Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-rdxmf Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-29T13:37:21.740Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Shall These Bones Live? Property, Pluralism, and the Constitution of Evangelical Reform

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 December 2018

Abstract

The Supreme Court of the New Deal era transformed the US Constitution, making the Constitution's original protection of property rights give way to democratically popular regulations. In The Evangelical Origins of the Living Constitution (2014), John W. Compton argues that twentieth-century progressives turned the Court toward this “living” interpretation of the Constitution by relying on legislative methods and judicial precedents created by nineteenth-century evangelicals. Evangelical reformers accomplished national prohibition of liquor and lotteries, but their regulations destroyed property rights that were legally valid and socially acceptable at the inauguration of the Constitution. Courts ultimately acquiesced in these novel economic proscriptions because of overwhelming majoritarian sentiment driven by evangelical populism. Relying on a recent literature of law and religion, Compton alters conventional accounts of the US constitutional tradition of protecting property. This essay reverses the path of analysis and argues that evangelical concerns with constitutional property rights challenge standard accounts of law and religion in US history. Rather than a simplistic imposition of moralism, evangelical reform was derived from antislavery liberalism. The legal and religious pluralism that had impeded antislavery, however, also hindered prohibition and spurred evangelicals to seek federal remedies to national sins. Thus national prohibition, no less than New Deal constitutionalism, centered on the US dilemma of how to wield illiberal regulations to safeguard liberalism.

