A Perfect Freedom: Religious Liberty in Pennsylvania (review)

Book Reviews51 the most essential issues was stretched but also fortified by the use of consensus decision making. The concluding essay by Elisabeth Potts Brown and Jean R. Soderlund on archival sources available for further study on old and new questions about Quaker women is suggestive and helpful. Selected documents at the end of each essay also enhance further reflection. In thinking of future directions for research, Mary Maples Dunn's suggestion is to bring theological analysis of the principal texts of the Quaker belief system as they relate to women's liberation (in all branches of Quakerism and in different parts of the country or the world) into dialogue with the social history of Quaker women represented in this collection. Guilford CollegeCarol Stoneburner A Perfect Freedom: Religious Liberty in Pennsylvania. Cambridge Studies in Religion and Public Life. By J. William Frost. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. x, 221 pp. $42.50. J. William Frost has given the scholarly community and readers interested in issues of church and state his best book thus far in this examination of religious liberty in Pennsylvania. One of the Cambridge Studies in Religion and American Public Life, this volume serves admirably to enlighten contemporary Americans on the evolution of religious freedom in Pennsylvania through the Civil War. The account details sources far more complex than merely the views of James Madison and other framers of the Constitution and the First Amendment. This study will thus serve to enlighten policy-makers ranging from legislators to learned judges (if they read it) of the rich tradition of religious liberty in Pennsylvania and, by extension, the nation. Pennsylvania was aptly chosen as a state in which to examine religious liberty. Deliberately tolerant of all Christians, Pennsylvania was one of the freest of the American colonies—the freest in matters religious according to Frost, although one could make a case for greater diversity of faith and hence larger liberty where Jews in Rhode Island were concerned. But it was in Pennsylvania that Roman Catholics received the best treatement in the colonial period, and so in that regard Frost's point is well taken. Definitions of religious freedom changed in Pennsylvania's long history, and those changes provide much of the richness of the state's approach to religious and moral issues. In the colonial period Quakers and allied groups helped set the standard: a Christian context with freedom for pacifists and all other Christian groups. Independence and a new state constitution in 1780 led to the establishment of distance between church and state but not absolute separation. Pennsylvania determined this distance, taking in recent changes in the state and nation and paying appropriate attention to traditional definitions of liberty. The First Amendment in this instance did not govern. This division between church and state did not exclude Christian groups from matters of governance. Before the war, clergy and other religious leaders promoted many of the restrictive laws that remained on the statute books through most of the first half of the twentieth century . Among these restrictions were Sunday blue laws and the prohibition of lotteries . The state also set the moral context for the schools where Christian prayers and Bible readings were the norm. Pennsylvania still defined morals in a Christian context. But woe unto the parson who entered the political lists with a politically partisan as opposed to a Christian moral agenda. Catholics fitted within this 52Quaker History framework most of the time. Only when nativist rioters abused recent Irish Catholic immigrants in 1844 was the basic tolerance broken that had left Catholics free to worship and their hierarchy free most of the time in the nineteenth century and after to impose its control on local churches. Thus Pennsylvania defined its positions on religious liberty, sometimes adjusting to change elsewhere in the community but always making the decision in the public domain with elected officials following the mandate of the electorate. Frost finds that there were few changes after the Civil War in Pennsylvania traditions of religious freedom until the mid-twentieth century. After 1940, however, the federal courts, with state courts on occasion following them, intruded into an area traditionally reserved for legislative action after extensive...