Continuing our round-up of the prizes and award announced at the recent meeting of the American Society for Legal History, we turn now to the William Nelson Cromwell Dissertation Prize ("awarded annually to the best dissertation in any area of American legal history, including constitutional and comparative studies").
This year's award went to Min Tae Cha (currently a Postdoctoral Fellow with the Nova Forum at the University of Southern California) for a dissertation titled “Constitutional Religion: Presbyterians between the British and American Empires” (Princeton University, 2023). The citation:
“Constitutional Religion” is an astonishingly ambitious project that seeks to refold religious ideas and practices into the history of Anglo-American constitutional thought. Following Presbyterians in the British Empire and the United States in the long nineteenth century, Cha reveals the extent to which debates within the Presbyterian Church over issues including disestablishment, constitution making, and empire, were not conducted in isolation. Rather, they were shaped by and in turn shaped broader political events. That Cha finds a mutually constitutive relationship between Church and State is not surprising. What commands our attention is Cha’s argument that intertwined religious and political developments -- particularly disestablishment -- led to the creation of a “fiscal-missionary” church in the long nineteenth century. In an age of revolutions, immigration, and imperial expansion, Presbyterians scrambled to win souls and organize increasingly far-flung congregations. One striking result of this was ecclesiastical constitution making, which existed in a dialectical relationship with more familiar forms of secular constitution making. Skillfully tracing this process through close readings of underutilized religious sources, Cha shows how Presbyterians deployed written constitutions in order to mobilize congregants across the globe in the face of sectarian conflict. From Scotland to the United States to the Antipodes, Presbyterian lay people and clergy searched for solutions to pressing institutional problems, often settling upon older religious ideas and practices. Indeed, Cha deftly places Presbyterian constitutionalism within a much longer tradition of religious constitutionalism, Catholic and Protestant alike, even as he elucidates how the unique pressures of modernity required creative adaptations. He likewise connects centuries-old religious thought and praxis to processes of globalization and colonization. Through painstaking archival work, he traces the movement of people, practices, and ideas across oceans, and thereby makes a case for the broader significance of Presbyterian constitutional thought. Congratulations to Min Tae Cha!-- Karen Tani
