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When the United States Department of State abruptly announced that Shintō would be disestablished as a state religion about a month into the Occupation, it placed the occupiers in an awkward position. Presurrender orders had said that they were to proclaim religious freedom for all, but their new mandate demanded that they target a particular religion for eradication. Their task was complicated not only because it was hard to guarantee universal religious freedom while simultaneously abolishing a particular religion, but also because Japan technically had no state religion in law. In fact, the constitution of 1889 had included a clear, if circumscribed, guarantee of religious freedom. Turning to religious studies experts for guidance in how to solve this dilemma, Civil Information & Education Section official William K. Bunce settled on using the previously obscure academic concept of "State Shintō" to create a vision of “bad secularism” against which the occupiers’ concept of religious freedom (“good secularism”) could be juxtaposed. This endeavor initiated a years-long collaborative process that enrolled both Japanese thought leaders and American officials in redefining religious freedom as a universal human right.

Although many professional observers have treated Japanese governance in the early twentieth century as unusually oppressive, in actuality Japanese practices of religious freedom under the Meiji Constitution (in effect 1890–1945) were quite normal insofar as they exhibited the typical functioning of secularist governance. The religion/not-religion distinction established in Japanese constitutional law prompted ongoing anxiety about how to properly separate religion from other aspects of social and political life. This uncertainty prompted a range of stakeholders to weigh in on the vexing question of whether compulsory participation in shrine rites constituted infringement on the constitutional right to religious liberty. Although there are documented cases of the Japanese state cracking down on religious minorities throughout the Meiji constitutional period, the debates over shrine rites reveal that the claim that the Meiji constitutional regime lacked religious freedom has little defensible historical basis. The upshot is not that the Meiji constitutional regime was benign, but rather that its method of distinguishing between religion and not-religion is similar to the secularist governance of religion in other times and places. The disturbing takeaway is that the Meiji constitutional regime looks familiar rather than peculiar: Secularist politics, not theocracy, created Japan's draconian police work and coercive ceremonialism.

Scholars of religion eagerly took up the Occupation mandate to foster "a desire for religious freedom" in the Japanese populace. These efforts can be seen in three postwar concepts that have deeply structured the postwar academic study of Japanese religions, but that have also had global reach. The concept of "new religions" was born out of Occupation-era collaborations between representatives of marginal religious movements, military government officials, and scholars of religion as a way of protecting the rights of some minority religions by avoiding pejorative terms such as “superstition” (meishin), “lascivious heresies” (inshi jakyō), and “upstart religions” (shinkō shūkyō). In translation, the concept of “new religions” went on to become a broadly accepted category in the global religious studies academy. Similarly, the postwar notion of "Buddhist war responsibility" helped to structure the widespread expectation that Buddhism, more than other religions, is inherently politically progressive and indisputably pacifist. Finally, the concept of "State Shintō" served as an early example of a "perversion of faith," a problematic framing device that dominates "countering violent extremism" initiatives to this day.

A widespread post-World War II narrative suggests that American occupiers liberated Japan by bringing the universal principle of religious freedom to a country captive to the particularist religion of “State Shintō.” But this chapter shows that by identifying Japan as the problem and religious freedom as a solution, the triumphalist Occupation narrative fails to account for the coercive qualities and historical particularities of religious freedom practice. Arguing that religious freedom is not an ethereal principle that is introduced to a nation or applied to a situation, the chapter suggests instead that freeing religion is a mundane project subject to political machination and discursive manipulation. Parties involved in this project include political leaders, policy makers, clerical authorities, and scholars of religion, all of whom “make” religion in order to free it.