The Spirit of the Law: Religious Voices and the Constitution in Modern America

by Sarah Barringer Gordon

A new constitutional world burst into American life in the mid-twentieth century. For the first time, the national constitution's religion clauses were extended by the United States Supreme Court to all state and local governments. As energized religious individuals and groups probed the new boundaries between religion and government and claimed their sacred rights in court, a complex and evolving landscape of religion and law emerged.

Sarah Gordon tells the stories of passionate believers who turned to the law and the courts to facilitate a dazzling diversity of spiritual practice. Legal decisions revealed the exquisite difficulty of gauging where religion ends and government begins. Controversies over school prayer, public funding, religion in prison, same-sex marriage, and secular rituals roiled long-standing assumptions about religion in public life. The range and depth of such conflicts were remarkable―and ubiquitous.

Telling the story from the ground up, Gordon recovers religious practices and traditions that have generated compelling claims while transforming the law of religion. From isolated schoolchildren to outraged housewives and defiant prisoners, believers invoked legal protection while courts struggled to produce stable constitutional standards. In a field dominated by controversy, the vital connection between popular and legal constitutional understandings has sometimes been obscured. The Spirit of the Law explores this tumultuous constitutional world, demonstrating how religion and law have often seemed irreconcilable, even as they became deeply entwined in modern America.

352 pages, Hardcover

First published April 30, 2010

About the author

Sally Gordon is a widely recognized scholar and commentator on religion in American public life and the law of church and state. She researches and teaches extensively in American constitutional and legal history, religion and religious experience, and property. Her first book, The Mormon Question: Polygamy and Constitutional Conflict in Nineteenth-Century America (University of North Carolina, 2002), won the Mormon History Association’s and the Utah Historical Society’s best book awards in 2003. Her new book about religion and law in the 20th century, titled The Spirit of the Law: Religious Voices and the Constitution in Modern America (Harvard University, 2010), explores the world of church and state. She is currently working on a third book, tentatively titled The Place of Faith, about religion and property in American history. Gordon serves on the advisory boards of the National Constitution Center, the American Society for Legal History, Vassar College, the William Nelson Cromwell Foundation, and the Mormon History Association. In 2004 and 2009 she received the Robert A. Gorman Award for Teaching Excellence.

Reviews

[Bryan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading this felt like pulling back a curtain on how deeply religion, law, and culture are woven together in American life. While the book’s main focus is on law and religion, the cultural and societal dimensions are what make it especially engaging. Gordon doesn’t offer a simple “separation of church and state” narrative. Instead, she shows how law, religion, and society repeatedly clashed, overlapped, and reshaped one another over time.

Many of the examples she explores still echo today. I especially enjoyed the chapter on the 1970s attack on Secular Humanism. Before reading it, I hadn’t realized how much of today’s church–state debates grew directly out of that era.

This is an academic work tackling a serious subject. Gordon writes with depth and precision, but without making the book unreadable. Some chapters take effort to work through, but the payoff is worth it.