Journal of Southern History

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...