Dickson D. Bruce Jr. wrote Earnestly Contending with unabashed presentism. Bruce contends that modern debates over a range of issues concerning religion's place in public life often prove vexing because protagonists fail to fully comprehend the demands that religious faiths impose on their adherents. Such misunderstandings, Bruce worries, reflect an even greater failure by contemporary Americans to acknowledge that religious convictions breed certainties that regularly conflict with ideals of religious toleration. Bruce's book seeks to address this modern dilemma by exploring its historical development in the antebellum era. Bruce asserts that antebellum religious writers never successfully reconciled “faith, freedom, and difference” (8). He seems doubtful that such reconciliation is possible in our time. For as Bruce argues, the history of religious debates in the antebellum period provide “an important case study that helps us understand a fundamental incompatibility between faith and tolerance that must be confronted rather than evaded in our own volatile religious world” (8). Earnestly Contending is a worthy book even though much of Bruce's evidence ultimately belies his pessimism.

Bruce's book centers on the concept of a “normative discourse of freedom and toleration.” This concept describes a widely held view in the early United States that religious liberty was the essence of American law, culture, and belief. Bruce locates the origins of this discourse in a fairly standard historical context. The discourse had its roots in Protestant teachings but gained new political resonance as religion was disestablished under federal law and in most states by the early nineteenth century. To explore this discourse, Bruce analyzes a wide array of published religious writings such as newspapers, orations, sermons, and religious dictionaries and histories authored from vastly different religious perspectives including freethinking deists, Unitarians, Methodists, Baptists, Jews, Catholics, and Mormons. Indeed, one of the book's greatest strengths is Bruce's ability to incorporate the vast complexity of antebellum religion into his interpretation. As a result, Bruce persuasively demonstrates the broad appeal of the “normative discourse.” Bruce also explains that antebellum religious writers could not agree on the discourse's relationship to diverse and competing faith claims. The authors of antebellum religious writings thus often grappled with tensions between normative ideals and faith. Efforts by such writers to address conflicts between toleration and faith provide the interpretive thread that ties together Bruce's seven thematic chapters. Bruce begins with a general overview of intellectual and political developments reaching back to the seventeenth century. He then explores how religious writers confronted tensions between toleration and faith in contemporary debates over human nature; the basis and standing of religious truth; the search for religious unity and essentials; religion's moral role in society; national identity; and, finally, the relationship between religious belief and the era's larger intellectual trends from fields such as science to biblical criticism

Bruce's thematic focus yields several fascinating insights. His chapter on religious truth is illustrative. Bruce recounts anti-Mormon writers who labeled Joseph Smith an “American Mahomet” (61). He also shows that writing comparative religious histories interested David Benedict, a Baptist, but also Lydia Maria Child, whose religious thinking had a Transcendental cast. Finally, Bruce provides a fascinating comparative analysis of Robert Baird's Religion in the United States of America (1844) and Israel Daniel Rupp's Religious Denominations in the United States (1861). Baird's and Rupp's books were both attempts to survey the American religious landscape. Baird divided his subject along evangelical and unevangelical lines, an editorial choice that reflected his own evangelical faith. Rupp, on the other hand, invited members of different religious groups to submit entries describing their beliefs on their own terms. “No less notably,” Bruce notes in an important observation, “the essays were alphabetically, that is, neutrally ordered” (58).

These examples illustrate one of Bruce's major arguments throughout the book. The “normative discourse of freedom and toleration” was powerful not because it generated affection for religious difference, but because it allowed its adherents to distinguish—and thereby judge as acceptable or unacceptable—true from false faiths depending on one's own religious beliefs. Bruce's book is thus a useful contribution to a growing historiography that moves beyond Nathan Hatch's emphasis on the appeal of popular religion in the early United States to analyze more closely the worries and conflicts generated by the era's deep religious changes. Bruce contributes to this literature in two important ways. First, his book is a useful intellectual history of the antebellum era as a pivotal moment of religious change. Second, Bruce's book seeks to understand interactions among writers from nearly all of the religious movements in this period.

However, by presenting the perspectives of religious writers from widely different faiths, Bruce's evidence also contradicts some of his central claims about the nature of religious conflict. Throughout his book, Bruce recounts issues around which writers of markedly different faiths either agreed on basic principles or, when agreement was impossible, used similar arguments and strategies for addressing their disputes. Bruce notes that Calvinist Theologian Leonard Wood and Rabbi Isaac Leeser sought to bolster the authority of their respective faiths through recourse to similar principles, creeds for the former and “the law” for the latter (86–87). He also demonstrates that Calvinist, Methodist, and Jewish writers all worried about the world's influence on their faiths. Finally, Bruce has examples of Catholic writers in the United States who argued that Protestantism rather than their own faith posed the greatest threat to republican institutions. Such examples return to the question of failure. Bruce contends that his book recounts “a story of failure,” a failure of believers to successfully balance religious “commitment and toleration” (8). In the end, Bruce's arguments about antebellum religion are largely persuasive. Bruce's claims about why this history could prove useful for understanding contemporary religious controversies are less convincing. When viewed differently, Bruce's evidence suggests that conflicts over seemingly intractable religious differences at the time look instead like important intellectual steps toward a consensus over how believers could safely disagree about matters of faith in public life. Perhaps, then, Bruce's history offers reason for optimism rather than worry.