In summing up Woodrow Wilson's legacy, author Barry Hankins maintains that Wilson's was a life permeated by Calvinist Presbyterianism. Thus Hankins's biography, Woodrow Wilson: Ruling Elder, Spiritual President, finds a place in Oxford University Press's series of Spiritual Lives.

Hankins tells the story of the secularization of Wilson's thinking. Wilson did not lose faith in the God of his fathers (all Presbyterian divines), but separated the realm of religion from the domain of science; he could detach believing from knowing. The book emphasizes some Calvinist elements over others, calling and covenant, for example, rather than election and predestination, claiming that the first two features had practical consequences in Wilson's life and gave him the basis for his views on public order and social coherence. Though Wilson emphasized dignity and decorum in religion, he managed to shift from Old School to New School Presbyterianism by endorsing a voluntary notion of religion and human agency, effectively pushing theology and doctrine into the background. In doing this he was able first to follow, and then to lead, Christian academic institutions towards a nonsectarian identity and ultimately secularize them.

While a student at Princeton, Wilson abandoned all providential explanations. He dismantled the carefully crafted Scottish Common-Sense tradition that combined orthodox Calvinist beliefs with Enlightenment ideals, separating these aspects from each other in order to put science to work in his general plan for improving the world. For Wilson, Christianity and democracy were closely identified.

Wilson's conception was that the state should protect the individual's space and allow for free interactions in society. This removed any privileged position that the church may have held, and consigned it to being just one of the voluntary organizations which could, at best, contribute to a moral climate.

When Princeton hired Wilson, some old-school trustees worried whether he was orthodox enough. He quieted their doubts by subscribing to the key principle of Christ's atonement in a personal statement, and then proceeded to set the college on a course to scientific enquiry and service to the nation. Princeton's goal became achieving academic excellence instead of training students in a Presbyterian worldview. Wilson's wish to be included in the Ivy League opened the door to more diversity of opinion and worldview. Hankins ponders whether this meant that Princeton essentially stopped being Christian and whether a broader concept of the religion robs Christianity of its intellectual role and limits its function to morality.

The book does not elaborate on how Wilson took a turn toward politics. Wilson rose to political prominence, first as the Democratic governor of New Jersey in 1910, and two years later as President of the US. In the 1912 campaign Wilson showed that he had distanced himself from another crucial Presbyterian element: the gravity of sin. In fact, his opponent, Theodore Roosevelt, who was less explicitly pious, took human depravity much more seriously than did Wilson.

Wilson's move away from traditional to liberal Presbyterianism allowed him to become one of the most idealistic Presidents who could dress up common, practical goals as instruments of the divine. He initially held the lofty idea that the mission of the US was to mediate between the belligerents in the Great War until it dawned upon him that Germany would not comply. After Wilson shifted his position to propose that the US engage in armed intervention in the war, a true battle of the Bible took place with his fellow Presbyterian, Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan, over Old Testament prophecies. Wilson's vilification of the enemy as less than human became a dominant theme of his administration, overtaking the Calvinist notion that all people are sinful, including Wilson. For sin he did, as evidenced by his years-long affair with Mrs. Mary Allen (Hulbert) Peck.

The biography does not relate all the events in Wilson's life to his spirituality. Hankins illustrates, for example, how Wilson's affair with Mrs. Peck showed the President's romantic Christianity, which he was able to use in this case to justify the embrace of other women. Hankins explains this weakness as an outlet for Wilson's passion for an irregular life. Perhaps it could be better explained as Wilson's turn towards immanence, an idea current at the time that political progressivism reflected God's will. Wilson's wartime vilification of Germany was soon replaced by a lofty internationalism promising international equality. His fellow negotiators at Versailles blamed Wilson's Presbyterian religion for his vagueness, but it was probably more his temperament than the content of his proposals that caused them to react that way.

At Wilson's funeral the minister praised Wilson's faith as the “spirituality of religion,” meaning that Wilson had adapted Calvinist principles to suit his own idealism. What Wilson had done in fact, was to strip the Presbyterian tradition and render it toothless. In the end this compelling and well-written biography shows how Wilson's political decisions were the logical outcome of his loss of theological balance.