Religious Liberty in America: The First Amendment in Historical and Contemporary Perspective.

• Author: Gutzman, Kevin R.C.
• Position: Book review

Religious Liberty in America: The First Amendment in Historical and Contemporary Perspective

By Bruce T. Murray

Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008.

Pp. xviii, 213. $80.00 cloth, $19.95 paper.

Bruce T. Murray, a former editor for the Los Angeles Times and the Orange County Register, has written an idiosyncratic volume on religious liberty in America. Although its subtitle indicates that its focus is the First Amendment, the development of legal doctrine forms only part of the tale Murray seeks to tell. What he has in mind, instead, is to explain how American society accommodates diversity of religious belief and practice.

In chapter 1, "From Revival to Religious Liberty," Murray tells the background story to the First Amendment. Here one finds a story very similar to that recounted in Isaac Kramnick and R. Laurence Moore's The Godless Constitution: The Case Against Religious Correctness (New York: Norton, 1996).

As through the balance of the volume, Murray here has the Massachusetts Puritans founding America. (Never mind that Virginia was founded twenty-three years earlier, was more extensive, and always had a larger population.) Their idea of America as a "city on a hill" marked off the American mission, Murray says.

Yet although Massachusetts is in some sense typical of America, indeed often becomes "America" in Murray's account, it is Roger Williams who is the hero of Murray's story. How can that be, when Williams was exiled from Massachusetts for disapproving of the New England Way, for disagreeing with that colony's leaders in regard to the proper relationship between government and religion?

Precisely because of that. Somehow, Williams is a prophet of an "American" model, even though there is no evidence that any significant participant in the American Revolution had even read Williams, let alone relied on his example. Where can Murray have gotten the idea that Williams was so significant?

Well, perhaps from the late Supreme Court justice Hugo Black. Murray's story of early America sounds much like what Black wrote for the Court in Everson v. Board of Education (330 U.S. 1 [1947]). Murray displays a disconcerting tendency to mistake judges' accounts of the past for history--a common tendency that I criticize at length in The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Constitution (Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 2007).

Thus, one finds Murray repeatedly quoting judges at length on the First Amendment's underlying purpose of...