For its bicentennial, the American Bible Society commissioned John Fea to write a history of the organisation as it prepared to sell its two-century home in New York City and move to Philadelphia. Fea succeeds in balancing respectful appraisal of an influential cultural institution with critical interpretation of how that organisation was shaped by the larger trends in the United States. The ABS experienced two continuities: the centrality of the Bible in the Protestant imagination and the vital utility of that Protestant biblical vision for the mission of building a volitional Christian nation. Beyond that, the ABS served to push American Christianity's global vision outward alongside the rise of the United States as a world power.

Several key features of the ABS encouraged its success. Interdenominational cooperation merged with an assumption of Protestant cultural power to make the ABS a distinctively American kind of Bible society, complete with a capitalist's eagerness for innovation. Freed from denominational strictures, the ABS rarely hesitated to recreate in translation, printing or distribution. ABS leaders were early adopters from steam presses to smartwatch apps that measure the wearer's spiritual health much as they might measure their steps. Such walks with the Lord could suggest comforting verses if biometrics suggest anxiety, for instance (p. 314). Fea measures this long history, from Founding Fathers to Fitbit Faith, in a cadence that keeps the reader closely attuned to how the Protestant American vision of the world as fertile soil for its political and religious ideals shaped the ABS at home and abroad. Mostly, however, Fea tells a distinctly American story of one of the Protestant majority's principal arms of moral hegemony and how that limb worked tirelessly to shape a Christian America that seemed perpetually just beyond it reach.

Elias Boudinot, a prominent member of the Washington Administration's Federalist east coast elites, combined his efforts with frontier missionary Samuel J. Mills to solidify a national Bible society (modelled explicitly on the British and Foreign Bible Society) out of dozens of regional bodies. They hoped that their combined efforts could forge an entity which would be up to the challenge of offering the Christian Scriptures to a multi-lingual, multi-denominational American populace that was constantly moving beyond the pale of the Early Republic. Resistance was not insignificant, as both regional and denominational entities distrusted a Christian body so explicitly set up along the model of Alexander Hamilton's First National Bank. Like the bank, the ABS crossed borders and offered a universal credit of Holy Writ ‘without note or comment’ (p. 22) that indicated an underlying trust in the Protestant principles of perspicuity of Scripture over against the factionalism of region or denomination. Early on such beliefs even allowed the inclusion of Quakers and Roman Catholics in the ABS founding fold and a multi-lingual mission to French, Spanish and Native American readers. But such idealism was tested time and again as what it meant to be Christian in America was itself a matter of intense and unresolved debate. Avoiding such debates was often at the cost of ABS ecumenism.

Like the nation it served, the ABS was tried by the struggle with slavery. When found wanting, it, too, claimed that constitutional obligations limited its ability to serve slaves. The ultimate job of distribution being left to local auxiliaries, the ABS was taunted by northern reformers for doing so little to help slaves to read the Bible and feared by slaveholding church leaders for doing too much. Historians should explore further how the ABS's awkward cloak of moderation in the midst of a national ethical divide suggested the moral limits that America's myriad parachurch organisations faced when choosing between rightness and relevance.

Through revivals, Gilded Age splendour (and donations), racial divides, world wars and a vision of global Christian states reborn, Fea chronicles how the global ambitions of the ABS spread billions of Bibles through agents and auxiliaries. It did so with an admixture of idealism and pragmatic closeness to the levers of power. As it expanded, the ABS learned hard lessons about the opportunities and limits of projecting influence abroad just as the nation did. Local politics in the Levant, Mexico and China could quickly thwart the best laid plans. Yet, as Fea skilfully points out, episodic religious revivals that shaped faith landscapes in the nineteenth and twentieth century often depended on soldiers, veterans, missionaries and statesmen with Bibles in their hands. How an organisation for a new nation's religious coherence gradually shifted into an arm of global Christian conversion sits at the heart of the ABS's more recent story. So, too, does the ABS's constant willingness to operate as a business that balanced the traditional market for family Bibles with the need to create new markets; translations into non-Western languages and more accessible English like that of The Good News Bible made the ABS an innovator. Fea carefully explains the dividing lines between translation camps without wading too deeply into theological minutiae. ABS efforts at accessibility often laid bare the tensions between the literalist, evangelical and civic strains within American Christianity.

As with the nation's capitols, the first birth of American Bible societies occurred in Philadelphia but quickly moved to New York. The builders of both edifices, often the same people, shared a vision of how the nation and its Bible Society would grow together. The Indiana auxiliary referred to the Erie Canal, which fed the ABS Bible into the interior, as ‘Holy Water’ (p. 32). Fea is at his best when interweaving this story of a new nation with one of that country's most important religious organisations as both struggled to establish the boundaries of faith and public life. This struggle continues through to the book's skilfully written last pages. The Bible cause is required reading for scholars interested in American religious nationalism, evangelicalism, mission history and history of the book.