The Bible, the School, and the Constitution is a lucid interdisciplinary history of religion and jurisprudence in America. In it, Professor Steven K. Green argues the nineteenth-century School Question debates “laid the foundation for modern church-state doctrine” (9). We must understand the “commanding impact” (225) of those disputes, Green maintains, to grasp how profoundly they shaped contemporary interpretations of the First Amendment. The School Question debates were significant for a number of related reasons, Green claims. First, a considerable—and varied—portion of the population was invested in and impacted them, as Americans came “the closest they have ever come” (9) to having a meaningful public discussion about the constitution and religion. The Question was also a lightning rod for many Americans' anxieties over the role(s) of government and religion relative to schools and schooling, and over who or what should provide the moral fabric for a diversifying nation. Green constructs his narrative through a close reading of multiple primary sources including: trials, constitutional amendment propositions, judges' opinions, newspapers, and reports from educational, political, and religious organizations. Through them, the multi-varied, interwoven, and often conflicting players and ideologies implicated in the School Question materialize.

Green's first two chapters cover the early development of the concepts of “nonsectarianism” and “no funding,” respectively. In chapter 1 he concludes that by the late 1850s and early 1860s, with the Donohue and Cooke holdings and the New York and Massachusetts Bible reading mandates, courts understood Bible reading as a nonsectarian practice. From then on, nonsectarianism was legal doctrine and a “workable solution” (44) to the School Question. Green provides a similar overview of the no-funding principle in his second chapter. Debates over Catholic school funding were, in Green's estimation, the rule's “most common application” (46) and they illustrate how the various constituents involved in the School Question understood it.

In chapters 3, 4, and 5, Green demonstrates how the relationship between nonsectarianism and no-funding was crafted in three episodes that took place from 1869 and 1876. This is when, Green contends, the jurisprudence the Supreme Court later adopted coalesced. Green claims the Cincinnati Bible War (Minor v. Board of Education), the central episode in chapter 3, “settled the question of whether nonsectarian instruction could ever reclaim its devotional roots or justifications” (135). The question then became “whether any use of the Bible was constitutional” (135). Disparate individuals and groups in the late 1860s and early 1870s sought to change the First Amendment to the Constitution, and Green builds chapter 4 around the tension between these “Amendmentists.” The Christian Amendment Movement believed the U.S. debt to a sovereign God should be constitutionally enshrined, whereas the Free Religion Association strove to ensure nothing of the sort would happen. Because they offered such competing visions for the country Green contends, the Amendmentists kept church-state questions relevant. In chapter 5, Green examines the Blaine Amendment, on which he has written extensively. Although the School Question “faded as a political issue” (222) after its defeat, the era still illustrates “significant constitutional development . . . that would serve as the crucible of future church-state doctrine,” (223) in Green's estimation.

This text has many strengths. Immediately striking is Green's incisive and accessible narrative in a monograph teeming with meticulous detail. His coverage of the Christian Amendment Movement is noteworthy as well. Green explains how before the Civil War, the movement framed its proposal as an effort to recognize God. But after the war, Green notes a “shift” in the “theological basis” (146) of their strategy; they no longer framed their efforts as an attempt to add God but rather, to return God to the constitution and preserve what they believed was the Founders' intention. This is fascinating. Its connection to varied theological interpretations of the war (northern, southern, religious, non-religious, and so forth) and how different views on slavery and race influenced and were in turn affected by it would be a fruitful exploration. What's more, small, conservative (non-fundamentalist) Presbyterian denominations, who were the backbone of the movement, were and are more influential in American religious history and culture than their numbers suggest. Green's work is a pertinent reminder that, surprising as it may seem, they deserve more contemporary scholarly analysis.

Some scholars might challenge Green's assessment of nativism's role in the School Question and the degree to which he believes anti-Catholicism was implicated in both. He claims, “establishing a tie between nativism and anti-Catholicism only begins the inquiry” (73). True, but Green's secondary sources somewhat distort his argument here; the social and economic histories he cites describe nativism as “an ideological and social movement . . . with strong class and economic overlays” in which anti-Catholicism “was less of a cause . . . than it was its effect” (78). Green concludes then, that nativist violence did not occur primarily because of anti-Catholicism or even religion, but that conflict over bible reading served as a “proxy for the larger economic and ethnic issues” (84).

This text will be enlightening for scholars and graduate students alike, and must be read alongside recent works by Noah Feldman, Sally Gordon, Phillip Hamburger, and David Sehat, who likewise wrestle with tensions at the intersection of religion and law. Though scholars will be tempted to interpret Green's work as a challenge to Hamburger's thesis that anti-Catholicism was the primary reason for the separation of church and state, I do not think either Green or Hamburger's work should be read so neatly. The separation of church and state is a messy process, and it is not synchronous with the development of church-state doctrine per se. Green's text is in fact, a keen illustration of how complicated both are.