Winnifred Fallers Sullivan proclaimed it, in legal and conceptual terms, an impossibility. David Sehat, taking a more historical approach, called it a myth. In this book, Finbarr Curtis aims to explore its production. “It,” of course, is religious freedom, or more specifically American religious freedom, a complex amalgam of institutional arrangements and legal precedents, beliefs and practices, narratives and collective self-understandings that cluster around issues of “church and state” in American culture and politics. Of course, religious freedom extends far beyond the institutional realms, and in The Production of American Religious Freedom Curtis takes the reader on a wide-ranging tour of the diverse locales in which these forces reside, and of the multifaceted cultural dynamics that both shape and are shaped by them.
In eight chapters, bracketed by brief introductory and concluding essays, Curtis ranges over a broad swath of the American experience, from Charles G. Finney's revivalism and Louisa May Alcott's novel Work to the 2015 Hobby Lobby U. S. Supreme Court case and debates over the teaching of Intelligent Design in the nation's schools. Along the way, readers encounter a range of racial, religious, legal, and social disputes, and Curtis offers cogent analyses of key figures like William Jennings Bryan, D. W. Griffith, Al Smith, and Malcolm X. Each chapter, without exception, presents intriguing and provocative insights, raising questions of race (Griffith, Malcolm X), gender (Alcott, Hobby Lobby), science (Bryan, Intelligent Design), and religion more narrowly and institutionally understood (Finney, Smith). Scholars interested in the broad interconnections between the religious and the political — particularly scholars with capacious definitions of those two terms — will find food for thought throughout.
“Religious freedom is a malleable rhetoric employed for a variety of purposes” (2), Curtis argues in the book's opening pages, and he offers a nuanced approach to the topic that “addresses institutional forces that define, produce, and distribute contested social resources in American life” (3). In other words, such an approach brings to light the way that American institutions “produc[e] persons who make choices about how to govern themselves” (3). These claims will be familiar to scholars working at the intersections of religion and American politics in recent years, but it's worth reminding audiences who retain a more conventional understanding of religion and politics as defined by questions of church, state, and the First Amendment.
For some of these cases, Curtis's approach works quite well. The chapters on Finney, Bryan, and Smith, in particular, provide a clear and focused analysis of the role of religion in the production of claims about American freedom, particularly religious freedom. As Curtis puts it, “Finney's revivals did not simply gather a collection of consumers; they produced environments in which social norms and public standards prescribed a limited variety of acceptable forms of individual discipline” (12). In Bryan's view, “Labor cultivated a virtuous and productive body that mirrored the civic role played by the institutions of church and state” (52). And in linking Al Smith's commitments to Tammany Hall with his identity as a Catholic raised on the Lower East Side, Curtis points out that “Smith's understanding of religious freedom was not reduced to individual choices; it included institutional and communitarian loyalties … loyalty to where and how one was brought up was protected under the umbrella of religious freedom” (106, 109). The writing is clear and tightly focused, and the analysis offers profound insights into the thought of these important Americans.
That said, the book's strength — the broad range of materials under consideration (sermons, novels, films, legal rulings, speeches, autobiography), and its historical range (Finney's 19th-century revivals through 21st-century Supreme Court rulings) — is at times its weakness. A more robust “spine” connecting such disparate material would have helped situate the cases into a broader framework, and a more substantive conclusion tying the arguments of the various chapters together would have clarified how Curtis sees these eight case studies fitting within a broader argument about American religious freedom. As it stands, the book's introductory chapter briefly (five pages) lays out the various cases to come, and a three-page “Epilogue” provides a cursory restatement of the book's themes. The criteria for inclusion of the various cases are not always clear, and the connections between them at times seem tenuous. Curtis's elegant discussion of Malcolm X, for example, says very little about the kinds of issues that animated figures like Finney or Alcott. Given his detailed and insightful analysis of the Hobby Lobby decision, I was surprised that Curtis did not do the same for Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District (2005), the landmark U. S. District Court decision that held the teaching of Intelligent Design in public schools to violate the Establishment Clause. The chapter on Hobby Lobby provides a clear and perceptive critique of the ruling in the case, but the discussion would have been enhanced by considering Bruce Lincoln's distinction between minimalist and maximalist religion, and by connecting Hobby Lobby to some of the other cases considered in the book. (The mentions of Alcott, Smith, and Finney in one sentence at the end of the chapter leave the reader wanting more.)
If the book's introduction leaves readers wondering why these particular cases are brought to bear instead of others, the brief “Epilogue” could leave readers wondering what the previous eight chapters add up to. This is not a request for a “grand narrative,” which Curtis rightly rejects. But surely there is more to say about the cumulative insights gained from these powerful cases. The Epilogue unhelpfully concludes with an awkward rhetorical shift to second-person address: “[F]reedom is on you … [Y]ou need to ask what you want to do with religious freedom” (169).
These concerns notwithstanding, there is much to recommend Curtis's broad aspirations in this book. Sullivan and Sehat, mentioned above, remained fairly focused on the complexities of American church and state and the power dynamics that underlie that relationship. Curtis's focus is more ambitious, and laudably so. In fact, I found myself wondering if the book ought to have been titled The Religious Production of American Freedom instead of The Production of American Religious Freedom, since it seems that Curtis wants ultimately to make broader and farther-reaching claims about the views Americans have historically held about their own choices in the political, social, economic, and religious realms. Indeed, “religious freedom” and “freedom” often appear almost interchangeable in Curtis's treatment. Perhaps Curtis will build upon the foundation laid here and take up the connection between freedom and religious freedom in future scholarship. There is surely much more to say, and in this book he has laid a solid and impressive foundation for a wide range of such inquiries.
