Koppelman on Madison's Non Sequitur: A Comment on Vincent Phillip Muñoz, Religious Liberty, and the American Founding @AndrewKoppelman

Andrew Koppelman, Northwestern University School of Law, is publishing Madison's Non Sequitur: A Comment on Vincent Phillip Muñoz, Religious Liberty and the American Founding in American Political Thought: A Journal of Ideas, Institutions, and Culture. Here is the abstract.

Vincent Phillip Muñoz’s book, Religious Liberty and the American Founding, is a marvelous piece of historical reconstruction, bringing to vivid life the intellectual world of the framers. He gives the reader a sharply etched picture of their natural rights philosophy. But their world is not ours, and they relied on premises that we cannot share and which cannot now be the basis of public law. Today, when courts interpret the First Amendment’s religion clauses, they must articulate a rationale that will not be unintelligible or repulsive to many citizens. The interpretation also ought not to inflame the very divisions that the clause was intended to prevent. The fundamental problem is that the framers believed both that we are endowed with natural rights and that the government is incompetent and untrustworthy to adjudicate religious questions. Their natural rights philosophy, however, ultimately rested on religious foundations if it rested on anything at all. Muñoz offers us a valuable window into the world of Madison. But that world is not our world. If religious liberty is to remain a shared ideal in contemporary America, it will have to be under a different description than the one that Muñoz skillfully recreates. It must not presuppose theistic premises that many Americans reject.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.