Writing the story of religion in the United States has become, in the last several decades, an increasingly fraught endeavor. Forty-five years after the publication of Sydney Ahlstrom's A Religious History of the American People (Yale University Press, 1972), and after trenchant critiques of that work, no single volume has arisen to replace it, while countless extraordinary books have been written that add to our knowledge and understanding of the astonishing variety of religious ways of life that have occupied the geographical space that is now the United States during the time of human habitation on the continent. What unifies these various ways of life—what allows them to be collected into a category called religion—and what precisely makes this particular set of religious stuff distinctively American, if it is, continues to elude us, however—although some interesting proposals have been made.

Finbarr Curtis enters the fray with a set of six new portraits of familiar American religious figures and two final chapters on the legal regulation of religion; in each case study, the stories he tells, as he graciously acknowledges, have richly benefited from the historical and social scientific work of the last half century. Curtis takes this collection of case studies to illustrate the fact that “there is no such thing as religious freedom” (2). Notwithstanding the pervasive conviction among Americans of all stripes that what distinguishes religion in the United States is its freedom, American religious people are not in fact free. Their religious lives are rather socially produced. The careers of Charles Grandison Finney, Louisa May Alcott, William Jennings Bryan, D. W. Griffith, Al Smith, Malcolm X, Intelligent Design, and the Hobby Lobby decision are offered together to dispel what Curtis takes to be an American misunderstanding of freedom, a freedom whose contours Americans have in fact never agreed on, and a misunderstanding which, at its worst, has meant that any effort to make that freedom real has had a tendency only to reinforce inequality and injustice. Each chapter shows us a highly particular performance of U.S. religion. Finney is really about psychological and emotional manipulation, not freedom. Alcott celebrates sentiment and dependence, not freedom. Bryan calls for love, not freedom. Griffith extolls sacrifice, not freedom. Smith looks to a tolerance born of communal solidarity, not individual freedom. Malcolm X embraced racial separatism, rejecting liberalism. These are not stories of religious freedom. They are complex stories of deeply compromised human creativity that is always entangled in that about which we are not free to choose. What defines American religious freedom for Curtis is a collective refusal to see that it is not really free. The courts’ treatment of Intelligent Design and Hobby Lobby only further underscore the confusion in our public rhetoric about religion.

There is much to admire in this work. Curtis is a lively and intelligent guide to these case studies, with a fine eye for the telling detail; he rarely lapses into cynicism in spite of his attraction to what he calls political economy as being the real story. He wants to teach us how to see that American religion comes into being as a result of social processes. He wants us to see how historical contingency and the complex interplay between structure and change, between the individual and the community, between determinacy and choice, between progressivism and conservatism, characterize what Americans call religious freedom. He wants us to see that religion is deeply implicated in the ongoing unfinished project of inventing America and that the various elements of the religious freedom idea change and recombine over time. He marshals his evidence carefully and generously cites other scholars. But one cannot help feeling that another eight cases would have done as well to make his point. If one is trying to counter the contemporary presupposition that religion, politics, and the economy in the United States are and should be separate domains, and always have been, then any story of religion will do to show that they are always everywhere intertwined. It is what we do in our classes. It matters, but it is a bit like shooting fish in a barrel.

We seem to be doomed as Americans to call our particular messy intertwining of religion, politics, and economy, religious freedom. But why is that? Curtis does not really address that question. And why does he end the book with law? Why after Malcolm X are there no more characters to embody non-freedom? Why are we looking now to law cases rather than biographies to explain the place of religion? Have we run out of exemplary individuals?

I would argue that the reason we—and Curtis—have turned to law is that law is suddenly visible in a new way. The mid-twentieth-century promise of religious freedom on a national scale, made at the time of Incorporation, has failed. The shiny optimism of the litigation unleashed by Incorporation, so ably described in Sarah Barringer Gordon's book, The Spirit of the Law: Religious Voices and the Constitution in Modern America (Belknap Press, 2010), has become tarnished. The Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) and its vicissitudes have soured our taste for religious freedom. We overreached.

The conditions of American religion originated in a distinctively new set of legal and social frameworks for religion in the new world. In the North American colonies that were to become the United States, religious diversity, disestablishment, and legal pluralism, together with the continuation of slavery and Jim Crow, as well as the rise of market capitalism, created a new and always unstable context for the formation of religious communities. For a time in the last half of the twentieth century, for political and economic reasons, a particular version of disestablishment and free exercise briefly stabilized in law. But that was an anomaly, not the rule, as we now see. Without formal, institutionalized religion to act as a partner with the state, as is the case in many countries, one sees in the United States a kaleidoscope of temporary consolidations of religion operating to enable or disable myriad social and cultural activities. We call that religious freedom.

This book ends with a very American challenge to the reader: “You need to ask what you want to do with religious freedom” (169). But the one thing this book teaches is that you do not have the freedom to decide this for yourself. We are all in this together, for better and worse.