Ebook: Sacred Liberty

Religion expert, founder of Beliefnet, and the bestselling author of Founding Faith explains how the principles of religious liberty became America's "greatest invention" and why these principles are under threat today.
Our current climate of divisiveness over religion is not new, but our misinterpretation of religious liberty is. In fact, Steve Waldman argues, we are now at risk of undermining this hard-won and fragile American right. Sacred Liberty is a sweeping historical survey of how our principles evolved and matured from the founding of the nation and the Constitution under James Madison to the fraught and often controversial integration of various faiths—Jews, Catholics, Native American, African slaves and their religions, Mormons, and now Muslims—into the American mainstream, sometimes successfully, sometimes not.

Waldman makes clear that these battles resulted in today's firm legal foundation of both the separation of church and state and the...