Аннотация:During the last two decades, an alluring metaphor, endowed with coherence, broad public recognition, and modern credentials, has made a mostly unimpeded journey to the center of our national dialogue on church-state relations. That metaphor is the “free market of religion.” In an April 2009 cover story declaring the end of Christian America, Newsweek editor and historian John Meacham made an increasingly common assertion: “The American culture of religious liberty helped create a busy free market of faith: by disestablishing churches, the nation made religion more popular, not less.” Economist editor John Micklethwait and co-author Adrian Wooldridge disputed Meacham’s claim that religion in the United States is languishing. But on the church-state framework conceived by the founders, they could not disagree. Like Meacham, they maintained that the First Amendment had created a “free market” of faith. It is not just journalists who have made the point. Leading scholars have moved further along these same metaphorical lines to
