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On June 27, 2015, an activist named Bree Newsome climbed the 30-foot flagpole outside the South Carolina State House. Ten days earlier a young white man had murdered nine black people in Charleston’s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church. As Ms. Newsome removed the Confederate flag and carried it down the pole, she recited Psalm 27 and the Lord’s Prayer. “You come against me with hatred and oppression and violence,” she declared, “I come against you in the name of God.”
Ms. Newsome features in Brook Wilensky-Lanford’s “A God-Shaped Nation,” an encyclopedic survey of religion in America. Some of Ms. Wilensky-Lanford’s subjects, such as Anne Hutchinson and Martin Luther King Jr., are well-known. Other figures have been rescued by the author from obscurity. Lillian Gobitas, a 12-year-old Jehovah’s Witness, was expelled from school in 1935 for refusing to pledge allegiance to the American flag. Toyogusu Uyenoyama, a Japanese-born Buddhist priest in Hawaii, was interned for four years during World War II. Stephen Pieters, a gay Christian activist, ministered to fellow AIDS patients for decades. “When it comes to religion in America,” Ms. Wilensky-Lanford writes, “we need more stories, not fewer.”
Ms. Wilensky-Lanford, the author of “Paradise Lust: Searching for the Garden of Eden” (2011), is an unsteady guide to this history. While she is correct that the separatists who traveled on the Mayflower in 1620 eschewed the pejorative term Puritan, she errantly suggests that they called themselves Pilgrims. That label emerged generations later. In a more glaring error, Ms. Wilensky-Lanford states that when a 26-year-old Joseph Smith prayed in the woods and asked God which church he should join, “a divine messenger named Nephi” forbade him from joining any of them. But Smith reported hearing those instructions directly from Jesus Christ. By the time he was 26, moreover, Smith had already published the Book of Mormon.
While the heroes in “A God-Shaped Nation” are refreshing in their diversity, the boogeymen are all too familiar. Ms. Wilensky-Lanford notes that the Puritans who settled New England wanted free expression of religion “only for themselves,” but she doesn’t take the time to explain why thousands of English men and women found Puritan piety compelling enough to risk persecution or the hazards of colonization to pursue it.
The book’s villains are the conservative Protestants who galvanized political opposition to the New Deal, the civil-rights movement, feminism and LGBTQ rights. They include Abraham Vereide, who in the 1930s started what became the National Prayer Breakfast; Jerry Falwell, an erstwhile critic of Christian political activism who founded the Moral Majority in 1979; and David Green, the founder of the Hobby Lobby craft-supply chain, which won an exemption at the Supreme Court in 2014 from having to cover certain forms of birth control in employee healthcare.
What is lacking in her treatment of such figures is the empathy and thoughtfulness displayed elsewhere. Ms. Wilensky-Lanford details the spiritual power that rippled through the 19th- and 20th-century revivals in American Christianity, but she leaves behind such threads when it comes to present-day evangelicalism, which she largely reduces to a tradition of bigotry and hypocrisy. Certain evangelical leaders may be politically and personally odious, but millions of Americans have flooded into nondenominational churches in search of biblical preaching, youth programs, fellowship, forgiveness and music.
For conservative evangelicals, she concludes, “Christians are persecuted outsiders who must defend only themselves, and the freedom they require is the freedom to put their religious beliefs ahead of any other concerns.” She favors a more pluralist conception of “religious diversity, individual choice, toleration, and even celebration of religious difference.”
Ms. Wilensky-Lanford uses the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) of 1993 to outline the divide between these two visions. Sparked by a Supreme Court decision that denied Native American plaintiffs an exemption from a state law banning the use of peyote, Congress mandated strict scrutiny to ensure that new statutes wouldn’t burden the free exercise of religion. The RFRA at first enjoyed broad support. As Ms. Wilensky-Lanford notes, it protected the right of Muslim women to wear hijabs for their driver’s license photographs and the right of Sikh men to join ROTC programs without removing their turbans or shaving their beards. That early support partly evaporated, however, when religious conservatives sought protections that supposedly impinged on the liberties of others, as in the Hobby Lobby case.
Yet there is no viable model of religious freedom that simply leaves everyone alone to follow his or her conscience. As Ms. Wilensky-Lanford stresses, religion is an inherently public matter, and Puritans and political conservatives haven’t been the only Americans to privilege their own liberties over those of others. Mainline Protestants once lobbied the government to keep fundamentalist and evangelical preachers off the air, and it isn’t difficult to grasp why many conservative Christians today fear that progressives will trample their rights. Competing visions of liberty sometimes clash in ways that cannot be easily resolved. Some adoption agencies, for example, exclude LGBTQ parents, while certain jurisdictions discriminate against those same agencies and parents who hold traditional views on sexuality and gender.
These clashes don’t mean that Americans from divergent backgrounds can never find common ground. As Ms. Wilensky-Lanford notes, at the time of the nation’s founding, Baptist firebrands and Deist skeptics worked together in the cause of liberty. Her call for Americans of all backgrounds to protect public religiosity “in all its specificity and messiness” reflects our best traditions.
Mr. Turner is a professor of religious studies and history at George Mason University and the author of “Joseph Smith: The Rise and Fall of an American Prophet.”