Inventing a Christian America argues against three trends. One is that of popular writers in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries who redefined the “founding fathers” as pious Protestants. Another is the sense in American culture that the character of the “Christian nation” is reflected in the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. Last is scholarship on the North American colonies and early national United States that defines the Revolution and its nation-building aftermath, like the 1787 federal convention, as consequences of changes in colonial religion between 1730 and 1765. The author's sources range from the Declaration and the Constitution to sermons and the convention transcript, to journalism and legal scholarship of the early to mid-nineteenth century. Each of the three parts of his argument deserve consideration.

The argument against popular writers is an easy success for Steven K. Green. Anyone familiar with documents concerning George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and peers would deny that they were pious Protestants. They were religious rationalists outside evangelical Protestantism. At most, they believed that Christ articulated a near-perfect ethics and that Protestant churches could helpfully promote order if they steered clear of enthusiasm and irrationalism. The pietization of these men has more to do with us than them. Yet reading the present into the past has been part of Christianity since its inception. A providential sense of history led apostolic-era, medieval, and early modern Christians to project the New Testament backwards into such unlikely candidates as the Greeks, the Romans, and the Israelites. In our time, the Spartans have received the same treatment in popular culture. In the period Green studies, abolitionists were projecting the Christian Bible into “primitive” Africans. Today when scholars encounter a figure like saintly George Washington, we often perceive a lack of education and lack of self-reflection among the promulgators. The figure reflects nostalgia for a state that never existed. Yet the providential sense of history has a dose of optimism in it. The Reformation and the Civil Rights movement each encouraged a vision of the present in the past that motivated countless people to move ahead. These comments are not meant to justify manifestly inaccurate conceptions of the past, but only to note that common-man's and common-woman's providentialism has internal logic that is sometimes progressive.

Belief in the “Christian nation” with foundational documents reflecting Protestantism is a harder target for Green, but he hits near the bull's eye. Religion was sparse in U.S. foundational documents, but not absent. Green notes the deistic language used to describe God—far from the vocabularies of evangelical Calvinism and free-will Protestantism. Yet deism, like the Enlightenment, had an evangelical thrust. Jefferson, Philip Freneau, and Thomas Paine imagined deism as democratic religion that would surely spread as the impostures of inherited religion were banished and ordinary men and women perceived God in nature, not in a book. The foundational documents were to create, then limit in power, a federal government that would foster democratic religion. Slippage occurred since Jefferson and company understood Christianity as an inherited obfuscation that democrats would jettison, as they had sumptuary laws, primogeniture, and similar outdated traditions. Green is correct that the federal government was conceived in 1787 as a secular government separated from established religion. Still, he omits germane elements of the situation. Church establishments and religious tests for office survived in the states, where political action was believed to be most powerful and most relevant to ordinary people. Many Americans welcomed—even sometimes insisted upon—the separation of church and state not because they wanted secularism, but because they wanted protection of religion from the majority or a minority that was locally powerful. Jefferson preferred federal governance that would encourage deism through education, while the Baptists wanted federal governance that would allow their own form of evangelical Calvinism to thrive. That necessitated secular government, but the goal was not secularism. A good example of a religious figure who gives Green trouble is Elhanan Winchester. Winchester moved from the established Congregational Church to a Baptist church to the Universalists. Winchester was subject to withering criticism from Baptists for his apostasy. The concept of “separation of church and state” is only a rough tool to use to help us understand those who feared religious power aimed from a variety of points at their own faith and practices. Religion crept into the founding era in other ways that Green slights. For example, some of his sources use the word “liberal” to describe government. In the late eighteenth century, “liberal” had no connotation of “libertarian,” “secular,” or “a-religious.” “Liberal” meant “impartial” and “charitable.” In religion, “liberal” described the impartial God of the deists, who beneficently gave creation to all humankind without any limited covenant, chosen people, or, indeed, theologians, hermeneuticians, philologists, paleographers, and other pedants. Liberal government was not what we would consider secular government. As Green rightly points out, between about 1800 and 1830, the federal government was hijacked by Christian nationalists, for example, Joseph Story. The “invention” and the “myth” of Green's title stem from those years. Government became neither liberal in the eighteenth-century sense nor secular in a twentieth-century or twenty-first-century sense.

Scholarship on American religion survives Green's counterargument, although he pinpoints a flaw. Green states that scholars made unsupportable connections between the First Great Awakening and the American Revolution. The achievement of the scholarship, with its plateau of excellence in the 1960s and 1970s, was an argument about reorientation in religious experience and reorganization of religious institutions favoring ordinary men and ordinary women instead of social elites or representatives of an established church or orthodox theology. It was more than assertion of a line from Awakening to Revolution. Dissent has been as much of the Christian tradition as has providentialism. Conditions in the North American English colonies encouraged dissent to spawn dissent, although this was challenged by the establishment and by the orthodox. American Puritans were not democrats but they were dissenters and, despite themselves, they fomented dissent. Scholars identified a dissenting impulse in eighteenth-century separate Baptist churches, new forms of preaching, and new rhetorics available to common folk. Even if by the 1770s men like Washington and Jefferson had entered the colonial social elite, they were commoners from a European perspective and dissenters against much of European culture. They favored deism and republicanism. Dissent was political in resistance to British imperial power as well as, later, in separation of church and state. In his 1775 oration on reconciliation between Great Britain and the resisting colonies, Edmund Burke described American patriotism as “the dissidence of dissent and the Protestantism of the Protestant religion.” The religious face of American patriotism was displayed by ministers who preached that Armageddon had arrived in the 1770s, that the War of Independence was a step toward the millennium. Indeed, the same logic was applied to early conflict over the Atlantic slave trade, showing that religion is not easily excised from social, economic, and political matters as we study the eighteenth-century Anglo-American sphere. However, Green notes a trend in scholarship in the history of American religion that began in the late 1970s and muddied the field, though surely that was unintentional. It was the effort to identify one feature of the varied religious landscape of colonial American religion as the most important trigger of the American Revolution. The apocalyptic interpretation of the Seven Years’ War fit the bill. Once arguments commenced about which religious cause was most influential, then it took only a small step to minimize religion as a cause.

Inventing a Christian America thus proffers state-of-the-art skepticism about both the pietization of the founders and the scholarship of a generation ago on eighteenth-century North American religion. It also provides a reliable account of Christian nationalism in the early nineteenth century.