Over the first two decades of the twenty-first century, John Witte, Jr. has not only carefully documented but also creatively promoted in many ways three very important developments: (1) the almost revolutionary worldwide reawakening of cooperation in the fields of law and religion after the termination of their long, fruitful history of cooperation in the mid-1800s; (2) the efforts to strengthen a justice-oriented legal culture in democratic societies and the legal, academic, and political appreciation of human rights (also in disputes with human rights skeptics); and (3) the reconciliation of traditional values and new needs for freedom in the ethos and law of marriage and family.

John Witte, Jr.’s book The Blessings of Liberty contains an important message about the origins and continuing relevance of religious liberty. Based on careful historical analysis of the development of religious liberty in England and the US, Witte demonstrates the importance of Protestant thinking both to the right and to human rights more generally. In the process he refutes both Christian and post-Enlightenment sceptics. His discussion of contemporary US and European law shows how much the right is still needed today, despite the claims of contemporary scholars that freedom of religion and belief is a redundant right.

A brief commotion arose during the hearings for one of twenty-first-century India’s most widely discussed legal disputes, when a dynamic young attorney suggested that deities, too, had constitutional rights. The suggestion was not absurd. Like a human being or a corporation, Hindu temple deities can participate in litigation, incur financial obligations, and own property. There was nothing to suggest, said the attorney, that the same deity who enjoyed many of the rights and obligations accorded to human persons could not also lay claim to some of their constitutional freedoms. The lone justice to consider this claim blandly and briefly observed that having specific legal rights did not perforce endow one with constitutional rights. Nevertheless, a handful of recent and high-profile disputes concerning Hindu temple deities and the growing influence of Hindu nationalist politics together suggest that the issue of deities’ rights is far from a settled matter. This article argues that declining to recognize deities’ constitutional rights accurately reflects dueling commitments in the Indian Constitution.

This essay examines the claims-making practices of conservative evangelical Protestants in England and Satmar Hasidim in the United States, communities marginal to two contingents of leftist academic discourse today: scholars who see liberation as an anti-statist project and others who imagine religious diversity as a common good facilitated by the state. The author suggests that one way forward in the critical study of law and religion is to examine communities with political commitments that differ from our own—who shape their worlds alongside and through the state yet are unconcerned about a common democratic future. By showing that no liberal (statist) or liberatory (anti-statist) framework holds either the Satmar or evangelical Christian legal claims, the author identifies generative problems for thought that challenge current approaches to understanding religion-state entanglement in the contemporary world.

The author first presents an uncritical user’s guide to the book, then discusses why Witte, Nichols, and Garnett should consider including key chapters of the story of US religious liberty in the next edition. The author then deconstructs the normative and methodological assumptions of the book.

This review essay registers sincere appreciation for John Witte’s singular contribution to defending the importance of the history and interpretation of rights in the Western tradition, especially as related to Christian thought and practice. It also proposes to amend and refine his approach by highlighting the difference between natural and religious justifications of rights, and by suggesting reasons for favoring the former.

This essay offers an analysis John Witte, Jr.’s contribution to the study of the relationship between Christianity and law as an autonomous branch within the broad field of law and religion. The author discusses Witte as a Christian jurist educated in Reformed Protestantism and influenced by Abraham Kuyper and Harold J. Berman, among others, and describes and evaluates the interdisciplinary, interdenominational, and international project on Christianity and law headed by Witte, to which more than five hundred scholars (jurists, theologians, philosophers, historians, and sociologists) are contributing. Witte analyzes the interaction between Christianity and law from a relational, biographical, and jurisprudential perspective, and underlying his project is the idea that the relationship between Christianity and law is not merely accidental, but has a metahistorical significance and an enduring value for the development of humanity. Although the project has already borne much fruit, there is room for further maturity and methodological purity as it is still in its early stages.