Eric R. Schlereth's An Age of Infidels: The Politics of Religious Controversy in the Early United States examines debates between American Christians and deists from the 1770s through the 1830s. Schlereth shows deism on the rise in early national America: “more, not fewer, Americans publicly announced their deism between the 1770s and 1830s” (7). He explores networks of deist newspapers and readers along with deist clubs and events in order to show this “infrastructure of lived deism” in polemical battle with a contending Christian infrastructure for cultural stewardship of the early republic (8).

Schlereth contributes to our historical understanding of religion in public life by considering how heated religious debate lost its capacity to precipitate widespread violence. He attributes this domestication of religion to the fact that early national Americans debated less about the theological truth of religious views than about their social and political consequences. This shift in the focus of religious polemics from theology to practical considerations rendered wide-ranging differences of religious belief tolerable as those beliefs became merely competing opinions about civic issues aggressively but peacefully debated.

The civic issues included notions of citizenship, consent, and political legitimacy. Schlereth explains how deists viewed citizenship in cosmopolitan terms, with reason unencumbered by tradition its proper basis. Deists contended that the consent informing legitimate government was that of citizens freed from the restraints of inherited culture. They thus portrayed the American Revolution as precipitating the decline of orthodox Christianity. Most Christians, in turn, viewed citizenship as rooted in the mutual obligations of community. They understood received culture as counseling reason in helping restrain the human passions and strengthen the social fabric. Christians thus maintained that informed consent required moral instruction (45–109).

The contours of these conflicting visions are not unfamiliar to students of the period. Nor are their partisan alignments, with most deists favoring Jeffersonian Republicans and Democrats, and many Christians siding with Federalists and Whigs. Schlereth, though, seeks not simply to describe these views, but to present them as an early version of American cultural politics in the terms of two related trends of scholarly interpretation.

One trend suggests a symbiotic relationship between religious tolerance and intolerance. Many scholars contend that tolerance and intolerance often feed on each other, with a pluralist coexistence of religious groups leading to increased manifestations of hostility between them. An example is Alexandra Walsham's Charitable Hatred (2006). A second trend emphasizes endemic religious intolerance in American history, as in John Corrigan and Lynn S. Neal's Religious Intolerance in America (2010) and David Sehat's The Myth of American Religious Freedom (2011).

Schlereth makes ample use of both trends. With the first, he shows early national Americans expanding their tolerance of private beliefs while intolerantly policing public expression. Philadelphians, for example, tolerated private deist debate clubs while policing conspicuous anti-Christian polemic, as when they denied the vociferous deist Elihu Palmer access to Philadelphia's public forums. Schlereth rightfully indicates intolerance here by employing a current understanding of tolerance that accords equal public space to different views (30–41). Other examples are less persuasive. Schlereth portrays Christian readers in Montgomery, New York as “policing religious expression” for canceling their subscription to a newspaper when its editorship passed into deist hands (102). The readers disagreed with the editor's view of citizenship as requiring the abandonment of traditions such as their own religion. Schlereth injects the word “patriotic” into the discussion so that the readers were questioning the editor's “patriotism” when disagreeing with his deism (100–1). As a result, he casts the readers as intolerant actors for canceling their subscription while debating notions of citizenship.

Such a capacious understanding of intolerance informs the latter half of the narrative. Schlereth dubs the antebellum networks of Christian and deist organizations “political religion” and “political irreligion” respectively (204). He labels them such because both groups legally incorporated their organizations, which he describes as a form of “state sanction” (224). He thus presents both as practicing the intolerance of “wedding religious opinion to political power” (238). Yet Schlereth never explains that antebellum governments had abandoned the older practice of granting exclusive charters of incorporation to privileged institutions in favor of a more open incorporation process accommodating diverse views and endeavors. Antebellum incorporation did not mean government endorsement. Skirting this fact, Schlereth casts energetic attempts to mobilize public opinion on behalf of preferred cultural forms as evidencing American habits of intolerance. Such wariness toward deeply felt and firmly expressed disagreements about the norms of American society evinces, perhaps, multicultural sensitivity to proselytism. Or maybe it reflects an unstated pragmatism hoping to eclipse ideological divides in the quest for an elusive consensus.