Disestablishment and Religious Dissent: Church–State Relations in the New American States 1776–1833 ed. by Carl H. Esbeck and Jonathan J. Den Hartog (review)

The disestablishment of religion in America has a long and storied history that, at times, becomes muddled with the histories of the first amendment to the United States Constitution; Thomas Jefferson's famous language of "separation of church and state"; anti-Anglicanism during the Revolutionary War; and court cases over the freedom of religious exercise. In Disestablishment and Religious Dissent, editors Carl H. Esbeck and Jonathan J. Den Hartog disentangle the legal process of state-level disestablishments from secularist rhetoric in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The book makes its boldest claim at the outset: "There never was a national disestablishment" (4). This conclusion rebuts false claims about a singular, federal history of disestablishment that have been "repeated as axioms in grade school social studies classrooms right on through textbooks for university undergraduates" (8). Insofar as this is the volume's goal, it succeeds.

Disestablishment and Religious Dissent is innovative in its state-by-state analysis. Previous works have focused on states like Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, and Virginia to infer some nationalized discourse around disestablishment (425–26). Disestablishment, however, opts for a comprehensive state-by-state legal account that covers the thirteen original British colonies and eventual states Ohio, Tennessee, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, and Florida. This broader scope not only challenges histories that continue to assert national disestablishment as a singular historical event, but it more appropriately situates the state-level issues in popularly covered states like Massachusetts and Virginia within a more comprehensively national context.

The editors' clearly stated definitions and goals help tie together seemingly disparate state histories. Chapter contributors, comprising scholars of legal, political, and religious history, adhered to the editors' criteria for what counted as establishment: government financial support of state churches; government control over creeds, orders of worship, polity, and clerical appointments; state-enforced mandatory attendance at worship services; use of state churches to conduct civil functions such as maintaining birth, marriage, and death records; and the administration of religious tests for public office-holding or voting rights. Each chapter chronologically traces developments in establishmentarian language from the states' founding charters to subsequent laws and state constitutions. The authors situate each shift within either its European philosophical and legal precedents or broader religious, political, and social forces in the British Americas. At the direction of the editors, contributors end each section inconclusively on the question of whether states truly did successfully disestablish religion.

At the heart of Disestablishment and Religious Dissent's many arguments is the relationship between religious pluralism and state-level disestablishment. The editors have sought to complicate narratives that explained disestablishment as a strictly pragmatic tool for governing a religiously diverse populace (8). The volume addresses these arguments in two ways. First, each chapter locates the ethos of disestablishment among the populace composed of religious dissenters, whose support for disestablishment was not borne out of a desire to benefit their own group but out of the sheer principle of religious freedom. These dissenters embraced the consequences of state-supported religious pluralism knowing full-well its effects on their own and others' religious groups' relationship to state power. As noted by the editors, "A majority of the colonists who agitated for disestablishment were religious dissenters who, although in agreement concerning the general tenets of Protestant Christianity, still materially differed from the established Protestant church of their state. Their beliefs motivated them to seek freedom for reasons that are rooted in Christianity, as they understood the teachings of that faith" (11).

Second, an overview of legal and religious issues across various states captures the co-constitutive relationship between disestablishment and religious pluralism. As illustrated by some of the chapters, disestablishment arises from religious pluralism so as to secure the latter's perpetuation...