Jonathan J. Den Hartog's Patriotism and Piety is a series of biographical sketches of Federalists in the early American republic designed to show the prominence of religion in Federalist politics. “[T]his religious dimension has been overlooked,” the author avers. That religion shaped the Federalist politics of New England clerics such as Timothy Dwight and Jedidiah Morse will hardly surprise. The volume, though, also includes Federalists ranging from the New Yorkers John Jay and his sons to the New Jersey statesman Elias Boudinot and the South Carolinian lawyers Henry William De Saussure and Charles Cotesworth Pinckney. For these figures too, the author maintains, “religion was essential to the identity and ideology of the Federalist party” (15).

The religion of the Federalists was not monolithic. Den Hartog identifies “three religious streams” informing the party's politics. Some Federalists were evangelicals seeking a robust public role for orthodox Christianity. Others were Unitarians modifying public Christianity for a diversifying commercial society. Others still were southerners favoring a more modest role for religion in politics. These religious currents animated the political activities of individual Federalists, but ultimately proved irreconcilable, in Den Hartog's telling. By the early 19th century, the differences would “fragment the party and drain the energy it would need to beat back the surging Democrats” (134).

Yet Den Hartog pursues more than just the religion and fracturing of the Federalist party. He tells a story that is increasingly common in the writing of American political history, “following the lead of political historians after the cultural turn,” in his words (15). This cultural turn submits that Americans have long organized politically around deep cultural conflicts, that the cultural wars of recent decades are but an additional chapter in a longer volume of American political history. Patriotism & Piety seeks to illumine not just Federalists mixing religion and politics, but “the ‘cultural politics’ of the period” (13). For “the early republic was a scene not only of bitter partisan rivalry but of intense religious conflict” (4).

The volume's biographical chapters thus portray religiously inspired Federalists engaged in the early Republic's cultural politics. Central here, and ultimately more important to the author than diverse streams of Federalist religion, are the different strategies to cultural politics he identifies. One strategy is “Republican” in nature. It emerged during the Revolution and Constitution period. It envisioned Christianity as a natural, though not always formal, ally of American governments, encouraging the virtue upon which stable republics depend. A second strategy is a “Combative” approach. This perspective emerged in the 1790s when Federalists felt besieged by a perceived rising tide of radical infidelity associated with the French Revolution. Federalists became more zealous in seeking the Republic's defense, pursuing religiously inspired political activities with increased intensity. Finally was the “Voluntarist” strategy which largely followed the War of 1812. As the party fractured, Federalist turned to voluntary religious societies as the best means of preserving the Republic. In this, they contributed to American civil society by pioneering the creation of national cultural institutions, such as the American Bible Society, that were characteristic of the antebellum period.

Den Hartog refers to the republican, combative, and voluntarist approaches to cultural politics as “three successive stages” in the early Republic (6). His succession largely runs chronologically from the Revolution to the 1790s to the 19th century, but the reader senses an accompanying normative succession, from the author's disquiet over combative politics to his regard for the voluntarism of later decades. Descriptions of the combative approach are occasionally innocuous — “a greater place for religion in the public sphere” (44). Yet a foreboding tone is clearly audible. Combative politics appear dark and conspiratorially minded: “Boudinot's vision darkened” (107). Admonitions regarding passion in cultural politics include the perilous raising of political stakes. For combative Federalists, “their enemies were not just politically wrong; they were morally and spiritually wicked.” The result is civic estrangement, as combative Federalists, generally evangelicals, “encouraged the cultural and political polarization of the nation.” Their “religious beliefs added greater charge to separate the forces of pious, patriotic light from the forces of Franco-American unbelief, anarchy, and darkness” (9–10).

Unease with rhetorical combat in cultural politics is understandable. The 1790s undoubtedly saw objectionable bombast accompanying unanticipated political divides. Yet even overblown rhetoric often relates, in caricatured fashion, to important realities. A potential, though not inherent, pitfall of political history after the cultural turn is that linguistic analysis crowds out language's relationship to real world events. Helpful here in understanding combative Federalists would be a more robust probing of important political realities of the 1790s—the murderous mob violence and dechristianization in France, the Genêt Affair, and, most importantly, the Federalists’ domestic political opponents. “Multiple groups,” the author explains, engaged in “intense competition for the prize of defining the nation's religious character. … Religious Federalists operated as just one claimant to the public religious culture of the new nation” (3). Yet the voices of other claimants are faint.

Patriotism & Piety focuses on the Federalists, and it rewards an attentive read. Critically probing but one side of combative cultural politics, however, tends to guide assessment of responsibility for polarization.