D. G. Hart understands that the inclusion of H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) in the longstanding Eerdmans Library of Religious Biography series, which is devoted mostly to assorted ministers, theologians, religious authors, prophets, and the occasional statesman, requires some explanation. The series includes a noted freethinker such as Thomas Jefferson, but nobody comes near Mencken in the sheer vituperative excess of his attack on the cultural authority of religion. To Hart, although Mencken “represents a later iteration of the Enlightenment outlook,” his life was framed by religion all the same, as it suffused the America in which he lived, and Mencken attended to it repeatedly (3). Mencken's father was a free-thinker, but nevertheless sent him to Methodist Sunday school where he came to relish songs like “Are You Ready for the Judgment Day?” which he thought “a gay and rollicking tune with a saving hint of brimstone” (16). Mencken continually returned to religion in his writing, judging the sober-minded Treatise of the Gods (1930) his best and most important work. Hart makes a case that Mencken, if not actually God-haunted, was a serious, perceptive, and respectful critic of Protestantism. This last feature—respectfulness—combined with Mencken's irreverent but irresistible humor, holds the greatest lesson for both embattled Christian conservatives and their New Atheist antagonists today: Hart wants a cessation of hostilities in our contemporary culture wars and feels that Mencken might just show how to “demilitarize the combat” (9).

As with other volumes in the series, Hart dispenses with footnotes in favor of a brief bibliographical essay. The result is a wonderfully written and compact intellectual study that doubles as an excellent brief biography. Born into a comfortable bourgeois existence in Baltimore, the youthful Mencken soon had the run of the city. Mencken's cigar-manufacturing father, August, was determined that young Henry follow in the family business, despite his manifest unfitness for such an enterprise, and only August's sudden and premature death from kidney disease liberated Henry to leap into the disreputable world of journalism, the “maddest, gladdest, damnedest existence ever enjoyed by mortal youth” (35). He became an editor and columnist, mostly for the papers associated with the Baltimore Sun, but gained national prominence for his bold and coruscating verbal attacks on the rickety structure of late Victorian gentility, which he reprinted in a series of volumes under the title Prejudices, and his editing of The American Mercury, which became required reading for many college students. At his peak of public celebrity in the mid-1920s, he was coordinating a journalistic assault on William Jennings Bryan and anti-evolutionist Christians at the Scopes Trial in Dayton, Tennessee and facing arrest and trial in a battle with censors in Boston, Massachusetts.

Yet Mencken was a figure of contradiction. He reveled in the free moral atmosphere of the city, yet, even as he became a national symbol of urban cosmopolitanism, he remained rooted in Baltimore. Mencken crafted a persona as a dyspeptic, hard-working, but earthy, free-thinking, and vaguely misanthropic elitist. The opposite of a flaneur, he observed the city not from strolling along the boulevard and repairing to the café and salon, but from the reporter's beat and in the security of the upper-floor room in the family home where he lived most of his life, returning from nights on the town or at work “to a plate of his mother's sandwiches” (58). Mencken's antipathy to Victorian moralism and his Nietzschean disregard for the faith of the poltroonish masses made him an ally of bohemians whom he otherwise disdained. He was a private puritan who structured his entire life around the comforts of the bourgeois home.

What Mencken objected to was Victorianism as a public culture. As Hart observes, he “repudiated the chief dogmas of America's attempt at civilization—a commitment to moral standards, the importance of refined culture, and a belief in progress” (79). Yes, but, Mencken only opposed such values when imposed on him by the community, particularly when they extended to such projects as Prohibition, which he abhorred. As Hart also shows, Mencken remained an Enlightenment rationalist at heart, believed in private refinement, and never quite overcame his progressive impulses. What disgusted Mencken was the democratic distortions of Victorian culture—the narrow-mindedness, the bullying progressive moralism dressed up as scientism, the intolerance, and the broad and vindictive censoriousness that he, like the number of left-liberal modernists among whom he otherwise did not quite fit, attacked as “puritanism.” Hart heroically sifts through Mencken's manifold comments on religion, yet while Mencken was a genuine religious skeptic, the puritanism he attacked was a facile cultural construct, which scholars began to show even in his own lifetime.

What justifies the study of Mencken's religious writings, for Hart, is not his rather commonplace Darwinian naturalism, but the awe with which Mencken was capable of viewing religion. This was evident in the young Mencken's stunned observation of a condemned murderer loudly declaiming Psalm 23 as he walked to his death. To Hart, Mencken approached religion with humility and respect. As much as he detested the authority that clergy and believers had in his life, he viewed them as a normal, ordinary, and acceptable part of life. Religious authority ought to be combatted, in Mencken's view; it need not be, nor should it be, excised from American life. Mencken was, as Granville Hicks observed, a “tolerant and not utterly sympathetic skeptic” (191). His observations possessed a cutting edge, but he used his rapier wit (or blunderbuss raillery, depending on one's taste) against plenty of secular targets as well. All was leavened with humor. To Hart, the New Atheists need some of Mencken's tolerance and humor. Practicing Christians need to desist from believing that all Americans can or must be united under a Christian culture, and remember, as Mencken did, that the fate of believers is to live among heathens. They should be so fortunate as to have as engaged, perceptive, and amusing heathen-critics as H. L. Mencken.