The free exercise of religion is a fundamental right guaranteed by the First Amendment of the US Constitution. Yet it is not the right itself that is Finbarr Curtis's focus here, but rather how individual religious choices are shaped by social forces throughout American history. As such, The Production of American Religious Freedom is a tour de force, offering a multifaceted and sustained analysis of how individual religious choices work both in history and in contemporary life. The result is Curtis's well-argued thesis: the free exercise of religion is not as free as it might appear to be. While no American is forced to choose any given religion, religious preferences themselves are influenced by competing social and market forces. This thesis is original and insightful.

Curtis opens his book with “Americans are a people captivated by freedom” (1). The first paragraph presents several paradoxical phenomenological observations regarding the free exercise of religion, such as “Freedom longs for a Christian nation and welcomes religious diversity” (1). Although Curtis tries to link each of his chapters later on in an epilogue, there is little sense of continuity. This gives the impression that the book project itself was conceived after the fact, in stringing together these chapters. That said, this patchwork quilt of disparate chapters does more or less support Curtis's objective, albeit unevenly. He gets to the point with his highly original thesis that “there is no such thing as religious freedom” (2). The heart of his argument is articulated here:

The Production of American Religious Freedom is not a closely argued monograph from start to finish. Rather, it is a collection of sundry articles: eight chapters, with an introduction and an epilogue. Chapters 5 and 7 are revisions of previously published journal articles, and chapters 4 and 8 are revisions to blogs (ix–x). What these otherwise seemingly disparate chapters have in common is that they “highlight different conceptual problems in the study of religion” (5). This volume is essentially a collection of “selected case studies” (5) of a related nature. Curtis's stated “goal” is “not to propose any one explanation for how religious freedom works” (5), but rather “to highlight how freedom has been contested, challenged, and transformed” (5). These diversely aspectual chapters are kaleidoscopic in nature. They “illuminate competing visions of the proper relationship between public and private life” (5).

Curtis acknowledges that he learned from his father “to respect and criticize American freedom” (x). He goes beyond his father's advice by presenting, then explaining, the paradox that religious freedom is not truly free. “Religious identities,” Curtis explains, “are themselves produced in response to social and political contests” (2). In other words, freedom of religion is not simply an individual choice, in the abstract. Religious freedom is the product, or result, of social forces that exert their collective influences upon individuals. Although religious choice, in the American context, is not coerced, it is heavily influenced in a number of ways. Curtis illustrates this point anecdotally, chapter by chapter, explaining how religious freedom has been “contested, challenged, and transformed.”

In chapter 1, “You, and You, and You: Charles Grandison Finney and Democracy,” Curtis features the famed nineteenth-century revivalist Charles Grandison Finney (1792–1875). Early in his ministry, in the 1820s and 1830s, Finney led revivals in upstate New York. Toward his goal of converting as many souls as possible, Finney used social pressure tactics to induce and persuade each “sinner” to convert. Curtis views these “revivals” as “illustrations of both democratization and market forces” (10). Finney was not interested in religious freedom per se, but he studied the dynamics of religious choice in order to exploit it. According to Curtis, “Finney studied the psychology of will to consider how social norms and discipline governed choices” and “observed popular behavior in order to shape it” (8). In his quest to maximize mass conversions to Christianity, Finney employed “new measures,” for which he was both celebrated and criticized (8).

In chapter 2 Curtis offers a literary analysis of Louisa May Alcott's 1873 novel Work, illustrating how the elusive quest for “independence” (notably financial independence) for the women of her day somehow found its fulfillment in “the right kinds of dependence” (29). With little discussion of religious choice, this chapter does not add to Curtis's argument and could have easily been omitted altogether. In much the same vein, chapter 4 is about D. W. Griffith (1875–1948) and his 1915 film, The Birth of a Nation (based on the novel The Clansman). Although an interesting analysis in its own right, this reviewer fails to see how the discussion contributes to Curtis's overall thesis, except insofar as “the filmmaker D. W. Griffith drew on white populism to craft a religiously and racially exclusive body politic,” in which Griffith “saw violence as the necessary means to protect Christian freedom” (4).

