“Why, given America's patent religiosity, do leading Americans of every generation prophesy, fearfully or hopefully, a coming godlessness? … And why … have we not realized that they sound so similar … across the centuries?” (6) Such is the main intellectual puzzle motivating this volume, a collection of essays tracing the American penchant for predicting the nation's imminent secularization. The beginnings of this penchant run deep: Already, William Bradford, one of the original Pilgrim “Saints” who arrived aboard the Mayflower in 1620, became convinced that their piety would not survive among their offspring. According to this volume, his prognosis represents part of an overarching tradition — a powerful and resilient script — running the entire length of American cultural and religious history from its earliest colonial days: “the recurrent, and recurrently wrong, predictions of America's coming loss of faith …” (5)

Following the Introduction, these repetitive predictions are demonstrated through a series of chapters discussing particular individuals or small groups. The list comprises, among others, John Winthrop, Thomas Jefferson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Abraham Lincoln, William James, William Jennings Bryan, and most recently the sociologist Peter Berger and evangelical Christians such as Jerry Falwell and Billy Graham. Notably, insofar as the volume considers these figures “ideal-typical for ranges of thought in their eras” (8), it opens itself to several methodological objections: Why are the above names included and not others? If the stated goal is to map spiritual-intellectual trends, does it make sense to focus on individuals? For example, how much can Jefferson's vision of America's spiritual future, grounded as it was in his rather quirky blend of Deism, Unitarianism, and Enlightenment humanism, really tell us about any larger patterns in religious expectations of the early republican period?

Be that as it may, the commonality uniting the selected figures is easy to discern: All prophesied that America would undergo secularization. For some, including Winthrop or the contemporary evangelical Christians, this prospect was deeply troubling; others, such as Jefferson, welcomed it. Importantly, this does not mean that the latter group sought the end of religion per se: “Actual atheists,” Mathewes and Nichols warn, “have been few and far between in American history” (236). Rather, figures such as Jefferson expected merely the end of established religion — in order that true faith might flourish. In this vein, as one of the contributors aptly states, “Many American prophets of godlessness [in fact] understood themselves … to be prophesying godliness” (175).

This interesting insight reveals that by “secularization” Mathewes and Nichols signify a very discrete phenomenon: not the death of God, but only the decline of visible or public piety, that is, “religious deinstitutionalization.” (10) This definition is certainly valid and allows the authors to provide a fine catalogue of the phenomenon throughout American history, but it neglects that there exists another, subtler meaning of secularization: secularization as a process of transformation of medieval Christian eschatology into modern western consciousness. Elaborated by scholars such as Carl Schmitt, Karl Löwith, Carl Becker, and Ernest Lee Tuveson, this second definition revolves around the thesis that reason, progress, ideal society, and other constitutive categories of western political modernity are products of systematic structural derivation from their theological antecedents (faith, divine providence, kingdom of God) and effectively represent their secularized vestiges (see Schmitt, Political Theology; Löwith, Meaning in History; Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers; Tuveson, Millennium and Utopia. In the words of Becker, describing this dynamic in France around the time Jefferson served there as the American ambassador, “[T]he Philosophes demolished the Heavenly City of St. Augustine only to rebuild it with more up-to-date materials. (…) The picture of salvation in the Heavenly City … [was translated into the image] of a ‘future state’ … or a more generalized earthly and social félicité or perfectibilité du genre humain” (Heavenly City, 29–31, 48–49, 63).

Mathewes and Nichols make no mention of this alternative definition and the extensive scholarship surrounding it; they exclude it from their theoretical optic. This is a pity, for incorporating it would have enabled them to do more than simply compile a list of American prophesies of godlessness, which, in fact, does not even answer the “why” of their main research question. Does this list perhaps reveal any subtler patterns over time? For instance, as one moves from Puritans lamenting the perceived decay of traditional piety to Jefferson celebrating it, can one read the changing attitudes as indicative of the rise of a new kind of religion in which the American republic replaces the traditional church as its updated (enlightened, modernized, rationalized) iteration? In striving to lift authentic faith from underneath the dead weight of established religious institutions, was Jefferson hoping to harness it for his own religious project: the United States of America? After all, as he stated in the Declaration of Independence, the inalienable rights the republic was founded to secure had their ultimate origin in God. These are but some of the intriguing questions and possibilities that Prophesies of Godlessness might have explored but left untouched.