In America, it would seem we have arrived at a moment when the “good book” has supplanted our constitution. Unambiguously conceived by the founders, once broadly considered admirable, the separation of church and state is deemed, as the supreme court justice Samuel Alito might put it, “egregiously wrong from the start”.
This is what makes reading Jeremy Schipper’s new book, Denmark Vesey’s Bible, so instructive. When religion is allowed to overcome and nullify the rule of law, Schipper shows, unless one is an adherent to “the right faith”, one is liable to be out of luck.
