Historians, legal scholars, and the general public—not to mention befuddled foreigners—have long been fascinated with the relationship between religion and politics in American society. And why not? The notion of forming a government that would function without the support of an established religion, or vice versa, was utterly unprecedented in Western society. The First Amendment, which mandated that the government stay out of the religion business, has proved remarkably resilient, and this despite various assaults that continue to the present. As Frank Lambert points out in Religion in American Politics, however, none of this means that religion has not influenced policy in the course of American history.

Lambert argues that religious individuals and coalitions have sought by political means to circumvent the Constitution by agitating for “a national religious establishment, or, more specifically, a Christian civil religion” (5). He also notes that “religion in American politics is contested” and that “any religious group's attempt to represent the nation's religious heritage or claim to be its moral conscience is sure to be met with opposition from other religious groups as well as from nonreligious parties” (6).

Lambert, a fine historian who has worked extensively in the colonial period, spends surprisingly little time with the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries before moving on to the formation of the new nation. The Great Awakening, he points out, introduced sectarianism to American society, but a bit more attention to the religious pluralism in the Middle Colonies, especially New York and Pennsylvania, might have provided a better background for understanding the genesis of the First Amendment. The author refers to James Madison's confidence that a plethora of religious sects “would be an effective guarantor of religious freedom” (31) and notes that Thomas Jefferson, a deist, received support from Baptists in the bitterly contested election of 1800 because of Jefferson's support for the separation of church and state.

By the early nineteenth century, various religious groups organized to influence policy. When Congress passed a law in 1810 requiring the delivery of mail on Sundays, Federalist clergy pounced on what they regarded as a desecration of the Sabbath and launched a campaign that finally ended such deliveries by mid-century. The arrival of Roman Catholics in large numbers presented new challenges not only to Protestant hegemony but to the political process itself. Andrew Carnegie's Gospel of Wealth prompted the emergence of a counter ideology, the Social Gospel, in the decades surrounding the turn of the twentieth century.

Lambert plows familiar terrain with the Scopes trial and the fundamentalist-modernist controversy early in the twentieth century (although he unaccountably links C. I. Scofield with the holiness movement). When he turns to religious liberalism, Lambert mentions changing attitudes toward missions in the late 1940s but fails to note the landmark 1932 study Re-Thinking Missions that prompted the shift. His treatment of the civil rights struggle is informed and thorough, and the final two chapters address the Religious Right and the Religious Left, respectively. Whether or not the “Religious Left” is mature or cohesive enough to warrant its own chapter might invite further discussion, and Lambert stumbles when he rehearses the discredited “abortion myth,” the fiction that the Religious Right coalesced as a political movement in response to the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision.

Religion in American Politics is a useful survey, not least because Lambert seeks to probe beyond some of the shopworn examples of religious and political entanglements, albeit with mixed results. He mentions the Ghost Dance of the late nineteenth century, for example, but he curiously fails to examine the Taos Blue Lake debacle, when the United States Forest Service commandeered 48,000 acres of Native lands, including Pueblo sacred sites, for inclusion into Kit Carson National Forest in 1906, a grievance that was not redressed until 1970. Lambert also undermines his credibility with occasional lapses in attention to detail. He traces the history of the Moral Majority to the “early 1970s” (190), although it was not established until 1979; in successive sentences, he misses by a year both the crucial Green v. Connally decision and the revocation of Bob Jones University's tax exemption (the real catalyst for the Religious Right). He writes that Time magazine (not Newsweek) declared 1976 “The Year of the Evangelical,” and he identifies Riverside Church in New York City as “nondenominational” (American Baptist and United Church of Christ). Other attributions may not be so much wrong as they are open for debate: the use of the term “liberal Democrat” to describe both John F. Kennedy and Jimmy Carter, and the lumping of Ronald Sider into the Religious Left.

These are cavils, of course, but they have the unfortunate effect of compromising the integrity of what is otherwise a very impressive book. In the concluding sentence of Religion in American Politics, Lambert writes: “Two hundred and twenty years after the new republic's birth, critics of both the Religious Right and the Religious Left think the [founders] were right to keep religion out of national politics” (250).

Few thoughtful readers will contest that statement.