The United States embraces two kinds of exceptionalism: it is the most religious nation among its secular peers, and a decidedly secular nation that finds transcendent purpose in its national experience. According to a PEW research poll published in 2006, 67 percent of Americans agree that the United States is a Christian nation; 78 percent believe the Bible is the word of God; and a vast majority either agree or completely agree with the statement, “I never doubt the existence of God.” Moreover, since the 1980s, polls have consistently shown that most Americans believe that religious influence is waning and that this trend is a bad thing for the nation. Why? Americans use churches to work through diverse questions from the Second Coming of Jesus to the war in Iraq (PEW Research Center for the People and the Press, 24 August 2006, available at http://people-press.org/report/?pageid=1081).

So, not surprisingly, alongside the persistence of American religiosity there has been an equally persistent fear of a creeping godlessness. In a collection of essays edited by Charles Matthews and Christopher McKnight Nichols, a group of religious scholars associated with the University of Virginia's Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture follows this dualism from the Puritan errand into the wilderness to the present day. The contributors note that too often in sectarian debates about American religiosity this dualism gets reduced to a caricature of religious zealots screaming about the “endtimes” and atheists proclaiming religious folks are sorely misguided and possibly antidemocratic. However, the editors argue, “Prophecies of godlessness are absolutely essential to how citizens have defined the meaning of America, the practice of democracy, and ultimately the nation's future.” Making such a claim means they take American religiosity seriously and see secularization theory as somewhat suspect, not least because, as many of the contributors suggest, the United States has developed into a modern democracy because of its historical and discursive resistance to godlessness.

There are many things to recommend about this book, but perhaps the most valuable aspect is the way it makes coherent and usable the debate over religion in American life. This debate during the George W. Bush years – call it an axis of faith – provoked a great deal of handwringing about religion and politics, but the commentators here ask, when has this not been the case? There has always been, and it seems always will be, a moral crisis that calls for the kind of analysis that religion seems able to provide. And in the United States there is a role for religion to play in deliberations that are ostensibly political.

There is an irony to the historical origins of the role religion plays in American life. As Johann N. Neem explains in an essay on Thomas Jefferson, the third President believed that rigid denominational religion would soon enough morph into fluid, nondenominational Unitarianism. He was wrong, of course; not because he tried to sideline or undermine the power of religion, but because he created just about the best possible conditions for a religious explosion. It was the freedom that Jefferson fought hard to get for religion and politics that ended up providing room for each to expand without being under the control of the other.

Each essay in this chronologically organized collection engages a moral crisis as something representative of an age. And each essay takes the jeremiad as a way to describe how Americans have dealt with the anxiety provoked by such crises. While at times the use of the jeremiad as a rhetorical device can get a bit repetitive, I was greatly impressed by how well these essays hung together and spoke to one another. I can imagine that the genesis for this volume emerged out of discussions in seminar rooms and hallways; the editors have done an admirable job sustaining that easy intellectual flow in their relevant and scholarly book.