The culture wars of recent decades have often animated the writing of history, shaping historical debates, and framing historical narratives. The currency of these cultural divides has thus underwritten untold research endeavors, especially on the origins of the United States and whether the American founding was Christian or secular in nature. The question's relevance is immediate, bearing directly on our understanding of the First Amendment's religion clauses and how we conceive the relationship between church and state, and religion and politics. It is a question with which Daniel L. Dreisbach and Mark David Hall are impatient in their edited collection of essays, Faith and the Founders of the American Republic.

Dreisbach and Hall forgo the contest between Christian- and secular-nation advocates as obscuring the subtleties of the American founding by caricaturing the founders in the terms of a false dichotomy. This includes many oft-labeled Deist founders such as Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, George Washington, John Adams, and Benjamin Franklin. These famous founders appear in Darren Staloff's “Deism and the Founders” and Greg Frazer's “Gouverneur Morris and Theistic Rationalism in the Founding.” Both essays distinguish Deists who rejected Christianity from moderate rationalists who reconciled it with reason by downplaying or modifying select Christian teachings. Both essays place these famous founders in the moderate camp, Unitarian or some variant thereof. Central tenets include an ethical, providential God active in human affairs, revelation subject to reason, an afterlife of rewards and punishment, and the importance of organized religion for civic well being. This providential rationalism yielded not a Deist polity shorn of all Christian moorings, but a broad religiosity of theistic morality anchoring a self- governing civil society.

Yet Dreisbach and Hall peer well beyond the small cadre of founders who attract the most attention and whom they discussed in a previous volume edited with Jeffry H. Morrison (The Founders on God and Government, Rowman and Littlefield, 2004). Elaborating on an earlier collaboration (Forgotten Founders on Religion and Public Life), Dreisbach and Hall divide Faith and the Founders into two parts. The first is thematic, illustrating “how different religious traditions” influenced “or were viewed by” the founders. The second is biographical, featuring “‘forgotten founders’ who made salient contributions” to the Republic. Central motifs of the two parts overlap. Staloff's providential theism is echoed in Jane E. Calvert's profile of John Dickinson, whom Calvert credits with articulating an originally Quaker insight of a perpetual yet amendable constitution.

Similarly, Hall's thematic look at “The Influence of the Reformed Tradition in the American Founding” anticipates Gary Scott Smith's essay on John Hancock and Jonathan Den Hartog's account of Elias Boudinot. All three highlight the congruity between Reformed and republican commitments in the founding. Notions of limited government, consent, federalism, and resistance to unjust rulers, Hall reminds, pervaded Reformed political thinking long before the Enlightenment, some of whose luminaries preferred centralized power; and the Constitution and Bill of Rights were products of communities populated by Reformed leaders who hardly envisioned a strictly secular political order. Related parallels link other essays. In “Religion and the Loyalists,” Robert M. Calhoon and Ruma Chopra show how diverging religious sensibilities emerging out the Great Awakening — Old Light turned Anglican and New Light turned Separatist Baptist – informed opposition to or support of the Patriot cause decades later. Joe L. Coker elaborates on this theme in recounting Baptist contributions to religious liberty in the founding.

Five other essays comprise the volume. Jonathan D. Sassi shows religious assertions of racial differences justifying slavery and Native-American rebellion, while religious views of a universal humanity encouraged abolition and attempts to convert Natives to Christianity. Two other essays concern how the founders viewed (rather than were influenced by) select religious traditions. This shift in perspectives admits non-Christian faiths into the discussion. Thomas S. Kidd considers Islam. He surveys the founders' rhetorical use of the religion as a symbolic antithesis of republicanism, similar to their pre-French alliance use of Catholicism, though he does not eagerly probe this rhetoric in relation to geo-political realities. David G. Dalin's essay on Judaism is more nuanced. In showing how several famous founders, Jefferson excepted, spoke positively of Judaism (Adams) and Jews (Hamilton and Washington), Dalin suggests that early American Jews contributed to religious freedom and, more broadly, that the scriptural notion of ethical monotheism informed the political culture of the Republic's inception.

This brings us to the overall impact of Faith and the Founders. The notion of a providential God who through scripture provides moral aids to, and models, republican government informs much of the volume. In “The Bible and the Political Culture of the American Founding,” Dreisbach suggests that this ethical theism was the founding's overlapping consensus, joining Reformed, evangelical, and moderate rationalists alike. The result is a broadly theistic, rather than a strictly Christian or secular, founding. Den Hartog offers similar reflections. He describes a religious ethic “preserving the state” by pervading civil society, but “without any formal tie to the instruments of civil power” (269). It's a Tocquevillian vision, with shared norms of theistic morality generating social capital for a largely self-governing society. Yet it's a vision not easily appropriated by a later age when civil power inhabits so much of civil society. The editors seem accepting of this difficulty, at least here, citing “contemporary questions of jurisprudence and politics” as “a matter we leave for another day” (7). For those whom this disappoints, it helps remind that church-state history written as policy guide is too often politicized history. Donald L. Drakeman implies as much in “The Antifederalists and Religion.” We distort the founders in demanding they provide clear constitutional answers to church-state questions, Drakeman contends, because they did not see most church-state issues “as contentious federal issues” (137). The role of religion in the founding was simply too nuanced to be encapsulated in a single metaphor, principle, or policy-driven narrative.