What is the United States’ greatest achievement? Winning World War II? Landing a man on the moon? Hollywood’s global reach? For Dartmouth College historian and Episcopal priest Randall Balmer, all these accomplishments pale in comparison to a less celebrated but more enduring breakthrough: the separation of church and state. Few ideas, he argues, have done more to preserve both religious vitality and civic peace. In America’s Best Idea, Balmer offers a spirited defense of this foundational principle, contending that the First Amendment’s twin guarantees—no establishment of religion and free exercise thereof—have made the United States a uniquely fertile ground for religious pluralism and, in turn, a more virtuous and democratic citizenry.
He is alarmed, however, by what he views as a growing desire in some quarters to return to an older model in which church and state walked much closer together. His book is at once a historical account of how this achievement was won and a warning (at times a touch hyperbolic) about the threats now arrayed against it.
For Balmer, this arrangement is not only good for the country, but good for the faith itself. It protects religion from state corruption and safeguards government from sectarian dominance. From Roger Williams’s exile in Rhode Island to William Penn’s “holy experiment” in Pennsylvania, Balmer traces how a long line of dissenters, reformers, and visionaries helped craft a constitutional order rooted in freedom of conscience rather than religious coercion.
And in our own unsettled moment, when some Americans fear the rise of Christian nationalism, others lament Christianity’s retreat from the public square, and religious liberty lawsuits surround everything from Ten Commandments displays to Satanic Temple nativity scenes, Balmer contends that the American model remains both radical and essential. In a nation where Hindu, Muslim, Jewish, Catholic, Mormon, and secular candidates now routinely seek office, and where the religiously unaffiliated continue to grow as a cultural force, his argument feels all the more urgent.
A mixture of history, polemic, and pastoral plea, America’s Best Idea is Balmer’s attempt to remind Americans why the First Amendment was worth creating and why it is still worth defending. His sense of urgency stems from what he sees as a growing and deeply troubling threat: the rise of Christian nationalism. For Balmer, recent efforts to conflate Christian identity with American citizenship (whether through Ten Commandments mandates in schools, public funding for religious education, or political campaigns wrapped in religious rhetoric) represent a betrayal of the founders’ vision and a danger to both church and republic. But given the flood of recent books attacking Christian nationalism, Balmer’s critique adds little that hasn’t already been said. His concerns and arguments closely mirror those found in works like Katherine Stewart’s The Power Worshippers and Andrew Seidel’s The Founding Myth, both of which portray Christian nationalism as little more than a cynical power grab built on a willfully distorted reading of America’s founding. Like them, Balmer treats Christian nationalism as a manifestly bad-faith movement—historically dubious, theologically misguided, and politically corrosive. But while those critiques may carry some merit, Balmer’s tone often lacks nuance. He shows little interest in understanding the appeal or growth of Christian nationalism and is often more interested in denunciation than diagnosis.
The notion that the United States is on the brink of becoming a theocratic nation-state owes more to Twitter threads and fringe podcasts than to any measurable political reality.
Nevertheless, what distinguishes America’s Best Idea from many other recent critiques of Christian nationalism is that Balmer is not merely issuing cultural warnings—he is casting a historically grounded, theologically informed vision for the American experiment in religious liberty. As both a historian and an Episcopal priest, Balmer defends the separation of church and state not as a secularist imposition, but as a theological and civic gift that has allowed religion in America not only to survive, but to flourish. He situates the First Amendment as a radical break from the European model of established churches, tracing its lineage to figures like Roger Williams and the Baptists, whose commitment to religious voluntarism was rooted in the gospel’s refusal to coerce. Balmer sees this system not as a safeguard against religion, but as a safeguard for religion, protecting it from factional capture and state corruption.
His account celebrates this pluralistic religious economy as central to both the vibrancy of American faith and the health of its democracy.
Along the way, Balmer reminds readers that evangelicals were once at the forefront of social reform movements, from abolition to temperance to women’s education. In that spirit, he calls today’s believers to recover that legacy of public witness, not by grasping for political power, but by preaching from the margins. Rather than lamenting the decline of cultural privilege, America’s Best Idea urges both religious and secular Americans to preserve the delicate architecture of the First Amendment, a system that, in Balmer’s view, has conserved both faith and freedom better than any official religion ever could.
By the end of America’s Best Idea, readers will likely come away with a renewed appreciation for the remarkable achievements of the First Amendment. Balmer’s historical sweep makes clear just how dangerous (and often deadly) state-established religion has been. Beginning with the sectarian conflicts that plagued Europe for centuries, Balmer shows that religious establishment has more often led to coercion and violence than to piety or peace. Against this grim backdrop, the American model of religious disestablishment appears not just prudent but inspired. Balmer underscores that it is precisely under this framework of constitutional neutrality that once outlawed or marginalized faiths have flourished. Baptists were once jailed in Virginia, Mormons driven west by mob violence, Catholics viewed with suspicion, and Jews barred from elite institutions. But all of these, along with newer movements like Pentecostalism, Islam, and Hinduism, have found space to grow, organize, and even shape public life in America. While the experience of religious liberty in the United States has certainly not been a straight line, when set against the alternatives found in both past and present, Balmer’s case for the First Amendment’s enduring genius is inspiring.