Populist crusader William Jennings Bryan (1860–1925), who promoted his vision of a white Christian nation, is the subject of chapter 3. As a three-time presidential candidate in 1896, 1900, and 1908—who later served as President Woodrow Wilson's secretary of state from 1912 to 1914—the famed Nebraskan orator was a supporter of Prohibition. Bryan viewed intoxication as a social evil that kept people in the bondage of alcohol addiction, not unlike the chains of slavery. That said, Bryan was a white supremacist (“I was born a member of the greatest of all the races—the Caucasian Race,” 59). Ironically, Bryan served on the General Committee of the American Committee on the Rights of Religious Minorities, and championed the religious minority rights of Catholics and Jews.

Curtis discusses Bryan's racial and religious politics (67), where Bryan's views on race and religion “intersected” in that “he saw no conflict between preserving the power of a white and Christian majority and maintaining the supposed racial and religious neutrality of civic institutions as long as they tolerated the rights of religious or racial minorities to exist” (65). In other words, Bryan favored “white supremacy” as a “means to preserve American national identity” (65). So, while African Americans could be granted certain legal rights, Bryan maintained that African Americans have no role in shaping government policy, nor should they. Bryan wanted to maintain the status quo, while also maintaining that “no one denied” equal protection to African Americans (65). So long as white privilege and supremacy could be preserved, the right side of minorities, whether racial or religious, could be tolerated.

Al Smith (1873–1944), New York governor and the first Democratic Catholic candidate for president in 1928, is the subject of chapter 5. Smith was a champion of religious freedom. Smith used a populist rhetoric to fight for the rights of American workers, and he emerged as a voice for urban, largely immigrant, Catholic and Jewish minorities. Curtis nicely sums up the main point of this chapter, stating, “Consistent with his social and religious experience, Smith's religious freedom was not primarily about individual conscience. Rather, he saw religious identity in terms of institutional and communal loyalties” (91). This ties in with Curtis's overarching thesis that political institutions and other social and economic forces collectively shape and influence religious freedom as exercised by individuals. In other words, the exercise of religious freedom at the individual level does not operate in a vacuum but is largely constrained and swayed by social forces, such as science, secularization, relativism, market economy, and other aspects of modernity, both economically and institutionally.

In chapter 6, Curtis portrays Nation of Islam firebrand Malcolm X (1925–1965) as a champion of black nationalism in a radical vision of racial solidarity that eschewed egalitarianism. Essentially a discussion of the 1959 documentary The Hate That Hate Produced, which was the work of journalists Louis Lomax and Mike Wallace, chapter 6 is well written and engaging. This film itself was “a curious inversion of the rhetoric of American religious freedom,” and is marshaled as evidence supporting Curtis's overall thesis: “Religious hate, unlike other religious choices, was not really a choice at all” (113). Here, The Hate That Hate Produced refers to white supremacy and its attendant racial animosity towards African Americans, which, in turn, triggered a reciprocally negative response of hatred on the part of blacks towards whites, at least in the extreme form of black nationalism that the Nation of Islam so effectively represented. Malcolm X taught that inequality was at the core and crux of American history. American promises of freedom were bound to be broken. As such, freedom for African Americans demanded revolutionary change. As a contribution to Curtis's overall project, this chapter illustrates how a religious movement such as the Nation of Islam was, in some sense, an epiphenomenon of white racism, which provoked and produced a countervailing reaction perceived by white Americans as reverse racism. Individual religious freedom to join the Nation of Islam cannot be viewed in the abstract. This religious choice was all about the rise of black nationalism as theorized by the film title, The Hate That Hate Produced.

