It is not especially controversial to observe that the Supreme Court is charting what some might claim are new directions in its Establishment Clause jurisprudence. Some others might say, though, that the new directions are actually ones that have long been charted, but were discarded by the Court in favor of other views its late 20th century doctrine. What’s new, on this view, is old.

In 2003, Professor Michael McConnell, then a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit, wrote what to my mind was one of the best articles about the meaning and scope of the Establishment Clause in American constitutional history, the colossal Establishment and Disestablishment at the Founding, Part I: Disestablishment of Religion. In the piece, Professor McConnell described systematically various categories of activity or behavior that were understood historically to be establishments of religion. McConnell’s focus on varieties of conduct or practice was deeply influential on my own view not only about the meaning of this Clause, but also on the nature of constitutional interpretation in general. But “Part II,” which seemed to be promised in the article’s title, never came. Years passed and it seemed that the project of completing the next installment was abandoned.

At long last, it looks like “Part II” has arrived, in the form of a new book by McConnell and Professor Nathan Chapman: Agreeing to Disagree: How the Establishment Clause Protects Religious Diversity and Freedom of Conscience (Oxford University Press). The book looks like it contains two principal parts: historical and normative. It will be of great interest to anybody who studies and thinks about this area of law. For me, it will be especially interesting to see how the authors theorize the connection between the historical and the normative pieces of the book (incidentally, both Michael and Nathan are good friends of ours and longtime contributors to Center projects and programs–Michael keynoted our first Tradition Project conference and Nathan was recently here to present his work at our Colloquium in Law and Religion…warm congratulations to them both!).

The Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion”, may be the most contentious and misunderstood provision of the entire U.S. Constitution. It lies at the heart of America’s culture wars. But what, exactly, is an “establishment of religion”? And what is a law “respecting” it?

Many commentators reduce the clause to “the separation of church and state.” This implies that church and state are at odds, that the public sphere must be secular, and that the Establishment Clause is in tension with the Free Exercise of Religion Clause. All of these implications misconstrue the Establishment Clause’s original purpose and enduring value for a religiously pluralistic society. The clause facilitates religious diversity and guarantees equality of religious freedom by prohibiting the government from coercing or inducing citizens to change their religious beliefs and practices.

In Agreeing to Disagree, Nathan S. Chapman and Michael W. McConnell detail the theological, political, and philosophical underpinnings of the Establishment Clause, state disestablishment, and the disestablishment norms applied to the states by the Fourteenth Amendment. Americans in the early Republic were intimately acquainted with the laws used in England, the colonies, and early states to enforce religious uniformity. The Establishment Clause was understood to prohibit the government from incentivizing such uniformity. Chapman and McConnell show how the U.S. Supreme Court has largely implemented these purposes in cases addressing prayer in school, state funding of religious schools, religious symbols on public property, and limits on religious accommodations. In one of the most thorough accounts of the Establishment Clause, Chapman and McConnell argue that the clause is best understood as a constitutional commitment for Americans to agree to disagree about matters of faith.

In the academy today, there are powerful forces that aim to dismantle and discard traditional sources of knowledge, and that reject the merit of gaining that knowledge, replacing it with other objectives. The motives are many, but it is possible to discern a reason that many of the disparate motives share: knowledge (and its acquisition and dissemination) is not, or not necessarily, an essential human good. It is not necessarily a human good, for example, if and when it conflicts with what are felt to be other, more important, ends.

Even among those who believe that the acquisition and production of traditional knowledge is good, there are further disagreements. Is such knowledge good because it is useful for some further purpose or end? For the exercise of power over others, for example, or for bending other people to one’s will, or even simply for the provision of material necessities? Or is it good because it is, as some contemporary defenders of the traditional liberal arts put it, “useless”–an end in itself, a good in itself that needs no, and, indeed, can have no further justification? Or some combination of these?

Disagreements about the good of knowledge–whether it is good at all, and what it is good for, if anything, beyond itself–are not uniquely modern (though the motives driving some of the trending policies in academia today do seem, to me at any rate, to be distinctive). The old Italian phrase, “unire l’utile al dilettevole,” which means to unite what is useful with what delights, reflects one interesting position. Namely, that the good of knowledge is comprehensively manifested in the coming together of utility and pleasure or delight.

Here is a book–admittedly in one of the more distant galaxies of the law-and-religion universe–that offers what looks like a wonderful perspective on the good-of-knowledge question reflecting, in certain ways, the point of view in the Italian adage: Why Does Math Work If It’s Not Real? (Cambridge University Press) by Dragan Radulović. The thesis of the book concerns the distinction between “pure” and “applied” mathematics, and it seems to be (if one can surmise from the description) that what in one generation or century seems entirely “pure,” or useless, or delightful for its own sake, can become, in the distant future and entirely unexpectedly, “useful.” So that the union of the useful and the delightful really should be evaluated across extended periods of time–perhaps centuries or even millennia–because it is unfathomable when confronting the good of knowledge at any given moment or point in time, especially the point in time in which the knowledge is acquired or comes to be known.

According to G. H. Hardy, the ‘real’ mathematics of the greats like Fermat and Euler is ‘useless,’ and thus the work of mathematicians should not be judged on its applicability to real-world problems. Yet, mysteriously, much of mathematics used in modern science and technology was derived from this ‘useless’ mathematics. Mobile phone technology is based on trig functions, which were invented centuries ago. Newton observed that the Earth’s orbit is an ellipse, a curve discovered by ancient Greeks in their futile attempt to double the cube. It is like some magic hand had guided the ancient mathematicians so their formulas were perfectly fitted for the sophisticated technology of today. Using anecdotes and witty storytelling, this book explores that mystery. Through a series of fascinating stories of mathematical effectiveness, including Planck’s discovery of quanta, mathematically curious readers will get a sense of how mathematicians develop their concepts.