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Michael Breidenbach
Prof. Michael Breidenbach is an historian of American politics, religion, law, and culture. He is an Associate Professor of History at Ave Maria University and a Senior Affiliate for Legal Humanities at the Program for Research on Religion and Urban Civil Society at the University of Pennsylvania.
He is the author of Our Dear-Bought Liberty: Catholics and Religious Toleration in Early America (Harvard University Press, 2021), runner-up for the 2022 Journal of the American Revolution Book of the Year Award. He is co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to the First Amendment and Religious Liberty (Cambridge University Press, 2020). Breidenbach’s writing has also appeared in The Atlantic, Washington Post, and First Things.
Dr. Breidenbach was elected Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in 2022. He has held research positions at Princeton University; St. John's College, Oxford; Corpus Christi College, Oxford; Rothermere American Institute, Oxford; Wolfson College, Cambridge; McNeil Center for Early American Studies, University of Pennsylvania; University of Florida; Villanova University; and Collegium Institute. He has also appeared on national television and radio programs.
He obtained his Ph.D. in History from King’s College, Cambridge, where he was a Cambridge Overseas Trust Scholar. He was a visiting graduate student in History at the Sorbonne in Paris and earned his M.Phil. with Distinction in Political Thought and Intellectual History at Cambridge. He graduated magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, and with departmental honors from Northwestern University with a B.A. in History and American Studies. He also received a Level 3 Award with Merit in Wines from the London-based Wine & Spirit Education Trust.
He lives in Southwest Florida with his wife, Janice Chik Breidenbach, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Ave Maria University, and their son.
He is the author of Our Dear-Bought Liberty: Catholics and Religious Toleration in Early America (Harvard University Press, 2021), runner-up for the 2022 Journal of the American Revolution Book of the Year Award. He is co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to the First Amendment and Religious Liberty (Cambridge University Press, 2020). Breidenbach’s writing has also appeared in The Atlantic, Washington Post, and First Things.
Dr. Breidenbach was elected Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in 2022. He has held research positions at Princeton University; St. John's College, Oxford; Corpus Christi College, Oxford; Rothermere American Institute, Oxford; Wolfson College, Cambridge; McNeil Center for Early American Studies, University of Pennsylvania; University of Florida; Villanova University; and Collegium Institute. He has also appeared on national television and radio programs.
He obtained his Ph.D. in History from King’s College, Cambridge, where he was a Cambridge Overseas Trust Scholar. He was a visiting graduate student in History at the Sorbonne in Paris and earned his M.Phil. with Distinction in Political Thought and Intellectual History at Cambridge. He graduated magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, and with departmental honors from Northwestern University with a B.A. in History and American Studies. He also received a Level 3 Award with Merit in Wines from the London-based Wine & Spirit Education Trust.
He lives in Southwest Florida with his wife, Janice Chik Breidenbach, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Ave Maria University, and their son.
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In colonial America, Catholics were presumed dangerous until proven loyal. Yet Catholics went on to sign the Declaration of Independence and helped to finalize the First Amendment to the Constitution. What explains this remarkable transformation? Michael Breidenbach shows how Catholic leaders emphasized their church’s own traditions—rather than Enlightenment liberalism—to secure the religious liberty that enabled their incorporation in American life.
Catholics responded to charges of disloyalty by denying papal infallibility and the pope’s authority to intervene in civil affairs. Rome staunchly rejected such dissent, but reform-minded Catholics justified their stance by looking to conciliarism, an intellectual tradition rooted in medieval Catholic thought yet compatible with a republican view of temporal independence and church-state separation. Drawing on new archival material, Breidenbach finds that early American Catholic leaders, including Maryland founder Cecil Calvert and members of the prominent Carroll family, relied on the conciliarist tradition to help institute religious toleration, including the Maryland Toleration Act of 1649.
The critical role of Catholics in establishing American church–state separation enjoins us to revise not only our sense of who the American founders were, but also our understanding of the sources of secularism. Church–state separation in America, generally understood as the product of a Protestant-driven Enlightenment, was in key respects derived from Catholic thinking. Our Dear-Bought Liberty therefore offers a dramatic departure from received wisdom, suggesting that religious liberty in America was not bestowed by liberal consensus but partly defined through the ingenuity of a persecuted minority.
politics, Washington’s conception of patriotism ought to be emulated in the modern Presidency in order to advance a transcendent form of patriotism.
