The argument of this book implies the assumption that the main thrust of American political behaviour since the early nineteenth century has represented a direct translation of religious belief into political action. Mark Noll argues that the connection of race and religion defines four periods of American politics. These periods, which overlap, are held to run from the early 1830s down to the Civil War, to resume in post-war America to 1900, and thence on to the post-war civil rights movement. The single exception is the New Deal, when economic issues dominated everything. (A dubious view of that complex of events). The Civil War was ‘fundamentally a religious battle over how to interpret the Bible and about how to promote moral norms in public life’ (p. 14). Religious rhetoric, however, should not be mistaken for religious motivation; many different causes or interests will often enlist under a single flag. In the defeat of Reconstruction and the process of ‘redemption’, white appeals to Christian values played a formalistic rather than a motivating role. After Reconstruction, the Supreme Court, in a series of spurious but secular decisions, effectively repealed the Fourteenth Amendment. Noll will not find it hard to convince readers of the dominance of the slavery issue in antebellum and wartime America, nor of the persistence of racial prejudice in the post civil-war period; and he supports his argument with a wealth of useful statistics and graphs. However the claim that American politics have been shaped or ‘driven’ by the intersection of religion with race is more problematic; and the process of their connection is a little unclear. As Noll recognises, a great variety of material interests and moral convictions contested the ground. The primacy of race in westward expansion or ‘Manifest Destiny’, or in the struggles of labour and capital in the later nineteenth century, is by no means obvious, and the rapid rise of aggressive capitalism left few traces of divine inspiration or ecclesiastical motivation. Another difficulty in attributing a definitive character to the connection of religion with race is the obvious fact that no one could be quite sure whose side God was on; and Noll recognises the ambiguity in quoting Lincoln: ‘Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God’. He makes the interesting point that the proliferation of Baptist and other sectarian Churches in the South offered African-Americans an alternative to politics when political participation was denied them. The moral passion of anti-slavery and egalitarianism, often spearheaded by religious causes, was countered by pro-slavery and racist forces which appealed to the same sources of moral inspiration, and which survived the Civil War in the form of profound and pervasive institutional racism. This short but not unambitious book is unlikely to cause a reorientation of American political history, but it may prove a stimulating introduction.