Although this book opens with a false step – the author's statement that ‘a basic, central, organizing idea of the Protestant revolution was the belief that all Christians had the duty to interpret the Bible for themselves’, which Miller characterises as a blinding insight – the book regains its footing to make a credible argument (p. 2). With deep immersion in primary sources dating back to the sixteenth century, the author constructs a persuasive case for looking at the First Amendment through a slightly different prism. Rather than viewing it as purely an outgrowth of Enlightenment rationalism or, alternatively, as a concession to religious pluralism in the various colonies, Miller wants to add a distinctively Protestant gloss to the First Amendment. Arguing that ‘religious beliefs need to have a more meaningful place at the historical table’, Miller contends that the intellectual genealogy of the First Amendment begins with Martin Luther and continues through Sebastian Castellio, John Smyth, Pieter Twisck, Thomas Helwys, Leonard Busher and John Murton (p. 12). Miller argues that ‘the English Baptists drew from the early Luther in constructing their church/state arguments’ (p. 38). Most compellingly, Miller establishes a connection between Murton's Humble supplication and both John Milton's Aeropagitica and Roger Williams's Bloudy tenet (the latter two were both published in 1644, in the midst of the English Revolution). Others in this genealogy include some familiar names: William Penn, Elisha Williams, Isaac Backus, John Witherspoon and James Madison. Miller properly examines the controversies surrounding the establishment of King's College (Columbia) in mid eighteenth-century New York as a pivotal moment in colonial discussions about Church-State relations; he also contends that William Livingston, who opposed the use of state funds in the formation of an Anglican school, employed the free-marketplace metaphor for religion several decades before it was picked up by Adam Smith in The wealth of nations. The effect of this updraft of ideas was to elevate the right of private judgement, a historically Protestant ideal, to the centre of the arguments for religious freedom in the new nation. Although Miller perhaps too often assumes that one author was ‘likely familiar’ with another, the lineage that he traces is at the very least plausible. The religious roots of the First Amendment amplifies even more than we already suspected the importance of dissenting Protestant, especially Baptist, thought and principles in the formulation of the First Amendment. The author concludes with a quintessentially Baptist declaration: ‘A loss of an understanding of the religious roots and Protestant heritage of the antimajoritarian, antiestablishment aspects of the religion clauses is accompanied, unsurprisingly, by a loss of the sense of the antimajoritarian and sacrosanct nature of rights generally’ (p. 170).