Sacred Liberty

America's Long, Bloody, and Ongoing Struggle for Religious Freedom

By: Steven Waldman

Narrated by: David Colacci

Sacred Liberty offers a dramatic, sweeping survey of how America built a unique model of religious freedom, perhaps the nation’s “greatest invention”. Steven Waldman, the best-selling author of Founding Faith, shows how early ideas about religious liberty were tested and refined amid the brutal persecution of Catholics, Baptists, Mormons, Quakers, African slaves, Native Americans, Muslims, Jews, and Jehovah’s Witnesses. American leaders drove religious freedom forward - figures like James Madison, George Washington, the World War II presidents (Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower) and even George W. Bush. But the biggest heroes were the regular Americans - people like Mary Dyer, Marie Barnett, and W. D. Mohammed - who risked their lives or reputations by demanding to practice their faiths freely.

Just as the documentary Eyes on the Prize captured the rich drama of the civil rights movement, Sacred Liberty brings to life the remarkable story of how America became one of the few nations in world history that has religious freedom, diversity and high levels of piety at the same time. Finally, Sacred Liberty provides a road map for how, in the face of modern threats to religious freedom, this great achievement can be preserved.

©2019 Steven Waldman (P)2019 HarperAudio

Great insights

Steven Waldman writes a wonderful chronicle on our evolution on religious freedom in this country. Mob rule, ignorance, and narcissistic tendencies are alive and well in America. I wonder if religion causes ignorance or intolerance or is the consequence of blind faith???

A disappointing introduction to the subject

Waldman's work is a largely whig history tale of gradually increasing religious freedom rights and separation of church and state pushed forward by wise personalities and the diverse beliefs that have either arisen in or moved to the United States over its history. There are interesting anecdotes throughout and the work does engage with the attacks on religious freedom of slaves and Native Americans that are frequently ignored in these discussions. But as one of the first criticisms I'll be making in this review, the book does caveat the residential schools by talking about some survivors of the system who praise their religious education as a mitigating factor which is not something the author felt the need to do for any other example of religious persecution in the book. That some individuals were successfully convinced by a policy of blatant and self-aware cultural genocide is in no way a mitigation of those actions and that this is the only case that is brought up is disappointing.

Another failure of the work is a failure of discussing how economics played a large role in the formation of different religious beliefs and how religious toleration (or lack thereof) came from this. For instance, in the discussion of the end of Quaker domination of Pennsylvania, Waldman does discuss how German non-Quakers disapproved of Quaker accommodations to Native Americans (though framed through the notion of "Native American attacks" and not "German theft of Native lands"). A discussion here could have noted that the German migrants were largely farmers who benefited from expansionism while Quakers were urban merchants/tradesmen who benefited more from peaceful co-existence. This could be a start point to discuss how changing ways of economic production helped encourage pro-toleration forces as urbanization advanced, and a model of how to do this can be found in Albion's Seed, but instead this entire angle is ignored.

In addition, in later portions of the book covering the 20th century, only the contributions from religious people are considered with the advance of religious liberty and the establishment clause. Very notable in this is how the Engel v. Vitale case only gets a one line mention on school prayer, instead focusing on a different case, which is notable as one in which an atheist plantiff was involved. Also no discussion occurs of the Scopes Monkey Trial or evolution versus creationism in public schools at all. The omissions give the impression that the author only wants to discuss religious people's contributions to religious liberty and the separation of church and state and not secular people's contributions.

But most disappointing is the lengthy discussion about Muslims in America that manages to avoid talking about American foreign policy at all. This is simply malpractice. The Bush administration is given immense praise for drawing lines between extremist Islam and the broader concept of Islam without any reflection on how US foreign policy under that administration, from the invasion of Iraq to support for the Saudi state and Israel, helped fuel the very terrorism cited for increasing anti-Muslim sentiment. Waldman manages to also avoid talking about legal cases brought by the Bush administration against Muslim charities, most notably the at the time largest charity the Holy Land Foundation, merely stating that surveillance of mosques happened and were apparently "understandable" given terrorism that had occurred. This is a total distortion, the case against The Holy Land Foundation was nearly entirely evidence free and is cited by Human Rights Watch as a miscarriage of justice (read more here: https://www.hrw.org/news/2022/03/11/after-israels-designation-human-rights-groups-terrorists-biden-should-release).

Also, even when Waldman accurately calls out a geopolitical player the US is aligned with, Saudi Arabia, as spreading backward beliefs. But even here the discussion of continued US support for the Saudis does not take place, nor the evidence that was already accumulating about Saudi governmental involvement in the 9/11 attacks. As early as 2004's 9/11 Commission Report Saudi fundraising was known, by 2016 deeper Saudi involvement was partially public from the 28 redacted pages of the report, and since then lawsuits have revealed deep Saudi complicity. But continued American support of that state is not discussed as contributing to the problems of terrorism and therefore the problems of religious intolerance.

Furthermore talking about anti-Western sentiment in places like Iran without even mentioning how this arose from US support of the Shah and a prior coup to overthrow secular, democratically elected prime minister Mossadegh, is absurd. Perhaps a reason why Waldman and political leaders he praises found themselves unable to stem the rising tide of Islamophobia of the 21st century is because they fail to engage with the actual reasons why extremist Islam spreads and terrorism occurs. Instead giving weak responses that concede points about the ideas coming from Islam being a problem rather than this being a response to American foreign policy.

Ultimately, the story Waldman clearly wants to tell with this book is one of religious intolerance being a problem of a combination of ignorance and single denomination demographic dominance being overcome by wise leadership and increasing diversity largely divorced from economic influences and geopolitical concerns and entirely being a discussion between believers with no significant non-believer influence. This story is highly incomplete and does a disservice to those wanting an introduction to America's struggles over the 1st Amendment's religious freedom and separation of church and state. I would only recommend this to those who want to understand how people with Waldman's perspective, largely American center-left liberalism, think about the subject and not really to learn about the subject directly.

Indefensible Liberal Bias

If cherry-picking were an Olympic Sport, Steve Waldman would have earned a gold. His unashamed bias skews his interpretation so harshly, it is difficult to digest his overall presentation.

Without offering a real debate, Waldman merely dismisses Conservative Christian values as either bigoted or out of date. His smugness and condescension towards Evangelicals smacks of the arrogant intolerance typical of modern liberals. Of course, presuming his own enlightenment, he assumed a voice of moral authority that he not only lacks, but seems to have no foundation to support- save his own opinion.

Typical liberal propaganda dressed in historical anecdotes! Read with caution, coffee and a double dose of critical evaluation.