About halfway through the second chapter of Christopher Grasso's monumental Skepticism and American Faith, I began to think that the book was severely mistitled. The title had suggested to me an account of a response (skepticism's challenge to American faith) or perhaps a dialogue (the interplay of skepticism and American faith). Chapter 2, though, doesn't seem to be about skepticism at all—it is about Methodists of varying degrees of radicalism. Many parts of the book turn out to be studies of early national and antebellum Christians, not their skeptical critics. The relevance of these characters became clear, however, as I realized the extent to which Grasso is not interested in differences in belief as such but in different attitudes toward the grounds of belief. Skepticism in Grasso's definition was “less than ‘secularism’” and different than being unorthodox or heretical: skeptics, he writes, were “those who doubted the primary grounds of Christian faith—the Bible, the church, or personal spiritual experience” (8). Doubt, as an organizing principle, orients the book around epistemological questions rather than specifically doctrinal ones, and these questions engaged all equally. Viewed in this way, the Methodists of chapter 2 (and 13, along with the Presbyterians of chapters 6, 7, and 12, the Millerites of chapter 10, and various believers sprinkled throughout) are as relevant as the deists and freethinkers that one might come to this book expecting.

Skepticism and American Faith is one of the most inventive studies of the religious environment of America between the revolution and the Civil War in some time. Focusing on epistemological questions confronted by skeptics and Christians alike, Grasso argues, suggests a corrective to the historiographical marginalization of skepticism. He acknowledges that “Americans were inclined to faith” as scholarship on religion in early America has made clear. This inclination, however, was not static or inevitable—it was not (as various studies have suggested) a rote inheritance from English dissent, or a product of the revolution, and certainly not a blessing from God. “It was a proclivity made and remade, year after year, forged in the foundry of culture” (17). It was, that is, work, and Grasso's effort is to “get a better sense of how that work was done.” Skepticism was part of that work.

Grasso begins with the skeptical, offering a close reading of the understudied works of Ethan Allen, revolutionary as well as deist hero. This is paired with an account of William Beadle, a merchant in Wethersfield, Connecticut, who murdered his family and himself in 1782, gifting ammunition to Christian polemicists by leaving behind an account of his deist convictions. From there Grasso's cast of characters expands geographically: freethought lectures in New York City; Presbyterians building a college and a new city in Missouri; Methodist missionaries in California. Grasso provides an enlightening, detailed study of Thomas Cooper, president of South Carolina College from 1820 until 1833 and a notable representative of religious skepticism in the south before it was neutralized, as Grasso eloquently demonstrates, by “the consolidation of a Christian proslavery theology” and the subsequent development of a “Confederate civil religion” that still haunts this country (399).

In each of these places, Grasso intends to go “beyond the confines of traditional intellectual history” to exhibit skepticism and faith “as lived experiences: lived religion, and lived irreligion, too” (4). He pursues this effort mostly through intellectual biographies of his individual characters. These are partially successful in broadening the purview of intellectual history, but they tend to emphasize formative experiences of upbringing and education (and sometimes, it seems, genealogy) rather than the ongoing interplay of ideas, practices, and lived circumstances that would more properly constitute “lived religion.” This preference for biography-as-intellectual-history highlights the relative homogeneity of these biographies: most of the main characters of this work are white, comparatively privileged men, though many of them are less known and less studied than the usual suspects of American theology. Freethinking reformer Frances Wright is the only woman who gets the full biographical treatment of Grasso's other main subjects. Where biography is used to understand the application and availability of ideas that are said to constitute “a central issue in American culture,” it is important to engage with a more representative set of Americans.

That said, intellectual biography has its place, and in the last few chapters, Grasso marshals remarkable sources to show the active interaction of circumstances and ideas before, during, and after the Civil War. The most engrossing of the relatively unknown characters whom Grasso profiles is John R. Kelso, a one-time preacher who lost his faith and became known as a hunter of Confederate guerillas during the Civil War. Kelso's archive is almost entirely unpublished, and Grasso has done a great service in bringing this character to life. Here, the dense biographical material—thwarted love, daring and violent attacks on his enemies—is more than forgivable and only partly because it reads like the script of a brooding Hollywood western. At the end of his life, Kelso wrote movingly of his youthful loss of faith and discovery of patriotism, connecting the two. “He and his fellow patriots,” Grasso writes, “had deified a superstitious idea—the Union—which was really just a myth covering the crimes of a plutocratic oligarchy” (479). Kelso, more than any other voice in the book, makes Grasso's case that the same epistemological questions haunted everyone. “How blindly, how piously, how patriotically inhuman even the best of us are capable of being made by superstition,” Kelso wrote, “whether with regard to those mythical monsters, called gods, or those equally mythical monsters called governments.”

In the end, the book is something of a picaresque: a series of stories that might be told discretely (the dense biographies of so many men) held together by a peripatetic character (entangled skepticism and faith) moving through time and space. It must be said that at five hundred pages – excluding notes – taking it all in as a whole requires patience. When in the epilogue Grasso has a source make reference to “a ‘ponderous volume’ of over 670 pages,” it feels like a bit of a wink to exhausted readers. Grasso is a subtle writer, and such echoes and rhymes woven through this book are rewarding and evocative (with Beadle and Kelso, for example, the book begins and ends with murderers). The book's unwieldiness should not undermine its artistry and usefulness for readers—it is well worth the effort.