This efficient volume reports on the first two waves of data from the Baylor Religion Survey, funded by the Templeton Foundation. Conducted in 2005 with 1,721 respondents and 2007 with 1,648 respondents, the survey provided data that sociologists Paul Froese and Christopher Bader used to constructs profiles of America's gods. They argue that “the kind of God we believe in is incredibly important,” and that “God continues to be the clearest and most concise reflection of how the average American perceives his world” (8, 10). Knowing who America understands God to be is more important than any other piece of information when attempting to understand someone's viewpoint, they explain. A person's image of God is “more important to their worldview” than their race, gender, or class (57). “Pundits tell us the wrong story about our culture wars,” Froese and Bader believe, writing that “the country is not divided into the religious and the irreligious but rather by specific images of God” (144, 55).

Previous surveys of American beliefs about God have been inadequate because the survey questions failed to access the ways God functions in the lives of believers. For example, knowing that nearly all Americans (85%) feel that the term “loving” describes God well does not access the ways that loving is a variable term in practice—for some people, loving a child might include corporeal punishment, whereas for others such a discipline would be understood as an anathema to love. Froese and Bader found that the two questions that were most illuminating in their effort to identify a three-dimensional theological dynamism within a given surveyed believer were those that focused on God's approach to humanity: To what extent does God interact with the world? To what extent does God judge the world? Using the responses they received to these questions, as well as follow-up inquiries and some congregational sampling, Froese and Bader identify America's four Gods: the Authoritative God (who is engaged in the world yet judgmental of it), the Benevolent God (who is engaged yet nonjudgmental), the Critical God (who is judgmental yet disengaged), and the Distant God (who is nonjudgmental and disengaged). Froese and Bader also account for atheist ideas about the world, which they return to throughout the volume as a point of contrast (and, at times, connection, especially to those adhering to a Distant God).

The four Gods are, in many ways, redactions that seem right, cleanly cutting through notions of contradictory diversity with familiar types. The Authoritative God is the God of Pat Robertson, a God who makes the good and bad things that happen to us (29). “Evangelicals tend toward belief in an Authoritative God,” Froese and Bader found, adding later that “believers in an Authoritative God are the most absolutist” (51, 67). The Benevolent God is the God of certain self-help entrepreneurs, like SQuire Rushnell, author of When God Winks at You (2009), who sees signs everywhere that God is taking care of us. “Believers in a Benevolent God can be amazingly upbeat,” Froese and Bader summarize (31). The Critical God is the God that Pope Benedict XVI invokes when he tells drug dealers that “God will call you to account for your deeds” (32). Believers in the Critical God see the afterlife as the site of reckoning, but do not imagine the present world as a punishing one. The Distant God is for those who like “meditation, contemplation, and the beauty of nature,” but “rarely speak of miracles or judgments” (34). Believers in a Distant God tend to be somewhat laissez-faire on certain hot-button political issues, believing that homosexuality is just “a part of the natural order of things, and that the decision to have an abortion should be left to the woman (71, 77).

As you read the above, you may have a variety of reactions, including: “that sounds about right,” or “only four gods?” or “the quantitative sociologists are at it again!” Your response is probably connected to your own intellectual affinity for surveys and types as source and interpretation. Reading America's Four Gods is emboldening and discombobulating, as this reviewer felt simultaneously excited to pull out the mop brush herself and also rather nervous about what details it would swipe from existence. Of course, one might argue that this anxiety over occlusion is precisely what keeps scholars from relevancy. And Froese and Bader seek utility, as indicated when they draw conclusions such as “in simple dollars and cents, it is evident that religion is not inexorably bad for scientific research” (103). America's Four Gods is not written for fellow academics; it is written for public policy think tanks. Its formats, mode of argument, and total perspicuity make America's Four Gods perfect for immediate rhetorical application in candidate platforms and speeches.

Meanwhile, the academic reader in the humanities will struggle with this work, insofar as it offers up overt caricature (“religious groups with a very engaged God tend to hold rituals high in emotional energy”), short-shrift psychology (“more than half of Americans who believe in an Authoritative God remember being spanked regularly as a child”), and complicated claims as axiomatic assertions (“unsurprisingly, many atheists [33 percent] never attended church as children”) (126, 39, 41). All of this in service to a quartet categorization that is advertised as representing America's plurality but never explores in detail any the non-Christian respondents to their surveys. Along the way, Froese and Bader do invoke George Herbert Mead, Karl Marx, Baruch Spinoza, and William James, inserting short ruminations alongside bar charts illustrating “distributions of opinions about God's level of judgment,” ranging from “Not Judgmental” to “Highly Judgmental.” At times, the book reads like satire; and, at other times, it reads like heroic clarity amid humanist cabalism. At all times, it seems devoted to a causal deduction in which images of God precede everything (for example, “in general, your values reflect your God, and your God reflects your pocketbook”) and everything proceeds from images of God (124).

Just when the reader feels frustrated by cartoon conclusions, Froese and Bader remind us that “as we delve into individual lives, we find a complex web of past experiences and memories,” and that “predictions will never be 100 percent accurate,” leaving a sliver of space for dissent to appear (39, 57). And so dissent inevitably does. In their exploration of denominationalism and its relationship to God-types, Froese and Bader report that “a Roman Catholic is as likely to believe in an Authoritative God as a Distant God.” They reply to this information with the conclusion that “saying someone is a Roman Catholic tells you virtually nothing about his image of God” (51). This is an extraordinary comment on the contemporary religion, suggesting that formal theology has no effect on practitioner's ideation. It is, of course, not the first time such a suggestion has been made; here it is made with devastating absolutism. Why then does anybody choose a particular congregation? Whatever the reasons are for our choices in churches, Froese and Bader argue that they will have little or nothing to do with any ideas we might have about God.