Fans pick 100 books like Religion and the American Constitutional Experiment

This is the book that first piqued my interest in the often contentious relations between church and state in American political and constitutional history, and it inspired my lifelong study of this topic. Although not without its problems, Robert L. Cord’s book offered a bracing critique of the U.S. Supreme Court’s mid-20th-century version of “history,” which the justices said confirmed the founders’ intent to erect a “high and impregnable” wall of separation between church and state.

The book questioned the foundations of the Court’s church-state jurisprudence and invited readers to reconsider the founding generation’s prudential and constitutional views on church-state relations.

This is perhaps the most talked-about book of the last generation on church-state relations. It offers a sweeping survey of the conceptions and rhetoric of church-state separation in American political and legal traditions from colonial times to the mid-20th century.  

Philip Hamburger challenges the notion that “separation of church and state,” as developed in 20th-century jurisprudence, is a fundamental American principle deeply embedded in the nation’s political and constitutional traditions. Rather, he argues, the rhetoric of separation emerged from the cynical politics of late-18th-century disestablishment battles and was picked up in the next century by nativists seeking to marginalize Catholics (while preserving Protestant hegemony) and by liberals intent on establishing a secular polity. I read few pages in this book that failed to prompt reflection or challenge long-held assumptions.

This elegantly crafted book examines two centuries of American history with remarkable clarity and brevity, revealing a vital, sustained, and salutary role played by a vibrant religious culture in the colonies and new nation. James H. Hutson, former Chief of the Manuscript Division at the Library of Congress, wrote Religion and the Founding of the American Republic to accompany the Library’s 1998 exhibition of the same title.

I am also drawn to the book’s many visual images–paintings, photographs, cartoons, document facsimiles, etc.–illustrating religion’s role in American political culture. I often recommend this slender volume as the best short history of religion’s role in American public life from the colonial era to the early 19th century.

Mark David Hall’s engaging book revisits the persistent myth that the American founding was a strictly secular project. He investigates, among other topics, whether the American founders were, as is often claimed, all deists who framed a strictly secular or even “godless” Constitution. Did the founders, he asks, erect a high wall of separation between church and state, thereby restricting religion’s role in public life? 

These are not questions of merely academic interest; rather, as Hall explains, they have implications for law and public policy today. His insightful book compels lay readers and seasoned scholars alike to reconsider conventional views regarding religion’s role in American history and political tradition.  

This is a brilliant textbook. Digging into my studies, I found a philosophy of law, in regards to the respect due to the nature of the human being, within the Bible, and sensing the same philosophy within the U.S. Constitution, I purchased this book. Much like the other books, these authors do a good job, through their presenting and reviewing of various cases, and of other documents, of setting the Constitution in the right light. I am recommending this book because it is a good read for anyone wanting to better understand the context of the Constitution’s ideology. I found this book to be not only educational but personally edifying. 

This is not just the story of José de León Toral – the man who killed President Álvaro Obregón in 1928 – but the story of the world he inhabited. Often dismissed as a religious fanatic, Robert Weis seeks (in a sense) to redeem Toral by contextualizing him in a very peculiar postrevolutionary cultural milieu: Mexico City’s network of lay Catholics, forced underground by the revolutionary state. Weis masterfully reconstructs this clandestine ecosystem of private masses and informal convents, and their cat-and-mouse games with the agents of state repression. I love the layers of detail, the reconstructions of daily life, and the author’s compassion for his subjects. I was skeptical at first, but by the end I was convinced that Toral’s action was political, and not driven (just) by religious zealotry.

Knowing our history is so important, and this is one of the best books on the history of Christian nationalism in the United States during the 20th century.

What becomes so clear is the cultural influences on American Christianity including which voices are lifted up, and which ones are ignored or silenced. Let’s just say you won’t ever look at Billy Graham and his work the same way again.

Poles have long prided themselves on having been tolerant of religious differences, this toleration dating from the deep historical past. In this pathbreaking and provocative work, Natalia Nowakowska challenges such interpretations of King Sigismund’s relationship to Protestants and Protestantism. Exquisitely argued, the book is an absolute tour de force, one that sheds new light on the period of the early Reformation.

Well over 200,000 books have been written about Napoleon, but this recent work actually manages to say something new by focusing on an aspect of his reign that has been oddly neglected – at least in the English-speaking world – his tense and turbulent relations with the Pope, Pius VII, which ended with the Pope’s kidnapping from Rome by French forces in 1809 and imprisonment in France. Though bullied, browbeaten, and even once physically manhandled by Napoleon, the elderly Pontiff steadfastly refused to make the concessions to the secular power that his captor demanded from him. Ambrogio Caiani not only brings vividly to life an extraordinary clash of personalities, but also a key episode in one of the great conflicts that has shaped the modern world: the rivalry between church and state.

In The Florentine Magnates we looked at Florence’s magnates, the powerful ruling class. Now we get a look at the people they lorded it over—the “popolo minuto” or the little people. We see them struggling, never able to get far enough ahead to get through a bad harvest, a year of terrible weather, or an epidemic with any security. Both church and commune recognized the need to come to the assistance of the masses of poor; this book tells us how they went about it and how successful they were (or weren’t). It deftly traces the role of religious confraternities in Florence’s charitable institutions. It’s been described as “one of the most detailed analyses of charity in late medieval Italy.”