Book Review: Religious Freedom: The Contested History of An American Ideal by Tisa Wenger

By recounting pivotal events of the Unites States imperialistic expansion through the lens of the religious-ideological struggle which informed them, in Religious Freedom: The Contested History of an American Ideal, Tisa Wenger explains how the ideal of religious freedom has been a part of the discourse of the United States’ dominant ethnic group, white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, as well as a tool deployed by the ‘many people who wanted to locate themselves as equal partners in the American experiment – and to transform themselves into actors, rather than subjects of the imperial modern’ (34). Continue reading