Steven D. Smith (University of San Diego). The Rise and Decline of American Religious Freedom (Harvard University Press, 2014)."Smith maintains that the distinctive American contribution to religious freedom was not in the First Amendment, which was intended merely to preserve the political status quo in matters of religion. What was important was the commitment to open contestation between secularist and providentialist understandings of the nation which evolved over the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century, far from vindicating constitutional principles, as conventional wisdom suggests, the Supreme Court imposed secular neutrality, which effectively repudiated this commitment to open contestation."
—The Rise and Decline of American Religious Freedom book jacket
