The Lustre of Our Country: The American Experience of Religious Freedom.

Rivers, Patrick Lynn

The Lustre of Our Country: The American Experience of Religious Freedom. By John T. Noonan Jr. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. xii + 436 pp. $35.00 cloth.

This book contains the erudition of someone who has not only read but done, differentiating this volume on religious freedom in the U.S. from recent volumes on the subject authored by Bette Novit Evans, Charles P. Hanson, and Timothy Hall. John T. Noonan earned both an A.B. and an L.L.B. from Harvard and a Ph. D. from the Catholic University of America. He worked on the National Security Council staff during the Eisenhower administration, practiced law in Boston, and served as a law professor at both Notre Dame and the University of California at Berkeley (where he is now professor emeritus). In 1985, Professor Noonan became Judge Noonan after President Reagan appointed him to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

Judge Noonan uses fourteen chapters in order to explore topics as diverse as his own religious autobiography, James Madison's role in the making of "the lustre of our country," a conceptual history of religious freedom creatively related in the form of a catechism, and storytelling about a Tocquevillian U.S. that one would expect from a critical legal studies scholar and not from someone who upholds the tradition. There are reflections on and analysis of the religious-liberty case law. Further, some of the final chapters show how the gospel of religious freedom, originating in the U.S., pervaded places like Japan, Russia, and France. This sounds like a hodgepodge of subject matter, but somehow Noonan pulls it all together, framing a picture not only of religious freedom but also of the political thought of John T. Noonan himself and the Reagan revolution.

Judge Noonan's religious freedom is the product of a "city on a hill" rooted in what is recognized as Western tradition. Much of this becomes apparent as Judge Noonan conceptually traces his history of religious liberty. Via catechism, the origin of religious liberty is quickly pinpointed, "In Holy Writ, which makes obligations to God superior to those to any human being or any human contrivance" (43). Because conscience came from God, it was a supreme kind of reason, though this supremacy of conscience did not necessarily mean liberty of conscience. The Reformation, which is an important marker in Judge Noonan's catechism, changed little in terms of the recognition of religious liberty. The Reformation did, however, provide a context where writers like Roger Williams, Spinoza, and Locke expounded about the persecution of those whose religious traditions were marginalized. And this led to a chain of events--revolutions, restorations, rebellions--that culminated in Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Baptists, Quakers, and Ranters coming to the "new" world.

James Madison, the key figure in Judge Noonan's story, did more than any other to enshrine the ideals of religious freedom, which was, of course, invented in the U.S. Madison, as "Founding Father" and "builder of an ideal monument on earth, never lost desire to be enrolled in the annals of heaven" (66). Judge Noonan, perhaps poignantly, suggested that the well-publicized flogging of a Baptist preacher in 1771 shaped Madison's thought. A few years later, several thousand Baptists recalled this flogging as an assault upon their religious liberty. As inferred by Judge Noonan, the flogging could also have been viewed as a political gathering of a "faction," about which Madison wrote in Federalist 10. Such factions, according to Madison, could lead to political unrest if not kept in check, or in "balance." And this unrest proved to be most threatening to those with wealth, like Madison himself, for factions were spawned by disparities in wealth, something that Judge Noonan neglects to note in his homage to things American. The book clearly privileges the idea of religious freedom over the material conditions that shaped the rhetoric on religious freedom and religious freedom itself.

As Judge Noonan's history of religious freedom continues, Madisonian values were "successfully" spread to other parts of the world. In the establishment of religious liberty, the French, who know not French culture but just culture, which is French, took cues from the U.S. Specifically, Article 10 of the Rights of Man, as Judge Noonan depicts it, was in some way inspired by a "flickering, ghostly light" that was "cast by the First Amendment" (284). As the culture and diffusion of ideas made this possible, Tocqueville's position as foreign minister to Napoleon III helped this process along as Tocquevillian reflections on the U.S. filtered into French domestic policy on matters of conscience. Less subtle was the diffusion of (U.S.) American culture to Japan after World War II. Judge Noonan conducted a rather interesting interview with Colonel J. P. McCaughan (Ret.) of the U.S. Army. Colonel McCaughan was on General MacArthur's staff during the U.S. occupation of a defeated Japan. There was actually a "Religious Division" of the U.S. occupation's administrative (read: ideological?) apparatus, which was "to expedite the establishment and preservation of religious freedom [in the U.S. and Western tradition]" (289). General MacArthur "himself `set the tone of crusade and reform'" (289), using the Philippine constitution of 1935 as a model. (Of course, the U.S. benevolently granted this constitution to the Philippines after Spain benevolently gave the Philippines to the U.S., as a "gift," after the Spanish-American War.) As for MacArthur's "arrogance" in handing the Japanese a new constitution, with its provisions for religious liberty, the Colonel responded: "`Arrogant' is too strong. Proud, yes.... It is hard to think of a greater gift than the gift of a working democratic constitution that among its wonderful features enshrines the American idea of religious freedom" (297). On the last page of this chapter, Judge Noonan did state that what appeared as dictatorial, and seemingly antithetical to liberty, was not imperious, in the end, as Japanese traditions and postwar law adjusted MacArthur's religious liberty to Japanese needs.

The book instructs us in both intended and unintended ways. The book is worth a read, and reflection, because of its intended and unintended insight not just on religious freedom but on "freedom" itself.

Patrick Lynn Rivers University of Washington