Gary Scott Smith's new book is an exhaustive but wonderfully informed compendium of religious faith, devotion, and principles held by eleven presidential figures through history. Smith's choice is interesting, not least for the exclusion of a figure like Richard Nixon, whose own Quaker background appeared to direct so many facets of his flawed administration. No matter, for Smith admits that this is meant to be a representative sample and the choice and span of history he covers works well enough in this context. Indeed so particular are Smith's observations of these leaders that one could do far worse than approach his text as an alternative biographical portrait of certain chief executives. But he does such a fantastic job of explicating the Presidents' career trajectories by means of their religious convictions that the book is in fact far more than this.

The extensive research and clear prose ensures that this book is not merely another run through the annals of presidential leadership, but is actually a cataloguing of the way career progress, power, and piety work in harmony for those who reach the pinnacle of public life. Smith reminds us that George Washington was at one time not particularly religious, that Jefferson was accused of being a heretic for the sin of admiring Thomas Paine, and that Ronald Reagan seemed to become reacquainted with his faith just in time for him to leave Hollywood and get elected as governor of California. Smith adds so much more to these tales but his message is often the same: call it destiny, expediency, or just plain conversion, religious practice and principle have been the bedrock of presidential behaviour since 1789.

Smith accepts that all eleven presidents had different values at work when it came to belief and spirituality, but “despite their differences, all eleven emphasised the nation's religious heritage, call for religious renewal, and relationship between faith and morality” (416). There is a common thread, he asserts, that is tied up in the often imponderable definition of character. And character is the sting in the tale for Smith's study. Despite the accumulation of spiritual credibility that so many leaders have stored up, he notes that this has increasingly gone hand in hand with a detached cynicism on the part of commentators if not the electorate, that presidents have used religion for their own ends, as a tactic to appeal to constituencies and, most cynically of all, as a mask to deflect from their own moral deficiencies. The greatest irony of all is that America's secular state has provided an office that, from its very inception, has tied belief and power inextricably together. Gary Scott Smith's study provides rich testimony and wonderful appraisal as to why this is so.