FORUM: Mark deWolfe Howe, The Garden and the Wilderness Introduction

摘要

MARK deWolfe Howe’s classic, The Garden and the Wilderness:nReligion and Government in American Constitutional History, wasnpublished in 1965. Notwithstanding the many subsequent judicialnand scholarly developments in First Amendment religion clausenjurisprudence, this slim volume remains among the best efforts to considernseriously the interrelated histories of law and religion in the United States.nBeautifully written and economical in its expression, Howe’s book is oftenncited but less often carefully read. Unlike many who write about the religionnclauses, Howe understood the deeply contingent nature of the dependence ofnreligion and law one upon the other.nThe metaphor in the title is taken from the writing of seventeenth-centurynpuritan Roger Williams, “founder” of Rhode Island, and a passionatenadvocate of “soul-liberty” and of the separation of church and state—for thensake of the church. Although he deeply cared about the quality of ourncommon lives as well, Williams’s vision is both austere and deeply humane.nThe thesis of Howe’s book was that a Jeffersonian impulse for the FirstnAmendment, a Jeffersonian understanding of “separation”—as protecting thenstate from “ecclesiastical depredations”—had been ahistorically givennprominence by the Supreme Court over a Williamsian “evangelical” impulse.nThe favoring of a Jeffersonian separation understanding, in Howe’s view,nboth distorted the original understanding of the religion clauses and hobblednthe possibilities for making those clauses live in the twentieth century. Afterntwenty-five years of revision, the history Howe only began to uncover isnnow much better known and understood. Howe’s book has, however,nbecome obscured in the process.