The word ekklesia, at different times, has referred to both the polis of the Greek city state and the early Christian church. As a construct denoting an exclusive assembly of peoples convened under a transcendent sovereignty, reified by ritual, and legitimated through law, Ekklesia is a fitting title for this book on the important relationship between church and state. The title challenges readers to conceive of church and state not as a binary of competitive or complementary powers in a zero-sum game, but as analytically distinct, historically and conceptual entangled constructs that are both interlocking with and translating from each other. It is in those fuzzy spaces of interlocking and translating in which this book is situated. Paul Christopher Johnson, Pamela Klassen, and Winnifred Fallers Sullivan introduce this conceptual framework as “churchstateness,” which is “composed of the interpenetrating and mutually constitutive forces of religion, law, and politics” (3).

The geographic focus on “the Americas” is not simply a product of the expertise of the authors, but a location where the messiness of the entanglement of church and state becomes clearer. In the Americas, the frontier marked an edge and even an end to stateness, where reifying rituals and legitimating laws were difficult to enforce given the distance of the metropole, the preexistence of sovereign nations of Indigenous Peoples, declarations of sovereignty from runaway slaves, and the presence of dissident religious communities. In this context, the settler state alongside and overlapping with rival, parallel, and extant ekklesia, needed to strategize how to make the assembly of peoples that will reify and legitimate its order and unmake the orders of others. In doing so, the “isomorphic patterns” of churchstateness (7) are brought into focus, as are the ways in which “religious and political authorities are coconstituted both in their separation and in their union” (16).

In the first essay, Johnson explores the emergence of a powerful church-state alliance in the newly established Brazilian republic, with attention to processes of making “the people” and unmaking other social orders in the conflict with a dissident Catholic community at Canudos at the end of the nineteenth century. Known as Antonio Conselheiro (“the Counselor”), the political and religious leader at Canudos preached an egalitarian form of Christianity and opposed the separation of church and state instituted by the newly formed republic. The law of the republic captured the ire of Antonio, including matters of taxation, the regulation of marriage, and a fear that the republic sought to one day reinstitute slavery, which Princess Isabel had abolished in 1888. Antonio saw the republic as a proponent of the “Law of the Hound,” an illegitimate authority in the face of divine law as communicated through prince and papacy (36). Church leaders defined Antonio and his followers as a political-religious sect disrupting the social order that could create a schism in the church. In turn, as Johnson explains, “a weaponized hybrid of churchstateness” emerged (62). While alive, those at Canudos became the Other (through race, class, intellect, and religion), outside “the people” as constructed by both church and state. The imagined unmaking of “the hoard” was coupled with a physical unmaking when Antonio and nearly all of his followers were slaughtered in their fourth and final conflict with the republic. In one of the most fascinating comparisons of isomorphic patterns, Johnson explains that whereas the followers of Antonio beheaded a military leader and removed the hands and feet of some soldiers as a communicative act that embodied a hierarchical social order, republicans, in contrast, beheaded all their enemies as a communicative act of equality under the asserted sovereignty of the republic (81). In their death, however, Antonio and his followers would be reimagined as “peoples”—necessary sacrifices: peoples, dead as they be, worthy of the legal protections of all those in the republic. The precarious new republic helped to make itself in the smoldering embers of Canudos, but so, too, did the church. In addition to the popular, egalitarian body of the Church represented in the exemplary town, Johnson writes, “[t]he other body of the church took the form of the newly ascendant, re-Romanized version of the church, in partnership with the state. In a sense it too was born in Canudos, when the Capuchin priests shook the dust from their shoes and condemned the town to the coming hell” (84).

Klassen's essay is written in the wake of the final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that sought to document the experiences of Indigenous peoples in legally mandated, state-funded, church-run residential schools, which Klassen appropriately labels “one of the most devastating example of churchstateness in Canada” (113). Klassen explores the continuity of churchstateness in two cases: King George III's Royal Proclamation of 1763 and the 2016 reconciliation ring ceremony presented to the people of British Columbia on behalf of Queen Elizabeth II. One of Klassen's most powerful arguments is that the recognition of churchstateness is imperative for the realization of the important relationship between spirituality, law, and politics, central to the Crown and the many nations of Indigenous peoples within the colonially determined bounds of Canada. Recognition of the continuing presence of churchstateness could provide a space for the decolonization of the law as well as an avenue for its Indigenization in pursuit of the realization of the fact that “we are all treaty peoples” (108).Footnote ¹ Claims of sovereignty critical to the maintenance of any ekklesia are fragile in Canada. The Royal Proclamation and the Treaty of Niagara (1764) may have asserted the dominion of the Crown but it also, in the view of some, paradoxically acknowledges the overlapping claims of Indigenous peoples to those same jurisdictions. In the pursuit of the unmaking of Indigenous peoples, the Crown has sought to erase Indigenous legal metaphysics and ritual performance critical to understanding the Royal Proclamation and subsequent treaties, supported by the attempted legalized cultural genocide enshrined in the Indian Act (1876–present), and yet the precarity of Crown sovereignty remains exposed. Klassen writes, “Canadian jurisdiction is an amalgam of spiritual and political claims rooted in the past and requiring intermittent revitalization through ritual, which depends on the Crown—the head of state and of the Church of England—for its metaphysical being” (148). The fragility of such claims are exposed in the 2016 reconciliation ring ceremony, in which a fourth ring, representing Indigenous nations, was added to the Black Rod at the British Columbia legislature, joining three other rings—symbolizing the authority of the Crown, the state, and the province—that explicitly represent the materiality and textuality of churchstateness at the heart of the Canadian state. The Honorable Stephen Point of the Stó:lō Nation blessed the ring with cedar and a prayer and Prince William slipped the ring onto the Black Rod while Grand Chief Edward John described the historical and continuing impacts of the colonial ideology on Indigenous peoples—a moment embodying churchstateness, the presence of multiple spiritual jurisdictional claims, and the yet-made “treaty peoples” for which the Proclamation, the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (1996), and the final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission have called.

