Denis Lacorne. Religion in America: A Political History. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014. 264 pp. $30.00 (paper), ISBN 978-0-231-15101-6.
Reviewed by Elizabeth A. Georgian (University of South Carolina at Aiken)
Published on H-FedHist (August, 2018)
Commissioned by Caryn E. Neumann (Miami University of Ohio Regionals)
Despite the title, Denis Lacorne’s book, Religion in America: A Political History, is less a political history of American religion than a history of how the French have understood the relationship between religion, politics, and the legal system throughout American history. Viewed through the writings of French philosophers, historians, and travelers, the American religious landscape grows complex and contested in some ways, but is reduced to simplistic narratives in others. Lacorne argues that two competing and evolving narratives of identity shape this relationship: one tells a story of a secular nation, grounded in Enlightenment philosophy, beginning in 1776. The other, described as “‘Romantic’ or ‘Neopuritan,’” traces a steady march towards freedom, beginning with the Reformation, and, in America, culminating in nineteenth-century evangelicals’ vision of a Protestant nation (p. xvii). In this account, the two traditions compete: in the colonial period Quaker pacifism faced off, at least in the eyes of the French, against the savagery of New England Puritanism; in the nineteenth century the secularism of the founding fathers struggled against the evangelicalism sweeping the nation during the Second Great Awakening.
While brief, this ambitious work traces this tension between secularization and religiosity from the beginning of British colonization through, in a new postscript, the presidential election of 2012. In roughly chronological order, Lacorne winds his way through a series of events and groups familiar to American historians. Reconsidering the Puritans through the eyes of Alexis de Toqueville and other nineteenth-century writers offers a chance to refute the founding myth of religious liberty. The Second Great Awakening evokes the familiar (if questionable) story of the democratization of American Christianity. The remainder of the book explores various conflicts between Roman Catholics and Protestants, nativists and immigrants, modernization and faith, separatists and antiseparatists. Ultimately, he argues, secularization triumphed in the legal sphere, producing first a “constitution without God,” a “daughter of the Enlightenment” and later a Supreme Court hostile to religion in the public sphere. But religion, or more specifically Christianity, conquered the political sphere, exerting considerable influence on presidential politics (p. 35).
Lacorne’s greatest contribution lies in his analysis of the works of French authors, and to a limited extent, their influence on American thinkers, particularly the founding fathers. While some names are familiar—Voltaire, Toqueville, Jean-Paul Sartre—others are less so. Taken collectively, they paint a picture of the complex and contradictory nature of religion in American life. The mechanization of the 1930s eventually gave way to a renewed evangelical presence in politics and then to the rise of the religious Right. Simultaneously Christianity pervades the nation, with “In God We Trust” stamped on bills and “one nation under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance, but at the same time an ever-present secularist element persists, exemplified by a Supreme Court that severely restricted prayer in public schools.
If the book’s strength lies in Lacorne’s skillful analysis of French bewilderment in the face of American contradictions, its weakness lies in his command of American religious and political history and a tendency to oversimplify. The late twentieth-century French conflation of Puritanism and evangelicalism parallels Lacorne’s tendency to reduce Puritanism to a metaphor for the intrusion of religion into the public sphere, at times losing track of a historically distinct expression of Calvinist beliefs. It overplays the secularization of the founding fathers, Jefferson in particular. The Jefferson Bible is hardly a little-known work, nor does it indicate a lack of respect for the Bible, the Qur’an or (more broadly) religion. And a more nuanced understanding of the history of Supreme Court jurisprudence and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 would make the relationship between seemingly contradictory court rulings in cases that pit the rights of religious minorities and laws protecting public health and children more comprehensible.
For federal historians, there is relatively little here of interest. Even the First Amendment waits until the end of the book to make an appearance. But for scholars of religious history willing to set aside the author’s oversimplifications, this tightly written exploration of French perspectives on the complex interplay between American religion, the legal system, and politics will prove interesting. Lacorne’s observations about what the French preoccupation with religion in American reveals about their difficulty accepting the significant role of Christianity in French history, concentrated largely in the latter half of the book, are the most intriguing and novel. In a few years, given the seemingly strange but strong relationship between American evangelicals and the current president, as well as conflicts over the role of religion in the French public sphere, would make an updated version of this book a welcome addition to these intersecting fields.
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Citation:
Elizabeth A. Georgian. Review of Lacorne, Denis, Religion in America: A Political History.
H-FedHist, H-Net Reviews.
August, 2018.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=50024
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