Most accounts treat religious freedom as a bedrock constituent of the American polity, an inalienable right enshrined in the First Amendment. From this perspective, it represents a static principle that protects individuals from state interference in their beliefs and devotional practices. Tisa Wenger approaches the subject differently; she wants to know how and why people have appealed to the ideal of religious freedom. Key to her analysis of ‘religious freedom talk’ (p. 1) – the diverse ways in which people have invoked this ideal – is to trace how it unfolded under the impact of different ‘assemblages’ (p. 3) – complexes of discourses, institutions and material relations that shape identity-formation and the distribution of power within societies. So conceived, religious freedom is less a right in itself than an ‘eminently malleable discourse’ (p. 235) that can be deployed to justify or challenge social and political arrangements. Wenger is particularly concerned with how religious freedom talk functioned between what she calls the ‘Spanish-Cuban-Filipino-American War’ and World War Two, a pivotal period in the American histories of race and imperialism but one that scholars of religious freedom have neglected. During this time, she contends, religious freedom talk intersected most particularly with assemblages concerning race, religion and civilisation to fashion compelling justifications for extending the American empire overseas while subordinating groups like Native and African Americans at home. At the same time, the value that the dominant culture placed on religious freedom encouraged such subaltern groups to employ it for themselves.

The prevailing religious freedom talk during this era, Wenger maintains, took shape in conversation with certain constructions of freedom, religion, race and empire. Freedom was understood as an individual right and the antithesis of slavery – which itself had come to be associated with race, a manner of ranking (and thus subjugating) people according to their physical characteristics. Religion, per the Enlightenment, constituted a realm of strictly spiritual matters divorced from the secular state, a definition that had progressed farthest among Protestant nations. The high valuation accorded religious freedom, conjoined with its dominant racial (white) and religious (Protestant) identities, marked the United States as an advanced nation whose self-evident superiority warranted its extending imperial control over and ‘civilising’ people considered – on the basis of such characteristics as darker skin colour and devotion to ‘superstitious’ or ‘heathen’ practices – to be less modern. Religious freedom talk buttressed claims that the United States should wrest the Philippines from Spain – whose historically Catholic authoritarianism had rendered it incapable of bringing the Filipinos liberty and democracy – and establish its own tutelary regime to do so. Closer to home, suppressing the Native American Ghost Dance as a violent resistance movement endangering white settlers could be justified on the grounds that it did not possess the moral and civilising qualities of ‘true’ religion – Christianity – and thereby fell outside the First Amendment.

The white, Protestant majority never monopolised religious freedom talk, however; according to Wenger, minorities constantly appropriated its iconic status for their own purposes. The Roman Catholic hierarchy in the United States charged that the true enemies of religious freedom in the Philippines under American rule were not Catholics but rather Protestants whose call to banish Spanish friars – itself evidence of bigotry – would turn Catholic Filipinos against the United States and frustrate plans to teach them American forms of self-government. In so doing, the Church refuted longstanding suspicions of Catholics’ patriotism by identifying itself with both a founding constitutional ideal and the American empire's civilising mission. Perhaps the most outstanding example of a minority using religious freedom talk to elevate its status within the United States were American Jews, who countered rising currents of racialised antisemitism by asserting their primary identity as a religious group fully deserving equal constitutional protection and, in the process, substantially repositioned themselves as racially ‘white’. Yet invoking religious freedom might have unintended consequences or fail to achieve a desired goal. Against charges that they were simply consuming illegal drugs, Native American adherents to the Peyote Cult eventually won the right to ingest cactus buttons by declaring that they were participating in a religious rite, but the exemption came only after they had refigured their practices in a more overtly Christian direction and ceded some claims to Native sovereignty. Moreover, movements like the Nation of Islam, which preached a vision of black nationalism that radically opposed majoritarian understandings of religious freedom as a matter of individual, not collective, conscience, could not gain protected status as religions for themselves. Overall, as Wenger details, religious freedom talk could not overturn race as the primary category identifying – and subordinating – African Americans.

Wenger is absolutely convincing that, however static and benign religious freedom may sound as an abstract ideal, its meaning in practice has depended on a host of contingencies, and groups have deployed it in myriad ways, some of which might be seen as constraining, rather than promoting, religious freedom. One would, in addition, like to know how deployments of religious freedom between 1898 and 1945 compare with those before and after those somewhat arbitrary dates. Officials in late seventeenth-century Pennsylvania – one of religious freedom's American birthplaces – harried George Keith on the grounds that his critiques of Quaker practice were not ‘religious’ (a protected matter of conscience) but ‘seditious’ (political and hence open to prosecution), a tactic that two centuries later closely anticipated the rationale for American authorities’ attacks on the Filipino Independent Church. The 1940s, we learn in Wenger's conclusion, opened a new era, one in which disputes about religious freedom landed more frequently in the courts. Such contests are quite alive in the United States at present, where a coalition of Evangelical Protestants and conservative jurists have raised the principle of religious freedom to defend – for fear of violating one's conscience – practices that others allege subvert equally important rights like freedom from discrimination because of sexual orientation. Wenger has, she admits, emphasised the ‘less savory aspects’ of religious freedom's history, but she also notes that its very plasticity grounds possibilities for challenging its dominant configurations, ‘however powerful they might be’ (p. 239).