The editors of this collection of eleven essays are setting out to redeem the neglect by biographers of the religious convictions and observances of American presidents. The results are often informative, sometimes unexpected. Eisenhower appears as much more religious than is generally supposed; but regarded his relationship to God as purely private, and would not use religion for political purposes. It also appears that he opposed the atomic bombing of Japan. Clinton invoked the deity more frequently than Bush has done. Truman anticipated Reagan in seeing the Cold War as a Manichean struggle between the religious ‘free world’ and ‘atheistic communism’. But it may be relevant to note that on the home front he was fending off the Republican charge (‘Twenty years of treason!’) that the Democrats were ‘soft on communism’. They all believed in an interventionist deity and most in the efficacy of prayer. The inevitable question of how far religious convictions have contributed to political policy remains open to interpretation with respect to each individual president. Kennedy, as the first Roman Catholic president, disappointed the hierarchy by a rigorously secular appointments policy and did everything in his power to disprove Protestant allegations that he would be in thrall to Catholic power. Carter, a Southern Baptist, had promised that he would not use the presidency to promote religious ends; but this essay does not explain how policy shortcomings relate to his faith. Carter's record on race relations deserved more attention. Lincoln, whose rhetoric was steeped in biblical language – a famous passage in the Second Inaugural quotes St Matthew – joins Washington in putting his faith in a civil religion, which for Lincoln amounted mainly to reverence for the constitution and respect for the laws. Washington's convictions have been much disputed. David Holmes, in a previous book in this series, classified him as a deist; Gary Scott Smith, also drawing on evidence of Washington's preference for a ‘supreme architect’ and similar impersonal expressions, prefers to call the first president a ‘theistic rationalist’ – a hybrid system which mixed elements of natural religion, Christianity and rationalism. Washington certainly believed in a supreme entity who guided, without controlling, human fate, whose intentions were benign and who deserved the credit for American success in the War of Independence. Jefferson and Madison both ascribed religious faith to ‘opinion’. Madison, who had written the ultimate justification for the separation of Church and State in his Memorial and response during the campaign for Jefferson's bill for religious freedom in Virginia, left few indications of personal faith. Jefferson's religious persona was subjected to fierce controversy during the election campaign of 1800, and Jefferson never forgave the opponents who maligned him as an atheist. His most celebrated presidential pronouncement on religion, his letter to the Baptists of Danbury claiming that the constitution had established a ‘wall of separation’ between Church and State, is here viewed in the light of Jefferson's reaction to the Federalist attacks of 1800. That metaphor had no resonance until 1947, when the Supreme Court resurrected it in a case about state support for Catholic schoolchildren. Jefferson himself believed in a Creator who had endowed mankind with ‘unalienable rights’. He also, incidentally, believed that God created nothing in vain and that dinosaurs must still be at large somewhere in the interior.