When Alexis de Tocqueville arrived in the United States in 1831, he was immediately and forcefully struck by the nation's religiosity. Tocqueville found it particularly astonishing that in contrast to France, where the “spirit of religion and the spirit of liberty almost always pulled in opposite directions,” religion and liberty in the United States seemed to advance together. Puzzled by what he observed, he probed “the faithful of all communions” for an answer. “To a man,” he related, “they assigned primary credit for the peaceful ascendancy of religion in their country to the complete separation of church and state” (Democracy in America, 2004, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, p. 341).

Were Tocqueville to return from the dead and once again wander these United States, it is unlikely he would find the same societal consensus. True, he would discover that the United States was still far more religious than his native France. But the discerning aristocrat might also detect that liberals had developed a sharp fear that the devoutly religious are a threat to liberty. And he could hardly fail to notice conservatives routinely criticizing the “rigid” wall of separation between state and religion on the ground that it unfairly discriminates against believers. Consensus on the place of religion in public life has seemingly given way to a culture war.

Contestation over religion's role in the public square has at least had the salutary effect of inducing political scientists to pay closer attention to religion. Joseph Viteretti's The Last Freedom begins from the premise that an “antireligious bias” (p. 4) afflicts a broad swath of America's opinion leaders. Particularly important, in his view, is the way in which “this negative predisposition toward religion” (p. 3) has come to dominate the decision making of the courts. Strident secularism, according to Viteretti, has resulted in the courts going too far in excluding religious expression from public schools and in not taking seriously the claims of religious conscience. He is particularly dismayed at the 1987 Mozert case in which a federal district court ruled that public schools were not required to make special accommodations for parents and children who had religious objections to aspects of the school curriculum. He acknowledges that the Supreme Court in recent years has made some progress in more fairly accommodating the deeply religious, but insists that the Court's jurisprudence still leaves the most devout individuals “legally vulnerable to the litigation-prone whims of ardent secularists” (p. 209).

Viteretti generally poses as the gentle voice of reason and moderation rising above the din of the culture wars. On one flank he situates the Religious Right that occasionally pushes an intolerant political agenda, and on his left is an equally intolerant but ultimately more dangerous band of secularists who are ignorant of and hostile toward the devout. He stands with the silent majority of Americans who desire neither “to drive religion from the public square not wield it as a club for governing the nation” (p. 239). The sensible path forward, he assures us, lies between these two intransigent extremes.

The trouble is that Viteretti's pose of moderation and evenhandedness is frequently belied by overheated rhetoric that makes him sound more like a practiced culture warrior than an impartial social scientist. He charges “ardent secularists” not only of harboring “litigation-prone whims” but of “indulg[ing] their prejudice [against the religious] with impunity” (p. 208). This is hardly the sort of name calling that is going to make him a favorite booking on Sean Hannity's show, but neither is it exactly what one expects from a university press book. The tenor of the book, moreover, is sometimes oddly apocalyptic. James Madison, Viteretti writes ominously, could not have foreseen how “secularism itself might become a force for abridging the rights or interests of religious minorities as the modern nation became more suspicious of all references to religion and God” (p. 175).

Is religious freedom in the United States really as precarious as Viteretti suggests? If secularism is such a potent force in American public life, why do U.S. political candidates go to such great lengths to profess their religiosity? And why do we so rarely see professed atheists in high office? To be sure, the number of people in the United States who profess no religious affiliation has inched steadily upward over the last several decades, but the number of self-identified atheists and agnostics is still only about 3% of the population. A 2004 Pew poll counted another 7% who could be classified as “Seculars” based on their behaviors and beliefs. Viteretti never convincingly explains how this secular tenth manages to exert such an inordinate and insidious influence over American political life.

The Last Freedom suffers from its lack of comparative perspective. Is there another Western nation in which a major party nominee for the highest office in the land would declare that Jesus Christ was his “favorite philosopher”? A modern-day Tocqueville would surely take note of the increasing divergence in religiosity between the United States and most of Europe. More than eight of 10 Americans today describe religion as personally important to them, whereas in the great majority of European countries the number is about half that. Six in 10 Americans report attending church once a month or more; in France, by contrast, only about 12% report attending church that often, and in the United Kingdom it is under two in 10 (see Steven Pfaff, “The Religious Divide: Why Religion Seems to Be Thriving in the United States and Waning in Europe,” in Jeffrey Kopstein and Sven Steinmo, eds., Growing Apart: America and Europe in the Twenty-First Century, pp. 30, 32). When one compares the United States with other advanced industrial nations, what stands out is not the fragility of religious freedom in America but its robust vitality, not the political strength of secularists but their weakness.

