One of the first hurdles in designing a course is assigning readings. Digital databases, book scanning, and ebooks have empowered teachers to assemble any combination of chapters, journals, and primary sources, but having so many choices can be as paralyzing as it is liberating. And given the digital distractions students face today, there is still no substitute for a physical book that an entire class can read together. Yet while some subjects (e.g., the American History survey; Western Civilization; Renaissance and Reformation) offer an embarrassment of riches, others are extremely limited, if not barren. For academics hoping to teach about the deeper origins of the American republic beyond its socioeconomic factors, such as the theological underpinnings that sparked the Revolution and the religious texts that shaped the founding generation’s political imagination, options for readers have been remarkably scarce.
That gap makes Dylan Pahman and John C. Pinheiro’s The Christian Roots of American Liberty: A Reader a welcome addition, arriving at a moment when civic centers across the country are increasingly charged with cultivating an understanding of the religious origins that informed the American founding. It is also a timely one, given the ongoing debates over whether America was founded as a Christian nation (and what that phrase even means), alongside the growing discourse around Christian nationalism, post-liberalism, and integralism in media and online conversation. Beyond being educationally useful, it is undoubtedly a volume that speaks to the present moment.
Organized into five parts—“God, Natural Rights, and the Rule of Law,” “Religious Liberty,” “Liberty and Private Property,” “Limited Government,” and ”Representation and Consent”—the reader offers an assortment of selections ranging from early church fathers and Thomas Aquinas to ecclesiastical rulings and figures from the revolutionary and early republic era. Most of the choices are just a few pages long, ideal for undergraduate classrooms or curious lifelong learners, and the translations are all drawn from public domain versions, so students who want to dig deeper should find them easily accessible. Each part also ends with discussion questions, a helpful touch for teachers looking to spark dialogue or generate assignment ideas.
Some of the choices by Pahman and Pinheiro are obvious but welcomed given their clear importance. The patristic cluster of Justin Martyr, Athenagoras, Irenaeus, Chrysostom, Athanasius, Theodoret, and Socrates Scholasticus all speak with varying directness to the autonomy of Christian conscience under imperial pressure. The repeated use of Lactantius (later known as the Christian Cicero) is similarly well placed, as is Tertullian, the man who as far as we know coined the phrase libertas religionis (“freedom of religion”) in his Apologeticus (197) and Ad Scapulam (212), arguing that religion cannot be imposed by force and that coerced worship is no worship at all. The choice of Aquinas’s treatise on the natural law is also apt. Of course, none of these texts maps cleanly onto the modern concept of religious liberty, but that is part of their value. They help students trace a genealogy of ideas, allowing them to see how foundational commitments to conscience, natural law, and limited government were laid down centuries before the First Amendment. They also invite students to reckon with how much the founders and framers transformed, and sometimes departed from, their sources.
Yet this raises a concern. None of the otherwise excellent selections are accompanied by introductions or brief editorial commentaries to help students situate the writings in their original contexts or understand their later influence. Without such guidance, students may not grasp that the patristic writers were defending Christianity against imperial coercion, not articulating universal liberty of conscience, or that Aquinas was building a natural law architecture capable of justifying toleration only under carefully constrained conditions, not enshrining pluralism. To be fair, Pahman and Pinheiro almost certainly do not intend these texts as easy proof-texts for American constitutionalism. As their introduction makes clear, their aim is to display them as generative predecessors to it. But without at least some editorial handholding, that distinction is likely to be lost to most students.
But while all readers invite debate about what they include or exclude, some omissions in The Christian Roots of American Liberty are more than quibbles; they are structural, as they seem to be mostly voices from the Protestant Reformation. To be clear, Pahman and Pinheiro do not ignore the Protestant world entirely, as figures like Locke and the American founders are well represented, but while they draw deep from the early church and medieval period, the lack of Reformation sources is noteworthy. Martin Luther’s On Freedom of a Christian (1520) is nowhere to be found, nor is his doctrine of the two kingdoms. John Calvin’s Institutes IV.20 (1559), the most influential Protestant treatment of civil government and conscience, is also absent; this would have complimented the Sebastian Castellio selections nicely. Thomas Helwys, whose Short Declaration of the Mystery of Iniquity (1612) was the first book in the English language to argue for universal religious liberty, does not appear (and he died in prison for writing it). Neither does Samuel Rutherford’s Lex Rex (1644), cited from colonial pulpits across America, nor does John Milton’s Areopagitica (1644), nor Hugo Grotius’s On the Law of War and Peace (1625), the principal conduit through which medieval natural law thinking reached the Protestant north and eventually the American founders. The complete absence of Roger Williams, whose Bloudy Tenent of Persecution for Cause of Conscience (1644) is by wide scholarly consensus the most important Protestant text on religious liberty in the Anglo-American world and whose metaphor of a “wall of separation” Jefferson later made famous.
None of this is to deny that the medieval and patristic thinkers gathered by Pahman and Pinheiro influenced the magisterial Reformers, of course they did, and tracing that inheritance is one of the volume’s genuine contributions. But the Reformation and dissenting tradition, especially in England, is precisely where ideas about conscience, toleration, and limited government were forged into the specific political forms the American founders inherited. A reader that covers the deep roots as well as this one does might naturally be expected to follow them into that later flowering, and I think students would benefit from seeing more of it.
These gaps by no means invalidate Pahman and Pinheiro’s reader, and of course no reader can be all things to all people, but they do limit its usefulness for students and scholars seeking a comprehensive account of liberty’s Christian roots. I should note, however, that given that the editors take pointed aim at Patrick J. Deneen in their introduction, the emphasis on Catholic and Orthodox sources makes a kind of strategic sense. The volume reads as though it is oriented, at least in part, toward a particular intra-Catholic conversation. But that focus comes at a cost, and a reader shaped primarily by the desire to answer one interlocutor will inevitably feel narrow to anyone outside that conversation. The book would have been stronger, and more broadly teachable, had the editors resisted the temptation to write for one audience.
That said, The Christian Roots of American Liberty is still a fine classroom tool, and a welcomed addition to the small shelf of primary-source readers on this topic, sitting naturally alongside Daniel L. Dreisbach and Mark David Hall’s excellent The Sacred Rights of Conscience: Selected Readings on Religious Liberty and Church-State Relations in the American Founding. Used together, the two volumes complement each other well.
My hope is that this serves as a first edition for the Acton Institute. The patristic and medieval depth that Pahman and Pinheiro bring is real, and genuinely valuable, as there is no other reader quite like it at this level. But a second edition that adds the Reformation and dissenting tradition neglected here and that furnishes each section with scholarly introductions giving students the context they need to read these texts with context and depth, would be a different and considerably more important book. The bones are good. What is missing is the other half of the tradition they set out to recover.
