What’s the USA’ best achievement? Profitable World Battle II? Touchdown a person on the moon? Hollywood’s world attain? For Dartmouth Faculty historian and Episcopal priest Randall Balmer, all these accomplishments pale compared to a much less celebrated however extra enduring breakthrough: the separation of church and state. Few concepts, he argues, have carried out extra to protect each non secular vitality and civic peace. In America’s Greatest Concept, Balmer affords a spirited protection of this foundational precept, contending that the First Modification’s twin ensures—no institution of faith and free train thereof—have made the USA a uniquely fertile floor for non secular pluralism and, in flip, a extra virtuous and democratic citizenry.
He’s alarmed, nonetheless, by what he views as a rising need in some quarters to return to an older mannequin by which church and state walked a lot nearer collectively. His ebook is directly a historic account of how this achievement was received and a warning (at instances a contact hyperbolic) concerning the threats now arrayed towards it.
For Balmer, this association shouldn’t be solely good for the nation, however good for the religion itself. It protects faith from state corruption and safeguards authorities from sectarian dominance. From Roger Williams’s exile in Rhode Island to William Penn’s “holy experiment” in Pennsylvania, Balmer traces how an extended line of dissenters, reformers, and visionaries helped craft a constitutional order rooted in freedom of conscience moderately than non secular coercion.
And in our personal unsettled second, when some People concern the rise of Christian nationalism, others lament Christianity’s retreat from the general public sq., and non secular liberty lawsuits encompass every little thing from Ten Commandments shows to Satanic Temple nativity scenes, Balmer contends that the American mannequin stays each radical and important. In a nation the place Hindu, Muslim, Jewish, Catholic, Mormon, and secular candidates now routinely search workplace, and the place the religiously unaffiliated proceed to develop as a cultural pressure, his argument feels all of the extra pressing.
A mix of historical past, polemic, and pastoral plea, America’s Greatest Concept is Balmer’s try to remind People why the First Modification was value creating and why it’s nonetheless value defending. His sense of urgency stems from what he sees as a rising and deeply troubling menace: the rise of Christian nationalism. For Balmer, latest efforts to conflate Christian identification with American citizenship (whether or not by means of Ten Commandments mandates in faculties, public funding for non secular schooling, or political campaigns wrapped in non secular rhetoric) signify a betrayal of the founders’ imaginative and prescient and a hazard to each church and republic. However given the flood of latest books attacking Christian nationalism, Balmer’s critique provides little that hasn’t already been stated. His considerations and arguments carefully mirror these present in works like Katherine Stewart’s The Energy Worshippers and Andrew Seidel’s The Founding Fantasy, each of which painting Christian nationalism as little greater than a cynical energy seize constructed on a willfully distorted studying of America’s founding. Like them, Balmer treats Christian nationalism as a manifestly bad-faith motion—traditionally doubtful, theologically misguided, and politically corrosive. However whereas these critiques might carry some benefit, Balmer’s tone typically lacks nuance. He exhibits little curiosity in understanding the attraction or progress of Christian nationalism and is usually extra concerned about denunciation than analysis.
The notion that the USA is on the point of turning into a theocratic nation-state owes extra to Twitter threads and fringe podcasts than to any measurable political actuality.
Nonetheless, what distinguishes America’s Greatest Concept from many different latest critiques of Christian nationalism is that Balmer shouldn’t be merely issuing cultural warnings—he’s casting a traditionally grounded, theologically knowledgeable imaginative and prescient for the American experiment in non secular liberty. As each a historian and an Episcopal priest, Balmer defends the separation of church and state not as a secularist imposition, however as a theological and civic reward that has allowed faith in America not solely to outlive, however to flourish. He situates the First Modification as a radical break from the European mannequin of established church buildings, tracing its lineage to figures like Roger Williams and the Baptists, whose dedication to spiritual voluntarism was rooted within the gospel’s refusal to coerce. Balmer sees this technique not as a safeguard towards faith, however as a safeguard for faith, defending it from factional seize and state corruption.
His account celebrates this pluralistic non secular financial system as central to each the vibrancy of American religion and the well being of its democracy.
Alongside the best way, Balmer reminds readers that evangelicals have been as soon as on the forefront of social reform actions, from abolition to temperance to girls’s schooling. In that spirit, he calls right now’s believers to recuperate that legacy of public witness, not by greedy for political energy, however by preaching from the margins. Fairly than lamenting the decline of cultural privilege, America’s Greatest Concept urges each non secular and secular People to protect the fragile structure of the First Modification, a system that, in Balmer’s view, has conserved each religion and freedom higher than any official faith ever may.
By the top of America’s Greatest Concept, readers will probably come away with a renewed appreciation for the outstanding achievements of the First Modification. Balmer’s historic sweep makes clear simply how harmful (and sometimes lethal) state-established faith has been. Starting with the sectarian conflicts that plagued Europe for hundreds of years, Balmer exhibits that non secular institution has extra typically led to coercion and violence than to piety or peace. In opposition to this grim backdrop, the American mannequin of spiritual disestablishment seems not simply prudent however impressed. Balmer underscores that it’s exactly below this framework of constitutional neutrality that after outlawed or marginalized faiths have flourished. Baptists have been as soon as jailed in Virginia, Mormons pushed west by mob violence, Catholics seen with suspicion, and Jews barred from elite establishments. However all of those, together with newer actions like Pentecostalism, Islam, and Hinduism, have discovered area to develop, arrange, and even form public life in America. Whereas the expertise of spiritual liberty in the USA has actually not been a straight line, when set towards the alternate options present in each previous and current, Balmer’s case for the First Modification’s enduring genius is inspiring.
