Document Type
Book Review
Publication Date
Fall 1988
Publication Information
23 This World, Fall 1988, at 144 (book review).
Abstract
Daniel Dreisbach: Real Threat and Mere Shadow: Religious Liberty and the First Amendment. Crossway Books. 351 pp. $15.00 (paper).
No aspect of constitutional law sports a bigger profile these days than that concerning religion, or "Church and state." Academics debate it prodigiously, lawyers litigate it furiously, and judges issue opinions on the subject with clockwork regularity. But this commotion is hardly esoteric. Pat Robertson's candidacy stirred everyone's emotions precisely because each of us has a strong sense of just how religious politics should be. George Bush clumsily attested to this popular sensitivity. What sustained bomber pilot Bush when he was downed by the Japanese? "Fundamental values. I thought about mother and dad and the strength I got from them - and God and faith and the separation of Church and state."
Into this twisted caricature of faith and politics ventures Daniel Dreisbach, a legal historian and Oxford doctor of philosophy. His Real Threat and Mere Shadow: Religious Liberty and The First Amendment cuts into the disfigured body of opinion at a vital point: the Supreme Court's revolutionary Church-state jurisprudence, grounded in the seminal Everson case of 1947.
Recommended Citation
Gerard V. Bradley,
Exorcizing Everson,
23 This World, Fall 1988, at 144 (book review)..
Available at:
https://scholarship.law.nd.edu/law_faculty_scholarship/1787
Included in
Constitutional Law Commons, First Amendment Commons, Sociology of Religion Commons, Supreme Court of the United States Commons