While Andrew Jackson has rarely been out of scholarly vogue, the rise of Donald Trump and his so-called “Jacksonian moment” have generated a fresh surge of interest in Old Hickory. Yet for all the volumes written about him, from Robert V. Remini’s authoritative three-volume study to Jon Meacham’s more popular presidential biography, no work has placed Jackson’s religious life at the center of the narrative. Jonathan Atkins’s Andrew Jackson: Old Hickory in Christian America, published as part of Oxford’s now sadly concluded Spiritual Lives series, seeks to fill this gap. Though it might be tempting to dismiss Atkins’s work as just another presidential religious biography, he convincingly argues that Christianity was integral to Jackson’s identity, and that reckoning with his faith opens yet another complex dimension of his life and legacy.

Spread across twelve chapters, Old Hickory in Christian America follows Jackson’s religious life chronologically. Born in the Carolinian Waxhaws, Atkins details how Jackson’s upbringing in a tightly knit Scots-Irish Presbyterian community shaped so much of his character, including his sense of honor. His mother, Elizabeth, one of the Waxhaw church’s most devoted members, instilled Presbyterian doctrine in her sons from their earliest days and harbored hopes that young Andrew might train for the ministry. Yet as Atkins shows, Jackson’s faith never followed a neat trajectory. It “ebbed and flowed through the various stages of Jackson’s life” (x), blending with the honor culture of the antebellum South in ways that could produce both genuine piety and stark violence. For example, when at war with the Red Stick Muscogees during the Creek War, Jackson could trust that “the same overruling providence” that protected him at home shielded him “in the heart of the creek nation” (69), and decades later, he processed the devastating loss of his beloved Rachel through the same faith, reading her marked Bible daily and assuring friends he would join her in heaven. For Jackson, religion may not have been central, but Atkins connivingly shows it certainly shot across his life and personality, flaring up when he needed it most. As Atkins concludes, “Religion may not have always animated or shaped him, but it explained the world to him and provided him with a basis for understanding right and wrong” (205).

Yet despite his preference for the Reformed tradition of his youth, Jackson never harbored denominational exclusivism. Atkins presents him as “traditionally orthodox” but “broadly ecumenical” (205), enjoying more what Christians had in common than the doctrinal bickering that divided denominations. As president, Jackson rented pews at both Presbyterian and Episcopal churches, and he insisted in his correspondence that all Christians whose conduct matched their profession deserved equal respect, “be him Presbeterian, Episcopalian, Baptist, Methodist or Roman catholic” (103). Similarly, Jackson declined to compel citizens to observe the Sabbath despite the hopes of allies who flooded Congress with petitions demanding it, and he rejected a Dutch Reformed Synod’s request to designate a national day of fasting during a cholera epidemic. Though Jackson accepted “the efficacy of prayer,” he explained that he could not approve such a measure without violating the Constitution’s limits (119). As Atkins explains, for Jackson, faith was a matter for the people, not the state.

But if there was a doctrine that Jackson held with the deepest conviction, it was providence, especially as it applied to himself. After the remarkable outcome of the Battle of New Orleans, which he credited to “the remarkable interposition of Heaven” (74), Jackson could not help but understand himself as operating under divine protection, a perception that others heartily agreed with and helped promote during his pursuit of the presidency. As president, Atkins shows how this providentialism suffused Jackson’s rhetoric against the Second Bank of the United States and the Nullifiers, as well as his justification for Indian Removal. While it would be a mistake to view these actions as a kind of religious crusade, providence assured Jackson that his course was right and that the republic he defended was divinely favored.

While Atkins does examine Jackson’s religious self-understanding, sadly, Old Hickory in Christian America does not devote much attention to how others received and constructed Jackson as a religious figure. John William Ward’s Andrew Jackson: Symbol for an Age (1953) remains the only sustained treatment of that subject, and after more than seventy years, it is ripe for new engagement. Additionally, while no biography can do everything, it also seems an oversight that Atkins does not explore Jackson’s relationship with Roman Catholics more fully. His friendship with Roger Taney, whom Jackson appointed as the first Roman Catholic Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, goes entirely unmentioned. Given the intensity of anti-Catholic sentiment in both the colonial and antebellum periods, Jackson’s willingness to elevate a Catholic to the nation’s highest judicial office, and the broader place of Catholic voters within the Jacksonian Democratic coalition, deserved more consideration.

These comments aside, Atkins has packed a remarkable amount into a trim volume. At just over two hundred pages, Old Hickory in Christian America handles its subject with the kind of balance that Jackson’s polarizing legacy demands. His stated commitment to understanding rather than condemning is a welcome posture in an era when Jackson has become as much a political symbol as a historical figure. By drawing out a dimension of Jackson’s life that most biographers have acknowledged only in passing, Atkins has produced a study that will serve future scholars and biographers well. In a field hardly lacking volumes, scholars should welcome Atkins’s contribution as one that was long overdue.