Examining conflicts over the entanglement of religion and government from James Madison's “Memorial and Remonstrance” in 1785 through Sunday openings of Chicago's World's Fair in 1893, Verhoeven offers a rich survey of those who promoted strict separationist perspectives on church-state relations. For Verhoeven, these secularist views were hardly the special domain of those who identified as freethinking secularists but were instead the province of a wide range of often uneasy allies—liberal Protestants, Seventh-day Adventists, Primitive Baptists, labor activists, and Reform Jews, among them. In stressing the strength of those arguing the case for the clear separation of religion and the state—whether in debates about Sabbatarianism or Bible reading in the public schools—Verhoeven suggests that the notion of a hegemonic Protestant establishment should be reexamined in light of the serious checks placed upon that evangelical order over the course of the nineteenth century. That is not an unfamiliar proposition: Verhoeven aligns himself with Steven K. Green's reading (in The Second Disestablishment: Church and State in Nineteenth-Century America [Oxford University Press, 2010]) of nineteenth-century church-state debates against those who see “an evangelical juggernaut” effectively coercing conformity to a Protestant-defined moral universe (4). What makes Verhoeven's contribution distinctive is the way he builds his argument up through close attention to grassroots petitions, especially those sent to Congress. These mass petition campaigns provide him with a window on popular mobilization aimed at foiling—or at least restraining—evangelical Protestant designs to mold public life and to define the nation on Christian terms.

Verhoeven's bottom-up, petition-driven approach to church-state debates pays dividends from one chapter to the next. The story begins with a classic moment in the formation of the case for strict separation: James Madison and his petition campaign to defeat a tax assessment in Virginia that would have offered state support for Protestant churches in general as a replacement for the former Anglican establishment. Madison's own remonstrance about the perils of infringing on religious liberty was joined with other petitions from Baptists and Quakers who were equally alarmed by the tyrannies of an ecclesiastical establishment. Petitions against the tax assessment ultimately dwarfed those in favor, and the bill was defeated through this famed working alliance of deists and dissenters. That cooperation, however, did not extend to Verhoeven's next case, the battle over Sunday mail delivery which erupted in the 1820s. The protection of the Sabbath was a widely shared Protestant concern, and moral reformers flooded Congress with petitions to shut down the federal postal system on Sundays. That evangelical crusade produced, in turn, a considerable anti-Sabbatarian rejoinder, a large-scale petition drive to make the case that yielding to these demands would impinge on fundamental civil and religious liberties. Campaigns to keep Sabbatarian reformers on a short tether—whether regulations of Sunday travel or entertainments—became a defining feature of the secularist program. For every move to entrench Protestant mores in the nation's laws and institutions, there was invariably, Verhoeven suggests, a substantial backlash against such combinations of religion and government. When, for example, a group of evangelicals coalesced after the Civil War around the idea of amending the Constitution on explicitly Christian terms, they were met by an extensive counter-petition campaign spearheaded by freethinkers, radical Unitarians, and spiritualists. Verhoeven captures this repeated dialectic with admirable balance.

There is a conceptual puzzle in Verhoeven's use of secularist and secularism in his analysis. For Verhoeven's purposes, a secularist is anyone who espouses a strict view of church-state separation. It is a secularism defined in the singularly political terms of a secular state, and hence people of faith could as easily adopt this principle as freethinkers, deists, or working-class radicals. Reform Jews and Seventh-day Adventists could be secularists on these terms: namely, that the government was to remain studiously neutral in matters of religious belief, that it had no business embracing one view of the Sabbath over another, and that it had no authority to intrude the King James Bible into the public schools. As Verhoeven well knows, such separationist propositions were only one dimension of secularism in the latter half of the nineteenth century; there was hardly a consensus around imagining secularism's scope in this limited political way. Freethinking secularists—and these were certainly the players most invested in sorting out the meaning and implications of secularism—often disdained wider collaboration with potential religious partners, even when they would have clearly made workable allies. And, conversely, many religious folks who equally protested church-state combinations wanted nothing to do with liberal secularists who, no matter what label they used, looked like the intimates of infidels and atheists. Using the term secularist to cover the full spectrum of strict separationists “from the devout to the irreligious” obscures the ways in which the camps were typically divided up in the nineteenth century (244). Too much cultural work went into the boundary dividing the godly and the godless, the religious and the irreligious, the deist and the evangelical to make this capacious construction of secularism workable as anything more than a makeshift arrangement. Secularism as a political principle governing the relation between religion and the state was one plank in a complex platform, and it was hard for Christians to look past the larger indictment of their faith—the Bible, the ministry, and the churches—to make common cause with card-carrying liberal secularists. Verhoeven effectively shows the broader popular appeal of the separationist logic in the nineteenth century, but in putting all such proponents under the secularist umbrella, he raises some riddles over categorization that warrant further pondering.