Books

Our Dear-Bought Liberty: Catholics and Religious Toleration in Early America (Harvard University Press, 2021)

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In colonial America, Catholics were presumed dangerous until proven loyal. Yet Catholics went on to sign the Declaration of Independence and helped to finalize the First Amendment to the Constitution. What explains this remarkable transformation? Michael Breidenbach shows how Catholic leaders emphasized their church’s own traditions—rather than Enlightenment liberalism—to secure the religious liberty that enabled their incorporation in American life.

Catholics responded to charges of disloyalty by denying papal infallibility and the pope’s authority to intervene in civil affairs. Rome staunchly rejected such dissent, but reform-minded Catholics justified their stance by looking to conciliarism, an intellectual tradition rooted in medieval Catholic thought yet compatible with a republican view of temporal independence and church-state separation. Drawing on new archival material, Breidenbach finds that early American Catholic leaders, including Maryland founder Cecil Calvert and members of the prominent Carroll family, relied on the conciliarist tradition to help institute religious toleration, including the Maryland Toleration Act of 1649.

The critical role of Catholics in establishing American church-state separation enjoins us to revise not only our sense of who the American founders were, but also our understanding of the sources of secularism. Church-state separation in America, generally understood as the product of a Protestant-driven Enlightenment, was in key respects derived from Catholic thinking. Our Dear-Bought Liberty therefore offers a dramatic departure from received wisdom, suggesting that religious liberty in America was not bestowed by liberal consensus but partly defined through the ingenuity of a persecuted minority.

The Cambridge Companion to the First Amendment and Religious Liberty (Cambridge University Press, 2020)

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This book is an interdisciplinary guide to the religion clauses of the First Amendment with a focus on its philosophical foundations, historical developments, and legal and political implications. The volume begins with fundamental questions about God, the nature of belief and worship, conscience, freedom, and their intersections with law. It then traces the history of religious liberty and church-state relations in America through a diverse set of religious and non-religious voices from the seventeenth century to the most recent Supreme Court decisions. The companion will conclude by addressing legal and political questions concerning the First Amendment and the court cases and controversies surrounding religious liberty today, including the separation of church and state, corporate religious liberty, and constitutional interpretation. This scholarly yet accessible book will introduce students and scholars alike to the main issues concerning the First Amendment and religious liberty, along with offering incisive new insights into one of the most important topics in American culture.

Naming the New World: Liberty and Language in Early America

Book manuscript in progress

Selected Articles and Chapters

“Religious Tests, Loyalty Oaths, and the Ecclesiastical Context of the First Amendment”
The Cambridge Companion to the First Amendment and Religious Liberty
Edited by Michael D. Breidenbach and Owen Anderson
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020

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“Church and State in Maryland: Religious Liberty, Religious Tests, and Church Disestablishment”
Disestablishment and Religious Dissent: Church-State Relations in the New American States, 1776-1833
Edited by Carl H. Esbeck and Jonathan Den Hartog
Columbus: University of Missouri Press, 2019

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“Jacques Maritain and Leo XIII on the Problem of Church-State Relations”
The Things that Matter: Essays Inspired by the Later Work of Jacques Maritain
Edited by Heidi M. Giebel
Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press/American Maritain Association, 2018

Jacques Maritain wrote in Man and the State (1951) that the “complete differentiation and full autonomy” of the temporal sphere found in the modern, secular age fulfilled the “very distinction between God’s and Caesar’s domains” found in the Gospel. Thomas Pink has argued that such a view is incompatible with what he calls the “Leonine model” of soul-body union articulated by Pope Leo XIII in Immortale Dei (1885). Pink’s claim that Maritain opposed Leonine teaching on Church-state relations, however, does not succeed for two reasons. Firstly, his conclusion overlooks critical qualifications in Man and the State that saves Maritain’s theory from advancing a strict separationist view of Church-state relations. Secondly, Pink ignores one of Maritain’s early works, Things that are not Caesar’s (1931), which reveals his full support of Leonine teaching in the tradition of St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Robert Bellarmine. Nevertheless, Pink’s critique of Maritain occasions important reflections on the relationship between principles and practicalities in the debates over Church and state. While Maritain’s view does not contradict what he and Leo XIII considered to be the immutable principles of Church-state relations, it remains to be seen whether Maritain’s practically attainable ideal is still, in fact, practically attainable.

