With clear-eyed understanding of church-state history and an incredible attention to detail. Ron Flowers opens up the tangle of conscientious objection and naturalization. What comfort to find a study by a first-class scholar of the United States Constitution and religion who grasps freedom of conscience. Flowers...opens a window on the converging streams of immigration and pacifism issues. This book deserves ... Read moreand demands the serious personal attention of every scholar in religion, political science, government, and law. It is full of primary sources and adds up to a satisfying completeness and calls forth conclusions.
Journal of Church and State
...Flowers provides vivid illustrations of the cultural context for these varied lawsuits, noting the diverse public interaction with these cases. Intellectually, Flowers' subjects span a spectrum of conscientious cooperation....To Defend the Constitution provides an impressive analysis of immigration, principled dissent, and legal conflict in American history. Student[s] of pacifism and religious politics in American life should include this work in their bibliographic survey.
Religious Studies Review
To Defend the Constitution is a welcome addition to the literature on the relationship between religion and civil authority in the United States. . . . While Flowers's book is decidedly a scholarly work produced by a very fine scholar, a more general audience can also read it with great profit. Flowers has built his treatment around four persons-Rosika Schwimmer, Douglas Clyde Macintosh, Marie Averil Bland, and James Louis Girouard—all of whom were denied citizenship because they had conscientious objection to war or, at least, to combatant status. He tells their stories with grace and drama, and the result for anyone is a wonderful reading experience that combines pure enjoyment with profound illumination. Flowers has supplemented his fine narrative with 28 appendices-cases, testimonies, oral arguments, media accounts, reactions of organized religious groups, and other documents-that help the reader to see the stories of these four brave persons in the larger context of the evolution of an important civil right in America.
Derek H. Davis, Director, J. M. Dawson Institute of Church-State Studies Show Less