The Production of American Religious Freedom by Finbarr Curtis (review)

Religious freedom is a dearly loved and hotly debated concept heralded by many as one of the foundational precepts of American political life. Closely tied to the separation of church and state and the First Amendment, religious freedom has been invoked to defend or attack various practices, beliefs, and groups, from Catholic schools to polygamy, Quaker immigrants to the contraceptive mandate. It is this last controversy, the contraceptive mandate issued by the Department of Health and Human Services and the application of religious freedom to a corporation, Hobby Lobby, that seem to have motivated Finbarr Curtis to ask the questions that gave rise to this book. His questions and the resulting study ultimately deconstruct the very notion of religious freedom itself.

Curtis argues that, "Religious freedom is a malleable rhetoric employed for a variety of purposes" (2). In doing so, he claims that the connection between religion and privacy is "itself a product of a political economy" (3). Because the rhetoric of religious freedom is fundamentally malleable and constructed it is especially influential and becomes one of the ways Americans create boundaries around and between themselves and others. In addition, the concept of religious freedom, according to Curtis, has increasingly inflated the supremacy of the private sphere in American life while deflating the influence of the public.

In order to make this argument, Curtis chooses a disparate group of case studies that, in his words, "highlight different conceptual problems in the study of religion" (5). Each study shows that religious freedom does not in fact release individuals from the constraints of community and society, while also showing that the relationship between public and private (and therefore sacred and secular) is constantly being redefined throughout American history. Curtis' background in philosophy, literature, and religious studies is evident in his methodology. The case studies are primarily literary criticism, as Curtis does not provide much historical context or narrative, but instead reveals the underlying logic of the rhetoric of his subjects.

Perhaps surprisingly, Curtis does not begin his analysis of American religious freedom in the colonial or even revolutionary period, avoiding the usual suspects like Thomas Jefferson or William Penn. Instead, he begins with a study of Charles Finney, who worked to shape the social environments of his revivals in order to influence free people to convert to Christianity. In studying Finney, Curtis shows that the religious freedom these converts experienced was not private, but instead moderated by an outside influence. Next, Curtis analyzes the writings of Louisa May Alcott, specifically her book Work. This chapter is the least explicitly connected to the concept of religious freedom, and instead focuses on how Alcott "contrasts freedom with independence" (41), and the importance of social ties to experience true freedom. William Jennings Bryan is the focus of the next chapter, whose rhetorical connections between populism, economic systems, and democratic institutions show that the flexibility of the rhetoric of "the people" contributes to the malleability of religious freedom.

Discussion of populism and boundaries and bonds between people continues with the case study of D. W. Griffith, who directed and produced Birth of a Nation. Then Curtis' focus turns to his first non-Protestant subject, presidential candidate Al Smith, who "saw religious identity in terms of institutional and communal loyalties" (91). Because of his Catholic perspective, Smith argued that secularism would protect the religious identities of minority groups. Malcolm X, the subject of the sixth chapter, was an active opponent of American religious freedom, claiming that "abstract ideals of freedom and equality were in tension with reality" (115). Then the final two chapters focused on the most recent case studies by looking at the Intelligent Design controversy and the contraception mandate. Both of these issues, according to Curtis, show that the idea of privacy can be used as a justification for applying religious freedom to systems of ideas that are not inherently religious in a traditional sense and groups or corporations rather than the liberal...