While one can appreciate Balmer’s passion for the First Amendment, aspects of his framing are historically problematic. He rightly celebrates early champions of religious liberty such as Roger Williams and William Penn, yet he often portrays the American experiment in religious freedom as if it arose chiefly in opposition to traditional Christianity, rather than emerging from within it. The very Baptists he praises (figures like Isaac Backus and John Leland) were not theological progressives or pure Lockean liberals; their arguments for liberty of conscience were rooted explicitly in biblical exegesis and evangelical convictions. Furthermore, Balmer’s repeated appeals to a “wall of separation” between church and state rely on a modern and legally contested interpretation of the First Amendment. One shaped more by mid-twentieth-century jurisprudence than by the text, context, or original intent of the founding generation. Jefferson’s metaphor, which was lifted not from a legal text or constitutional debate, but from a private letter to a Baptist association, has come to bear far more constitutional weight than the framers ever intended or could have imagined.
In emphasizing rigid separation, Balmer overlooks the fact that early American states routinely supported religion without establishing it, tied public morality to religious belief, and defended the right of religious citizens to contribute meaningfully to public life. Massachusetts, for instance, maintained religious tests for public office well into the 1830s. Connecticut’s 1818 constitution explicitly affirmed “the duty of all men to worship the Supreme Being,” and several states, including Maryland and North Carolina, required public officials to profess belief in God or in divine judgment. Far from being anomalies, such measures reflected a broad consensus that religion, particularly Christianity, was essential to civic virtue and republican self-government, even if no single denomination should be elevated above others. Much of what Balmer presents as a timeless constitutional principle is, in fact, a projection of modern jurisprudence and liberal Protestant values onto a founding generation that held a far more complex and variegated view of church and state.
One is left to wonder why Christian moral witness is celebrated in one era but viewed as suspect in another.
Balmer’s narrative tends to flatten this complexity into a simplistic binary, either establishment or total separation, when the historical record reveals a spectrum of arrangements across the states, many of which retained close church-state ties well after 1791. By reading back a post-Jeffersonian, mid-twentieth-century model of “separation” as the founders’ original intent, Balmer risks turning a rich and pluralistic founding landscape into a legal abstraction better suited to modern polemic than historical accuracy.
Then there are the words of warning against Christian nationalism. Like many books in this genre, America’s Best Idea offers warnings that feel hyperbolic and out of proportion to the actual threat. Balmer largely overlooks Christian nationalism’s limited real-world influence, its lack of theological or organizational coherence, and its marginal growth beyond chronically online circles. As Mark David Hall and Miles Smith IV have persuasively argued, the notion that the United States is on the brink of becoming a theocratic nation-state owes more to Twitter threads and fringe podcasts than to any measurable political reality. In fact, and somewhat ironically given Balmer’s earlier work on the rise of the Religious Right, the more significant transformation in recent years has been the emergence of a non-religious right. In contrast to Christian nationalism, this is a tangible and measurable shift: according to the Public Religion Research Institute, the share of religiously unaffiliated Republicans has tripled, from about 4 percent in 2006 to roughly 12 percent in 2022, and Gallup reports that nearly one-quarter of nonreligious Americans now lean Republican. Ironically, this growing secular bloc on the right (which is probably far more aligned with Balmer’s pluralist ideals) gets far less attention than the overhyped specter of Christian nationalism, despite representing a deeper and more lasting shift in American life.
Which brings me to a perplexing tension in Balmer’s account. He lauds evangelical involvement in nineteenth-century reform movements (particularly abolition, temperance, and women’s education) as exemplars of Christian public witness. These efforts, in his view, demonstrated faith speaking truth to power and working for the common good. Balmer also praises historical figures like William Jennings Bryan for his economic populism and Martin Luther King Jr. for his prophetic civil rights leadership, holding up such examples of progressive, justice-oriented engagement as faithful expressions of Christianity in the public square. More broadly, he voices admiration for faith-based activism that advances values like social justice, equality, and inclusion.
Conversely, Balmer is consistently critical of recent evangelical political engagement, especially when it aligns with the Republican Party or centers on issues such as abortion, gay rights, or religious symbolism in public life. He often portrays such activism not as prophetic witness but as a bid to reclaim lost cultural privilege or enforce sectarian morality through legislation. One is left to wonder why Christian moral witness is celebrated in one era but viewed as suspect in another. Of course, Balmer is entitled to his political and theological commitments, but the criteria by which he distinguishes faithful from inappropriate activism often seem ad hoc and selectively applied. The result is a framework in which Christian political engagement is endorsed when it advances progressive goals but dismissed when it reflects more traditional convictions.
In short, Balmer seems comfortable rendering unto Caesar when Caesar shares his views, yet eager to proclaim “Jesus is Lord” when Caesar does not.
Despite its limitations, America’s Best Idea stands as a compelling progressive tribute to the Madisonian tradition and its vision of religious liberty. Balmer’s greatest strength lies in his passionate and historically informed defense of the First Amendment as a civic and theological breakthrough, one that has allowed an astonishing diversity of religious communities not merely to survive, but to flourish. In an era when “religious pluralism” can often sound like a platitude, Balmer roots the phrase in real historical struggle, making clear just how hard-won (and how uniquely American) this achievement truly is. His narrative reminds readers that the separation of church and state was not designed to diminish faith, but to preserve its integrity and safeguard public life from religious domination. While reasonable people may disagree over how this principle has been interpreted or applied over time, Balmer makes a compelling case that our church-state separation truly is one of America’s best ideas.