Type
Review Essay
Copyright
Copyright © American Bar Foundation, 2016 

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

Bruce, Ackerman. 2000. We the People: Transformations. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.Google Scholar
Amar, Akhil Reed. 2000. The Bill of Rights: Creation and Reconstruction. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Berman, Harold J. 1983. Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Bonomi, Patricia U., and Eisenstadt, Peter R. 1982. Church Adherence in the Eighteenth‐Century British American Colonies. William & Mary Quarterly 39 (2): 245–86.Google Scholar
Cover, Robert M. 1983. Nomos and Narrative: Foreword to the Supreme Court 1982 Term. Harvard Law Review 97 (4): 468.Google Scholar
Cover, Robert M. 1984. Justice Accused: Antislavery and the Judicial Process. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Cushman, Barry. 1998. Rethinking the New Deal Court: The Structure of a Constitutional Revolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Dennis, Donna. 2009. Licentious Gotham; Erotic Publishing and Its Prosecution in Nineteenth‐Century New York. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Dorsey, Bruce. 2006. Reforming Men and Women: Gender in the Antebellum City. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Downs, Gregory. 2015. After Appomattox: Military Occupation and the Ends of War. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Edwards, Laura F. 2009. The People and Their Peace: Legal Culture and the Transformation of Inequality in the Post‐Revolutionary South. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Feldman, Noah. 2010. Scorpions: The Battles and Triumphs of FDR's Great Supreme Court Justices. New York: Twelve Books.Google Scholar
Finke, Roger, and Rodney, Stark. 2005. The Churching of America, 1776–2005: Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.Google Scholar
Friedman, Lawrence. 2005. A History of American Law. New York: Simon and Schuster.Google Scholar
George, Robert P. 1998. Protecting Religious Liberty in the Next Millennium: Should We Amend the Religion Clauses of the Constitution? Loyola Law Review 32:2749.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. 2014. The First Disestablishment: Limits on Church Power and Property Before the Civil War. University of Pennsylvania Law Review 162:307–72.Google Scholar
Green, Steven K. 2010. The Second Disestablishment: Church and State in Nineteenth‐Century America. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Hall, David D., ed. 1997. Lived Religion in America: Toward a Theory of Practice. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Hamburger, Philip. 2009. Separation of Church and State. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Hamm, Richard. 1995. Shaping the Eighteenth Amendment: Temperance Reform, Legal Culture, and the Polity, 1880–1920. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Heyrman, Christine Leigh. 1997. Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt. New York: Alfred Knopf.Google Scholar
Holifield, E. Brooks. 2003. Theology in America: Christian Thought from the Age of the Puritans to the Civil War. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Howe, Daniel Walker. 2007. What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Hurst, James Willard. 1956. Law and the Conditions of Freedom in the Nineteenth‐Century United States. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.Google Scholar
Johnson, Curtis D. 2014. The Protracted Meeting Myth: Awakenings, Revivals, and New York State Baptists, 1789–1850. Journal of the Early Republic 34 (3): 349–83.Google Scholar
Kramer, Larry D. 2006. The People Themselves: Popular Constitutionalism and Judicial Review. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
McConnell, Michael. 1998. Textualism and the Dead Hand of the Past. George Washington Law Review 66:1127–40.Google Scholar
McDaniel, Caleb. 2013. The Problem of Democracy in the Age of Slavery: Garrisonian Abolitionists and Transatlantic Reform. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press.Google Scholar
McGarvie, Mark Douglas. 2005. One Nation Under Law: America's Early National Struggles to Separate Church and State. DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press.Google Scholar
Noll, Mark. 2002. America's God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Nord, David Paul. 2001. Benevolent Capital: Financing Evangelical Book Publishing in Early Nineteenth‐Century America. In God and Mammon: Protestants, Money, and the Market, 1790–1860, ed. Noll, Mark. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Novak, William. 1996. The People's Welfare: Law and Regulation in Nineteenth‐Century America. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Oakes, James. 2014. Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861–1865. New York: W. W. Norton & Co.Google Scholar
Perry, Jeffrey Thomas. 2015. “Courts of Conscience”: Local Law, the Baptists, and Church Schism in Kentucky, 1780–1840. Church History 84 (1): 124–58.Google Scholar
