Religious Liberty and Its Implications for Church and State

Abstract

It is refreshing to read a scholarly work on both the founding and the relationship between politics and religion that highlights the limits of our knowledge, which is one of the distinct virtues of Vincent PhillipMuñoz’sReligious Liberty and theAmerican Founding. Thiswell-researched, thoughtful, and carefulwork seeks to illuminate how the founders understood both religious liberty and the separation of church and state. It concludes that the founders overwhelmingly viewed religious liberty as an inalienable natural right, while they disagreed quite sharply on what this meant for church-state relations. When it comes to understanding the meaning of both the Free Exercise Clause and the Establishment Clause and applying that meaning to our persistent conflicts over politics and religion, Muñoz’s book reveals that the meaning of these clauses is underdetermined (in the case of free exercise) and indeterminate (in the case of establishment). Given this, Muñoz engages in constructing the core constitutional meaning of the clauses fromwhat we do know. Yet this is, asMuñoz deftly articulates, a different project than simply interpreting the clauses. And Muñoz’s constructions of these clauses yield intriguing results that do not line up neatly with any current jurisprudential approach to either religious liberty or the separation of church and state.