According to American opinion polls, the overwhelming majority of the American people want their presidents to have religious faith. According to the author of this magisterial study, a sequel to one published in 2006, these desires have been more than met. The eleven presidents featured in the book (John Adams, James Madison, John Quincy Adams, Andrew Jackson, William McKinley, Herbert Hoover, Harry Truman, Richard Nixon, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama) ‘have been more deeply religious … than most scholars have recognized’. Their faith, the author concludes, ‘had a greater impact on their worldviews, leadership, actions, policies, and decision-making than is typically acknowledged’ (p. 416). Some genuine surprises await the reader. John Quincy Adams, one the nation's four Unitarian presidents, was probably the most consistent in applying his religious principles to the national issues that he confronted. Andrew Jackson, who is well known for his violent temper, his plantation full of slaves and a bloody record in the Indian wars, was an astonishingly pious Presbyterian. The chapter on Bill Clinton was less surprising but deeply perplexing. Clinton offered up a full cup of Southern Baptist, born-again piety and he expressed a fairly comprehensive faith-shaped political ideology – a ‘New Covenant’, he called it. Yet his sexual transgressions were also of biblical proportions. Simply calling these contradictions hypocrisy, says the author, does not do them justice, and he struggles along with the interpreters whom he cites to make sense of it all. Speaking of citations, this book rides on a mountain of them. Like its predecessor, it is built on extensive archival research combined with a comprehensive mounding up of popular and scholarly published sources too. The author uses sources with great care; he is careful to consult not only what presidents said for public consumption but also their private musings and the observations of colleagues and critics alike. The result is a very sturdy, benchmark sort of work. The author's extensive presentations of material results in a fairly pedestrian narrative pace, which may make some readers impatient. The result is none the less a careful and comprehensive treatment, one that should serve reliably on the reference shelf for a very long time.