We of Little Faith: The limits of religious freedom without religious commitment.

• Author: Baumann, Paul

Sacred Liberty: America's Long, Bloody, and Ongoing Struggle for Religious Freedom

by Steven Waldman

HarperOne, 416 pp.

Steven Waldman's Sacred Liberty is an ardently evangelical book. Waldman's faith, however, is not in any particular creed or sacred text; the First Amendment's guarantee of religious liberty is what garners his reverence. Religion has thrived in America because the Founding Fathers, but especially James Madison, understood that it would best prosper if "left untouched by government." In a "free marketplace" of competing Christian denominations, and eventually a public square in which many different faiths operate, America tamed the propensity for religious violence while democratizing traditional faith communities. The result, Waldman argues, is a religious vitality rarely found in other modern societies. He uses economic metaphors to explain the triumph of religious liberty. The "Madisonian arena of religious competition" has rewarded the "product and marketing innovations" of religious entrepreneurs and punished faith communities that no longer meet the needs of congregants. The result is "a religious landscape so fragmented that no denomination is big enough to dominate."

Waldman's previous book, Founding Fathers, made many of the same arguments, but Sacred Liberty extends the story from the Founders to Donald Trump's efforts to antagonize Muslims. Religious change is not an unexplored aspect of U.S. history, but it is an often neglected one. Waldman (a Washington Monthly contributing editor) lucidly explains Supreme Court First Amendment rulings, the theologies of Mormonism and Jehovah's Witnesses, and the nation's long and virulent history of anti-Catholicism and anti-Semitism. Among the many historical oddities of how religion has taken shape in America, it is good to learn, or be reminded, that the Puritans once banned Christmas; that the contents of the Bible and the order of the Ten Commandments are different for Protestants and Catholics; that many African slaves were Muslim; and that the Ku Klux Klan had very popular glee clubs (!).

Waldman, a cofounder of Beliefnet.com, which describes itself as "the leading lifestyle site dedicated to faith and inspiration," covers an enormous amount of material. There are chapters on the "failed experiments" of established churches in the original thirteen states; the Moral Majority and the Christian right; and contemporary struggles, after 9/11 and Trump's election, to...