Schulman, Bruce J., and Zelizer, Julian. 2008. Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Sehat, David. 2010. The Myth of American Religious Freedom. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Siegel, Reva. 2008. Dead or Alive: Originalism as Popular Constitutionalism in Heller . Harvard Law Review 122:191245.Google Scholar
Sullivan, Winnifred Fallers. 2007. The Impossibility of Religious Freedom. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Summers, Mark Wahlgren. 2015. The Ordeal of the Reunion: A New History of Reconstruction. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Tomlins, Christopher. 1993. Law, Labor, and Ideology in the Early American Republic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Tomlins, Christopher, and Mann, Bruce H., eds. 2001. The Many Legalities of Early America. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Young, Michael. 2006. Bearing Witness Against Sin: The Evangelical Birth of the American Social Movement. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Advisory Opinion, 25 N.H. 537 (1855).Google Scholar
Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, 573 U.S. ___ (2014).Google Scholar
Champion v. Ames, 188 U.S. 321 (1903).Google Scholar
Conestoga Wood Specialties Corp. v. Secretary of U.S. Dep't of Health & Human Servs., 724 F.3d 377 (3d Cir. 2013).Google Scholar
Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. 393 (1857).Google Scholar
Fletcher v. Peck, 10 U.S. 87 (1810).Google Scholar
Hammer v. Dagenhart, 247 U.S. 251 (1918).Google Scholar
Lincoln v. Smith, 27 Vt. 328 (1855).Google Scholar
Lochner v. New York, 198 U.S. 45 (1905).Google Scholar
Moore v. State, 48 Miss. 147 (1873).Google Scholar
Mugler v. Kansas, 123 U.S. 623 (1887).Google Scholar
Nebbia v. New York, 291 U.S. 502 (1934).Google Scholar
State v. Paul, 5 R.I. 185 (1858).Google Scholar
Stone v. Mississippi, 101 U.S. 814 (1880).Google Scholar
The License Cases, 46 U.S. (5 How.) 504 (1847).Google Scholar
Trustees of Dartmouth Coll. v. Woodward, 17 U.S. 518 (1819).Google Scholar
Tyson & Brother v. Banton, 273 U.S. 418 (1927).Google Scholar
United States v. Darby Lumber Co., 312 U.S. 100 (1941).Google Scholar
United States v. E.C. Knight Co., 156 U.S. 1 (1895).Google Scholar
Barnes, Albert. 1852. The Throne of Iniquity: Or Sustaining Evil by Law.Google Scholar
Beecher, Lyman. 1827. The Bible a Code of Laws: A Sermon Preached in Park Street Church, Boston, September 3, 1817.Google Scholar
Cooke, Parsons. 1839. Moral Machinery Simplified: A Discourse Delivered at Andover, July 4, 1839.Google Scholar
Finney, Charles. 1852. Guilt Modified by Ignorance. Oberlin Evangelist, August 18.Google Scholar
Robinson, John. 1852. The Testimony and Practice of the Presbyterian Church in Reference to American Slavery.Google Scholar
Sunday Mails, Report of Senator Richard Mentor Johnson. [1830] 1834. In American State Papers, Vol. 7, ed. Walter Lowrie and Walter Franklin. Washington, DC: Gales and Seaton.Google Scholar
The Doctrines and Disciplines of the Methodist Episcopal Church, 16th ed. 1816. New York: J.C. Totten.Google Scholar
Advisory Opinion, 25 N.H. 537 (1855).Google Scholar
Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, 573 U.S. ___ (2014).Google Scholar
Champion v. Ames, 188 U.S. 321 (1903).Google Scholar
Conestoga Wood Specialties Corp. v. Secretary of U.S. Dep't of Health & Human Servs., 724 F.3d 377 (3d Cir. 2013).Google Scholar
Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. 393 (1857).Google Scholar
Fletcher v. Peck, 10 U.S. 87 (1810).Google Scholar
Hammer v. Dagenhart, 247 U.S. 251 (1918).Google Scholar
Lincoln v. Smith, 27 Vt. 328 (1855).Google Scholar
Lochner v. New York, 198 U.S. 45 (1905).Google Scholar
Moore v. State, 48 Miss. 147 (1873).Google Scholar
Mugler v. Kansas, 123 U.S. 623 (1887).Google Scholar
Nebbia v. New York, 291 U.S. 502 (1934).Google Scholar
State v. Paul, 5 R.I. 185 (1858).Google Scholar
Stone v. Mississippi, 101 U.S. 814 (1880).Google Scholar
The License Cases, 46 U.S. (5 How.) 504 (1847).Google Scholar
Trustees of Dartmouth Coll. v. Woodward, 17 U.S. 518 (1819).Google Scholar
Tyson & Brother v. Banton, 273 U.S. 418 (1927).Google Scholar
United States v. Darby Lumber Co., 312 U.S. 100 (1941).Google Scholar
United States v. E.C. Knight Co., 156 U.S. 1 (1895).Google Scholar
Barnes, Albert. 1852. The Throne of Iniquity: Or Sustaining Evil by Law.Google Scholar
Beecher, Lyman. 1827. The Bible a Code of Laws: A Sermon Preached in Park Street Church, Boston, September 3, 1817.Google Scholar
Cooke, Parsons. 1839. Moral Machinery Simplified: A Discourse Delivered at Andover, July 4, 1839.Google Scholar
Finney, Charles. 1852. Guilt Modified by Ignorance. Oberlin Evangelist, August 18.Google Scholar
Robinson, John. 1852. The Testimony and Practice of the Presbyterian Church in Reference to American Slavery.Google Scholar
Sunday Mails, Report of Senator Richard Mentor Johnson. [1830] 1834. In American State Papers, Vol. 7, ed. Walter Lowrie and Walter Franklin. Washington, DC: Gales and Seaton.Google Scholar
The Doctrines and Disciplines of the Methodist Episcopal Church, 16th ed. 1816. New York: J.C. Totten.Google Scholar