Chapman and McConnell’s Agreeing to Disagree accomplishes the significant task of explaining the Court’s Establishment Clause caselaw persuasively.

It is no mean feat to explain the Supreme Court’s Establishment Clause caselaw in a way that might make the doctrine appear attractive enough for the Court to continue developing it. Yet Nathan Chapman and Michael McConnell have done so in Agreeing to Disagree: How the Establishment Clause Protects Religious Diversity and Freedon of Conscience.

The strengths of this book stem from the way that Chapman and McConnell compensate for its main source of weakness, namely the judicial doctrine they have taken on the task of rationalizing. Over the past four-score years or so (beginning in 1947), the Supreme Court has amassed a bulky and flabby body of doctrine premised on the idea that the Establishment Clause is a source of “rights.”