What unites the apparently disparate topics of this volume – human rights, separation of church and state, and marriage – is a methodology committed to a providential view of history. It is the belief that nothing is wasted, that the most enduring teachings of religious traditions live on in modern secular legal institutions, and that the retrieval of their sources is essential for our proper understanding of them. Witte, the ‘Christian historian’, is engaged in searching ‘the wisdom of the ages for some indication of the eternal wisdom of God’ (p 4). It is a refreshingly ambitious project, here largely worked out in the context of controversies surrounding the nation-building traditions of American protestantism, though with more than passing reference to the wider world of catholicism, orthodoxy and, to a lesser extent, Judaism and Islam. Law and religion have always coexisted and continue to interact in a variety of ways, at best in a state of ‘dialectical harmony’, and the ‘binocular’ of both disciplines must be used to understand our present situation in regard to the chosen topics (p 5). In the area of human rights, it is not difficult for Witte to demonstrate the enormous debt that the contemporary law owes to religious developments of the past, notably in catholic medieval canon law, protestant beliefs in the freedom of the gospel, and the work on toleration undertaken by the likes of John Locke and the framers of the American Constitution. When discussing the protestant contribution, for example, he gives an originating role to Luther's tract Freedom of a Christian, specifically in its religious approach to dignity, liberty and equality. A Christian is at once a lord, subject to no one, and a priest who is servant to everyone. All vocations are equal, all have direct access to God. This is the origin of a Christian's dignity and liberty. As we know, there was a deal of back-pedalling over the social implications of Luther's equality doctrine. Nevertheless, the revolution in thought was a real one, worked out in the political changes of the following centuries. Inalienable individual rights were a consequence, although, for the thoughtful protestant (Locke comes to mind), the individual is sovereign only in possessing rights to discharge his or her duties imposed by the creator. But all this Reformation activity presupposed the previous 300 years of catholic legal activity on the rights and privileges of the Church and lay corporations and of individuals in their separate ‘dignities’. There is continuity as well as revolution.

The modern success and ubiquity of rights talk now threatens its effectiveness as individuals drift away from the moral grounding of their religious traditions and increasingly identify their rights with their wants. At present, says Witte, we are in a state of ‘Dickensian paradox’ (‘the best of times’ and ‘the worst of times’) (p 63). Never so many declarations and claims, never so many violations and clashes. This is particularly so in the noisy arena of religious rights, where the human rights revolution has let loose religious energies the world over. It has, for example, prompted conflict between those (mainly in Western churches) who consider it their right to go and evangelise wherever God sends them and those (of indigenous faiths of other continents) who consider it their right to be left in peace in their own territory, and who resent the aggressive intrusion of new religions that they associate with individualism, materialism and the decay of their communal traditions. There is consequently a clash of rights that cannot be resolved with further rights talk, but which, on all sides, demands a greater attention to founding events and texts of religions, and a suspicion of what the ‘traditionalists’ – religious or secular – tell us about them.

What is needed, says Witte, is a ‘human rights culture’ (p 67). On the one hand, human rights norms need religious narratives to ground them. On the other hand, ‘religious narratives need human rights norms both to protect them and to challenge them’ (p 69). It is essential that rights emerge from the resources of the religions themselves, rather than being imposed from outside – a particularly disastrous procedure when it is seen as the West imposing itself on everyone else. As if to illustrate this, a chapter is devoted to the especially bitter conflict in Russia where, since 1996, Western faiths – including Roman Catholicism – have been restricted by draconian new laws that favour a recovering Orthodoxy to the exclusion of almost all others. This has severely affected not only the proselytising activities of Western churches but also the day-to-day religious freedoms of minority religions with undeniable historical claims. In view of such legal catastrophes, the demand for a human rights culture begins to make sense, even thought it is unclear to me how Witte proposes that we can move from the need to the reality.

I have highlighted this argument, which occurs early in the book, because of its global relevance. Otherwise, the setting of two-thirds of the book is the USA: its early history, its constitutional debates, its experience of marriage and divorce, its strange (to European eyes) combination of vigorous religiosity and extreme secularism. This limits the book's relevance on this side of the Atlantic, although I do find at least one of the American chapters – ‘That serpentine wall of separation between church and state’ – very helpful in understanding the part played by religion in US politics, which is something that we should all try to understand. It appears that principled rejection of all religious affiliation, subsidy or symbolic support for religions on the part of government is a very recent interpretation of the First Amendment that was forced on states by a secularising Federal Supreme Court in the 1940s, and that, for their first 150 years, the states of the union were a good deal more relaxed about such things. In any case, the original purpose of the wall of separation was to stop the state interfering in religion rather than the reverse. Witte understandably wants to see a return to a more flexible and local interpretation of the separation rule and an end to the aggressive ‘religion of secularism’, which is a break with American roots and which does nothing but inflame religious fundamentalism. This, like all the chapters in the book, is the fruit of a deep scholarship and familiarity with documentary sources. The American chapters are a brilliant example of the pursuit of moral truth through historical research.