Deists, skeptics, and freethinkers are making a comeback—at least those who lived and wrote in America between the 1770s and 1840s. After a generation or more of relative neglect, the infidels of the revolutionary and early republic eras are once more in the historical limelight thanks to Amanda Porterfield's Conceived in Doubt and Eric Schlereth's new study of religious contest and political formation in the new nation. Persuaded that the roles of Christianity's opponents “are largely unaccountable in religious histories that emphasize democratization” (10; think Nathan Hatch's The Democratization of American Christianity here), Schlereth asserts that deists and the controversies they generated played an essential part in shaping early national religion and its effects on American politics. For that reason, he proposes that the spectrum between belief and disbelief be seen as nothing less than an alternative paradigm for plotting the evolution of American religious history in the early national period.

As Schlereth tells the story, when the United States began, it had to sort out how its religious diversity and all its competing claims to religious truth could be made compatible with republican political institutions. In other words, what would be the “relationship between belief and state power” (240) in the new nation? Disputes quickly arose in the revolutionary and constitutional periods between deists (broadly defined) and their opponents over the bounds of tolerable religious belief and expression. But soon America began to move beyond toleration and commit itself to religious liberty in the late eighteenth century. As that happened, the arbiter of religious truth shifted from the state to the marketplace of ideas, American public opinion. Controversies over infidelity quickly became situated firmly within the public sphere, as evidenced, for example, by the fury aroused by Thomas Paine's The Age of Reason and by the prominent place of religious attacks within Federalist-Republican political contests. In the early republic, the power of persuasion became preeminent and over the course of the next half-century, opportunities for politicized religious expression multiplied with the rise of political parties, the growth of print media, and the formation of voluntary associations. Within these communication contexts, Americans may have occasionally debated one another's actual religious truth claims but far more often, they wrestled over the likely political and social consequences of one another's beliefs. Hosts of American Christians came to see deism and infidelity as irreconcilable with republican virtue; in their view, citizen deists “brought subversive religious opinions into public life, thereby threatening the nation's very being” (108). Conversely, in the eyes of some deists, “Christianity was incompatible with republicanism, thus Christians were potentially traitors” (108). Such arguments waxed and waned in the first few decades of the nineteenth century but served to indicate that “Americans could safely engage in religious controversy [in the public sphere] without inciting religious violence” (240). Another fever point came in the 1830s with the emergence of the Second Party System. Evangelicals coalesced in a Whig party bent on moral reform and denouncements of “political irreligion.” Free enquirers (and anti-revivalist Christians) found a home in a Democratic party skeptical of a “political religion” anxious to use state power to regulate other people's behavior. Herein, then, Schlereth argues, lay the origins of American cultural politics for “by the 1830s Americans had thoroughly constructed American civil society and politics on religious terms” (238).

Schlereth's case for the importance of infidel controversies in the new republic's religious and political development offers a helpful supplement to existing conceptualizations. And it restores to rightful prominence within the narrative of American religious history some well-known and also some less well-known deist voices. Nevertheless, overall, it is hard to see the infidel controversies as quite so central as Schlereth makes them. While he mines seemingly all of the relevant printed primary sources, the evidence is still thin for a widespread popular infidel movement. He is persuaded that regardless of the number of deists and skeptics in the early republic (a number he thinks was growing but still small), they exercised a disproportionate influence due to the reactions they provoked among Christian believers. In particular, he sees fears of infidelity pushing Christians of various stripes together in a kind of ecumenical front against disbelief. Those Christians in his view gained a common identity in the face of the disbelieving other. There is no denying that a good number of protestant Christian leaders employed alarmist anti-infidel rhetoric regularly as a political tool to rally the masses, even as they did with anti-Catholic polemics in earlier and later periods. But scholarship on the Second Great Awakening since the 1970s has made clear that there were a host of other forces alongside shared fears pulling evangelical protestants together in this era and their laments about infidelity, whether in the 1790s or the 1830s, were often quickly balanced by hopeful assessments of the state of religion in their own congregations and communities. In other words, much else besides arguments with deists was always going on and proved formative for how the nation put together plural religion, republican institutions, and political culture in the nineteenth century.

I am a believer, then, when Schlereth claims that “religion and politics in the early United States were remade to fit each other” (2) but remain skeptical that the infidel controversies were the primary engine of change.