US Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia once wrote that “in Anglo-American history, at least, government suppression of speech has so commonly been directed precisely at religious speech that a free-speech clause without religion would be Hamlet without the prince.”Footnote ¹ In Religious Speech and the Quest for Freedoms in the Anglo-American World, Wendell Bird argues that the same could also be said for the freedom of the press, criminal procedure rights, higher education, the abolition of slavery, and the civil rights movement. Bird’s case is a well-researched, clear, and valuable entry into the related historical literature.Footnote ²

Bird’s book has two principal strengths. In the first three chapters, Bird clarifies the radical Puritan contribution to the development of the rights of speech, press, and criminal procedure. (More on this below.) The book’s other strength is also, unfortunately, a weakness. In an effort to remind readers of the contributions of religious ideas to Anglo-American constitutional discourse, Bird collects disparate narratives that would ordinarily be treated in separate volumes. Some of them share enough common protagonists and events to be mutually illuminating—especially the chapters on the Puritans. Others are less clearly moored to the rest of the story. Together, though, they all show that radical Protestantism has been a significant motivating factor for social and political movements that are now widely praised.

For those familiar with current conversations in the history of rights, it may be worth noting what Bird does not do in this book. First, he does not enter directly into running debates about the history and origin of human rights in general. One of the central issues in those debates has been the nature and extent of the contribution of Christian thought to the development of human rights. Bird touches on that conversation, but only indirectly, by foregrounding the role of Christian thought or motivation for the development of specific Anglo-American constitutional rights. Some of those rights certainly have a place in contemporary human rights regimes, but the book is less about the history of natural or human rights than about the religious motives for the movements that led to specific constitutional developments. Bird does not get into the weeds on the history of theories of the state of nature, natural rights, natural law, universality, inalienability, and so forth.

Second, it is not a work of constitutional originalism. The first three chapters, especially, are framed as early instances of the assertion of rights that came to be enshrined in the US Bill of Rights. These chapters make interesting contributions to the back-story of those rights. But Bird does not engage with the history of the framing of the US Constitution and makes no claim, express or implied, that the original meaning of the constitution ought to determine contemporary legal disputes. Bird offers an exercise in legal, social, intellectual, and political history, not an argument about what the constitution meant in the past or what it ought to mean now (though he plainly supports the rights he examines).

Bird’s principal historical contribution with this book is to clarify and amplify the role of English dissenters in seventeenth-century debates about the rights of speech, the press,Footnote ³ and criminal procedure. In the first chapter, Bird explores the Puritans’ use of parrhesia to argue for freedom of speech. The Greek term was well known from classical works referring to bold, open, or frank speech, especially the potentially dangerous speech of philosophers to their social superiors. Bird shows that the Puritans based their arguments for parrhesia not on classical sources but on the New Testament (24–29), where the term is used to refer to the freedom or boldness to declare the gospel despite personal risk. Their case for freedom of speech, then, was a case specifically for freedom or courage of religious speech, as opposed to a case for freedom to speak the truth generally.Footnote ⁴ Parrhesia was conceived, however, not as a secular right so much as a spiritual duty and authority. According to Bird, historians of Puritan arguments for freedom of speech have neglected their reliance on the biblical, rather than the classical sources (see 25–27). Bird does not trace the direct influence of these arguments in detail, but suggests that the Puritan arguments for freedom of speech influenced John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon (of the essay series Cato’s Letters) (40–41), and share at least a family resemblance to those of James Madison because both were born of “acceptance and defense of freedom of religion” (45).

Similarly, Bird clarifies the contributions of the Levellers, especially John Lilburne, in the development of criminal procedure rights now enshrined in the US Bill of Rights. Historians have widely credited Lilburne with one of the earliest assertions of the right against self-incrimination (see 118n4). As Bird shows, however, Lilburne and his compatriots probably did not offer an innovative argument for that right.Footnote ⁵ Ironically, though, and apparently unbeknownst to most historians, he and other Levellers did assert virtually every other criminal procedure (and substantive) right now codified in the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Eighth Amendments.Footnote ⁶ Lilburne’s arguments, most of which would have expanded rights at common law (130), “were based on Judeo-Christian religious thought and were infused with biblical references and other religious language” (122).

In matters beyond the seventeenth century, Bird’s ambition is more modest: to remind readers of the “important role of Judeo-Christian faiths and their religion-based demands for freedoms” that “historians [and] other observers” have “increasingly forgotten or ignored” (351). The narratives of the development of western universities, the slavery abolition movements in the United Kingdom and the United States, and the civil rights movement in the United States break little new ground, but usefully gather disparate primary and secondary sources to emphasize the role of Christian motivation.

I do have some questions about these narratives. First, why include the chapter on the development of the university? The university’s religious background is well known, and Bird does little to connect it to constitutional rights. Second, why not explore the theological or socio-religious context of the “religious speech” underpinning the arguments about slavery abolition and civil rights? For instance, though Bird acknowledges that many American Christians made arguments from scripture for slavery, he does not wrestle with the theological disputes that fueled (and were themselves shaped by) American disputes about slavery. Similarly, although Bird notes that Martin Luther King, Jr., was influenced by the social gospel and liberal Protestantism, he does not explore how those ideas (which were actually fairly diverse families of ideas, including, especially for King, personalism) may have influenced the precise contours of his arguments for equal rights.

Third, why refer throughout to all the religious actors, ideas, arguments, and movements as “Judeo-Christian”? The term is both anachronistic (it was not in common usage until the mid-twentieth century) and imprecise. As a shorthand to distinguish a generic set of theological or moral beliefs from Paganism, Islam, or eastern religions, the term “Judeo-Christian” might have some non-rhetorical use. But here it elides theological differences that were deeply important to the book’s protagonists themselves. In almost every case (except the origin of universities), the “religious speech” in question was Protestant and usually of a radical hue.

Nevertheless, Bird succeeds in highlighting religion’s influence on the development of a handful of prized human rights, often with useful amendments to the conventional scholarly account. Just don’t look for an intellectual through-line from the early seventeenth century to American constitutionalism or for an analysis of those ideas’ interaction with other intellectual sources of American constitutionalism.