G. K. Chesterton once observed that America is “a nation with the soul of a church” and “the only nation in the world founded on a creed.” While these observations may exaggerate the uniqueness of America, they may also contain more truth than Chesterton realized, if we are persuaded by Gregg Frazer's new book.

According to Frazer, America's Founders created a national religious creed that underlies our republican institutions, even though it is hard to pin down precisely because it is more than “deism” and less than orthodox Christianity. To capture the Founders' religion, Frazer invents a new term, “theistic rationalism,” which emphasizes rational belief in God and morality rather than faith in the revealed mysteries of the Biblical God (14–20). It was a hybrid religion, combining Enlightenment ideas of a Creator God who is the Intelligent Designer of a rational cosmos and elements of Christian belief in a providential God who intervenes in history and supports a moral code of benevolence and political freedom. Frazer shows how theistic rationalism became a republican religion of God-given natural rights and civic duties, whose expressions in America were the Declaration of Independence and public rituals of civil religion—such as Thanksgiving Day prayers, paid chaplains for Congress and the military, church services in the House chambers, public funds for land grant schools promoting religion and morality, and even our present-day Pledge of Allegiance (213, 225). By deliberate design, the American Founders created not only a new constitution but also a new civic culture that made America into a nation where the church was disestablished but a creed of rational religion was unofficially “established” as its foundation.

In advancing this argument, Frazer carves out a middle ground in today's culture wars between the “Christian America” and the “secular America” views of the Founders and public life. Frazer is surprisingly frank in disabusing the “Christian America” school of their cherished beliefs that America's Founders were devout Christians in any orthodox sense and that America is a Christian nation in the sense of basing its founding principles on the Gospel of Jesus Christ or taking its legal principles from the Bible or divine law. He examines in detail the private and public documents of the leading Founders (Adams, Franklin, Jefferson, Hamilton, Washington, as well as James Wilson, Gouverneur Morris, and James Madison) and provides abundant evidence that none of them adhered to the central doctrines of Christianity—which Frazer defines as the divinity of Christ, the Trinity, original sin and Christ's atoning sacrifice, the revealed character of the entire Bible, and the divine authority of Christian churches and sacraments. He shows that many of the Founders attended divine services in their churches, whether Episcopalian or Presbyterian, but most were like George Washington in never receiving holy communion or adhering to sacred dogma (with the exception of Alexander Hamilton, who seems to have had a genuine conversion to sincere faith in Christ and the Christian sacraments before his fatal duel [193–96]). This side of Frazer's book will undoubtedly upset many followers of the “Christian America” thesis, and indeed many pious Americans, when they read how deliberately Washington avoided taking communion or how the image of Washington kneeling at Valley Forge in prayer before his troops was created later as a myth. While this debunking side of Frazer's book is disconcerting, it gives the author credibility by displaying his intellectual honesty.

On the other side of the culture wars, Frazer will upset the secularists of today who want to expunge God from the American Founding and to remove religion from public life or deny its essential connection to morality. These issues reemerged recently when the Democratic Party dropped references to God in its 2012 platform and then awkwardly reinstated them. Critics have also attacked President Obama for paraphrasing the Declaration of Independence without including the words “endowed by their Creator” in referring to the source of our unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. While some people reacted indifferently, others were alarmed. Does it make a difference if politicians and public documents fail to connect the belief in God with the natural rights and civic duties of the American people? Frazer shows convincingly that the American Founders thought it was crucial (214–31): they were emphatically “foundationalists” who may have been skeptical rationalists on some issues but would repudiate the postmodernism of philosophers like Richard Rorty, who think that one can be committed to social justice without having foundations in religion or metaphysics. The American Founders clearly recognized the connection between justice and the moral order of the universe, including a divinely given natural law that grounds human rights and human dignity. The Founders were men of the Enlightenment who questioned miracles but did not deny the cosmic support for justice or the objective nature of moral knowledge.

Frazer's ultimate judgment on these matters is therefore subtle and complex. As a professor of history at an evangelical Christian school, The Master's College, he is a critic of the theistic rationalism of the American Founders on biblical grounds while recognizing its moral significance for liberal democracy. He tips his hand at several points, for example, when sympathetically discussing the Christian scholar James W. Jones, whose book The Shattered Synthesis (1973) criticizes the “arrogance” of the American Founders for deliberately altering and diluting Christianity for political purposes. Jones traces their error to theologians like Charles Chauncy (1705–1787) who remade God and the Bible in the image of man by insisting that God's “benevolence” bound Him to the humanistic idea of nonjudgmental acceptance of every sincere person—preparing the way for the Unitarian universalist claim that everyone goes to heaven (55–62). In the last lines of his book, Frazer judges this transformation of religion with benevolent severity: “God became whoever they preferred Him to be and made only those demands they wished Him to make. They had truly created a god in their own image” (236). In other words, the American Founders and their theological authorities were guilty of idolatry by remaking God into a republican humanist.

Despite his critique of the Founders, one senses that Frazer remains a patriotic American who is far more disturbed by secularism or postmodern nonfoundationalism than by the American Founders, who after all were expressing a partial truth about God rather than completely denying objective truth. Frazer might have expressed his mixed feelings more clearly by placing his analysis in the light of St. Augustine's Two Cities: Is not the American national creed of theistic rationalism, as expressed in the Declaration of Independence, a partial but incomplete version of true religion that is suitable as a civil religion for the City of Man? As long as it is clearly distinguished from the genuine Christian faith of the City of God, which is above and beyond politics and whose purpose is eternal salvation rather than political prosperity and earthly justice, one can acknowledge the greatness of the American Founders in their realm and live with the different demands of citizenship in two worlds.