In The Second Disestablishment, Steven K. Green rests heavily on his legal expertise to craft a narrative that explores the discursive relationship between religious and secular visions for American civil society that flourished throughout the nineteenth century. He argues against the common histories that trace religious disestablishment to the formative decades of the late eighteenth century by suggesting that it was during the nineteenth century when disestablishment — in the form of church-state separation — became a more visible reality, at least within the institutions of law and education. Taking a cue from American religious historians such as Jon Butler, who famously referred to the Antebellum period as a “spiritual hothouse,” Green looks to the nineteenth century as a time of intense religious fervor and equally intense reactions. As evangelicalism grew, so to did the “Protestant Empire,” complete with mythologies regarding America's Christian heritage. At the same time, those inspired by the political disestablishment of the founding generation — and by the nation's growing religious pluralism — challenged the Christian-state maxim that upheld the inseparability of Protestant theology and common law. According to Green, the second disestablishment was a legal disestablishment that sought to modify religiously-driven law, most clearly represented in efforts to officially displace Protestantism from the nation's public school system. Green notes that by the end of the nineteenth century “the notion that the law incorporated Christian principles had lost its legal currency” (329), thus setting the stage for what he later refers to as a third constitutional and cultural disestablishment during the twentieth century.

Green offers readers a detailed and well-written analysis of the rhetoric that encased efforts to either substantiate America's Christian foundation or promote church-state separation during the turbulent decades of the nineteenth century. His narrative is as timely as it is erudite. Traditionally, nineteenth-century America has been overlooked by church-state historians who have tended to concentrate on the legal and political innovations of the late eighteenth and the mid-twentieth centuries. Green attempts to fill this gap in the historiography by constructing an analysis that challenges, or at least complicates, these prior histories. He also argues against the notion that the nineteenth century constituted a “dark age” in church-state relations, a thesis perpetuated by Mark DeWolfe Howe's 1965 book, The Garden and the Wilderness, as well as the numerous articles by legal historian Harold J. Berman. Furthermore, Green contrasts his interpretations of church-state relations with those found in Philip Hamburger's Separation of Church and State. Although Green acknowledges that Hamburger's study is “comprehensive and influential,” he argues that it is also “thematically flawed” (8) and criticizes his colleague for questioning the motivations and commitments of John Locke and later nineteenth-century Republicans, who, in Green's view, fought tirelessly to ensure a religious disestablishment in American society.

Readers will search long and hard to find weaknesses in this otherwise cogent narrative. There is, however, one minor critique worth noting. The conservative evangelicals who supported the Christian-state maxim and the perpetuation of Christian principles in American common law occasionally appear in Green's analysis as autocratic and intolerant, especially when juxtaposed with what he perceives to be the democratic inclusively of the secular public sphere. It is here Green misses an opportunity to further complicate his narrative. He suggests that the “diminution of religious influence in the law, government, civic institutions, and culture” (11) in nineteenth-century America — what he coins as the “second disestablishment” — was, at its core, a religiously tolerant, or at least religiously neutral, affair. A number of scholars, however, would beg to differ. For example, in Culture and Redemption, Tracy Fessenden uses an assortment of primary sources — including legal documents, sermons, and literature — to craft an argument that directly challenges the myth of secular toleration. She suggests that what many, including Green, have labeled “secularization” in the nineteenth century was really the reformulation of Protestant identity by means of religious exclusion. Relying on the anti-Catholic and anti-Native American literature of the period, Fessenden contends that the secular public sphere emerged from discourses of differentiation that privileged certain religious traditions while actively suppressing others. Regardless of the “official” political or legal rhetoric, which often utilized the language of religious freedom and plurality, the process of secularization — or disestablishment — in nineteenth-century America may have been just as intolerant and undemocratic as the conservative evangelicals Green gently reproves.

Despite this minor criticism, Green's The Second Disestablishment is a thorough and engaging history that promises to make a strong contribution to the ongoing and often heated conversation on church-state relations in the United States. It is a book that is sure to attract a wide range of academic and popular readers who will find it both informative and compelling.