The preamble to the treaty signed in 1797 between the United States of America and the piratical state of Tripolitania asserts that the government of the United States ‘is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion’. Even at the time, but with increasing stridency since, numerous writers have argued just the opposite -- that America is a Christian nation and that its government -- in origin, form and purpose -- reflects and promotes Christian values, or ought to. To many Europeans and virtually all serious historians the myth-making involved in such claims, and its cultural-political intent, are so obvious as to require little further commentary. Steven Green's uneven book conveys attempts to breathe life into its subject through an ambitious mission statement: ‘because Americans lack a common ethnicity or extensive heritage, our founding myth is more important than it is for most other peoples. Unlike other peoples and nations that can rely on centuries of gradual development, Americans must rely on their founding as a nation for their identity’ (p. 16). Conceptual objections to such a statement, for example that all nations are ‘imagined communities’, form no part of the book's design. The analysis eschews discussions of comparators such as Israel, a multi-ethnic state, with a clear founding moment and plenty of religion, wherein the issues in play in modern American culture wars are approached differently. Nevertheless within its chosen parameters Green's book offers a brisk guide to the terminology and methodology of the contemporary polemical literature concerning Christian nationalism in America. Green identifies and decries ‘proof-texting’ -- the act of wrenching an isolated statement (such as Joel Barlow's above) out of context and rhetorical usage. He scrutinises ‘accommodationists’ -- writers who argue that the belief systems of figures such as Franklin and Jefferson are not representative of the Founding Fathers as a whole and that their views have been afforded undue influence. He offers a sensible general commentary on the religious beliefs of America's political leaders and a good discussion of arguments made during ‘the Founding’ for and against establishing religious tests for government officials, and discusses the relationship of such debates to government-sponsored acts of commemoration and worship.

Inventing a Christian America seems to be aimed at a general rather than a specialist readership and it is in many ways an artefact of the campaign within America's ‘culture wars’ that it seeks to analyse. Accordingly Green's analysis suggests that Americans, especially academics, have paid both too little and too much attention to the impress of religion on the nation's origins. The text is littered with the corpses of straw men. The opening chapter engages Puritan New England. Dismissing arguments that surely have no traction outside Christian nationalism (that Puritans valued modern standards of religious toleration or even religious freedom), Green turns to the relationship between Church and State in early New England. There Church and State were indeed ‘technically separate’ (p. 26). But, in a technicality that the text does not address, voting in colony-wide elections, holding colonial office or serving as a magistrate were restricted to full church members. Hence it is less surprising than Green thinks that ‘officials’ – who are they? -- wrote and enforced law that attempted to capture God's word. Green concludes that they did so to ensure ‘conformity’ (pp. 26–7). Paradoxically, this swipe at the equally vacuous theme of ‘freedom’ in modern American Christian nationalist literature sets up conformity as a straw man. After all what religion, what law code, is value-free and designed to promote non-compliance? To ask these questions is not to pay too little attention to religion. A clumsily selective approach to historiography also sets up straw men. In an eyebrow-raising passage Gary Nash figures alongside Clinton Rossiter, Alan Heimert and William McLoughlin as a mid twentieth-century ‘successor’ to Perry Miller interested in challenging ‘the standard account’ that Americans were inspired by ideology to join the patriot cause by stressing the role of religion (p. 104). (It is not clear which standard account Green has in mind and the work by Nash cited in the endnotes is his pot-boiling The unknown American revolution, published in 2005). The argument seems to be that Green's unlikely pantheon have substituted in their accounts of the causes of the American Revolution the religiosity of a Great Awakening for republican ‘ideology’ and, by so doing, have given aid and comfort to Christian nationalists. Yet, as Green's précis makes clear, Nash's argument is that revivalist ministries helped bring into focus emergent and unruly class antagonisms which challenged social hierarchies and made social upheaval more likely. Religion alone did not ‘cause’ the American Revolution and neither Nash, nor any of the writers corralled by Green has ever argued that it did. In such passages Green indulges in some proof-texting of his own. Meanwhile, a good proof-reader might have caught some factual errors. James Burgh wrote Political disquisitions not Political disquietations (p. 54). The University of Pennsylvania was not formerly known as the ‘University’ of Philadelphia (p. 76).

In contrast to the introverted exceptionalism of Inventing a Christian America, Emily Conroy-Krutz offers a transnational and implicitly comparative discussion of an aspect of Protestant triumphalism in nineteenth-century America. Formed in 1810, around the time when the myth of America's religious founding took hold, the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) reflected and promoted the values of what Conroy-Krutz dubs America's ‘Christian imperialism’. In this world-view Evangelical Christians were transnational figures engaged in a global struggle to establish God's kingdom. America's Evangelicals consciously emulated their British counterparts out of shared conviction but also for reasons of national pride (American values were at least as enlightened as British values). In the rhetoric and practice of American missionary activity ‘empire’, even ‘colony,’ were not necessarily dirty words since such governmental forms could or should be the means through which the world's population might be improved and refashioned. 1,300 Americans, only 400 of them ordained, volunteered their services as missionaries before 1860. Conroy-Krutz's study of the ABCFM uncovers imperialism in a country, the United States, and an age, pre-1898, presumed to be non-imperial.

Conroy-Krutz handles the similarities and differences between formal colonies and settler missions with sensitivity. Both forms hoped to repopulate colonial spaces with civilised people (p. 104): the former through the large-scale emigration of settlers, the latter through the conversion of indigenous people. The resistance of indigenous peoples to acculturation through, for example, dress codes or prescribed gender roles, and also the racialised stereotyping involved in the link that missionaries made between ‘heathen’ and ‘uncivilised’ are well-worn themes. Conroy-Krutz's discussion of missionary activity frequently presents them in a fresh light. For example, concerned to prevent Hawaiian women from visiting American sailors on ‘infamous errands’, missionaries persuaded Hawaiian government leaders to adopt a legal code, based on the Ten Commandments, that proscribed prostitution. This code was flouted and assailed by men from the civilised United States. Meanwhile, missionaries reported with delight and surprise that Hawaiians were embracing Christianity even though they remained heathen. Was it possible to be both Christian and heathen? If the Hawaiians were truly Christian what role were missionaries performing by remaining? As Conroy-Krutz's discussion of missions to the Cherokee and to Liberia indicates, the logic of missionary aspirations could lead to a defence of indigenous people. The mission that the ABCFM established within the Cherokee nation created, as they put it, a colony of children ‘collected from the wilderness and placed under the direction of Christian benevolence’ (p. 112). The apparent success of this missionary effort led the Board to oppose the US government's policy of Indian removal (though Board missionaries eventually followed the Cherokee to Oklahoma). In Liberia missionaries confronted an American colony designed to solve an American problem and to spread American civilisation into Africa. Led by John Leighton Wilson the Board sided with the Africans against the would-be American imperialists. Christian imperialism’s signal contribution to the literature rests in its discussion of the political frictions within western cultures emerging from the distinction between colony and mission. American missionaries sometimes piggy-backed on British imperial initiatives and at other times sought to extend Anglo-American cultural Christianity to areas, such as Burma, which they thought to be ‘neglected’ by the British. In a fascinating chapter on Singapore, Conroy-Krutz charts the tensions that arose between Britain, America and the indigenous population when the creation of an exemplary settlement of American Christians created a colony within a colony. Christian imperialism offers a fresh and compelling slant on the politics of missionary activity. Joel Barlow was wrong: the early American republic did have the character of a Christian nation.