New from Harvard University Press:
The Evangelical Origins of the Living Constitution (March 2014), by
John W. Compton (Chapman University). From the Press:
The New Deal is often said to
represent a sea change in American constitutional history, overturning a
century of precedent to permit an expanded federal government,
increased regulation of the economy, and eroded property protections.
John Compton
offers a surprising revision of this familiar narrative, showing that
nineteenth-century evangelical Protestants, not New Deal reformers,
paved the way for the most important constitutional developments of the
twentieth century.
Following the great religious revivals of the early 1800s, American
evangelicals embarked on a crusade to eradicate immorality from national
life by destroying the property that made it possible. Their cause
represented a direct challenge to founding-era legal protections of
sinful practices such as slavery, lottery gambling, and buying and
selling liquor. Although evangelicals urged the judiciary to bend the
rules of constitutional adjudication on behalf of moral reform,
antebellum judges usually resisted their overtures. But after the Civil
War, American jurists increasingly acquiesced in the destruction of
property on moral grounds.
In the early twentieth century, Oliver Wendell Holmes and other
critics of laissez-faire constitutionalism used the judiciary’s
acceptance of evangelical moral values to demonstrate that conceptions
of property rights and federalism were fluid, socially constructed, and
subject to modification by democratic majorities. The result was a
progressive constitutional regime—rooted in evangelical
Protestantism—that would hold sway for the rest of the twentieth
century.
The reviewers say:
“John Compton’s superb book provides a
fascinating account of the influence that evangelical attempts to stamp
out drinking and lotteries had on American constitutional development.
That, in itself, is worth the price of admission.”—Mark Graber, University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law
“The book’s clear, forcibly argued, and original thesis challenges some of the most influential scholarship in its field.”—Ken I. Kersch, Boston College
“As scholars and pundits debate whether the
New Deal order is coming to an end, questions about its inception are
particularly timely, and the author’s engagement with the question of
how morals can influence constitutional politics is quite salient at
this time.”—Julie Novkov, University at Albany, State University of New York
More information is available
here.
