In this brief, polemical, and often witty book, Georgetown law professor Steven Goldberg makes his case against the public display and political manipulation of religion in contemporary America. Goldberg seeks to demonstrate that religion inevitably loses its real content and value when public displays are made politically acceptable and constitutionally licit. “If religion is to gave any real impact in America — if it is to serve as a source of moral values in a materialistic, scientific culture — it must have real content. That content emerges in hearts, homes, houses of worship, and in the private sector, not in government bureaucracies” (2).

This argument is developed through a consideration of three recent church/state controversies: the display of the Ten Commandments on public property, the attempt to teach “intelligent design” in public school science curricula, and what he somewhat histrionically regards as the “ultimate demise” Christmas and Chanukah through excessive commercialization. In the first case, Goldberg argues that the effort to promote the display of the Ten Commandments in public, rather than promoting genuine religion, threatens to reduce the text to “an empty symbol” (7). Commencing with a brief discussion of the two renderings of the “Ten Commandments” (Exodus 20:2–17 and Deuteronomy 5:6–21) within their narrative contexts, Goldberg rightly observes these laws were not considered to be universal but had jurisdiction over the Israelites newly freed from Egyptian bondage and entering into a covenant with their God. Moreover, he notes the substantial disagreement within the Christian tradition regarding the translation, enumeration, meaning, and applicability of the Decalogue. In short, Goldberg reminds us that there is no universally agreed upon “Ten Commandments” and no universal agreement on their jurisdiction or applicability.

With this in mind, it is no wonder why public displays of the Decalogue have proved to be a legal, political, and theological mine field. Goldberg efficiently analyzes the Supreme Court's tortured grappling with the issue of public displays of the Ten Commandments in Stone v. Graham (1980), McCreary County, Kentucky v. American Civil Liberties Union (2005), and Van Orden v. Perry (2005). The cost of a constitutionally viable, “ecumenical consensus” (30), Goldberg concludes, is the effacement of the singularity of religious traditions, and thus the erasure of the religious meaning of the Ten Commandments themselves. “Posting a hollow imitation in the public square,” Goldberg writes, “is a victory for secularism, not for religion” (31). In the closing pages of the chapter, Goldberg looks at the public outrage against the Jehovah's Witnesses for their refusal to say the Pledge of Allegiance and the decline of Blue Laws and provocatively suggests Americans have shown themselves to be perfectly comfortable with undermining or ignoring the commandments themselves.

In the second chapter, Goldberg considers the contemporary debates concerning the teaching of evolution in public schools and challenge of the Intelligent Design (ID) movement. Tracing the legal struggle from the Scopes trial to the 2005 Dover case, Goldberg shows that the contemporary intelligent design movement emerged as an attempt to bypass laws forbidding the teaching of “creation science” in public schools: “Intelligent design is religion as a litigation strategy” (51). The problem with deploying such a strategy, Goldberg insists, is that it actually undermines the religious faith it desires to protect. In the end, ID would earn the faithful only a pyrrhic victory: rather than the Creator taught in the opening chapters of the Book of Genesis, the “intelligence” demonstrated by ID is at best a “second-rate engineer” (39). The discussion veers off course somewhat as Goldberg turns to consider the faith of some modern scientists, in an attempt to show that religious belief and scientific endeavor are not mutually exclusive. Here the chapter exhibits some confusion about what is at stake in the debate over the teaching of evolution — this issue is not whether science as such is “anti-religion,” but whether a particular scientific theory challenges a particular religious narrative and the theological and ethical claims it supports. That scientists such as Einstein may have had a “religious sensibility” does not alter the fact that the theory of evolution undermines a literal reading of Genesis, and that parents committed to that reading will regard the teaching of evolution a fundamental threat to their beliefs. Moreover, Goldberg is unconvincing when he claims that the “biggest threat” to religion comes not from science but from those who promote the teaching of ID (65). This obscures what the proponents of ID are really after, i.e., to undermine the dominant scientific account.

In Chapter Three, Goldberg recounts the variety of cases regarding the public displays of religious symbols such as crèches, Christmas trees, Hanukkah menorahs, as well as the way in which economic pressures “have resulted in a remarkable victory for the commercialization of religion,” which has obscured the “true history and meaning” of these winter holidays (67). He laments that “the great battle over Christmas in our time is not to put Christ back in Christmas but to put Christmas into Wal-Mart” (66).

In all of these cases, Goldberg maintains that the attempt to force religious beliefs and symbols into the public square inevitably and invariably distorts religion. Those that wish to have their religious symbols acknowledged in the public square do not, in the end, get what they want: “religion is inevitably watered down or distorted beyond recognition” (1f). In the chapter entitled “Neither France nor Iran: Religious Freedom in America,” Goldberg suggests that this is unfortunate, and unnecessary, for the constitutional separation of church and state has had a beneficial effect on American religious life. Further, Goldberg stresses the role the free exercise clause has played in cultivating religion in America. And, unlike staunch secularists, he is unworried about the rich role religion plays in American civic culture, in such places as the recognitions of God on currency and in such civic rituals as the Pledge of Allegiance.

Bleached Faith covers quite a bit of ground in very few pages, and this approach yields some minor glitches and over-simplifications. While focusing on such high-profile yet ultimately symbolic legal cases such as those regarding the Ten Commandments and Intelligent Design, Goldberg ignores other much more complicated church/state controversies such as those surrounding abortion and same sex marriage. Perhaps more problematically from the perspective of religious studies is Goldberg's rigid and somewhat sentimental conception of “religion” and its proper role in society, his belief that, while avoiding the mechanisms and temptations of political power, religion maintains a “vital role as a guardian of timeless faith and values” (129). This presumption renders him somewhat unmindful of the actual range and ambiguity of religious phenomena and how traditions accommodate themselves to different social and cultural situations. For example, in his consideration of contemporary celebrations of Hanukkah, Goldberg might have considered that the change in the importance of the festival served as part of a strategy which helped Jews integrate into American society while maintaining a religious difference, albeit in much different terms than the Maccabbees or the Sages of late antiquity could have imagined. In other words, the “timeless faith and values” that Goldberg valorizes themselves have complicated histories and represent specific interests.

Goldberg's argument that the religion clauses of the Constitution have been beneficial to religion is not novel, of course. America exhibits a higher level of religious observance than the rest of the developed world. Yet, the reasons for this are no doubt more complex that Goldberg's account seems to suggest.

Despite these concerns, Bleached Faith is a useful primer to some of the recent church/state debates. Considering the current political climate, such conflicts are not likely to recede any time soon.