One Nation Under Law: America's Early National Struggles to Separate Church and State.

One Nation Under Law: America's Early National Struggles to Separate Church and State. By Mark Douglas McGarvie. (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, c. 2004. Pp. xii, 256. $38.00, ISBN 0-87580-333-4.)

This extensively researched, well-written book narrates the "struggle" to separate church and state during the early national period. Trained in both law and history, the author suggests that the clinching phase of that struggle was the contract clause of the Constitution, which, he argues, transformed churches from quasi-public bodies into private associations whose founding covenants and subsequent actions were immune to political regulation.

The problem with the book is that from the brief, initial formulation until the middle of the final chapter on the Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward (1819), the contract clause argument drops from sight. To be sure, the author develops some intriguing conceptual language on the first page of the introduction when he argues that "[d]uring the early republic, consistent with the ideology that spawned the First Amendment, Americans reconceived of churches as private voluntary associations"--a "transformation ... [that] arose in the midst of contentious debate over American values" (p. 3). That cluster of ideological reconceptions ought to have been systematically applied to--and integrated among--the myriad of political arguments and religious postures that compose the bulk of the narrative. Instead, readers are left to assume that the book is a fleshing out of those conceptual suggestions. But fleshing out is not analysis, nor is it interpretation. It may well be that in the Dartmouth College case John Marshall detected the omnipresence of the contract clause in law and civic thought. But if that is the linchpin of the argument, then the author needed to discuss Marshall's jurisprudence and ideological awareness much more explicitly.

What is missing from One Nation Under Law: America's Early National Struggles to Separate Church and State--and what would have enabled readers to connect fact and interpretation throughout the book--is historiographical awareness. In 1991 Daniel L. Dreisbach wrote a landmark article in the American Journal of Legal History on the legislative history of a package of five church-state laws in post-Revolutionary Virginia, Jefferson's statute among them ("A New Perspective on Jefferson's Views on Church-State Relations: The Virginia Statute for Establishing Religious Freedom in its Legislative Context," 35 [April 1991], 172-204). Dreisbach followed up with books on Jasper Adams's prescient theory of church-state practice, Jefferson's "wall of separation" metaphor, and a coedited collection of recent scholarship on religion and society in Virginia.

Dreisbach's analysis of the cultural politics of church and state places Madison's statecraft in sharp relief. By incorporating Jefferson's languishing Statute for Religious Freedom in a comprehensive settlement of issues arising from disestablishment and evangelical activism, Madison engineered the derailing of public funding ("assessment") for Christian teaching. That legislative achievement, and the building of an anti-assessment groundswell to support it, should have been crucial to Mark Douglas McGarvie's argument about the role of law in church-state politics. But he describes these developments only briefly and in general terms.

One Nation Under Law is a valuable updating and enrichment of the same story Thomas J. Curry told in The First Freedoms: Church and State in America to the Passage of the First Amendment (New York, 1986). Alert to his sources but oblivious to the scholarly state-of-the-art, McGarvie not only fails to cite Curry's 1986 book but also Curry's more recent Farewell to Christendom: The Future of Church and State in America (New York, 2001), which grapples directly with issues of law and constitutionalism.

Dreisbach himself contributed a dust jacket blurb: "Offering interesting and thought-provoking insights ... One Nation under Law invites a rethinking of the role of law in shaping church-state relations." The operative term is invites. That is the book's achievement but also its limitation.

ROBERT M. CALHOON

University of North Carolina at Greensboro