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Title: The Founding Fathers and the Place of Religion in America by Frank Lambert ISBN: 0-691-08829-2 Publisher: Princeton University Press Pub. Date: 01 January, 2003 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $29.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.5 (2 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Good, Well-Balanced Review of religion & the Constitution
Comment: What a well-balanced review of how religion started in the colonies. I believe this is a fair assessment although it contradicts an anti-religious & pro-religious viewpoint. I am a christian and was surprised to learn the religious community's attempt to oppose Thomas Jefferson's election to President in 1800. In fact, based upon what you hear from the religious right, all our Founding Fathers were christians and never considered a separation of church and state. This text, as I noted earlier, contradicts this notion.
Being a christian I would prefer a christian president but no litmus test was established so the Founding Fathers must not have thought it to be critical for the new republic. What was also interesting was the fact the northern states were more religiously conservative than the southern states (the fight to keep Jefferson from the White House came from preachers in the north). Based upon other texts I have read, it appears the south became a more religiously conservative haven after the civil war.
The only minor dissapointment with the book was that I wanted the author to address the current church/state issues such as having the ten commandments in the courtroom and prayer in public schools. I of course support the prayer and ten commandment issues. The author could have addressed whether the Foundng Fathers would have supported these notions also. The author could have at least took a position on what the Founders would have wanted. He did indicate whether the favorable tax status of religious institutions violated the 1st ammendment. Again, the text provided a fair protrayal of the environment in our early years but could have done more to project what the Founders would have done today, in today's environment, with the current church/state issues.
Rating: 5
Summary: Excellent History, and also Law, and Policy... a must-read
Comment: This book is the best on its subject which I have come across in a very long time -- after a fairly long course of reading books on US church-state relations over the years -- in history, law, policy...
I came to Lambert now after wading through a score or so of recent books on this -- tracts, I'll call most of the others, because they were nearly all horribly-biased. This has been part of a personal project to explain, and defend, the extraordinary depth and richness of US religiosity to some overseas friends. Foreigners never do understand how we can have such strong religious activity and belief, here in the US, while at the same time we maintain a "wall of separation" between church and state.
Lambert does an admirable job of explaining this -- and he does it fairly, with great balance, and with wonderful style in his writing. He has a point of view himself, but he does not let it become a bias -- anyone possessing any of the many opinions which exist, on these issues, can get much out of reading this book.
Lambert is a master of the topical and well-timed historical anecdote: he weaves these together, gently, in an entertaining and informative account of the US Colonial record on the difficulties of accommodating "varieties of religious experience". But he also has a keen historian's eye for the value of generalizations. He confines his text very carefully to his chosen historical period, 1600-1800. But he is not at all afraid to draw out a universal theme, occasionally, from his account of what those little bands of English expatriates and descendants of same were doing, or thought they were doing, back then in their "13 colonies".
So we get the intriguing suggestion that the world -- or at least the Western European and particularly the New World American British Colonies part of it, but not just that last -- was proceeding, during that period, from a religious politics dominated by the clergy to one governed by the individual -- and perhaps that, more than quarrels over belief, is what the fuss was all about... "The central question for the Founders had not been religion's role," he asserts, "Rather, they worried about religion's place, deciding in the end that it would fluorish more through persuasion... than through government coercion." (p. 206)
And, along the same lines, Lambert gives us the suggestion -- this one heard in the French Revolution as well -- that more than a matter of doctrine the religious changes of the times were political, again, and more of a shift in power from Ministers to Lawyers -- "Lawyers, not clergymen, took the lead in challenging Parliament's new imperial policies..." (p. 210). So the US Revolution certainly changed US politics, but unlike the French the US Americans still were free, afterward, to believe whatever they wanted to believe in matters of religion.
Lambert's "Introduction" ought to be mandatory reading for anyone interested in current issues in these areas. As already mentioned, the body of the book is devoted to careful, balanced, US Colonial history: interesting stories, intriguingly presented, but meticulously crafted so as not to become the sweeping over-generalizations and "moral lessons" so often presented in other literature on this subject. In his Introduction, however, Lambert is not afraid to take a shot at characterizing current controversies: and it is a very careful and balanced and complete one --
"This study looks at the cultural and political boundaries that circumscribed the Founders' decisions and actions," he warns in his Introduction (p. 8) -- his implication, at least, being that passionate controversies today have their "contexts" as well...
"During the last two decades of the twentieth century and continuing into the twenty-first, Americans have engaged in a culture war... On one side of the debate are those who insist that America has been since its conception a 'Christian Nation'... They blame 'liberals' for not only turning their backs on the country's religious heritage but openly attaching those who embrace 'traditional' Christian values... these conservatives often conflate the planters -- such as the New England Puritans and the Chesapeake Anglicans -- and the Founders into one set of forefathers...", Lambert says.
But in addition, "Partisans on the other side of the culture war also consult the nation's Founders for a 'usable past' of their own. They, too, tend to conflate the two sets of progenitors by making both the Founding and the Planting Fathers impassioned champions of a religious freedom that extended liberty of conscience to all..."
The book presents a really interesting controversy, then: good history, and also invaluable ammunition for both sides in the current fight, hopefully for use in moderating their own extremist positions and coming to a better understanding -- an understanding of the necessities for change, if those exist, but also of the reasons for maintaining continuity, as those do too.
In a time of White House "faith-based initiatives", and of Department of Justice "Moslem" roundups, and of Supreme Courts which grant certiorari to "Under God" cases, Lambert's book should be required reading -- not just for religion classes, but also for history classes and law classes and decision-makers, and for all members of the general public... who either do or do not love the US... There is a great deal of wisdom about what makes the US a strong and good place, in this book.
Jack Kessler...
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Title: The Godless Constitution: The Case Against Religious Correctness by Isaac Kramnick, R. Laurence Moore ISBN: 039331524X Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: 01 February, 1997 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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Title: The Myth of Christian America : What You Need to Know About the Separation of Church and State by Mark Weldon Whitten ISBN: 1573122874 Publisher: Smyth & Helwys Publishing Pub. Date: 01 October, 1999 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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Title: Christianity and the Constitution: The Faith of Our Founding Fathers by John Eidsmoe ISBN: 0801052319 Publisher: Baker Academic Pub. Date: 01 May, 1995 List Price(USD): $29.99 |
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Title: Why the Religious Right Is Wrong: About Separation of Church & State by Rob Boston ISBN: 0879758341 Publisher: Prometheus Books Pub. Date: 01 March, 1994 List Price(USD): $21.00 |
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Title: Abortion and Social Responsibility: Depolarizing the Debate by Laurie Shrage ISBN: 019515309X Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: 01 February, 2003 List Price(USD): $17.95 |
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