THE LUSTRE OF OUR COUNTRY: THE AMERICAN EXPERIENCE OF RELIGIOUS FREEDOM.

QUINN, KEVIN P.

THE LUSTRE OF OUR COUNTRY: THE AMERICAN EXPERIENCE OF RELIGIOUS FREEDOM. By John T. Noonan, Jr. Berkeley: University of California, 1998. Pp. xii + 436. $35.

Noonan, a federal appellate judge and legal scholar, has written another exceptional book. Remarkably well researched, eloquently argued, and surprisingly witty, this deeply personal paean for America's bold experiment in free worship belongs on the same shelf with N.'s well-received studies on usury, contraception, abortion, and bribery.

"Free exercise [of religion]--let us Americans assert it--is an American invention.... Never before 1791 was there a tablet of law, a legal text guaranteeing to all a freedom from religious oppression by the national legislature. Never before 1791 such a public, almost unalterable commitment to this ideal" (2). Not only without precedent in the history of the world, the lustre of the American ideal, N. also argues, illumined the world, both past and present. In sum, this book explores how the idea of religious liberty was conceived, developed, and defended first on American soil, and then exported elsewhere.

N. is refreshingly candid in asserting that "God must enter any account of ... religious freedom" (1) and conceding his bias on religion. He understands the exercise of religion as the human worshiper's free response to a personal God: "Heart speaks to heart.... There is a heart not known, responding to our own. Such is human experience. Religion is ineradicable because of this other and greater to whom we relate and respond" (1-2). For the believer, such as N., religion is not a Durkheimian projection of personal or collective need.

The book is divided into three parts, enclosed between a prologue and an epilogue (which epitomizes the book in ten, inspirational "commandments"). Part 1, "History," surveys "cramped and confined" (3) Western views on religious liberty before the First Amendment; credits James Madison, and not Thomas Jefferson, as the great innovator in pushing for complete religious freedom; and then concedes that the American experience of religious freedom, despite Madison's best efforts, evinces numerous ways in which government affected religion and religion government. Part 2, "Problems," traces the Supreme Court's tortured "progress" in developing doctrine on the free exercise of religion, and then raises a question about America's "civic religion" (with a nod to Robert Bellah) in light of the ban on establishment of religion. N.'s answer is novel and unexpected: "Free Exercise authorizes full mobilization on behalf of a moral imperative religiously conceived. Free Exercise stands against any takeover of the government by a church" (259). In the final part, "Influences," N. reviews how the American experience of religious freedom influenced the legal treatment accorded religion in revolutionary France, post-World War II Japan, post-Communist Russia, and the Catholic Church at Vatican II.

In N.'s account, Madison is the hero--"the man primarily responsible for religious freedom becoming the first of our liberties.... It is Madison whom American experience has vindicated" (3-4). Devoted to Christianity and alert to the evils of establishment, N.'s Madison promoted a daring insight: as a "natural and absolute right" (70) religious freedom meant more than toleration and civil immunity, it compelled free exercise which "in itself was incompatible with establishment" (82). So, for Madison, religion would thrive only if government left it alone. The urge to separate church and state, N. ably demonstrates, sprang more from Madison's faith in a personal God than from any republican defense of liberty. And that is no small matter (in tracking the intellectual process by which Madison arrived at the notion of "free exercise").

N. is wise to concede, in the remaining chapters on "History," that America's free exercise of religion has fallen short of the Madisonian ideal. Lapses in the nation's practice of religious liberty--well rehearsed in constitutional law classes--receive fresh scrutiny. N. is characteristically undoctrinaire and at his creative best in excerpting from an unpublished account of a fictional sister of Alexis de Tocqueville, who writes (contrary to her brother's famous observations) that the U.S. govenment was in fact very closely tied to religion. N.'s paradox is that Madison's indispensable view is occasionally too ideal, for N. recognizes again and again that government and religion are inextricably linked.

Part 2 speaks to that paradox more analytically. Although N. highlights those Supreme Court cases that vindicate state interests over religious claims, he also celebrates the forceful social implications of religion that kindled moral "crusades" against slavery, alcohol, and racial injustice. It is just this unresolved tension that goads N., in an imaginary dialogue on religious liberty among fictitious characters, to abandon the "wall of separation" metaphor in favor of a high-tech alternative: "The constitutional provision [on free exercise] can work admirably as a semiconductor [between religion and government] ... for a government needs the charge [of religion], in small amounts" (210).

In a stimulating final chapter, "The Light of Revelation and the Lustre of America," N. dramatically rehearses the role that John Courtney Murray, S.J. (and the American bishops) had in bringing Vatican II around to its "Declaration on Religious Freedom" (1965). Despite "its own primordial charter and developed character" (331), the Catholic Church learned from the American "experiment" and emphatically endorsed the free exercise of religion in society as a basic human right. And N.'s gripping tale has another hero, Murray.

This book is a "must read" for anyone with a serious interest in religious liberty.