Murray has set out to provide students, fellow journalists, and the general public a primer on the complicated field of religious liberty in the United States. Likely intended as a survey of the field, this work ambles through a variety of issues (civil religion, school vouchers, “faith-based initiatives”) and historical documents (speeches, court decisions) to provide, as the subtitle puts it, a historical as well as a contemporary perspective on the current debates. Murray writes in the preface: “The issues involved with religious liberty are too important to be muddled down in legalese, political double-talk, or even the language of my own profession, the dreaded journalese.” His goal is to “boil the issues down to the journalist's proverbial ‘nut graph’” (xv).

’Tis more the pity. The resulting work—which is, to be fair, quite accessible to a general audience—never really provides more than a passing glimpse at the rich tapestry and (maybe to him, unnecessarily) complex history of religious liberty in America. Murray never clearly defines the term “religious liberty”—which is unfortunate given how much the debate involving the First Amendment has pivoted on this very fundamental dispute. He also clings to a sense of historic nostalgia by leaping from the lofty rhetoric of the late eighteenth-century framers of the First Amendment to the Supreme Court decisions beginning in the 1940s, noting misleadingly that “the Supreme Court began enforcing a ‘separation of church and state’ doctrine” (xii) only in the past sixty years. In so doing, he overlooks almost everything related to even the most narrow conceptualization of religious liberty that took place in the intervening years—the good and the bad. Seemingly unconcerned with the developing relationship between the Court, the First Amendment, the Fourteenth Amendment, federalism, and religion during that century and a half—as well as the more than three dozen Supreme Court cases involving religion (and maybe even “religious liberty”)—Murray is then trapped into using an eighteenth-century vision of religion, religious institutions, and religious identity while imposing a twenty-first century understanding of religious liberty.

As readers of this journal well know, a static vision of American religious history overlooks radical transformations in American culture over time, most of which had some impact on the way the culture (and the law) has come to define religious liberty. A view of history less romantic than Murray's (and, alas, far too many other religious liberty “theologians”) suggests that the First Amendment was penned (third, by the way, behind amendments addressing apportionment and congressional pay) to safeguard the new federal government against competition between sectarian powers that differed from colony to colony; Protestant state establishments survived until 1833, and state restrictions on political participation based on (non-Protestant) religious identity survived until the end of the nineteenth century. It is likely that the words and opinions of early practitioners of the law, like nineteenth-century Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story (on the Court from 1811–1845)—as much or more than the rhetoricians of the seventeenth and eighteenth century, like Roger Williams, John Winthrop, and Thomas Jefferson—had a profound effect on the definition and development of religious liberty in America as it has come to be understood. Set in this historic context, the history of First Amendment litigation—over both its “free exercise” and its “no establishment” clauses—can be more easily explained within the larger history of the loss of a Protestant monopoly in American public institutions (such as its laws): in school curricula, public rituals (like Christian nativity displays), Sunday (“blue”) laws, and other areas of public culture in which relative religious homogeneity slowly gave way to extraordinary religious diversity, and in which monopoly (for the most part) slowly gave way to competition.

Somehow, Murray misses this story, either in his reception of it from his sources or in his transmission of it to his readers, and the work suffers as a result. Overemphasis on the “No Establishment” clause (the “Free Exercise” clause finally sees some light in the final chapter), combined with rather lengthy discussions of school voucher programs and of President George W. Bush's “faith-based initiatives,” presents a rather narrow—or shallow—view of religious liberty as it has come to be imagined and debated. The complex history and the legalese lamented by Murray is part of that history, and explaining it (rather than explaining it away) would be of greater use to those—as Murray himself argues—who are in need of a deeper understanding.

Murray proposes to provide the background that students and journalists need to approach the field of religious liberty in America; unfortunately, he has not. An ahistorical oversimplification and a meandering through a serious subject to which the author seems to have had only fleeting exposure—mostly from a series of workshops for journalists with a few (to be sure, well-regarded) religious liberty scholars—this work may be appealing to journalists, students, and the general public, but it is not highly recommended.