The mingling of religion and politics has formed a defining feature of American public life ever since the founding of the United States as a nation. This potent, sometimes explosive mixture has been remarkably pervasive, especially given the limitations the Constitution placed on the extent to which religious faith can participate as a function of government. The only guidance the Constitution offered on religion’s standing in politics came in Article VI, which prohibited the use of religious tests to determine if someone is eligible for national office. The Bill of Rights addressed religion more directly—the first sentence of the...

“In one respect,” mused the author of an 1882 article, “the Roman Catholic Church has proved itself the conservator of the family. By a consistent and stringent discipline it has always maintained the sacredness of the marriage bond.” In and of itself, such a claim was not unusual in nineteenth-century America. Roman Catholics frequently asserted that their tradition’s prohibition of divorce left them better equipped than Protestants to prevent the dissolution of the nuclear family. In this instance, however, it was not a Roman Catholic making the argument; it was a Protestant, and a Protestant clergyman at that. The Congregationalist...

To write about Jewish politics, one must consider Jewish space. This is perhaps true for any group of people—the places from which politics emerge matter. But the formulation holds particular significance for Jews, a group with a long history of spatial constraints, internally and externally imposed. On first blush, the common epithets for Jews undermine their connection to place: the Wandering Jew or the People of the Book. Yet in both cases, one describing an ongoing journey and implying an eventual landed end, and the other equating a quasi-national identity (“people”) with a textual center, Jewish identity is rendered...

One of the profoundest turns in American Protestantism transpired in the resort community of Kuling, China, a favorite conference site for foreign missionaries. It began in 1920 with the sojourn of William H. G. Thomas and Charles G. Trumbull. Thomas was an Oxford-trained seminarian who preached the doctrines of premillennialism and biblical inerrancy, Trumbull the editor of theSunday School Times, a centerpiece in the crusade against liberal thinking. Both men believed that mainline Protestants had abdicated their authority in Christendom by embracing historicist teachings that denied the supernatural dimensions of Scripture, a Social Gospel that attended to economics at...

Inauguration Day of 1933 dawned with a cloudy chill. President-elect Franklin Roosevelt and his family began the morning with a brief prayer service at Saint John’s Protestant Episcopal Church. The damp gray lingered as Roosevelt rode beside President Hoover to the Capitol. Just before Roosevelt took the oath of office, a southern admirer later wrote to him, “the clouds were especially heavy.” But “when you came and put your hand on [the Bible] when you were taking the oath, the sun broke through the clouds and gave a ray of light through upon you. I said then, and I still...

In the fall of 2013, the New Age mind-body physician and spiritual entrepreneur Deepak Chopra led a crowd of hundreds in a session of guided meditation from the steps of Thomas Jefferson’s nineteenth-century temple to reason. The Rotunda at the University of Virginia, which Jefferson modeled on the Roman Pantheon, served as the first library of the nation’s first fully secular university, and endures as the central symbol of its Enlightenment heritage. Yet on a warm fall afternoon Chopra stood, back to the Rotunda, encouraging his audience to ponder the findings of neuroscience, attend to their breath and hearts, and...

Six years before captivating the nation at the March on Washington in 1963 with his “I Have a Dream” speech, Martin Luther King, Jr. had been in the capital for the Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom. In his somber baritone, King urged the American government to “Give Us the Ballot.” With this “sacred right,” “we will no longer plead to the federal government for the passage of an anti-lynching law.” With the ballot, “we will no longer have to worry the federal government about our basic rights.” With the ballot, African Americans could do for themselves, rather than have the federal...

Scholars and journalists sling the term “the Christian Right” with such confidence that even a conscientious reader may be forgiven for concluding that there must be a consensus on what, precisely, the phrase means. But the matter of definition is not so simple. The Christian Right is, depending on whom you ask, a “new Christian political coalition” of church leaders, politicians, media gurus, and lay organizers; a network of political action groups that “advocate ‘taking dominion’ over political parties”; or a “despotic movement” that “understands the ills of American society even as it exploits these ills to plunge us into...

In 1970 Catholic priest and Democrat Father Robert Drinan launched a campaign to represent Massachusetts’s Third District in the U.S. House of Representatives. At first blush, the priest appeared unlikely to win the district, which included many of the most affluent and liberal suburbs along the Route 128 highway that encircled Boston and was a central node in the nation’s growing high-tech economy. Drinan publicly contended that his “campaign was a manifestation of his priesthood,” stating repeatedly, “a priest is a mediator who preaches moral values.”¹ For Drinan, such values included strong opposition to the Vietnam War, support for the...

The 2012 primary season was a feast of signification for students of American religion. The combustible coalition that remade the post-Goldwater GOP produced a slate of primary contenders who marked a coming-of-age for religious conservatives beyond the Protestant fold. White evangelicals, fundamentalists, and Pentecostals had been the backbone of the conservative revival, the Bible-believing Americans who put the majority into Moral Majority. In contrast, 2012’s headliners—Mormon Mitt Romney and Roman Catholics Paul Ryan, Rick Santorum, and Newt Gingrich—represented the former denominational junior partners of the self-described “New Christian Right.” Their acceptability to the white “values voters” testified to...