This provocative volume examines church and state as unstable, interlocked categories, “virtual isomorphs” born together in the Western imagination (5). The eponymous term ekklesia, an evocation of Athenian citizen assemblies and early Christian churches, here describes people “convened under a transcendent sovereignty” and compelled to act as one body with “mixed qualities” of “churchness, stateness, and churchstateness” (4).

The volume focuses on the Americas, where claims of church-state separation operate as founding myths. Instead, the authors find “a crossed and intertextual churchstateness” that establishes and periodically reinforces its power by “unmaking extant rival sovereignties” (17). Violence and its memory weave through the three inquiries that compose the book, unfolding in nineteenth-century Brazil, in colonial and modern Canada, and in the present-day United States. Each essay stands alone, but together they raise a constellation of questions about the ways scholars see, know, and teach the Americas.

Paul Christopher Johnson's “The People and the Law of the Hound at Canudos” focuses on a single dramatic exemplar of modern Brazil's “foundational violence” (3). The republic's founding in 1889 and its separation of church and state in 1890 paradoxically set the stage for “a powerfully weaponized church-state alliance” that eradicated the rival ekklesia of Canudos (36).

The tale of Canudos is remarkable: a mysterious wandering prophet, Antonio Conselheiro, emerged as a critic of the fledgling republic's tax system and of its claim on burial and marriage. Conselheiro accrued a following and built a fortress-church in the frontier valley of Canudos, where refugees from nearby estates joined his self-sufficient little community. Canudos residents practiced a devout, popular Catholicism but showed little reverence for visiting priests and their ascendant authority. This little community of dissent defied every feature of Brazil's new ekklesia. Soon the church designated the community a politico-religious sect and a schism, thereby sanctioning a military attack.

Thrice thwarted, the Brazilian military finally besieged, defeated, captured, and decapitated virtually the entire community in 1897. In the process, it redefined the Brazilian ekklesia over and against the racially mixed “horde of excess declassificados” in Canudos (73). Johnson argues that the spectacular violence of the attack and the ghastly, ritualized revelry that followed make sense only if we understand Canudos as a rival ekklesia to the fragile new republic. The destruction of Canudos was thus a unifying act of triumph, an affirmation of the holiness of the republic. Its authority established, Brazil retroactively distanced itself from its own violence, claimed Canudos residents as citizens of the state they had reviled, and declared the soil they had trod to be sacred ground.

In “Spiritual Jurisdictions: Treaty People and the Queen of Canada,” Pamela E. Klassen reads the treaties and proclamations that papered over Canadian violence against Indigenous nations as “materializations of spiritual jurisdiction” (157). She focuses specifically on King George III's Royal Proclamation of 1763 and Queen Elizabeth's 2016 “ring of reconciliation,” added to the monarchical Black Rod, to explore “the explicit language of sacredness and spirituality used in reference to the treaties, as well as to the material protocols associated with Crown-based symbols of treaty people” (110).

Klassen argues that the Royal Proclamation, which established British control over lands ceded by the French and set terms for negotiating treaties with Indigenous nations, represented a sacred promise between nations. Yet the British remembered only the text of the proclamation and subsequent treaties, while Indigenous memory encompassed the simultaneous ceremonies, multilingual negotiations, and gift exchanges. Preserved in oral histories, rituals, and carefully preserved objects handed down over generations, Indigenous memory challenges “monological treaty accounts” that emphasize land ceded and ignore “agreements to share the land in a multijurisdictional frame” as living promises backed by the Christian God (115).

The ring of reconciliation, presented by Prince William in a symbolic ceremony in the aftermath of Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission report, both indirectly admitted the crown's culpability and failed to acknowledge full Indigenous sovereignty. Church-state separation in the Americas was thus “an attempt to forget the metaphysical underpinnings of colonial domination in the doctrine of discovery and the spiritual jurisdiction of the Crown.” Furthermore, Klassen argues, Canada's failure to recognize its own “churchstateness” allows Canadians to forget the crown's sacred promises.

In Winnifred Fallers Sullivan's “Banning Bibles: Death-Qualifying a Jury,” the violence of churchstateness is bureaucratized, sanitized, modernized. Sullivan focuses on the exclusion of biblical texts and references from the penalty phase of capital jury trials in many states to ask larger questions about the relationship between American churchstateness and the death penalty.

Despite the careful excision of the church from the death-qualified jury's shared deliberations, Sullivan shows, a “complex cultural Protestantism” and its paradoxical preoccupation with free will and determinism” shape Americans’ commitment to the death penalty as well as jurors’ decisions about individual cases (193). Sullivan locates the primacy of texts in this argument both in the history of Protestant Biblicism and in the impossible task of disestablishment. The end result is that the death-qualified jury, a little ekklesia within the larger one, is “required to improvise with a man's life at stake just when the structuring textual logic and ritual of an actual church and state might be most useful to the juror, to the defendant, and to the people” (184).

Sullivan also addresses the racism that also shapes the American criminal justice system, but she argues that the history of American “churchstateness” as much as the history of slavery explains Americans’ willingness to execute members of their own citizenry. For Sullivan, the death penalty and the death-qualified jury draws from those histories, but its persistence also exposes “a deep uncertainty about sovereignty at the heart of the American project” (218). In the end, a jury of individuals, without the benefit of church or state, must act as both in deciding one human's fate.

The disciplinary and methodological range of this volume is extraordinary, as its attention to the local, the textured, the particular. But look elsewhere for easy conclusions. By design and to our benefit these inquiries raise more questions than they answer.