The Spirit of the Law: Religious Voices and the Constitution in Modern America
A new constitutional world burst into American life in the mid-twentieth century. For the first time, the national constitution's religion clauses were extended by the United States Supreme Court to all state and local governments. As energized religious individuals and groups probed the new boundaries between religion and government and claimed their sacred rights in court, a complex and evolving landscape of religion and law emerged.\ Sarah Gordon tells the stories of passionate believers...
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A new constitutional world burst into American life in the mid-twentieth century. For the first time, the national constitution's religion clauses were extended by the United States Supreme Court to all state and local governments. As energized religious individuals and groups probed the new boundaries between religion and government and claimed their sacred rights in court, a complex and evolving landscape of religion and law emerged.Sarah Gordon tells the stories of passionate believers who turned to the law and the courts to facilitate a dazzling diversity of spiritual practice. Legal decisions revealed the exquisite difficulty of gauging where religion ends and government begins. Controversies over school prayer, public funding, religion in prison, same-sex marriage, and secular rituals roiled long-standing assumptions about religion in public life. The range and depth of such conflicts were remarkable—and ubiquitous.Telling the story from the ground up, Gordon recovers religious practices and traditions that have generated compelling claims while transforming the law of religion. From isolated schoolchildren to outraged housewives and defiant prisoners, believers invoked legal protection while courts struggled to produce stable constitutional standards. In a field dominated by controversy, the vital connection between popular and legal constitutional understandings has sometimes been obscured. The Spirit of the Law explores this tumultuous constitutional world, demonstrating how religion and law have often seemed irreconcilable, even as they became deeply entwined in modern America. Burt Neuborne - Forward Sally Gordon turns the accepted wisdom neatly on its head by demonstrating that it is the extraordinary power of the religious impulse that has shaped--and continues to shape--American law, not the other way around...[An] excellent book.
PrefaceThe New Constitutional WorldThe Worship of IdolsThe Almighty and the DollarFaith as LiberationHoly WarCovenants of LoveEpilogueNotes AcknowledgmentsIndex
\ Books & CultureThe Spirit of the Law subtly suggests that the era of strong evangelical influence in America culture may be at least temporarily over.\ — David Skeel\ \ \ \ \ \ ForwardSally Gordon turns the accepted wisdom neatly on its head by demonstrating that it is the extraordinary power of the religious impulse that has shaped—and continues to shape—American law, not the other way around...[An] excellent book.\ — Burt Neuborne\ \ \