Whereas one can respect Balmer’s ardour for the First Modification, features of his framing are traditionally problematic. He rightly celebrates early champions of spiritual liberty resembling Roger Williams and William Penn, but he typically portrays the American experiment in non secular freedom as if it arose mainly in opposition to conventional Christianity, moderately than rising from inside it. The very Baptists he praises (figures like Isaac Backus and John Leland) weren’t theological progressives or pure Lockean liberals; their arguments for liberty of conscience have been rooted explicitly in biblical exegesis and evangelical convictions. Moreover, Balmer’s repeated appeals to a “wall of separation” between church and state depend on a contemporary and legally contested interpretation of the First Modification. One formed extra by mid-twentieth-century jurisprudence than by the textual content, context, or unique intent of the founding era. Jefferson’s metaphor, which was lifted not from a authorized textual content or constitutional debate, however from a non-public letter to a Baptist affiliation, has come to bear much more constitutional weight than the framers ever meant or may have imagined.
In emphasizing inflexible separation, Balmer overlooks the truth that early American states routinely supported faith with out establishing it, tied public morality to spiritual perception, and defended the suitable of spiritual residents to contribute meaningfully to public life. Massachusetts, for example, maintained non secular checks for public workplace nicely into the 1830s. Connecticut’s 1818 structure explicitly affirmed “the obligation of all males to worship the Supreme Being,” and several other states, together with Maryland and North Carolina, required public officers to profess perception in God or in divine judgment. Removed from being anomalies, such measures mirrored a broad consensus that faith, notably Christianity, was important to civic advantage and republican self-government, even when no single denomination must be elevated above others. A lot of what Balmer presents as a timeless constitutional precept is, the truth is, a projection of contemporary jurisprudence and liberal Protestant values onto a founding era that held a much more complicated and variegated view of church and state.
One is left to surprise why Christian ethical witness is widely known in a single period however seen as suspect in one other.
Balmer’s narrative tends to flatten this complexity right into a simplistic binary, both institution or complete separation, when the historic report reveals a spectrum of preparations throughout the states, a lot of which retained shut church-state ties nicely after 1791. By studying again a post-Jeffersonian, mid-twentieth-century mannequin of “separation” because the founders’ unique intent, Balmer dangers turning a wealthy and pluralistic founding panorama right into a authorized abstraction higher suited to fashionable polemic than historic accuracy.
Then there are the phrases of warning towards Christian nationalism. Like many books on this style, America’s Greatest Concept affords warnings that really feel hyperbolic and out of proportion to the precise menace. Balmer largely overlooks Christian nationalism’s restricted real-world affect, its lack of theological or organizational coherence, and its marginal progress past chronically on-line circles. As Mark David Corridor and Miles Smith IV have persuasively argued, the notion that the USA is on the point of turning into a theocratic nation-state owes extra to Twitter threads and fringe podcasts than to any measurable political actuality. In truth, and considerably mockingly given Balmer’s earlier work on the rise of the Non secular Proper, the extra vital transformation in recent times has been the emergence of a non-religious proper. In distinction to Christian nationalism, it is a tangible and measurable shift: in response to the Public Faith Analysis Institute, the share of religiously unaffiliated Republicans has tripled, from about 4 % in 2006 to roughly 12 % in 2022, and Gallup studies that almost one-quarter of nonreligious People now lean Republican. Sarcastically, this rising secular bloc on the suitable (which might be much more aligned with Balmer’s pluralist beliefs) will get far much less consideration than the overhyped specter of Christian nationalism, regardless of representing a deeper and extra lasting shift in American life.
Which brings me to a perplexing stress in Balmer’s account. He lauds evangelical involvement in nineteenth-century reform actions (notably abolition, temperance, and girls’s schooling) as exemplars of Christian public witness. These efforts, in his view, demonstrated religion talking fact to energy and dealing for the widespread good. Balmer additionally praises historic figures like William Jennings Bryan for his financial populism and Martin Luther King Jr. for his prophetic civil rights management, holding up such examples of progressive, justice-oriented engagement as trustworthy expressions of Christianity within the public sq.. Extra broadly, he voices admiration for faith-based activism that advances values like social justice, equality, and inclusion.
Conversely, Balmer is constantly crucial of latest evangelical political engagement, particularly when it aligns with the Republican Occasion or facilities on points resembling abortion, homosexual rights, or non secular symbolism in public life. He typically portrays such activism not as prophetic witness however as a bid to reclaim misplaced cultural privilege or implement sectarian morality by means of laws. One is left to surprise why Christian ethical witness is widely known in a single period however seen as suspect in one other. After all, Balmer is entitled to his political and theological commitments, however the standards by which he distinguishes trustworthy from inappropriate activism typically appear advert hoc and selectively utilized. The result’s a framework by which Christian political engagement is endorsed when it advances progressive targets however dismissed when it displays extra conventional convictions.
In brief, Balmer appears comfy rendering unto Caesar when Caesar shares his views, but desperate to proclaim “Jesus is Lord” when Caesar doesn’t.
Regardless of its limitations, America’s Greatest Concept stands as a compelling progressive tribute to the Madisonian custom and its imaginative and prescient of spiritual liberty. Balmer’s best power lies in his passionate and traditionally knowledgeable protection of the First Modification as a civic and theological breakthrough, one which has allowed an astonishing variety of spiritual communities not merely to outlive, however to flourish. In an period when “non secular pluralism” can typically sound like a platitude, Balmer roots the phrase in actual historic battle, making clear simply how hard-won (and the way uniquely American) this achievement actually is. His narrative reminds readers that the separation of church and state was not designed to decrease religion, however to protect its integrity and safeguard public life from non secular domination. Whereas affordable individuals might disagree over how this precept has been interpreted or utilized over time, Balmer makes a compelling case that our church-state separation actually is one among America’s finest concepts.