“Conciliarism and the American Founding”
William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 73, no. 3 (2016): 467-500

Conventional understandings of Catholicism, especially the claim that the pope held temporal power over all civil rulers, presented a signal challenge to early American Catholics' civil and religious liberty. Yet reform-minded Catholics in the North Atlantic world asserted their independence from the temporal powers of external authorities, including the pope. Catholics who participated in the American founding, such as Charles Carroll of Carrollton and John Carroll, drew from an intellectual tradition of conciliarism that was rooted in Catholic thought yet compatible with republicanism. The Carrolls' public support of the nation's foundational documents and their development of the American Catholic Church presented to the broader political and religious public a Catholic tradition that advocated not only a republican view of temporal independence but also a juridical, nonhierarchical understanding of church and state. Catholics of this sort were not a foil to American religious and political arrangements; instead, they fit their beliefs within the ideologies of the American founding and thereby answered Protestant charges that Catholics should be legally penalized. These conclusions offer compelling reasons to include the conciliarist tradition within the “multiple traditions approach” of American founding historiography.

  1. Download PDF at Project Muse and JSTOR

  2. Cited in:

    1. Scott D. Gerber, "Law and Catholicism in Colonial Maryland," The Catholic Historical Review 103, no. 3 (Summer 2017): 465-490

    2. Timothy Leech, “The Continental Army and American State Formation: 1774–1776,” Ph.D. dissertation, Ohio State University, 2017

    3. Jeremy Black, Charting the Past: The Historical Worlds of Eighteenth-Century England (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018)

    4. William S. Cossen, "Review of Farrelly, Anti-Catholicism in America, 1620-1860," The Junto, January 23, 2018

    5. Paulina Kewes, "'The Idol of State Innovators and Republicans': Robert Persons's A Conference about the Next Succession (1594/5) in Stuart England," in Literature of the Stuart Successions, eds. Paulina Kewes and Andrew McRae (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018)

    6. Jeffery Appelhans, "Catholic Persuasion: Power and Prestige in Early American Civil Life," Ph.D. dissertation, University of Delaware, 2018

    7. Shaun Blanchard, "Neither Cisalpine nor Ultramontane: John Carroll's Ambivalent Relationship with English Catholicism, 1780-1800," U.S. Catholic Historian 36, no. 3 (Summer 2018): 1-27

    8. Mitchell Edward Oxford, "'This very important & almost unbounded trust': The Commission to Canada and the Place of Catholics in Revolutionary America," U.S. Catholic Historian 36, no. 4 (Fall 2018)

    9. James M. Patterson, "Why Integralism Is an Ideology of Despair," Law and Liberty, November 28, 2018

    10. James M. Patterson, Religion in the Public Square: Sheen, King, Falwell (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019)

    11. Shaun Blanchard, “Was John Carroll an “Enlightened” Catholic?: Resituating the Archbishop of Baltimore as a “Third Party” Prelate, in Katholische Aufklärung in Europa und Nordamerika (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2019)

    12. Jonathon Derek Awtrey, “Jews and the Sources of Religious Freedom in Early Pennsylvania,” Ph.D. dissertation, Louisiana State University, 2019

    13. Jonathan Daly, How Europe Made the Modern World: Creating the Great Divergence (London: Bloomsbury, 2019)

    14. Carl H. Esbeck and Jonathan J. Den Hartog, "Introduction: The Task, Methodology, and Findings," in Disestablishment and Religious Dissent: Church-State Relations in the New American States, 1776-1833, eds. Carl H. Esbeck and Jonathan J. Den Hartog (Columbus: University of Missouri Press, 2019), 3-23

