom: The Contested History of an American Ideal provides a fresh approach to the subject, proposing that in order to understand the development of religious freedom in America one must consider it within the frameworks of race and empire. Wenger maintains that traditionally “dominant varieties of American religious freedom talk were configured, more often than not, in ways that enabled imperial forms of domination” of racial minorities by white Protestants (14). This then caused minority groups to redefine their communal identities as religious rather than racial: “Minority invocations of religious freedom could at times provide an avenue of escape from the defining power of race,” allowing groups such as Catholics and Jews to eventually enjoy “the racial privileges of whiteness in American life” (13).

To demonstrate this dynamic, Religious Freedom considers transitions within five different religio-racial communities, all taking place within the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: Catholics, Filipinos, Native Americans, Jews, and African Americans. The theme that purportedly ties together these various communities is that they all experienced the effects of a white Protestant empire, either foreign or domestic, and each struggled to achieve inclusion into the culture by the process of redefining their differentness as religious. This process was not an effort to become assimilated but to maintain their identities and distinctiveness by defining those markers now as religious.

This theme, while compelling, works better for some of these groups than others. The theme is likely most applicable for the experience of the nation's Jewish community. Having faced anti-Semitism, persecution, and pogroms in Europe, American Jews within the Reform movement came to define Jewishness as a religious identity rather than racial, as did Zionists, and they championed ideas of religious freedom as a way to achieve “their always-tentative acceptance as equal participants in America life” (154). The result was the emergence of a “tri-faith America” (49) by the 1950s, whereby most Protestants accepted, if not celebrated, the nation's Judeo-Christian heritage. Wenger's theme also works for Native Americans, a group she considered in her previous book, We Have Religion (University of North Carolina Press, 2009). While Native Americans would never become “white,” as did Jews and Catholics, the redefining of their cultural practices as religious and as raising a religious freedom issue went far to preserve their identities against the cultural genocide initiated by the government.

The book's theme struggles in other chapters. The book's consideration of Catholicism feels highly underdeveloped. Wenger discusses Catholicism in the first two chapters, which examine the United States' imperial ambitions in the Philippines at the turn of the century. While Protestant imperialists initially justified the Spanish-American War on the basis of freeing indigenous peoples in Cuba and the Philippines from the tyrannical rule of a corrupt Spanish-Catholic regime, Catholic Church leaders later became the defenders of American values against the subsequent insurgences of Filipino and Moro-Muslim nationalists. (Filipino nationalists used the language of religious freedom against white Catholic leaders as a means of demonstrating their civilizational credentials to their American overlords.) Although this episode supports Wenger's theme, it gives short shrift to the much larger story of the transition of American Catholicism of the mid-nineteenth century from being an ethnic religion—despised as much for its ethnic associations (that is, Irish Catholics, Italian Catholics, and Polish Catholics) as for its religious qualities—to being an American church. Catholics became “white” in the eyes of Protestant Americans as a result of the church's organizational support for the nation's cause during World Wars I and II and the participation of Catholics in both wars (and their later integration into the middle class as a result of the G.I. Bill).

The book's theme also becomes complicated with the chapter on African Americans, a point that Wenger readily acknowledges. As she notes, “For the vast majority of African Americans, religious freedom provided little escape from the confines of racial oppression” (191). The chapter briefly compares the different approaches of black civil rights leaders Martin Luther King, Jr., who skillfully integrated claims of faith and religious equality into broader claims for racial inclusion, with Malcom X, who used religion (the Nation of Islam) to emphasize black identity. The chapter concentrates on the Nation of Islam and the Moorish Science Temple, which asserted stronger religious freedom claims in their efforts to achieve legitimacy. While the experience of both groups supports the book's theme, the consideration comes at the expense of the black Protestant community—represented by King (who is mentioned only twice)—which since Reconstruction has made religious freedom claims to ensure the independence of the black church and that community's participation in the larger culture.

Overall, Religious Freedom makes an important contribution to the literature, reminding us how the language of religious freedom has been fluid and complicated, and that the idea of religious freedom cannot be considered apart from other cultural assemblages.