589 - The First Liberty: Religion and the American Republic

The First Liberty: Religion and the American Republic

By William Lee Miller

New York, Knopf, 1986. 375 Pp. $24.95.

William Lee Miller, author of several previous books on religion and politics, has now given us a scholarly and immensely readable account of the meaning of religious freedom in America. Miller identifies two major intellectual sources of that liberty. The first is the founding generation of the republic, typified by Jefferson, who drafted Virginia's Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom, and by Madison, who guided that act to passage in the legislature and later helped write the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The second is left-wing or dissenting Protestantism, which has found its most enduring (if often misrepresented) symbol in Roger Williams. Devoting almost two-thirds of his book to the life and thought of these three men, Miller implies that we shall find in them the intellectual core of America's first liberty.

Miller insists that the tradition of religious freedom does possess an intellectual core. Unlike those who contend that religious liberty is merely an accommodation to pluralism, Miller believes that our first liberty entails a commitment to a particular view of religion's role in society. The commitment is that the state should, on principle, be "impartial toward the differing convictions about those final [i.e., religious] things... Our state leaves matters in that realm aside not because they are beneath or against its concern, but because they are

590 - The First Liberty: Religion and the American Republic

above it." Impartiality is not premised on indifference or upon a relativism denying absolute truth. America's first liberty presumes the existence of truth and asserts that it can best prevail by free argument. In that continuing debate, there is room, perhaps even the necessity, for the vigorous espousal of one's particular truth provided that one also is willing like Roger Williams to grant "soul freedom" to everyone and maintain a "humane and inclusive" public order. But partisanship and civility can only co-exist where persons recognize that their truths, however passionately held, are but pieces of or pointers to the larger Truth. Thus the goal of the first liberty is a "reciprocating deep pluralism in which the several communities [of faith] affect each other for the better." "Something like that," he writes in his concluding sentence, "this remarkable nation requires in order to hold both to Truth and Liberty without allowing either to destroy the other."

Miller feels that current debates over issues such as Bible reading or prayer in public schools and creches on public lawns have trivialized the tradition of religious liberty. The new religious right, civil liberties groups, and even the Supreme Court itself have invoked the high principles of the First Amendment in cases where those principles are only tangentially involved. Miller urges Americans to remember that the First Amendment was designed to establish a foundational principle for American life, not to resolve every minute issue of policy. He strongly implies that the Supreme Court has erred in treating the "no establishment" clause of the First Amendment as separable from the "free exercise" provision. The Court has thereby distracted attention from the fundamental intent of the Amendment and has wandered into areas which it might better have avoided. Miller's criticisms are not, however, directed primarily at the judiciary. They are a call to all current disputants in church-state issues to reduce shrill rhetoric, step back a moment from debated issues, and examine more carefully the first principles of American liberty.

Miller's effort to establish a vantage point above the fray-an effort which he carries out with a verve and nuance impossible to convey in a brief review-evokes ambivalent feelings. His study will undoubtedly offer a useful corrective to unreflective partisanship of all stripes. But the realist in us must ask the extent to which the author's idealistic vision of the first liberty has ever been-or can be-embodied in American life. Miller himself knows the problem and produces abundant evidence that the history of religious liberty in America has been a much grimier business than Williams or Jefferson would have wished. This brilliant book thus leaves us wondering how the view from Olympus is to be applied in a world where passions, group conflict, and the balancing of interests have had at least as much to do with our actual liberties as the humane view of a few exceptional thinkers.

JAMES H. MOORHEAD

Princeton Theological Seminary
Princeton, New Jersey