This collection of essays, most ably edited by Sylvester A. Johnson and Steven Weitzman, maintains that the Federal Bureau of Investigation has been intimately engaged with religion throughout its existence, an engagement that has significantly impacted on the contours of organized religion in the twentieth-century United States. Never before has such a comprehensive and multi-layered investigation into the relationship between the FBI and U.S. religious communities been attempted as we have here in this trailblazing, most important book.

The editors' ambition is to recast security studies as an inherent part also of religious studies and to show through the case of the FBI how religion and secularity have become intricately enmeshed in the federal government's operations despite the separation of church and state. They set out to uncover how agents have learned about religions, what FBI leaders' and agents' orientating religious preconceptions have been, and how the Bureau has managed to balance its investigatory and enforcement functions when it comes to religion.

It is a most ambitious undertaking and inevitably uneven, as is any collection of essays. Some of the essays are less pioneering than others, some are quite polemical and ideologically colored, and some are less than fully documented. But on the whole, we have here most formidable contributions firmly grounded in newly available archival materials. Most of the contributors steer close to the editors' most useful distinction between “authentic” and “inauthentic” religion (10). As seen from the FBI's perspective, U.S. religious communities have always been of one or the other, the editors maintain. On the basis of agents' preexisting cultural and religious prejudices, the Bureau has actively monitored and investigated these communities as well as repressed and punished the ones it has deemed subversive (i.e. “inauthentic,” neither truly religious nor truly “American”).

Unfortunately, some of the chapters are suffused by a highly adversarial approach born out of a palpable, deep suspicion of the FBI and the federal government in general that shuts out important lines of inquiry as often as it opens them up. This is particularly glaring in the chapters devoted to Islam and African American religion (six out of fifteen). Here we come perilously close to a reductionism that sees racism as the only explanation for the FBI's actions. In the introduction, the Bureau is depicted as the guardian of “fundamental structures of anti-Black racism” and of an American “apartheid” that includes the “state murder of unarmed Blacks” (10). Relatedly, the editors assert the existence of a “century-old pattern of Islamophobia and the racialization of Islam” (14) of which the FBI has been a product, a perpetuator, and an enforcer. Sylvester A. Johnson's contributions on the surveillance of the Moorish Science Temple and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference repeat these claims, while in his essay on the FBI and the Church of God in Christ during World War I, Theodore Kornweibel Jr. speaks of the Bureau's devotion to “White supremacy and Black submission” (53). Junaid Rana goes further in discussing the FBI's post–9/11 targeting of immigrant Pakistani Muslims as a form of “racial statecraft” that has used “scapegoating through religion and racism” to stifle “legitimate ideas and dissent and liberatory struggle” (268).

The polemical tenor persists in Dianne Kirby's survey of the FBI and the religious Cold War. One of the least documented of this collection's chapters, it is distinguished by repetition of prejudicial words such as “paranoia” and “witch-hunting” (71, 75) and by questionable characterizations of the most radical of the Cold War era's liberal Protestants as “committed Cold Warriors and anticommunists to the core” (79). No attempt is launched to understand the multiple meanings and sincerities of faith-based or other anticommunist views; instead, the Cold War era's FBI is presented as malevolently bent on suppressing “innocuous and conscientious clergymen” who just advocated for “equality and justice” (70, 76). Kirby does make an important point when she notes that the FBI ended up indirectly empowering those whom she calls “the radicals of the Christian Right” (75).

More nuanced and thoroughly documented examinations of the Cold War era's faith communities are offered in the chapters on Catholics, fundamentalists and evangelicals, Jews, and Mormons. In his case study of the production of the 1945 Cronin Report, Regin Schmidt shows how central the FBI was in prompting the Catholic Church's turn from liberal to conservative, antisubversionary anticommunism. Michael J. McVicar establishes the centrality of the FBI's example in prompting fundamentalist groups such as the Church League of America into their own investigations of alleged subversion in the churches. Its framing of truly “American” religiosity, McVicar also shows, coincided with and strengthened pre-existing fundamentalist understandings of Americanism and Christianity alike. Sarah Imhoff's meditation on the FBI's important role in crafting Cold War era discourses on Judeo-Christian “Americanness” is most welcome and a real contribution to knowledge, as is Matthew Bowman's case study of the FBI's active recruitment of Mormons and of the Mormons' interest in the FBI.

FBI surveillance of conservative religious groups is also mentioned in several chapters, but regrettably, it fails to receive in-depth investigation. Also regrettably, in most of the contributions, faith communities tend to come across more as passive victims of the FBI's unwanted attentions than as actors in their own right. Just how they impacted on the FBI remains mostly unclear. These dimensions of the story need more investigation than is available here.

Regardless, this book should be of great interest to all scholars of religion, political scientists, and historians of the twentieth-century United States, most of all to those interested in issues of religious freedom and civil rights and in the perplexities of the national security state. While hardly the last word on the subject matter, this book does succeed admirably in establishing the importance of incorporating the FBI into the study of religious history.