This timely book aims to show the lasting effects of one man's biblical interpretations on contemporary US politics. The argument is straightforward. American exceptionalism, in Redding's telling, was the driving force behind Billy Graham's unabashedly nationalistic interpretations of apocalyptic biblical literature. The tendency to read the books of Daniel and Revelation primarily as commentaries speaking directly to the interpreter's own particular social and political milieu by no means began with Graham, however. According to Redding, Christian history has been rife with such readings. By allowing their respective contexts to control their interpretations of Daniel and Revelation, Christian thinkers from Justin Martyr to Martin Luther created ‘a self-reinforcing loop of skewed interpretation’ (p. 32) that inevitably resulted in ‘unapologetic nationalism’ (p. 15). Things continued mostly apace in the writings of dispensationalist thinkers like Darby and Scofield – both of whom Redding identifies as crucial precursors to Graham's specific version of ‘American-centric apocalyptic theology’ (p. 36) – as well as in the early to mid-twentieth century preaching of Evangelical and fundamentalist figures such as George W. Truett, Harold John Ockenga, John R. Rice and William Bell Riley. If neither context-dependent hermeneutics nor even pro-America interpretations were unique to Graham, then what made him special? For Redding, the answer is simple: influence. Although generations of predecessors and countless contemporaries certainly shared a similar worldview, among twentieth-century apocalypticists Graham's outsize impact on US American religious, cultural and political life was second to none. As one of the most famous and influential preachers of all time, Graham used his considerable ‘political and social clout’ (p. 74) to ensure that his ‘trademark American apocalyptic exceptionalism’ (p. 60) would be forever codified in the laws of the nation. And it worked. Due to Graham's influence, Redding argues, President Eisenhower oversaw the official addition of the words ‘under God’ to the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954, and the rest, as they say, is history. From that point onward, Redding concludes, the phrase ‘one nation under God’ thenceforth became both ‘a de facto slogan for the United States of America’ (p. 103) and a kind of ritualistic incantation that politicians of all stripes ‘could use to channel evangelical Christianity for personal and political gains’ (p. 107).

Although it is indeed difficult to overstate Graham's influence, Redding's portrait of the famed evangelist occasionally wanders into hyperbolic territory. The repeated suggestion ‘that every time people recite the pledge, they speak Graham's words’ (p. 8), for example, makes Graham's role seem monocausal, thereby painting an overly simplistic picture of a complex historical reality. In the end, the book is weakest when making sweeping generalisations and assumptions about historical interpreters and their motivations, and when occasionally resorting to anachronistic comparisons (for example, ‘Augustine justifies the damage brought upon Rome by reading Daniel and Revelation with an overt Christian nationalism’; p. 18). On the whole, One nation under Graham is at its strongest when focusing on the evolving nuances and subsequent afterlife of Graham's consistent apocalyptic rhetoric – the far-reaching impact of which Redding rightly and compellingly emphasises.