Anthony Gill has packed an enormous amount of thought-provoking material into this book. His presentation of religious liberty as “a matter of government regulation” (p. 10)—in other words, as “the deregulation of the religious marketplace” (p. 47)—shows the potential of rational choice and economic approaches to shed new and intriguing light on a topic more often treated philosophically and historically. One rarely encounters such terms as “religious ‘market share’” (p. 113) in the standard accounts of religious liberty's roots, and this book is a breath of fresh air, dealing with complex historical and political developments in clear and lively prose.

The first two chapters provide a comprehensive definition of religious liberty and defend Gill's rational choice approach to its history. His opening chapter is as clear, elegant, and accessible an overview of its topic as anything written in recent years; in the second, he provides a series of axioms and propositions laying out his theory in greater detail. Three subsequent chapters provide narrative accounts of the origins and development of religious liberty in colonial British America, Mexico and Latin America, and Russia and the Baltics. Each of these substantive chapters represents a self-contained interpretive essay on the societies under consideration, one that considers the history of religious liberty in light of the theoretical edifice laid out in the book's first two chapters. A brief concluding chapter attempts to tie together the fruits of approaching religious liberty in rational choice terms.

As in any attempt to account for hundreds of years of history in a single essay, there are the inevitable misfires in the substantive chapters. It is hardly ironic, for example—nor does it indicate that Puritans' views were “more strategic than ideological” (p. 65)—to note that Puritans went from being dissenters in England to defenders of orthodoxy in New England. Their arguments were never about tolerating difference for its own sake, but tolerating Truth (which they were sure that they possessed) in place of error. The claim that “[t]he lesson of the English Civil War was that nations that are fighting amongst themselves internally cannot aspire to greater prosperity” (p. 109) would likely surprise many participants in these conflicts, who rather saw them as ushering in the millennium, or casting down power-hungry kings, lords, and bishops. Likewise, the claim that “nobody was thinking of challenging Stalin's authority at this time knowing what had happened to those who had in the past” (p. 187) understates omnipresent divisions within the Soviet elite throughout the Stalin years (see William O. McCagg, Jr., Stalin Embattled, 1943–1948, 1978). Overall, though, the remarkable thing to note about such overstatements and oversimplifications is their relative rarity in a book that covers centuries of history, on four continents, in fewer than two hundred pages.

Far more intriguing and provocative is the methodological question about rational choice as a way of studying religious liberty. Religious liberty, after all, is simultaneously a concept, a practice, and an institutional arrangement. What exactly does the rational choice method say about the relative influence of economic and idealistic factors (to be crude, “interests” versus “ideas”) in fostering the practice of religious liberty across time? Gill's answer to this question is never quite clear, and the “brief discussion” (pp. 57–59) of these issues does not do justice to the importance and complexity of the question. Early on, the author notes that “interests play an equally important if not more critical role [than ideas] in securing legislation at unburdening religious groups from onerous state legislation” (p. 7), and describes his approach as “plac[ing] interests, as opposed to ideas (or culture), at the center of the analysis” (p. 22). What exactly “at the center of the analysis” means, and where this leaves ideas, remains vague. Elsewhere, Gill links his approach to that of neoclassical economists for whom “interests predominate over ideas” (p. 27), and yet he also admits that “[t]o claim that ideas have no influence over behavior would be misleading” (p. 57), and pronounces rational choice theory “agnostic” on the role of ideas.

It seems unclear, then, whether Gill's method can establish his broader claims, or at least the stronger claims about the predominance of interests over ideas. In what way can historical narratives “test a generalized theory regarding the origins of religious liberty” (p. 23)? Narratives, after all, are authorial constructions, and tricky ones at that (see Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation, 1987). It is true, of course, that “[f]inancial considerations were … at the heart of King Henry VIII's break from Rome in 1534” (p. 77). But can a historical narrative establish that “the first major regulatory decision that emanated from religious pluralism … was largely based on the desire by the ruler to maximize revenue” (p. 77)? Similarly, saying that certain events “fit with” (pp. 79, 139) or “illustrate” (pp. 62, 145) Gill's axioms and propositions, or that they are “in line with” (p. 128) or “support” such propositions (pp. 153, 212)—or even, most provocatively, that they “support empirically the theoretical axioms and propositions developed here” (p. 171)—is not the same as demonstrating that economic interests causally supplanted appeals to principles. Saying that interests must be weighed alongside ideas is fairly uncontroversial. Saying that interests predominate over ideas is a far more expansive claim, one far more difficult to prove, and one that seems to bifurcate and dichotomize the many ways in which interests and ideas mutually intertwine in the real lives of political actors.

Gill rightly situates his thesis about interests and rational choice in direct contrast to overly idealistic theories of religious liberty and its origins in the early modern world, taking issue with accounts that “view the concrete progress of religious liberty as a unilateral trend in intellectual thought” (p. 112). But surely this is a straw position, and recent scholarship presents far more nuanced explanations that blend philosophical argument with social history and a sensitivity to political contexts (see, for just the American case, the essays in Retelling U.S. Religious History, ed. Thomas A. Tweed, 1997). What is most impressive about The Political Origins of Religious Liberty, I think, is the way in which its attention to interests, economics, and rational choice can enrich the “standard story” wherever it is still promulgated. Whether such an achievement empirically proves a deductive theory about the primacy of interests over ideas, however, seems far less certain.