The most influential Roman Catholics in the early American republic were Charles Carroll of Carrollton (1737-1832) and John Carroll (1735-1815). They were inheritors of the Maryland tradition, whose 1632 founding by Lord Baltimore promised religious toleration based on conciliarist principles, as well as the eighteenth-century conciliarist debates in which they were immersed as students in France, modern-day Belgium, and England. This political and intellectual history provides an unexplored context for American Catholic political and religious thought, and illuminates Catholic support of American religious and civil liberty, despite the anti-Catholic political culture in which they were situated. Charles Carroll of Carrollton was a member of the Continental Congress, the only Roman Catholic signer of the Declaration of Independence, and senator of the Maryland and U.S. senates, where he drafted and contributed to America’s most consequential laws on religious liberty. Carrollton’s political contributions, as well as those of other American and British Catholics who helped to codify civil and religious liberty, challenge preconceived accounts of Catholic loyalty and British liberty, and offer new context for understanding the original meanings of the First Amendment. John Carroll, a Jesuit priest, also wrote in public support of American independence and religious liberty, and joined Carrollton in a congressional mission to Canada to seek Roman Catholic assistance in the revolutionary cause. As America’s first Roman Catholic bishop, John Carroll was the principal architect of the Roman Catholic Church in the United States. His arguments against temporal interference from Rome ensured the institution of conciliarist practices, such as episcopal elections by national clergy, which would be consonant with American republicanism. The mark of the Carrolls’ imprimatur on this Catholic republicanism was evident in Tocqueville’s 1835 observation that American settlers had “escap[ed] from the authority of the Pope’, whose princely power was removed to create ‘conditions...more equal than in republics’. The legacy of the American conciliarist tradition continued through the twentieth century, when another American Jesuit, John Courtney Murray, invoked conciliarist principles in his defense of the Catholic Church’s modern declaration on religious liberty.
In colonial America, Catholics were presumed dangerous until proven loyal. Yet Catholics went on to sign the Declaration of Independence and helped to finalize the First Amendment to the Constitution. What explains this remarkable transformation? Michael Breidenbach shows how Catholic leaders emphasized their church’s own traditions—rather than Enlightenment liberalism—to secure the religious liberty that enabled their incorporation in American life.
Catholics responded to charges of disloyalty by denying papal infallibility and the pope’s authority to intervene in civil affairs. Rome staunchly rejected such dissent, but reform-minded Catholics justified their stance by looking to conciliarism, an intellectual tradition rooted in medieval Catholic thought yet compatible with a republican view of temporal independence and church-state separation. Drawing on new archival material, Breidenbach finds that early American Catholic leaders, including Maryland founder Cecil Calvert and members of the prominent Carroll family, relied on the conciliarist tradition to help institute religious toleration, including the Maryland Toleration Act of 1649.
The critical role of Catholics in establishing American church–state separation enjoins us to revise not only our sense of who the American founders were, but also our understanding of the sources of secularism. Church–state separation in America, generally understood as the product of a Protestant-driven Enlightenment, was in key respects derived from Catholic thinking. Our Dear-Bought Liberty therefore offers a dramatic departure from received wisdom, suggesting that religious liberty in America was not bestowed by liberal consensus but partly defined through the ingenuity of a persecuted minority.
politics, Washington’s conception of patriotism ought to be emulated in the modern Presidency in order to advance a transcendent form of patriotism.
The most influential Roman Catholics in the early American republic were Charles Carroll of Carrollton (1737-1832) and John Carroll (1735-1815). They were inheritors of the Maryland tradition, whose 1632 founding by Lord Baltimore promised religious toleration based on conciliarist principles, as well as the eighteenth-century conciliarist debates in which they were immersed as students in France, modern-day Belgium, and England. This political and intellectual history provides an unexplored context for American Catholic political and religious thought, and illuminates Catholic support of American religious and civil liberty, despite the anti-Catholic political culture in which they were situated. Charles Carroll of Carrollton was a member of the Continental Congress, the only Roman Catholic signer of the Declaration of Independence, and senator of the Maryland and U.S. senates, where he drafted and contributed to America’s most consequential laws on religious liberty. Carrollton’s political contributions, as well as those of other American and British Catholics who helped to codify civil and religious liberty, challenge preconceived accounts of Catholic loyalty and British liberty, and offer new context for understanding the original meanings of the First Amendment. John Carroll, a Jesuit priest, also wrote in public support of American independence and religious liberty, and joined Carrollton in a congressional mission to Canada to seek Roman Catholic assistance in the revolutionary cause. As America’s first Roman Catholic bishop, John Carroll was the principal architect of the Roman Catholic Church in the United States. His arguments against temporal interference from Rome ensured the institution of conciliarist practices, such as episcopal elections by national clergy, which would be consonant with American republicanism. The mark of the Carrolls’ imprimatur on this Catholic republicanism was evident in Tocqueville’s 1835 observation that American settlers had “escap[ed] from the authority of the Pope’, whose princely power was removed to create ‘conditions...more equal than in republics’. The legacy of the American conciliarist tradition continued through the twentieth century, when another American Jesuit, John Courtney Murray, invoked conciliarist principles in his defense of the Catholic Church’s modern declaration on religious liberty.