Anyone who remembers Rodney Dangerfield also remembers his on-stage persona's elusive quest for respect. Anyone having even casual familiarity with the modern secular academy knows that for scholars of American religion, especially those who are believers themselves, Dangerfield's frustrations can seem uncomfortably familiar. George Marsden made the case forcefully in the late 1990s (The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship [New York: Oxford University Press, 1998]). But unlike the comedian's character, who never quite grasped the link between wanting respect and earning it, religious historians over the last two decades have generated a block of scholarly capital that cannot be ignored. A variety of interpretive purposes has guided the work of such notables as Marsden, Mark Noll, Nathan Hatch, and Grant Wacker, but their collective demand that religious ideas be taken seriously is impressively augmented by Nicholas P. Miller's study of Protestantism's role in shaping the First Amendment.
While more than a generation ago historians Bernard Bailyn and Gordon Wood waged a spectacularly successful campaign to place ideas at the center of our understanding of America's Revolutionary and Constitutional past, Miller argues that religious ideas were largely orphaned in the process. Taking as his focus the principles that shaped the founding generation's understanding of First-Amendment freedoms, Miller contends that longstanding scholarly battles to attribute the framers' inspiration to either classical liberalism or republicanism ignores their most important intellectual and cultural resource: the influence if dissenting Protestantism on the colonial and Revolutionary intelligentsia and, most significantly, on the broader American population.
Especially important to Miller is upending the well-worn argument that religious leaders became champions of freedom only as secular reasoning subsumed their religious principles or as increasing cultural diversity compelled them toward pragmatic toleration. Such an assumed adversarial relationship between religion and reason, Miller contends, obscures what was in fact a cooperative venture in which historic Protestant principles actually led the charge. In other words, Miller offers a First Amendment derived substantially from religious principles, not in spite of them.
His argument rests on historic Protestant commitments to the right of private judgment in matters of faith. He locates the wellspring of this principle in the early work of Martin Luther, citing the theologian's Address to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation (1520) as being far more influential than his later flares against seditious heresies following the 1524 Peasants' Revolt. Most significantly, Miller sidelines Luther's magisterial Protestant heirs and contends that dissenting Protestant sects made this spiritual individualism politically viable. Quakers and Baptists—not Puritans, Presbyterians or Anglicans—became the primary transatlantic carriers of this tradition to America with Roger Williams, William Penn, and John Locke equipping dissenter principles for much broader cultural and political duty.
Dissenters' emphasis on the right of private judgment as the personal, spiritual route to biblical truth gave rise to liberty of conscience as its secular expression, one that ultimately became serviceable in more conservative Protestant enclaves, as well as among the central players in the nation's Constitutional founding, chiefly James Madison. Miller finds Madison's explanation of religion's civic role in Memorial and Remonstrance (1786) to be a far more useful guide to understanding church disestablishment in the early republic than Thomas Jefferson's “wall of separation” as explained to the Danbury Baptist Association. Jefferson's explanation of the church-state divide, he maintains, was out of touch with “the religious mainstream, or really even the acceptable Protestant periphery of his day” (148). More consonant with Protestant culture was Madison's insistence that the individual's primary and personal duty to God necessarily elevated individual conscience above state authority.
Although Miller's later chapters are convincing with respect to the influence of dissenting Protestant thought on such key figures such as Locke, Penn, and Madison, skeptical readers will not assign as much weight to several “plausible” and “possible” connections that Miller suggests. He does his best work on this front, however, by emphasizing that the Constitution's framers did not have to make their personal religious choices the measure of their political discourse. Cognizant of their ideological vulnerability amid a much more traditionally religious citizenry, they could see the public advantage in emphasizing historic Protestant justifications for individual choice, especially since their more secular defense of individual conscience aligned with the Protestant variety in significant ways. Benjamin Franklin put it nicely when he told Thomas Paine to count the cultural cost of his comprehensive published assaults on Christianity: “Display your excellent talents of reasoning upon a less hazardous subject,” Franklin lectured. “He that spits against the wind, spits in his own face” (letter to Paine, n.d.).
While most of Miller's pages are devoted to establishing dissenting Protestantism's influence among colonial founders and the Revolutionary generation, it is his complementary emphasis on the religious disposition of ordinary Americans that represents this study's most important contribution. Holding to the common story line that Enlightenment reason carried freedom's battle against church establishment in New England and Virginia during the founding era obscures the fact that Baptists and Methodists—not Paine and Voltaire—became the dominant cultural advocates of free will and individual choice in the United States.
Most scholars who seek to clarify the church-state vision of the founders cannot resist a comparative reach to our own time, and Miller is no exception. Citing the debilitating impact of political polarization and authoritarian impulses in government that threaten historic principles of tolerance and individual freedom, Miller seems sympathetic to the restorative potential of a Lockean solution as filtered through Madison. Miller's Madison respects the individual's unfettered pursuit of transcendent truth as the linchpin of freedom and prescribes a corresponding cultural acknowledgement of a creator God as the indispensable “theoretical limit on the powers or prerogatives of the state” (168).
There is compelling reason to keep the founders' Enlightenment principles at the forefront of First Amendment history, as the recent works of Daniel Dreisbach, Phillip Munoz, and Philip Hamburger amply demonstrate. Miller's excellent study reminds us, however, that a dominant Protestant culture processed them on its own terms.
