In the study of church-state relations there are far too many volumes purporting to illuminate what the First Amendment really means, or what it should mean, or what it originally meant. These volumes are often written by pseudo-theologians of religious liberty, scholars of various fields (law, history, political science, religious studies, theology, and others) who offer normative arguments based more on their own personal (political) faith than on reality; as such, their works tend to produce far more heat than light. Thankfully, there are a few reliable scholars whose work can be counted on not only for eschewing arguments of normativity, clinging to the historical record steadfastly, and letting the material speak for itself rather than presuming to speak for it. And admirably, Donald Drakeman has produced such a volume.

The question raised by the argument is fairly straightforward: How does one actually know what he knows? The starting point for Drakeman is the appearance of an ur-history-based justification for First Amendment jurisprudence (known in various forms as “originalism”) that rises to the level of sacred myth after its first incarnation in the 1878 Supreme Court decision Reynolds v. United States, and is confirmed as dogma after its second incarnation in the 1947 Supreme Court decision Everson v. Board of Education. After providing ample evidence that, in both decisions, the Justices advocating the various “originalist” positions were more influenced by their historian neighbors than by actual historical evidence (the two apparently not coinciding here), Drakeman explores the actual record of what people said–and did–from the period of the Framers until well into the nineteenth century, up to and including the 1868 ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment, which would be so influential in transforming the meaning of the First Amendment.

The evidence strongly suggests that the most anyone can conclude is that, by and large, no one wanted a national church (as in the Church of England) benefiting from the imprimatur of the government, or providing it. Beyond that, the best guess is that people are complex and contradictory. The evidence suggests that, depending on what you read, when it was written, and in what context it was intended, Jefferson's and Madison's own opinions of what might constitute an “establishment” of religion varied markedly. The evidence suggests that, despite protestations to the contrary from the so-called “pseudo-theologians of religious liberty,” Jefferson and Madison should not be seen as representative of the entirety of the nation on the issue of the relationship of religion and government. The evidence suggests that some people—state and other federal legislators, writers, clerics, and others—favored a First Amendment that protected their own state establishments over the intrusion of other states' establishments, or (contrary to their neighbors' views) considered there to be unsavory establishments in other states but not in their own.

There is a wonderful “king has no clothes” quality to the work. Drakeman draws on Holmes (Sherlock, not Oliver Wendell) and the case solved by the absence of a barking dog to illustrate that there is just not enough (or, at times, no) evidence to support the lofty place given by some to the “No Establishment” clause over the past seventy years or so; while some of the sentiments (religious liberty and the like) behind the First Amendment were no doubt important to many, the actual Amendment itself (or at least the “No Establishment” clause) raised very few eyebrows. In the end, the reader is left with the impression that the authors of the First Amendment may have been merely politicians, who may have meant the First Amendment as a vague and general statement to placate citizens, with no power to actually change many of the nation's cultural habits that—today, to some—might seem to contradict it.

Drakeman's discussion admittedly and reasonably privileges the “No Establishment” clause of the First Amendment over its lexical neighbor the “Free Exercise” clause. But exploring as he does the way in which the so-called “originalist” arguments came to be—well beyond the original period—rather than how the Supreme Court understood the term “religion,” Drakeman leaves unresolved the enigma that launches his investigation. The Supreme Court stated in the 1878 Reynolds decision that the U.S. Constitution left undefined the word “religion”, and then went on to fabricate not a definition of religion but a definition of the relationship of religion to government. Drakeman's analysis convincingly repudiates the canard of “originalism,” but adds little to the discussion of what the Framers—or the Court—may have understood to be the definition of religion. In this reviewer's opinion, Drakeman successfully reveals that the king is wearing no clothes, but takes as a given what is “king.” This omission is neither unexpected nor unusual for the field of church-state studies, and it certainly is not fatal to the purpose or argument of the book. In fact, it is appreciated; given the comprehensive coverage Drakeman gives to the data, it is fortunate that he leaves this (admittedly problematic) topic for others who, standing on his shoulders, may continue the discussion.

Regardless of the topic of the work, this volume should be of value to any scholar who has the least interest in historical research; it is a text-book example of how to approach an historical debate and dismantle it bit by bit through the scrupulous use of primary materials, a well constructed argument, and a refusal to jump to conclusions that are not supported by the evidence. But to scholars of church-state relations in the United States—be they historians interested in religion in American culture during the nineteenth century, or political scientists interested in church-state debates in American politics during the twentieth—this book is a must read. In examining unabashedly the actual historical evidence, Drakeman has written a volume that produces much light on the development of church-state relations and rhetoric. Given the politics of the topic, it is a volume likely to produce some heat as well.