Reviewed by:

• Disestablishment and Religious Dissent: Church-State Relations in the New American States, 1776–1833 ed. by Carl H. Esbeck and Jonathan J. Den Hartog
• Debra Neill

After declaring independence from Great Britain in 1776, the new American states embarked on constitutional projects that forced them to grapple with important political and social issues, including the question of the proper relationship between church and state. Each state took a unique path on the way to disestablishing religion, a process that ended in 1833 after Massachusetts banned all taxes in support of religion. The complexity of this story is what the editors of Disestablishment and Religious Dissent: Church-State Relations in the New American States, 1776–1833, the legal scholar Carl H. Esbeck and historian Jonathan J. Den Hartog, want to capture. In doing so they aspire to “offer corrections to the past telling of the story” (p. 8).

In a state-by-state analysis carried out by an assortment of historians, political scientists, and legal scholars in individual chapters, the book encompasses the history of disestablishment in the thirteen original states as well as eight other soon-to-be states from various regions. By going beyond the typical thirteen states, the editors hope to illustrate a much broader range of circumstances in which disestablishment happened. It is, after all, the simplistic unified narrative of the history of disestablishment that they wish to undermine.

It was the task of the chapter contributors to tell these distinct stories. These state-by-state chapters vary in quality and scope. Some chapters are marred by subpar scholarship, but as a whole the contributors were hampered in conveying the desired complexity by the demands of the editors, who asked them each to cover a broad range of subjects in a single chapter. The result is a series of rudimentary narratives that do more to obscure the complexities of the history than to illuminate them. What the chapters gain in breadth, they lose in sophistication.

The condensed state narratives, however, do convey enough history to make some reasonable conclusions about the nature of, and reasons for, the disestablishment of religion. For example, there seems to be a relationship between high levels of religious diversity and the need for disestablishment. Yet the ten “findings” elaborated in the introduction, supposedly drawn from these narratives, seem unrelated, and even contrary to one another. For example, one of the findings claims, “Neither resistance to the Congregational (Puritan) establishments in New England nor the Church of England establishment in the southern colonies was a material cause of the War of Independence” (p. 12). Given that this point was presented as a contrast with the anticlerical French Revolution, it seems that it was added simply to assert that the American Revolution was not anticlerical. Setting the mischaracterization of the French Revolution aside, the fact that the colonists did not bring whatever grievances they may have had with their own establishments into their fight with Great Britain should not be surprising. Each colony was established by a royal charter allowing significant leeway in managing its own church-state affairs. Why would resistance to their own established church-state affairs have been a cause [End Page 112] of the revolt against Great Britain? And how could this claim be a finding when the contributors do not examine the relationship between disestablishment and the War of Independence?

The most fundamental finding directly bearing on disestablishment asserts, “Protecting the ‘right of private judgment’ in individual religious observance and practice came easily to the new American states. However, voluntarism in the funding of ministers and churches—leading to the repeal of religious tax assessments and glebes—was slow and arduous work, spanning fifty years” (p. 10). This claim rests on the assumption that the issue of individual religious rights was separate from the issue of disestablishment. This assumption is broadly accepted and rarely challenged. Its origins have more to do with...

审核人：

• 瓦解与宗教异议：《新美洲州的教会与国家的关系》，1776-1833年版。卡尔·H·埃斯贝克（Carl H.Esbeck）和乔纳森·J·登·哈托格（Jonathan J.
• 黛布拉·尼尔

在1776年宣布脱离英国独立后，新的美国各州开始实施宪政计划，迫使他们应对重要的政治和社会问题，包括教堂与国家之间的适当关系问题。各个州在消灭宗教的道路上走了一条独特的道路，这一进程于1833年在马萨诸塞州禁止一切税收以支持宗教之后结束。这个故事的复杂性是《反宗教与宗教异议：1776-1833年新美洲国家的教会与国家关系》的编辑，法律学者卡尔·H·埃斯贝克和历史学家乔纳森·J·登·哈托格想要捕捉的。他们这样做是为了“对故事的过去提供纠正”（第8页）。

在各个章节中，由各种各样的历史学家，政治学家和法律学者进行的逐个状态分析中，该书涵盖了13个原始州以及其他八个即将由美国废除的州的瓦解历史。各个地区。通过超越典型的十三个州，编辑们希望说明发生瓦解的更为广泛的情况。毕竟，他们希望破坏的是对瓦解历史的简单化的统一叙述。

本章作者的任务是讲述这些不同的故事。这些各州的章节在质量和范围上各不相同。有些章节受到学术水平低下的损害，但总体而言，由于编辑的要求，撰稿人在传达所需的复杂性方面受到阻碍，编辑要求他们各自在一个章节中涵盖广泛的主题。结果是一系列基本的叙事，其作用是掩盖历史的复杂性而不是阐明它们的复杂性。这些章节在广度上获得了什么，而在复杂度上却失去了。

然而，浓缩的国家叙事确实传达了足够的历史，可以就宗教的性质和原因作出一些合理的结论。例如，高水平的宗教多样性与瓦解的必要性之间似乎存在某种关系。然而，引言中阐述的十个“发现”似乎是从这些叙述中得出的，它们似乎无关，甚至相互矛盾。例如，调查结果之一声称：“对新英格兰的集会（清教徒）机构的抵抗或南部殖民地的英格兰教会的机构都不是独立战争的重要原因”（第12页）。考虑到这一点与古怪的法国大革命形成对比，似乎只是为了断言美国大革命不是滑稽的而已。抛开法国大革命的错误特征，殖民者没有将自己对自己的机构的不满带到与英国的战斗中，这一事实不足为奇。每个殖民地都是由皇家宪章建立的，在管理自己的教会国家事务方面有很大的余地。为什么抵抗自己建立的教会国家事务是一个原因 每个殖民地都是由皇家宪章建立的，在管理自己的教会国家事务方面有很大的余地。为什么抵抗自己建立的教会国家事务是一个原因 每个殖民地都是由皇家宪章建立的，在管理自己的教会国家事务方面有很大的余地。为什么抵抗自己建立的教会国家事务是一个原因[完第112页]对英国的起义？当捐助者不审查分裂与独立战争之间的关系时，这种说法怎么会成为发现？

直接关系到瓦解的最基本发现是：“在新的美国州很容易在个人宗教遵守和实践中保护'私人审判权'。然而，部长和教堂资助的自愿性导致缓慢而艰巨的工作，长达五十年之久（导致废除宗教税收评估和丑闻）（第10页）。这项主张基于这样一个假设，即个人宗教权利的问题与瓦解的问题是分开的。这个假设被广泛接受，并且很少受到挑战。它的起源与...有关