Sacred Liberty: America’s Long, Bloody, and Ongoing Struggle for Religious Freedom

Waldman (Founding Faith), founder of multifaith website Beliefnet, offers a fine overview of the growth of religious freedom in the United States. While the framers of the U.S. Constitution debated the place of religious freedom, it was James Madison, Waldman writes, who championed the separation of church and state and, in particular, the idea that states could not establish an official faith. Waldman details how Native Americans, Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Jews later looked to Madison’s ideas in order to argue for equal treatment. It was not until after WWII that religious freedoms taken for granted today were established as the result of pressure placed on the political (particularly from Catholic groups, who organized diverse coalitions into voting blocks) and legal systems (including 23 Jehovah’s Witnesses cases argued in front of the Supreme Court between 1938 and 1946) to widen concepts of religious freedom to include the freedom of public religious expression and protections guarding against religious bias. Waldman makes a brief argument that common sense should prevail over legal battles, citing the Colorado case against a baker who refused to sell to an LGBTQ customer as an example of the legal system reaffirming common sense practices. General readers of American history will find much to enjoy in Waldman’s exploration of the evolution of American religious freedoms. [em](May) [/em]