Church and State in America: The First Two Centuries (review)

James H. Hutson, chief of the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress, has done as much as anyone in recent years to recover the authentic understanding of the Founding Fathers' views on church and state, in his books Religion and the Founding of America (Washington, DC, 1990) and Forgotten Features of the Founding (Lanham, MD, 2003). In a sense this latest book sums up his earlier work.

The story is a fairly simple one. No one among the founders believed in absolute separation of church and state in the sense that the modern Supreme Court erroneously attributes to them. It was taken for granted that there would be religious liberty and that there would not be an established national church. The principal dispute was over direct tax support of the churches, an issue that brought forth a variety of responses. But no one at the time doubted that religion in general was to be encouraged and that it was essential to the moral fiber of the nation.

The book's title is misleading, in that the period after the founding gets only a few pages, which requires leaving out some important issues, such as the sabbatarian laws and various court decisions. (Remarkably, the 1947 Everson case, which began the modern era of church-state jurisprudence, did not have a single precedent to back it up.)

The book is part of a semi-popular series and as such has no footnotes or other references, thereby handicapping readers who may want to make use of it in ongoing political discussions. Hutson's account is completely reliable, but his claims would have to be proven by recourse to other works. There is a brief bibliography.

There is an issue that goes unaddressed. Hutson characterizes some of the founders as politiques, because they had no firm principles about church and state, but took particular stands mainly to forestall social conflict. To the degree that this is true, it seems to support the modern separationists' otherwise dubious claim that the founders' fear of "divisiveness" was at the root of everything else.

Hutson's works have been invaluable contributions to the debunking of the modern myth of church-state relations, along with Philip Hamburger's Separation of Church and State (Cambridge, MA, 2002) and, if I may say so, my own The Supreme Court and Religion in American Life (Princeton, 2004). At the scholarly level the myth is no longer sustainable, but at an intermediate level—that of editorial writers, for example—it appears to be indeed set in concrete.