We Have a Religion: The 1920s Pueblo Indian Dance Controversy and American Religious Freedom
Abstract
Journal of Church and State certainly remarkable. Yet, the data tables raise questions about the extent of the churchesâ influence in family matters. Najar covers a large area over fifty-five years. Only about 5 percent of the cases involved white men facing charges concerning their families Applying some reasonable assumptions to the data, it appears that any given church would sit in judgment over a white maleâs behavior toward his family only once every seven years or so. Any clustering of these charges in certain churches would increase their influence in those locales while diminishing the likelihood that Baptists in other areas might ever witness such an event. To be sure, men were occasionally held accountable for mistreating their wives. Whether they and their fellow Baptists greeted this phenomenon with shock and amazement or merely saw it as a natural consequence of womenâs âecclesiastical citizenshipâ is difficult to tell from the data at hand. Professor Najar has given us wonderful and pathbreaking insights into the lives of southern evangelicals of this era. And since the Baptists figure so prominently in church-state jurisprudence, her work should inspire us to consider whether Jefferson might have been as wrong at the