New Books In Religion

What is religious liberty, anyway? What are its origins? What are religious exemptions? What would a jurisprudence of religious liberty based on the idea of natural rights look like? What is distinctive about such an approach and what are some of its pluses and minuses? These are some of the questions addressed in Religious Liberty and the American Founding: Natural Rights and the Original Meanings of the First Amendment Religion Clauses (U Chicago Press, 2022) by Vincent Phillip Muñoz. The book explores the fraught legal and philosophical terrain of religious freedom. It is a meticulous study of the Founders’ common concern for the protection for our inalienable right of religious free exercise and their surprisingly divergent views on how to navigate the relationships of privilege and control between church and state. Muñoz examines the attitudes of the Founding Generation on these topics as reflected in the understudied area of constitution making between 1776 and 1791 in America at the state level. He arg