In recent decades, the subject of church-state relations has engaged the legal system in the United States. This growing body of litigation has, in turn, generated extensive commentary by academic observers. For the most part, this literature has focused on the legal issues involved in jurisprudence over the religion clauses of the First Amendment of the United States Constitution. With some exceptions, there is relatively little popular or academic literature concerning the actual participants in church-state litigation.

Peter Irons' volume, God on Trial: Dispatches from America's Religious Battlefields, represents an important attempt to remedy this shortcoming in the literature. As the subtitle of the work attests, the book is intended to provide descriptions of the controversies that have occasioned litigation over the Establishment Clause.

The first three chapters provide the context for the main body of the text. Chapter 1 deals with the historical circumstances surrounding the adoption of the religion clauses of the First Amendment, while Chapter 2 consists of an accessible, non-technical summary of First Amendment jurisprudence since the Everson case incorporated the Establishment Clause in 1947. Chapter 3 contains biographical sketches of Barry Lynn, former head of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, and Jay Sekulow, who directed the American Center for Law and Justice.

The core of the book is comprised by five chapters that provide narrative accounts of the following church-state controversies: An ongoing dispute over the display of a cross in Mt. Soledad Park in San Diego; a controversy concerning public prayers at high school football games in Santa Fe, Texas; disputes concerning the public displays of the Ten Commandments in McCreary County, Kentucky, and Austin, Texas; the dispute over the inclusion of the words “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance; and the dispute over the teaching of “intelligent design” in Dover, Pennsylvania.

The fact that I have not referred to these cases by their titles (e.g. Santa Fe Independent School District v. Doe) reflects the focus of this interesting volume. Although the author is a professor and attorney (and participated actively in the litigation in the San Diego cross case), the content of this book is not based primarily on the application of legal doctrine. While Irons is quite conversant with Establishment Clause jurisprudence, the substantive chapters are primarily about the original disputes leading to the litigation in each case. Irons focuses attention on the grievances of the plaintiffs in the case, the responses of the defendants (generally, public officials), and interaction at the community level. Thus, we learn that the defendants in the Santa Fe football case regarded themselves as the victims of intimidation (occasioning the use of the pseudonym Doe in the formal litigation), yet that the parties to the Kentucky Ten Commandments case continued to interact in an affable manner toward one another. Each chapter includes extensive first-person narratives from participants on both sides of the controversy covered in each chapter.

As narrative history, and “thick description” participant observation, God on Trial is well-researched, well-written, and very enjoyable reading. Irons has done a marvelous job of conveying the perspectives of participants “on the ground” in these church-state disputes. However, the work ultimately suffers from a lack of editorial presence and analysis. In particular, the first-person narratives with which Irons concludes each substantive chapter are clearly unedited, and Irons refrains from commenting on the issues raised, differences in key assumptions, or the plausibility of the arguments offered. The concluding chapter contains no evaluation, or even a systematic comparison of the similarities and differences among the cases. Irons does compare his work to the recent volume by Morris P. Fiorina, Samuel J. Abrams, and Jeremy C. Pope, Culture Wars: The Myth of a Polarized America. Irons regard his work as a counterpoint to the Fiorina volume, in which the authors assign a high level of responsibility for the apparent emergence of a “culture war” to the news media. By contrast, Irons attempts to demonstrate that, at least with respect to church-state issues, legal controversies are generated by real people, with real grievances, who inhabit real communities.

Thus, God on Trial provides the raw material for fascinating cultural and political analyses of legal issues that have received prominent attention in recent decades. For this reason, the book is highly recommended as an informative and enjoyable read. However, Peter Irons does not undertake the task of providing any thoroughgoing analysis. Thus, God on Trial represents an interesting set of ethnographies, as well as a missed opportunity.