Free Exercise: Religion, the First Amendment, and the Making of America

Free Exercise traces the routes by which Americans arrived at the First Amendment’s religious clauses, the cultural currents that shaped their meaning, and the consequences that flowed from them. The book also demonstrates how white women, African Americans, Jews, Roman Catholics, and nonbelievers expanded the application of religious liberty – and illuminated its boundaries.Free Exercise uses the religious clauses’ contested phrases to take stock of the era’s social environment and collective imagination, explaining how provisions for religious liberty became attractive to early national voters and lawmakers. It investigates what the founding generation agreed about, what they disagreed about, and what they could not bear mentioning. The book’s early chapters consider how the religious clauses came into being and what they likely meant for contemporaries. Later chapters examine their relationship to memories of religious violence, free market practices, religious civility, gender and racial exclusion, and unbelief.