In the final essay, Sullivan suggests that there is an absence at the heart of American churchstateness that is exposed in discussions of banning Bibles and biblical citations from capital jury trials. Jurors are expected to use their own moral judgment, which may be rooted in religion, to determine whether someone should be sentenced to death, but courts have been wary of biblical citations and the presence of physical Bibles seemingly because they represent a more authoritarian form of religion. Sullivan explains, “The jurors must be religious in a very precise way, one independent from God, in order to qualify themselves constitutionally to render the verdict” (181). Juries in capital cases hold the power to decide life and death in secret deliberations based on their own reasoning. In this sense, as Justice Kennedy wrote, “the law comes from the people” (183).Footnote ² In Sullivan's most crucial argument, she writes, “[T]he jurors are adrift, in the religious no-man's land created by constitutional disestablishment—a small ekklesia—a churchstateness—required to improvise with a man's life at stake just when the structuring textual logic and ritual of an actual church and state might be most useful to the juror, to the defendant, and to the people” (184). The argument to ban bibles presents an illusion of death penalty sentences as free of prejudice and “further exposes the futile effort that is disestablishment, leaving Americans with few acknowledged shared resources to think life and death together” (212). Sullivan concludes, “Bibles in the courtroom should not be understood as a failure of separation. They should be understood as intrinsic to American churchstateness—to the do-it-yourself quality of American ekklesia” (215).

The three essays together make a strong and convincing argument that the entanglement and co-constituted nature of church and state is an undeniable feature of Brazil, Canada, and the United States. One of the most fascinating threads that binds these three essays together is the claim that such entanglements are pivotal for understanding the nature of law, politics, and religion in these unique and sometimes contested jurisdictional spaces. Advocates of a firm separation of church and state will be disappointed in the convincing argument that suggests that churchstateness is not simply a matter of fact, but that the recognition and acceptance of churchstateness may be of benefit to a people trying to understand themselves, their place in the Americas, their relationships, and their futures.

It should be no surprise to learn that those working in law and religion in Brazil, Canada, or the United States will find real value in this book. As a scholar who works at the intersections of law, religion, and Indigenous studies in Canada, I found Klassen's essay creative and invigorating. There is a very real need for well-grounded arguments in support of the decolonization and Indigenization of the law. Klassen provides just that in her assessment of the material and textual elements of churchstateness in Canada. If current trends are not simply manifestations of rights ritualism, Klassen's analysis could have very real impacts.

That said, one of the greatest values of this book is in its breadth. The essays offer important insights to those unfamiliar with one, two, or even all three of the regions covered. For example, I have limited knowledge about Brazil. Johnson's beautifully written essay provided the necessary context in a captivating manner that clearly articulated points of connections with other chapters while emphasizing the unique character of churchstateness in Brazil. In addition to learning about church and state in Brazil, I found his chapter the most insightful on the theoretical underpinnings of making and unmaking of ekklesia. I also found myself contemplating connections between the unmaking of those at Canudos and Crown treatment of Indigenous peoples in Canada even before reading Klassen's essay.

The book is without a conclusion, though Sullivan does offer some comments at the outset of her essay (176–77), and each author makes a conscious attempt to draw some connections between their work and the other essays in the book. Readers may find themselves returning to the concise, if dense, introduction following Sullivan's essay, if only to recall the many complex ways in which these quite different essays are bound together.

The book provided both theoretical and grounded insights in law and religion making it essential reading for graduate students and scholars working in the area. I found myself immediately thinking about how Klassen's work may intersect with my own while creatively considering the ways in which Sullivan and Johnson may shape the trajectory of the kinds of research questions I may pursue. At the same time, I am left wanting more, which is often the case with such a groundbreaking book. I found myself wondering how other grounded investigations of churchstateness may have an impact on the discourse. What about Jamaica? Bolivia? Haiti? This book is, I hope, the start of an important discourse on what the authors have termed churchstateness.