Gerber's "Law and Religion in Colonial America"

Scott Douglas Gerber, Ohio Northern University, has published Law and Religion in Colonial America: The Dissenting Colonies (Cambridge University Press):

Law – charters, statutes, judicial decisions, and traditions – mattered in colonial America, and laws about religion mattered a lot. The legal history of colonial America reveals that America has been devoted to the free exercise of religion since well before the First Amendment was ratified. Indeed, the two colonies originally most opposed to religious liberty for anyone who did not share their views, Connecticut and Massachusetts, eventually became bastions of it. By focusing on law, Scott Douglas Gerber offers new insights about each of the five English American colonies founded for religious reasons – Maryland, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and Massachusetts – and challenges the conventional view that colonial America had a unified religious history.

Here is an endorsement:

‘An invaluable compendium and analysis of all the laws and legal actions regulating or protecting religion in the five colonies founded by religious dissenters. Three founded to protect religious liberty for all (Maryland, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island), and two founded to protect religious liberty only for the one-time dissenters who had gained a colony of their own, where they tried to suppress or exclude all other faiths (Connecticut and Massachusetts).'

Douglas Laycock - University of Virginia School of Law and author of the 5-volume Religious Liberty series

 --Dan Ernst