Hostname: page-component-84b7d79bbc-dwq4g Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-25T20:28:25.432Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Religion and the Practices of Popular Constitutionalism: Sarah Gordon's The Spirit of the Law

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 December 2018

Joshua Dubler
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Sarah Gordon'sThe Spirit of the Law: Religious Voices and the Constitution in Modern America (2010) details the advent, beginning in the 1940s, of a “new constitutional world” pertaining to the religion clauses. By focusing on case studies, Gordon's narrative history shows the emergence, maturation, and waning of a rich historical moment in which religiously motivated popular constitutionalists had a profound impact on how the Constitution was technically interpreted by the courts. Shifting perspectives from history to ethnography, the essay synthesizes Gordon's stories to yield an anatomy of “religious” popular constitutionalism as it appears in Gordon's book and conjectures at what it might look like if we left court records behind.

Type
Review Essay
Information
Law & Social Inquiry , Volume 36 , Issue 4 , Fall 2011 , pp. 1062 - 1088
Copyright
Copyright © American Bar Foundation, 2011 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

References

Abzug, Robert H. 1994. Cosmos Crumbling: American Reform and the Religious Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Aristotle. 1996. The Politics and the Constitution of Athens. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Asad, Talal. 2003. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Berger, Benjamin L. 2010. The Cultural Limits of Legal Tolerance. In After Pluralism: Reimagining Religious Engagement, ed. Courtney Bender and Pamela Klassen, 98–126. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Bender, Courtney, and Snow, Jennifer. 2006. From Alleged Buddhists to Unreasonable Hindus: First Amendment Jurisprudence after 1965. In A Nation of Religions, ed. Stephen Prothero, 181–208. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Bielo, James. 2009. Words upon the Word: An Ethnography of Evangelical Group Bible Study. New York: New York University Press.Google Scholar
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1990. The Logic of Practice. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Cover, Robert. 1983. Nomos and Narrative. Harvard Law Review 97: 4–68.Google Scholar
Gordon, Sarah Barringer. 2010. The Spirit of the Law: Religious Voices and the Constitution in Modern America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Gordon, Sarah Barringer. 2002. The Mormon Question: Polygamy and Constitutional Conflict in Nineteenth Century America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Greenhouse, Carol. 1989. Praying for Justice: Faith, Order, and Community in an American Town. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Hamilton, Marci. 2005. God vs. the Gavel: Religion and the Rule of Law. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Harding, Susan Friend. 2001. The Book of Jerry Falwell: Fundamentalist Language and Politics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Herberg, Will. 1983. Protestant, Catholic, Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Holscher, Kathleen. Forthcoming. Habits in the Classroom. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Hutchison, William R. 2003. Religious Pluralism in America: The Contentious History of a Founding Ideal. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Kramer, Larry D. 2004. The People Themselves: Popular Constitutionalism and Judicial Review. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Lepore, Jill. 2010. The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party's Revolution and the Battle over American History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Marsden, George. 1982. Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism, 1870–1925. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Mazur, Eric Michael. 1999. The Americanization of Religious Minorities. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.Google Scholar
Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat. 1989. The Spirit of the Laws. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Harvard Law Review. 1978. Note: Toward a Constitutional Definition of Religion. 1 Harvard Law Review 91 (March): 1056–89.Google Scholar
Moore, R. Laurence. 1986. Religious Outsiders and the Making of Americans. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Peters, Shawn Francis. 2000. Judging Jehovah's Witnesses. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press.Google Scholar
Public Safety Performance Project. 2008. One in 11: Behind Bars in America. Washington, DC: Pew Charitable Trusts.Google Scholar
Post, Robert, and Siegel, Reva. 2004. Popular Constitutionalism, Departmentalism, and Judicial Supremacy. California Law Review 92:1027–1044.Google Scholar
Rousseau, Jean Jacques. 1997. “The Social Contract” and Other Later Political Writings. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Sehat, David. 2010. The Myth of American Religious Freedom. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Smith, Jonathan Z. 2004. Relating Religion: Essays in the Study of Religion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Sullivan, Winnifred Fallers. 2005. The Impossibility of Religious Freedom. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Sullivan, Winnifred Fallers. 2009. Prison Religion. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Winston, Diane. 1999. Red-Hot and Righteous. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar

Cases Cited

Abington Township School District v. Schempp, 374 U.S. 203 (1963).Google Scholar
Americans United for Separation of Church and State v. Prison Fellowship. Ministries, Civil No. 4:03-cv-90074.Google Scholar
Cantwell v. Connecticut , 310 U.S. 296 (1940).Google Scholar
Davis v. Beason, 133 U.S. 333 (1890).Google Scholar
Employment Division v. Smith, 494 U.S. 872 (1990).Google Scholar
Engel v. Vitale, 370 U.S. 421 (1962).Google Scholar
Everson v. Board of Education, 330 U.S. 1 (1947).Google Scholar
Goodridge v. Department of Public Health, 798 N.E.2d 941 (Mass. 2003).Google Scholar
Hein v. Freedom from Religion Foundation, 551 U.S. 587 (2007).Google Scholar
Minersville School District v. Gobitas, 310 U.S. 586 (1940).Google Scholar
McCreary County v. American Civil Liberties Union, 545 U.S. 844 (2005).Google Scholar
Pierce v. LaVallee, 212 F. Supp. 865 (N.D.N.Y. 1962).Google Scholar
Reynolds v. United States, 98 U.S. 145 (1879).Google Scholar
Torcaso v. Watkins, 367 U.S. 488 (1961).Google Scholar
United States v. Ballard, 322 U.S. 78 (1944).Google Scholar
United States v. Kauten, 133 F.2d 703 (2d Cir. 1943).Google Scholar
United States v. Macintosh, 283 U.S. 605 (1931).Google Scholar
United States v. Seeger, 380 U.S. 163 (1965).Google Scholar
Van Orden v. Perry, 545 U.S. 677 (2005).Google Scholar

Unpublished Material

Gause, Debra (interview). 2011. Poughkeepsie, New York, February 11.Google Scholar
Ewell, Carlito, and Khalil Davis. 2011. Student papers from History 4998–099: Event, Ethnography, History. Villanova Program at Graterford Prison, Spring 2011.Google Scholar