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Americans love religious freedom. Few agree, however, about what they mean by either religion or freedom. Rather than resolve these debates, the book argues that there is no such thing as religious freedom. Lacking any consistent content, religious freedom is a shifting and malleable rhetoric employed for a variety of purposes. While Americans often think of freedom as the right to be left alone, the free exercise of religion works to produce, challenge, distribute, and regulate different forms of social power. The book traces shifts in the notion of religious freedom in America from The Second Great Awakening, to the fiction of Louisa May Alcott and the films of D.W. Griffith, through William Jennings Bryan and the Scopes Trial, and up to debates over the Tea Party to illuminate how Protestants have imagined individual and national forms of identity. A chapter on Al Smith considers how the first Catholic presidential nominee of a major party challenged Protestant views about the separation of church and state. Moving later in the twentieth century, the book analyzes Malcolm X’s more sweeping rejection of Christian freedom in favor of radical forms of revolutionary change. The final chapters examine how contemporary controversies over intelligent design and the claims of corporations to exercise religion are at the forefront of efforts to shift regulatory power away from the state and toward private institutions like families, churches, and corporations. Religious freedom is produced within competing visions of governance in a self-governing nation.

This book investigates the place of spirituality within the American experiment with public management of land, particularly with respect to national parks. It focuses on national parks because they have received the most attention and development on the part of the state and the visiting public. National parks serve as symbolic representations of the nation, including both its natural and cultural heritage. They are tremendously popular destinations, attracting over 350 million visits yearly. They hold political significance out of proportion to their size, visitation, and economic impact. The book examines how national parks’ status as the pinnacle of nature in America relates to the spiritual sensibilities that so many visitors express. The larger implications of this volume concern a much broader phenomenon: the form of religion under conditions of secularity.