There is a venerable tradition of problematizing presumed definitions of religion that goes back to Socrates posing his famous question to Euthyphro: Is the pious dear to the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is dear to the gods? The question undid poor Euthyphro in the dialogue that bears his name and remains a potent disrupter of any attempt to find a one-size-fits-all definition of religion, let alone the concept of religious freedom. Is there anything intrinsically “there” in what human beings take to be holy, such that they can recognize and then honor whatever that thing is? Or is what people take to be holy merely a result of what more powerful forces have decreed based on some inscrutable will beyond our understanding?

In The Production of Religious Freedom, Finbarr Curtis responds to Socrates’ question by answering the last question in the affirmative. There is no such thing as religious freedom, and this is largely because there is no substantive reality behind the concept(s) of religion. “Religious freedom is a malleable rhetoric employed for a variety of purposes,” and these purposes ultimately arise from various conflicts between jostling and competing forces, which then produce the very lenses through which we see and live in the world (pp. 2–3). Whereas most Americans’ commonsense view is that religion deserves protection as a personal and inward disposition toward the ultimate, coupled with the beliefs and practices that follow, this very understanding has been produced by “[a]n economy of religious freedom” that “addresses institutional forces that define, produce, and distribute contested social resources in American life” (p. 3).

Religion, then, is not one of theologian Paul Tillich’s matters of ultimate concern, nor a particular system of theological doctrine and liturgical practice, nor St. James’s looking after widows and orphans and keeping oneself pure from the world, nor Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s Hobby Lobby definition of explicitly individual acts such as “prayer, worship, and the taking of the sacraments” (p. 150). We cannot say that any of these definitions are correct, or mistaken for that matter, because we have no reason to think there is a true definition by which to measure them. “If,” Curtis notes, “it serves judges’ purposes to restrict religion to prayer and sacraments, then that is what religion is” (p. 151). Religion and religious freedom, then, are epiphenomena, concepts created, molded, and applied by unseen and difficult-to-diagnose forces—modern gods perhaps—that produce our social realities. “Religious freedom” is a tool used to obfuscate the exercise of power.

This critical approach to religion and religious freedom undergirds the plan and layout of the book. Curtis acts as a historical and philosophical tour guide in introducing the reader to several somewhat disparate chapters of American religious history and several key players in the production of religious freedom. The chapters are comprised of thoughtful and incisive meditations: the calculated revivalism of Charles Finney, the healing and holistic proto-feminist fiction of Louisa May Alcott, the category-defying progressivism of William Jennings Bryan, the noxious inversion of racial sympathy and justice in D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, Al Smith’s Catholic appeal for American Protestantism to practice a broader religious freedom, the iconoclastic and revolutionary faith and practice of Malcolm X, the slippery rhetorical dynamics of the intelligent design (ID) movement, and, finally, the use of corporate personhood in constitutional law to maintain power over propertied persons in the Hobby Lobby case and beyond.

Curtis wisely makes no pretense of presenting a comprehensive review of religious freedom in America, nor does he attempt to provide a common thread linking the various figures and movements. Given his premises, this makes a great deal of sense. To the extent that there is a common thread, it is that no one formulation of religious freedom actually frees anyone from social constraints (p. 5). We might think that the very etymology of “religion” supports Curtis’s assumption that defining religion and religious freedom is quixotic, as the Latin root ligare means to bind or to tie together, like a ligament. What can it mean to have the freedom to bind oneself?

Students, scholars, and observers of American politics and religion can profit a great deal from engaging Curtis’s treatment of these various figures and snapshots of American history. He does more observing and explaining than he does arguing; that is, he frequently lays out a particular argument, some conflict of power, but rather than take sides he is more interested in the sort of ideas and concepts that arise from the conflict and its resolution. While specialists in any particular area—say, early American religious revivalism or constitutional law—may find this or that detail of Curtis’s treatments wanting, he has a knack for framing what is going on in each chapter in surprising and provocative ways. Malcolm X’s supposed conversion to a more liberal Islam after his haj cannot be so easily understood as white liberals or his former Nation of Islam colleagues have described it (pp. 121–22). William Jennings Bryan’s populist progressivism and creationism, teetotalism, and racism do not comprise a modern/religious Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde but stem from one man’s imperfect attempt to promote the well-being of the common (white) man. Critics of intelligent design have unwittingly broadened the concept of religious freedom to anything that includes the notion of an extra-human intelligence because they have been so intent on labeling ID as religious so as to keep it out of public schools (p. 144). Each chapter has insights like these that are at best quite insightful and at the least challenging, even when not entirely persuasive.

As a series of thoughtful vignettes on several chapters of American religio-political history and politics, the book cannot help but be of interest. It is less successful, however, as an argument leading to the conclusion that religious freedom does not exist. This is primarily because despite the promotional description of the book and Curtis’s claim to argue for this conclusion in his introduction (p. 2), the chimerical existence of religious freedom is a premise rather than a conclusion. Given that the conflict of power interests “produce” religion as a means for prevailing in any given contest, one can read each subsequent chapter as describing the production of varying and incommensurable versions of religious freedom. The missing and necessary premise, however, is that conflicting iterations of a purported social reality indicate that the reality does not exist. Or to put it differently: If religious freedom existed, we would expect to find it manifest in the same recognizable way in every stage of American history.

Why should we expect this? It is not surprising that if one starts with power as the fundamental reality of the world, then everything else will ultimately be explicable only as it relates to power. Yet it simply does not follow that because it is difficult to provide a comprehensive and timeless definition, the reality that the definition is attempting to capture does not exist. The many different defenses and articulations of, for instance, women’s rights do not mean that there are no such things as women’s rights apart from how such a concept can be wielded by powerful forces. This book succeeds more as a fascinating exploration of what it might mean to look at religious freedom, assuming religion to be a shifting and ethereal epiphenomenon, than it does as an argument establishing the same.