In his 1929 Preface to Morals, Walter Lippmann summarized the problem facing his generation by observing “how mankind, deprived of the great fictions [of religion], is to come to terms with the needs which created those fictions.” Mark Thomas Edwards presents the essence of Lippmann's large body of work by tracing this fundamental paradox of the need for something “MORE” to believe in. As Lippmann puts it: “a good society must have and yet could not have a fixed set of first principles” (4). This insight explains Edwards's subtitle. Lippmann was an American Skeptic and an American Pastor. He resisted “absolutes in any form” and yet searched after “a fighting faith” to salve and serve “the needs which created those fictions” in what Edwards, following Lippmann's analysis, calls a post-Christian America (5, 4, 10).

Edwards traces Lippmann's paradoxical “love–hate dalliance” toward civil religion to his days at Harvard in the early twentieth century. He studied with two of the university's most well-known pragmatists, George Santayana and William James. It was a tutelage that distanced Lippmann from strict adherence to any tradition without ditching the value of allegiance to something bigger than the self. Such an orientation made Lippmann a principled “chameleon” from the 1910s until his death in 1974, a thinker who Edwards ably demonstrates blended progressivism, secularism, Christianity, and conservatism. For Edwards, he negotiated these worldviews into dueling post-Christian identities: “Spiritual but Not Religious” and “Religious but not Spiritual.” Edwards contends that Lippmann prefigures these contemporary categories and serves as a still relevant guide to the search for meaning and authority absent a divine being. The result is a rendering of a towering life with commendable attention to the pastiche, paradox, and purpose of Lippmann's thought.

Lippmann's lifelong opaqueness about his Jewish ancestry adds another dimension to his back-and-forth approach to organized religion. Edwards wonders if Lippmann's reticence, even rejection, of his heritage emerged from his “aesthetic pragmatism and socialism” or served as a way to navigate anti-Semitism (32–35). Following Lippmann's way of thinking, it was probably a function of both his pragmatism and caution in the face of anti-Semitism. It may be difficult to fully chronicle the “why” of Lippmann's disavowal of his Jewishness because, as Edwards reminds, he rarely discussed or wrote about it.

Stylistically Edwards's approach relies too heavily on block quotations and promises to analyze a given issue at a later point in the book. This tendency marks each chapter, including the twenty-four-line block quotation in chapter six (173–174) and frequent assurances of “more on that later” (63). Analysis may require an occasional block quotation – especially given Lippmann's brilliance as a writer – or delayed interpretation. Edwards's repeated employment of these techniques, however, distracts from the study's analytical strength.

Historical analysis also warns against flying too close to the present. In the closing pages of the book, Edwards suggests “We need his [Lippmann's] cautions against ideological crusades now more than ever.” Celebration of Lippmann on this point suffers in light of Edwards's anachronistic judgments of Lippmann based on contemporary diversity, equity, and inclusion ideology. Throughout the text, Edwards faults Lippmann for his reinforcement of “straight white male authority” (6, 83, 86–87, 130, 162–163, 182, 205) only to curiously categorize some of Lippmann's work as “antiracist” (6, 190). No doubt Lippmann proved inconsistent, at times flagrantly so, on matters of race and gender by the standards of his own day – which Edwards neglects to establish in detail. Meanwhile, Lippmann would of course fall short of twenty-first-century ideas about diversity, equity, and inclusion. Edwards is free to note the distance between contemporary ideas and Lippmann's thought, but also ensure his treatment privileges the early to mid-twentieth-century context in which he lived.

In our present context, Edwards provides an important study of Lippmann's criticism of easy consensus built upon ideological stasis. For Lippmann, such thinking doomed democracies, religions, or any fixed position. And yet Lippmann's worry for how America would fill the needs “of the great fictions” haunts contemporary life as people pin their identities to “orthodox” positions of politics, social justice, sexuality, education, religion, or secularity.