In this era of increasingly narrow academic specialisation, rarely does a junior scholar's first book raise sweeping questions about the whole of American religious history. David Sehat's Myth of American religious freedom and David Holland's Sacred borders both accomplish this feat by rethinking, from different angles, the fundamental tension in American life between freedom of religion and the restriction (whether de jure or de facto) of that freedom.

Sehat's basic argument is that the religious freedom allegedly guaranteed by the US Constitution is a pious fiction. In reality, the oft-repeated language of religious liberty frequently cloaked a ‘moral establishment’ (or ‘religious establishment by proxy’) through which individual states and courts imposed a Christian, and sometimes overtly Protestant, set of social mores on the nation. Examples of this de facto Christian establishment include blasphemy statutes, which well into the nineteenth century were upheld by the courts on the argument that Christianity was part of Anglo-American common law; the law of coverture, which denied legal rights to women based on biblical notions of female subordination; anti-polygamy statutes, which the government used to battle the Latter-day Saints in the last half of the nineteenth century; and the Comstock Law of 1873, which imposed fines and prison time for distributors of literature deemed obscene.

Sehat is not the first scholar to argue that the United States has a de facto moral establishment that has interfered with the rights of non-Protestants and dissenters of various stripes. To cite but one example, Kathleen Flake's 2004 study, The politics of American religious identity: the seating of Senator Reed Smoot, Mormon apostle (a book not mentioned by Sehat), makes a similar case that Protestant establishmentarians defined the limits of religious free exercise. Sehat's major contribution, however, is his subtle reflection on the deleterious effects, especially in our own time, of the myth of religious freedom on American jurisprudence. By continually invoking this myth and thereby refusing to acknowledge the republic's ‘historically coercive regime’, according to Sehat, both conservatives and liberals have mired the nation in legal confusion. Conservatives have painted themselves as the true defenders of religious liberty even while seeking to impose new laws (for example statutes aimed at curtailing abortion rights) motivated by a particular religious morality. Liberals, meanwhile, have combatted such measures by their own appeals to the First Amendment heritage of religious liberty while remaining steadfastly ‘reluctant to acknowledge past religious power for fear that it would strengthen conservative jurisprudence’. In averting their eyes from the nation's long history of religious coercion, Sehat concludes, liberals ‘have given up the most compelling argument for their own jurisprudence, which was originally to liberate the individual from religious oppression that used the apparatus of the state’ (p. 291).

In tracing the roots of contemporary battles over religious freedom back to America's founding constitutional debates, Sehat displays a knowledge of legal history that is both broad and deep. His book is an intellectual tour-de-force and a must-have for all scholars interested in the ongoing saga of American Church-State relations. Likewise, David Holland, in Sacred borders, offers a model of intellectual history. He takes themes familiar to historians of early Christianity – namely, debates about the biblical canon and the nature of authentic revelation – and examines these issues in the American context.

The result is nothing less than a new way of thinking about the development of early American religion. Holland convincingly shows that the breaching or securing of canonical boundaries factored importantly, if not centrally, in a wide variety of groups, from the Puritans and their later Evangelical heirs, to Unitarians, Deists, Transcendentalists, Swedenborgians, Quakers, Shakers, Mormons and Adventists. Scholars of all of these disparate movements will benefit from Holland's work. Historians of the United States more generally will learn how pervasive debates about revelation and canonicity were in antebellum religious culture. Similarly, historians of ideas will find here a feast of paradoxes to chew on – for example, Holland's observation that Puritanism was a key source of both the canon-securing and canon-breaching tendencies in American religion.

Holland detects in the colonial period the beginning of an ongoing competition among religious groups to one-up each other on whose God was more communicative. This was no less true for deists, who rejected the Bible's timeless canonical status, than for the canon's Evangelical defenders. The difference was in whether the ongoing divine communication was conceived of as transcending Scripture or as simply unlocking its mysteries. Holland brilliantly demonstrates that the most fertile ground in American religion was precisely this ‘borderland’ (his own term) between transcending and unlocking, or breaching and securing, the canon. He sheds new light on a number of familiar figures – Jonathan Edwards, for instance – by showing the ways in which they often inhabited this ‘canonical threshold’.

A common thread with Sehat's book is Holland's attention to religious figures and movements outside of the Protestant mainstream. Such groups, in pushing against legal and canonical establishments, repeatedly challenged America to live up to its promise of religious liberty, sometimes to the chagrin of liberty's stoutest defenders. Holland's witty observation about Thomas Jefferson is apt here: ‘Among the many ironies of Jeffersonian America is that the religious freedom for which Jefferson fought so hard seemed to stimulate the sorts of religion of which he thought so little’ (p. 93). Holland exemplifies a new breed of intellectual historians who have democratised intellectual history by taking seriously the ideas of people on the margins. In Sacred borders Holland manages to weave together the thought of rough-hewn prophets like Ann Lee and Joseph Smith with the ‘canonical’ ideas of intellectuals like Horace Bushnell into a sophisticated reinterpretation of antebellum American religious history.

Holland's and Sehat's books are fine examples of the riches that can result when talented historians reclaim the freedom to think boldly and synthetically about the American religious experiment.