Viteretti is not unaware of relevant survey data; indeed, he devotes an entire chapter to a summary of such data. He argues these data show that the vast majority of Americans “abide by a hollow faith” (p. 179), by which he means that religion “does not play a decisive role in shaping their political views or how they run their lives” (p. 179). This is important to his argument about the fragility of religious freedom because it explains why the many do not get more upset by the legal elite's stingy understanding of religious freedom. Of course, Viteretti is correct that the majority of Americans are not “devout oddballs” (p. 205), but neither is it helpful to describe Americans' faith as hollow. That conclusion can be reached only by ignoring what people say about their lives or by a strained interpretation of polling responses. Contra Viteretti, as I have already noted, an overwhelming majority of Americans tell pollsters that religion is important to them in how they live their lives, an answer that most Europeans do not give. When Viteretti is not ignoring what people tell pollsters, he is twisting their words. For instance, he summarizes a 2004 Pew survey as finding that “most [people] say that religious beliefs do not shape their political opinions” (p. 178), whereas in fact the survey in question found that nearly two-thirds of Americans said religion was either important or somewhat important in shaping their political thinking (p. 29). In further support of his argument about the “hollow middle” (p. 201), he cites a 2006 Pew poll that found that 63% of Americans said the will of the people “should have more sway in the making of the laws than the Bible does.” But surely the more arresting finding is that 32% of respondents said that the Bible should be more important than the popular will in the formulation of the nation's laws. (p. 178).

If Americans are far more religious than the populations in most other advanced industrial democracies, and American politicians more likely to wear their religious faith on their sleeves, why do so many Americans strenuously resist providing state support for religious schools? In Britain, in contrast, where nearly two-thirds of the population never attend church, state support of religious schools is virtually taken for granted. This important paradox provides a promising starting point for Faith in Schools? authored by the British-born-and-educated Ian Macmullen.

Macmullen posits that the aim of education in a liberal state is to foster individual autonomy. Liberal theory, in his view, does not require a strict separation of church and state; what is required is only that the state ensure that education enables the individual to develop the capacity for choice. So long as religious schools do not indoctrinate students but rather enable them to engage in rational reflection about their values, then, Macmullen contends, the state should fully fund religious schools. If, on the other hand, a school is not developing autonomous persons, then the state should have the right to shut the school down.

Unfortunately, Macmullen largely remains at the level of philosophical conjecture, rarely allowing his normative argument to touch down on empirical ground. To his credit, he confronts the problem. “It might still appear,” he writes, “that the question of the suitability and effectiveness of different types of schooling to cultivate autonomy is a matter for empirical research rather than theoretical conjecture” (p. 161). But he assures the reader that there is “valuable work to be done here without venturing ‘into the field.’” Indeed, he sees virtue in sticking to the theoretical high ground “since the prospects for successful empirical work look bleak” (p. 162). Macmullen embraces Rob Reich's conclusion that “the creation of a test to measure the development of ethical autonomy ‘may be desirable, but it seems highly unlikely.’ The empirical measurement of autonomy, especially in children, seems … an exceptionally difficult and probably quixotic task” (p. 162).

Macmullen interprets Reich's pessimistic verdict as a green light to continue down the path of abstract philosophy. But Macmullen fails to appreciate that this admission renders his philosophical project dangerous for a liberal society. If no reliable measure of ethical autonomy is possible, and if the state is empowered to close down religious schools whenever authorities feel that they are educating young people in a way that impedes individual autonomy, then surely the door is open to coercive and arbitrary state action. If Macmullen's theory is to have any real-world uses, then it is incumbent on the author to show that ethical autonomy can be operationalized in ways that will provide a meaningful check on state authority and give schools a way of identifying the criteria they must meet to comply with state requirements. Had Macmullen dirtied his hands a little more, he might have written a book of greater relevance to citizens and policymakers.

Both Faith in Schools? and The Last Freedom operate from the premise that religious expression needs or deserves more state assistance and protection than it currently gets. But maybe Tocqueville's many interlocutors from two centuries ago had it right. American religion is so vibrant precisely because of the separation of church and state. Or, as Tocqueville put it, “religion never more surely establishes its empire than when it reigns in the hearts of men unsupported by aught beside its native strength.” Perhaps those ardent secularists are religion's best friends after all.