Tisa Wenger's second book is in some ways a continuation of her first. In We Have a Religion: The 1920s Pueblo Indian Dance Controversy and American Religious Freedom (2009), Wenger argued that Pueblo Indians successfully deployed the language of religious freedom in the 1920s to protect their dances from white interference. In the process, she maintained, they subtly changed how they understood their own practice, buying into a division between what counts as religious and what is secular.

Her new book extends that argument far more broadly, beginning with the effects of the Spanish–American War of 1898, and continuing up to the outbreak of World War II. In this period, Wenger argues, “religious freedom talk” (a phrase she uses throughout) was deployed by “a dizzying array of people, on behalf of every imaginable practice and tradition” (12). This talk was motivated by the importance that Americans themselves attached to the concept of religious freedom. And it reinforced the concept's central assumption – that religion is a category, distinct from other aspects of individual and social life. To invoke religion, that is, requires it to be separated from the secular, compartmentalizing human experience in ways that conformed to dominant modes of American political culture.

Wenger uses these insights to interrogate how religious freedom talk was received, and who it helped. Key to her study are the ways in which both race and empire affected how religious freedom was understood and who could use it to their advantage. In beautifully written chapters that range from religious movements and their connection to struggles for independence in the Philippines, to Native American claims to self-governance and ritual practice on reservations, to Jewish rebranding from racial to religious identity (and becoming white in the process), to African American attempts to escape oppressive racism through new religious identities, Wenger shows the power and limits of religious freedom talk. In each, race was central to the story.

In only two of her five major studies did a claim to religious identity achieve what Wenger labels a success. First, US Catholics “became fully American, fully modern, and racially white” in contrast to Filipinos at the turn of the twentieth century (44). Second, Jews effectively helped create and joined a tri-faith (Catholic, Protestant, Jew) coalition of white religious groups that “pushed race and class into the background,” a process that unfolded in Wenger's persuasive telling in the 1930s, earlier than we had previously understood (172, 186).

For Native Americans, African Americans and Filipinos, however, racist assumptions and barriers set sharp boundaries around what religious freedom talk could achieve. As Wenger explains the “expansion of whiteness” achieved by Catholics and Jews, it only exacerbated the problem for racial others. For Filipinos, their “weird shriekings” and “uncivilized tribes” justified attacks on indigenous customs that were framed in terms of progress toward greater moral development and “progress” toward civilized status (45, 93). Among Native Americans, appeals to religious freedom channeled customary practices into forms that were legible to Christians, or into secular discourse. In either case, religious freedom talk “transformed” Native culture and belief, rather than protecting it (135, 142). And for African Americans, the “black–white racial binary” remained the primary identifier for the larger American society. Religious freedom talk “simply did not have the power to transcend the racialized terms of their oppression” (231).

Wenger's conclusion – that “the dominant strains of American religious freedom talk functioned to bolster racial discrimination and the civilizational hierarchies that sustained it” (235) – is a sobering one. Much of this history has flown underneath the radar, or has been obscured by the drumbeat of celebration of religious freedom as both a fact of American life and an unqualified good. Yet Wenger stresses that she does not believe that the ideal of religious freedom is unsalvageable. She acknowledges that defining religion limits its scope and places it in opposition to anything outside the lines drawn around what counts as religious. But she argues that “the potential shape of such definitions and oppositions are infinite in their possibilities” (239). Despite the clear limits of resistance among racial minorities, that is, religious freedom talk did prove valuable in defending tradition and crafting identity. In Wenger's view, this is ground for hope.

Clearly, there is much to admire and learn from here. Religious Freedom is a breakthrough study that productively “brings the state back in” in a monograph that is as grounded in religious studies as in history. The book delivers a reinterpretation that disturbs comfortable myths, even as it carefully parses the drawbacks (and a few benefits) produced for those who engaged in religious freedom talk.