    15. Donald L. Drakeman, "Which Establishment Clause Original Meaning is the Right One?" in The Cambridge Companion to the First Amendment and Religious Liberty (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020)

    16. Chris Beneke, "The Historical Context of the Religion Clauses of the First Amendment," in The Cambridge Companion to the First Amendment and Religious Liberty (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020)

    17. Scott McDermott, “Charles Carroll (1737–1832),” in American Religious History: Belief and Society Through Time, ed. Gary Scott Smith (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2020), 1:116–17

    18. Michael J. Pfeifer, The Making of American Catholicism: Regional Culture and the Catholic Experience (New York: New York University Press, 2021)

    19. Shaun Blanchard, “John Carroll,” The Catholic Enlightenment: A Global Anthology, eds. Ulrich L. Lehner and Shaun Blanchard (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America, 2021), 273–75

    20. James Patterson, “Catholic Republicanism in America,” Perspectives on Political Science (2022)

    21. Anna Vincenzi, “‘Mutation in Dominion’ or Revolution? The American Revolution as Seen from Papal Rome,” Early American Studies 20, no. 3 (Summer 2022): 466–505

    22. Juan Pablo Aranda, “Taming the Infallible People: Sensus Fidei, Democracy, and Populism,” Political Theology (2022)

    23. Jason Morgan, “Common Good Constitutionalism vs. America’s Enlightenment Civil Religion,” Studia Gilsoniana 11, no. 4 (2022): 673–734

    24. Kody W. Cooper and Justin Buckley Dyer, The Classical and Christian Origins of American Politics: Political Theology, Natural Law, and the American Founding (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2022)

    25. Trevor Burnard, Writing Early America: From Empire to Revolution (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2023)

    26. William S. Cossen, Making Catholic America: Religious Nationalism in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2023)

    27. Jeffery R. Appelhans, “Something New Under the Sun: The Catholic Counterpoint in Early America,” Journal of the Early Republic 43, no. 4 (Winter 2023): 645–57

  3. Reviewed in:

  4. Assigned in "History of the American Revolution" (Wayland Baptist University), "American Catholic History" (Ave Maria University), and "Catholics and Catholicism in American Politics" (Loyola University Chicago)

  5. Featured at Ave Maria University, Jack Miller Center, and Cushwa Center for American Catholicism at the University of Notre Dame

“Aquinas on Tyranny, Resistance, and the End of Politics” (co-authored)
Perspectives on Political Science 44, no. 1 (2015): 10-17

This study argues that Aquinas’ account of tyranny grants citizens a surprisingly wide ambit for resistance to tyrants but that such actions demand a tall order for even the most virtuous citizens: knowledge of the hierarchy of ends in politics and the prudence to apply it under the pressure of a tyrannical government. We consider sections of the Summa Theologiae and De Regno, Aquinas’ most sustained discussion of tyranny, to demonstrate the theoretical illumination that the former provides of the latter. De Regno, we argue, presents a negative teaching of the best regime and citizen, one in which citizens are shown the need for their own virtue in discerning the roots of tyranny and their remedy. With the Summa, we show how such prudential decisions fit within the orders of charity and piety: the citizen must come to see love of country as intrinsically ordered to love of family and God. Ultimately, Aquinas’ resistance theory rests on a hierarchy of ends for civil government that orders both ruler and citizen to God.

Book Reviews

Review of Catherine O’Donnell, Elizabeth Seton: American Saint (Ithaca, NY: Three Hills, an imprint of Cornell University Press, 2018) in William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 79, no. 4 (October 2022): 672–76

Reference Works

“John Carroll,” The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 4th Edition, eds. F. L. Cross, E. A. Livingstone, and Andrew Louth (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022)

© 2024 Michael D. Breidenbach