In chapter 7 Curtis discusses “intelligent design,” proponents of which are basically sophisticated “creationists.” The intelligent design movement emerged after the courts rejected the creationists’ efforts to give “equal time” to the teaching of creationism in public schools. This rejection, in large part, was based on the perception that creationism's ties to fundamentalist Christianity disqualified creationism as a viable scientific alternative to prevailing theories of evolution. The intelligent design movement strategically offered a “minimal theory” (132) that represented itself as a valid scientific alternative to prevailing views taught in secondary school science classes, such that intelligent design should be offered in the curriculum alongside the standard educational fare. However, the courts tended to reject the challenges by proponents of intelligent design for “equal time” in schools since the theory was perceived to be little more than an “updated version of creationism” (133). Here, Curtis has chosen to not to address the merits of legal or scientific arguments about intelligent design, but rather to address its proponents’ employment of a “language of religious and intellectual freedom” (133) to prosecute their cause. “As guardians of freedom,” Curtis states, proponents of intelligent design “try to turn the First Amendment to their advantage” (138). He observes that “intelligent design advocates have convinced many Americans that science is a form of religious belief” (147). In the discussion that follows, Curtis presents a sophisticated analysis that, although somewhat complex, is remarkably clear and cogent and is therefore one of the highlights of his book.

Proponents of intelligent design are Christian advocates who demand equal time with the teaching of evolution in schools. This is not a call for equal time in terms of debating scientific methods and theories, as such, but as a means of privatizing science, whereby “the public is reduced to a forum in which people express and affirm private commitments” (145). Thus the public authority of science is weakened and becomes increasingly tenuous when subjected to an uncritical tolerance of differences in the guise of alternative science (intelligent design), which really amounts to privatization of science in the guise of a right to equal time. “The result,” according to Curtis, “is that instead of defending their science, [intelligent design] proponents defend our freedom” (146). Here, Curtis shows how scientific consensus can be significantly constrained by the exercise of religious freedom, in the name of science itself.

Chapter 8 is well positioned as the final chapter, as it presents the fullest discussion of religion and law. Curtis opens the chapter by citing Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc., 134 S. Ct. 2751 (2014). As the defendant, Hobby Lobby, an evangelical corporation, argued before the US Supreme Court that it should not have to provide health care coverage to employees for the use of abortifacients, which offend the corporate religious conscience. Curtis mentions the 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), and the significant case law in connection with it‚ notably Employment Division v. Smith, 494 U.S. 872 (1990), regarding the Native American Church and its religious use of peyote (containing mescaline, a hallucinogen), overruling Sherbert v. Verner, 374 U.S. 398 (1963); City of Boerne v. Flores, 521 U.S. 507 (1997); and Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church & School v. EEOC, 565 U.S. 171 (2012). “In the wake of the 2014 Burwell v. Hobby Lobby decision,” Curtis writes, “many wondered how corporations could exercise religious liberty” (147).

By treating corporations as legal persons, the Court in Hobby Lobby extends free exercise of religion to corporations in addition to the free exercise enjoyed by individuals. Although it is unclear what the exact nature of this corporate exercise of religious freedom entails, the Court, according to Curtis, “has invented a novel form of religious practice in which persons protect their property from polluting contact with other persons” such that the Court “has not simply granted Hobby Lobby the status of a person but has allowed corporations to define themselves as holy persons whose moral purity is endangered by sexual pollution” (150).

Curtis's book is an anthology of disparate chapters, held together by the foundation and capstone of his introduction and epilogue. Yet there is no mortar between the bricks, so to speak, in that chapter transitions are entirely lacking (with the exception of a transition between chapters 3 and 4). Curtis concedes, “This book does not tie all the pieces together because they do not fit together” (169). Although Curtis's “book will have frustrated readers looking for a single thesis that explains religious freedom,” he hopes that his patchwork project “has offered some insights into how … consciences are constructed … how arbitrary lines are drawn between public and private life, and how processes of institutional differentiation produce not only religious freedom but economic, artistic, and scientific freedom as well” (168). Since the puzzle pieces do not fit neatly together, Curtis, in the epilogue, recapitulates what he has argued:

Curtis succeeds in his deconstructive enterprise, which is to disenchant the notion that freedom of religion is truly free, in that it is limited by some very real social and economic forces at play. As such, his constructive deconstruction is achieved through portraying, with trenchant and pellucid analyses, a sequence of historical (and literary) “contests” in American history and culture in which free exercise is put to the test. Despite its modular makeup, The Production of American Religious Freedom is greater than the sum of its parts.