“Wenger asks: What are Americans really talking about when they talk about religious freedom? In part, they are invoking one of the United States’s ‘signal contributions to the larger causes of liberty and democracy around the world.’ Equally relevant is the inverse of that question: What are Americans not talking about when we talk about religious freedom? That is, what concerns and issues are typically masked by religious freedom discourse? Race and empire—terms that do not harmonize quite as well with the American Dream—are often just below the surface of national conversations about religious freedom, Wenger finds.” — Los Angeles Review of Books
“A convincing and illuminating book about a little-studied facet of American religious history.” — Publishers Weekly
“A breakthrough study that . . . disturbs comfortable myths . . . [Wenger’s] insights are highly relevant to an age in which religious freedom is once again claimed to support exemptions from anti-discrimination laws, as in the Masterpiece Cakeshop case currently pending in the Supreme Court.” — Sarah Barrringer Gordon, Jotwell: The Journal of Things We Like (Lots)
“Tisa Wenger’s Religious Freedom is so compelling that I wish there was more of it.” — Reading Religion
“Remarkably successful . . . explores an understudied chapter in the definition and deployment of religious freedom ideology and expands its study to a broad and engaging collection of individuals and communities.”—Journal of the History of Ideas
“Its sustained commitment to seeing race, religion, and empire as essential—and essentially intertwined—categories in American history marks it as among the most interesting and most urgent works in American religion today.”—Journal of the American Academy of Religion
“By mapping the racial and ethnic politics underpinning principles of religious freedom in public debates, public policy, and legal opinions, Wenger offers a compelling and noteworthy study of the philosophical and practical 'uses and abuses' of religious freedom.”—Journal of Church and State
“Rigorously constructed and argued. It should change the way historians think about how the ideal of religious freedom has evolved in the United States and functioned in relation to the inescapable American hierarchies of race and empire.”—Journal of American History
“Wenger has produced an excellent, provocative book with a compelling argument. It serves as a valuable and insightful analysis of how the U.S. government, the United States' imperial subjects, and different groups of Americans have all claimed religious freedom in order to justify and defend their actions.”—Pacific Historical Review
“Wenger’s close attention to intersecting forms of collective identification is a welcome corrective to popular views of religious freedom as a distinctive right exercised by individuals who seek to opt out of social obligations.”—Journal of Social History
