"Not in the Heavens"

In the February 20 issue of The New Republic, my friend Noah Feldman has a very critical review of Jay Sekulow's book, Witnessing Their Faith: Religious Influence on Supreme Court Justices and Their Opinions.  Feldman writes:

In this political-religious environment, the relation of an official's faith to his political practices has become a renewed topic of conversation in evangelical circles. That is the best reason to examine the new book by the lawyer-activist Jay Sekulow, a central figure in the evangelical rethinking of constitutional law and practice. He serves as chief counsel for the cleverly initialed American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ), a law firm founded by Pat Robertson to represent evangelicals in constitutional litigation. He has appeared several times at the Supreme Court on behalf of evangelical causes. . . .

Witnessing Their Faith, it turns out, is Sekulow's doctoral thesis, written for the School of Leadership Studies at Pat Robertson's Regent University in Virginia Beach. Whatever its merits as an example of "leadership studies," Sekulow's work is a failure as history. This is not because his facts are wrong. Most of them are correct, and a reader new to the subject could certainly pick up some useful things about the history of church and state in America. The trouble with Sekulow's book lies in its selection and its interpretation of biographical materials about nine Supreme Court justices and their opinions. The choice of examples is highly selective, and the interpretations are pervasively tendentious. Witnessing the Faith is an important document of a disturbing phenomenon. . . .

The central claim of Sekulow's book is that in the cases he analyzes, "the opinion of the justices coincided with the official positions held by the religious denomination that had influenced them." In practice, Sekulow cannot successfully demonstrate this claim. Yet the story he tells is worth considering, more for what it fails to show than for what Sekulow claims it does show. A reasonable argument can be made that in fact Sekulow's subjects overwhelmingly separated their religious faith (which was often quite minimal) from their constitutional decision-making. The faith that they witnessed, in other words, was not religious, it was constitutional. . . .

There's a lot more, and the view is well worth reading.  Like Feldman's book "Divided By God," the review is -- even in those places where one might have questions or even disagreements -- respectful, charitable, and generous.  Some MOJ readers and bloggers might quibble with this line, though:

Presumably Brennan's liberal activism would not have squared well with his Catholic upbringing and commitments (although one can imagine some historian trying to connect Brennan to the social justice tradition of the Catholic Worker movement).

=-)