Gregg Frazer’s book is a valuable contribution to political theorists and historians seeking to understand how the American Founders selectively revised orthodox religious beliefs into a new civic religion identified as “theistic rationalism.” Frazer was compelled to research and write this book because “we are so invested in the Founders [today] that, in an effort to agree with them, we too often make them agree with us” (p. 1). In an attempt to explain the Founders on their terms, Frazer’s work has four major goals: first, to clarify the Founders’ religious affiliations based on their “private correspondence, diary entries, and personal memoranda” (pp. ix–xi); second, to understand how the Founders’ religious beliefs informed “their political actions” (p. ix); third, to juxtapose the arguments conveyed by “patriotic” and erudite “preachers” supporting the American Revolution and their “affinity” with political leaders (p. ix-x); and fourth, to reconcile contemporary disagreements “over the relationship between church and state” (p. x). The author has taken on an arduous historiographical challenge, which has resulted in a lucid and efficacious work of scholarship.

In the Religious Beliefs of America’s Founders, Frazer adopts a “balanced view” between the “secular camp,” comprised mostly of scholars who too often identify the Founders as deists, and the “Christian America camp,” which consists of “Christian school and home school movements,” guided largely by an “evangelical Christian subculture” determined to convince themselves and others that the nation’s origin is based on Christianity (pp. 2–3). He provides serious thinking about the reformulation of orthodox Christianity leading up to the revolution. By excavating and engaging with secondary and primary sources, Frazer is successful in providing the historian with a new perspective in understanding the often tenuous connections made by educated ministers and the elite Founders they influenced in sculpting a religious belief system, “a revolt against Calvinism” (p. 6), compatible with revolutionary political theory. Frazer’s new perspective identifies key Founders not as Christians but as a group who constructed a new “hybrid belief system” that mixed “elements of natural religion [and] Christianity,” with “rationalism as the predominant element” (p. 14). In other words, these “theistic rationalists” denied every fundamental doctrine of Christianity as it was defined and understood in their day” by extolling greater allegiance to reason and maintaining only those sections of Scripture that corresponded to reason. Deism fails to adequately identify the key Founders’ religious beliefs as well because they did not believe in a remote and detached God, including Jefferson, whom the author cites a number of times to support this conclusion. Indeed, there were Christian and deistic ingredients that the key Founders maintained, enough that they “could still sound Protestant when talking politics” (p. 21).

Frazer’s “balanced view” of the key Founders’ “theistic rationalism” is largely the result of influential theologians. The strands that connect these individuals and the beliefs of key Founders included their giving superiority to reason over revelation when the two conflict, and their embracing moral unity (Unitarianism) that transcended any specific sect or denomination. Reason, rationality, and naturalism served as the nexus that could jettison religious dogmas and herald an enlightened humanism while holding onto select ingredients of the past: belief in God as a listener and an intervener in human affairs. Frazer is successful in illustrating how these beliefs contributed to the “secularization” of America, the “differentiation” (p. 46) of religious and civil realms, and the infusion of political theories supporting social contract, the separation of church and state, and religious toleration.

Amid details that reveal major inconsistencies between what was being uttered among the revolutionary pulpits and orthodox Christianity, Frazer takes deists and the Christian America camp to task by illustrating the influence of Lockean theory in the statements of educated ministers. He contrasts deist beliefs and orthodox Christian Scripture with the ministers’ “almost ubiquitous” (p. 87) use of Locke’s vision of the state of nature, consent of the governed, law of self-preservation, popular sovereignty, self-determination, social contract, accountable rulers, purpose of government, natural rights, Locke’s notion of liberty, majority rule, republican government, resistance to tyranny, and the way in which these political theories are inconsistent with, if not outright antithetical to, Christian orthodoxy. By providing a hermeneutical analysis of ministers’ sermons, Frazer successfully illustrates how their oratory was consumed by “the principles of liberal democracy,” which “became a prism through which Scripture was read” (p. 81). In contrast, “Calvin taught the opposite of revolutionary theory and made it abundantly clear that rebellion was never justified” (p. 83).

After laying the groundwork illustrating how the educated and “nonconformist” ministers discarded “the elements of orthodox Christianity that could not be reconciled with reason (p. 106), the author explicates the intellectual linkages with these ministers and their impact on John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Gouverneur Morris, James Wilson, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and George Washington. On the basis of extensive analysis of these Founders’ statements, Frazer resurrects evidence that “religion, regardless of specifics, was vital” for a “free society because of the moralizing effect it had on the people.” In fact, toleration was necessary to prevent “religious wars in America,” which “was consistent with the text and original understanding of the First Amendment” (p. 213).

Frazer locates theistic rationalist thinking not only in the “theological justification and support for revolution” (p. 214) but also in the text of founding documents, including the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, the Constitution and Constitutional Convention debates, the Federalist Papers, and the Northwest Ordinance. Discrete passages are reviewed to illustrate that the key Founders fully supported ecumenical thinking without subscribing to a particular sect or dogma, and primarily for utilitarian purposes. In the end, it is this theistic rationalism—a “consensus among Protestants, Catholics, Jews, and even nonbelievers . . . that religion, meaning morality, was essential to democratic institutions”—that contributed to America’s “civil religion,” which “still thrives today” (pp. 227–28). As a succinct ending, Frazer quotes the Senate’s 1797 ratification of “a treaty with Tripoli,” wherein it is “stipulated that ‘the government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion,’ and the treaty was approved ‘without protest’ and ‘without a single dissenting vote,’” but neither were the Founders “irreligious or deists or hostile to religion.” Rather, they intended to erect “a purely secular state with no connection between the [federal] government and religion” (p. 234).

The Religious Beliefs of America’s Founders is a solid and well-researched book that is packed with controversial issues that will assuredly stir discussion among contending schools of thought on the purposes of America’s Founding generation. Although Frazer sprinkles the influence of Whig ideology in a few pages, including the influence of Joseph Priestley, I wonder if the radical Whigs, many of whom were theologians, could have been given a stronger presence in the book, particularly since they had as much, if not more, influence on the key Founders’ political thinking. Also absent is a discussion of Locke’s Letter on Toleration, which would have been a useful addition. Nevertheless, Frazer has the big picture correct and successfully helps us understand the specific nature of theistic rationalism as a better descriptor of America’s key Founders. His book will go a long way in keeping ideologues honest.