Many past assumptions about Freemasonry in American culture seem to bend back upon themselves, a trajectory that is in the shape of a horseshoe. The first telling of fraternal purpose trended upward, up to a point, and then curved into other popular impressions. The historical scope before the last quarter of the twentieth century often started with tracing the labored self-study written by the Masons and ended in the unintended exposure of lighthearted spoof. Masons occasionally overreached the capacity of evidence in their claims of fraternal antecedents formed by the ancient builders of Giza, the Acropolis, or Chartres.

Further, the Masonic “historians” sometimes grafted their fraternal order's intellectual roots to Medieval chivalry, Newtonian hermeticism, and Renaissance alchemy and ultimately, American Masons developed the habit of name-dropping, overestimating their ties to history-makers, and understating the most vital of all democratic values, that of openness and transparency. What H. L. Mencken and Nathaniel Hawthorne did for the reputation of the New England puritans, the Freemasons in America inadvertently did for themselves.

As a result, contemporary Masons found it problematic living down the Ralph Kramden and Ed Norton brotherhood found in the Raccoon Lodge of Brooklyn around 1956. Fifty years later, the popular novelist Dan Brown wrote his celebrated protagonist and “symbologist” from Harvard, Robert Langdon, into a fraternal intrigue called The Lost Symbol that transposed the laugh lines of “The Honeymooners” and its sit-com portrayal of madcap lodge activity into a much darker, suspenseful parody.

With these familiar images in mind, several generations of academic historians have approached the study of the oldest fraternal order with measures of professional caution. Beginning in the 1980s, however, a few university scholars of both European and American historical contexts (particularly between 1590 and 1940, covering 350 years) began to give Freemasons serious academic scrutiny, particularly about issues of social status and political conjunctions. They did for Freemasonry what Perry Miller single-handedly did for American puritanism, reviving its reputation to show the distinctive usefulness of Masonic ideas and practices in essential aspects of American culture, such as egalitarianism, religious pluralism, and the leveling of class structure.

Scholarship about European and American Freemasons published in the 1980s focused mostly on social and political interiors, especially examining the lodge room as a source of vocabulary used by the generation of the American Revolution, defining and transmitting Enlightenment ideas of consequence. Further, as an expression of material culture, from the tavern to the temple, and also of masculine gender identity, from secret rituals to public roles, historians found in Masonic differentiation and the ready access to archival sources a wider interpretive meaning about the social status of men (and, inversely, women), civic life, and charitable values in American society.

The one area generally untouched in Masonic historiography is this question: can Masonic experience also be religious experience? Perhaps because the Freemasons themselves have always insisted that the fraternity is not in purpose or practice a religion, historians have accepted those boundaries. Thus they have assumed that interpreting the Masonic brotherhood in the broadest terms of religious studies (such as those tropes sketched by Mircea Eliade, Robert Bellah, or Jonathan Z. Smith) would be a stretch surpassing appropriate argument. David G. Hackett thinks otherwise. And he is right to do so.

In his thoroughly researched, competently contextualized, and well written study, That Religion in Which All Men Agree, a title taken from a phrase in the 1723 Masonic constitution, Hackett's purpose is “to show how Freemasonry's American history contributes to a broader understanding of the multiple influences that have shaped religion in American culture” (4). There are numerous reasons why this premise was taboo for Masons themselves, who in post-Revolutionary history became periodically defensive, reclusive, and sometimes persecuted, largely because of their public image of keeping esoteric secrets and, at the worst and most absurd, appearing to give genteel cover to cabals conspiring to gain political and economic power. In looking through the interpretive lens of what historian David Hall named “lived religious experience,” Hackett goes farther than any of his predecessors who had already gone far past the simplistic view of American Freemasons as a mere touch point in political moments and charitable developments of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Hackett's work cuts a fresh trail through a complex thicket of Masonic influence. He argues that beyond the conduits of the press and networks of the churches, “Masons were more successful than the members of any other colonial organization in joining together disparate political and religious leaders” (4). Military lodges, for example, were more effective in building affinities of meaning among the corps of Continental Army officers during the American Revolution than denominational chaplains. As a consequence, “Freemasonry rivaled Protestantism” in forming many of the key social arrangements and practices of piety (for men) emerging in America at its most formative period. This line of influence, according to Hackett, projects through an expanding veneration of Masonic ritual that, in effect, developed into an alternative to church membership; this male ritual experience created a raw point of domestic tension with protestant women who were dominant in congregational life of nineteenth-century churches.

Hackett explores simultaneous “primitivist” and “restorationist” shifts affecting nineteenth-century perspectives in both protestant practices of worship and Masonic ritual aggrandizement, each attempting to recover lost traditions from the most ancient days of the most original spiritual experience. This ultimately created more pageantry for both spheres in Sunday sanctuary and weekday lodge. The effort to recover the originality of a tradition, Christian or Masonic, was also at the root of early anti-modernist responses to late nineteenth-century urban-industrial structures.

This work is also exceptional for its comparative study of Jews, Catholics, African-Americans, and Native Americans as Freemasons. These chapters add considerable interest and strength to the book, but much, perhaps too much, was crowded out. Hackett missed an opportunity to discuss the affinity felt and protest made by American Freemasons in the face of Nazi persecutions of the 1930s, eventually giving way to the Holocaust, a term that was actually used very early, perhaps even appearing for the first time in print, by American Masonic publications. Meanwhile, David Hackett has written an authoritative book and created an agenda for deeper consideration of a particular variety of ritual experience that for many was also religious in nature and practice.