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Michael McNally

Michael D. McNally is the John M. and Elizabeth W. Musser Professor of Religion and Director of American Studies at Carleton College.  He is author, most recently, of Defend the Sacred: Native American Religious Freedom beyond the First Amendment (Princeton University Press, 2020) along with law review articles exploring the intersection of Native American claims in U.S. Law to sacred places, practices, objects, and ancestral remains.

Essays

Doctrine of Discovery, Then and Now

European thinkers in early modernity, John Locke chief among them, looked to Europe’s encounter with Indigenous peoples and pored over the developing body of “native information” to lay the foundation of a political order not derived from Scripture or Church Authority but from presumptively secular natural rights and reason of “the people.”  

Why Not Religious Freedom?

Like the advocates I follow, I don’t ask what religious freedom really means; I ask what it can mean.