This is a book I was very much looking forward to reading and found to be quite insightful after wading through the introduction. Less concerned with church or religious history, I came to understand that introduction as an extended foray in political philosophy offered to nuance and reinterpret Patrick Dineen's Why Liberalism Failed (Yale University Press, 2018). For those of us non-political scientists uninterested in Prof. Dineen's interpretation of why liberalism failed (if indeed it did), reading the introduction will be, well, challenging.

The body of the book is a careful (and interesting) examination of three clergymen—Fulton Sheen (distractingly labeled “Venerable”), Martin Luther King, and Jerry Falwell—all of whom famously embodied precisely that agency that Patterson wants to highlight. The genius of these popularizers was that they both rendered difficult ideas into simple tenets with direct relevance to peoples’ lives as well as elevated these everyday lives by joining them to a higher purpose than mere material consumption.

The interpretive frames offered to understand these very different clerical figures are, quite intriguingly, those of the “American jeremiad” (magisterially identified and defined by Perry Miller in the mid-twentieth century, although subsequently expanded by Sacvan Berkovitch to apply not only to the New England Puritans but to American history generally); American “civil religion” (brilliantly adumbrated by sociologist Robert Bellah in his famous 1967 essay in Daedalus but thereafter enjoying a rich afterlife in the scholarship of a broad array of social scientists and cultural historians); and that of the “Great Denouement” as outlined by Hugh Heclo (referring to the double achievement of the “political freedom of elected officials from control by religious authorities, and the religious freedom of individuals and groups from control by the government” [12]).

Patterson argues (convincingly) that these interpretive frames offer deep insight into the nature of the “dogmas” (what Ralph Henry Gabriel termed the “American Democratic Faith” over half a century ago) that have held together a national consensus that binds citizens together to serve agreed-upon aims. Indeed, he convincingly notes that too often these frames have been mistakenly presented as fixed entities in interpreting the past when, in fact, it is their very plastic, provisional nature that allows popular religious actors to utilize them to improvise their messages. That very plastic, provisional nature of the frames was central for understanding how these three figures constructed very different public theologies.

In chapter 1, Patterson argues that in the 1930s Fulton Sheen adumbrated a religio-political construct he termed “Americanism,” in the process foregrounding the Catholic Church as the surest American institution to provide moral leadership in fighting the secular totalitarian ideology pressed by the Soviet Union. In the process of adumbrating an anti-totalitarian message of Americanism, he effectively reversed the older fears of “Romish plots” against a Protestant republic (when “Americanism” was the nineteenth-century watchword for anti-Catholic nativists as well as a Catholic heresy condemned by the Vatican) with a newer model of civil religion focused on “Judeo-Christian consensus” rather than Protestant hegemony (24). This new civil consensus drew effectively on broader cultural constructs—like the “American Way of Life”—so that, in a deeply ironic cultural moment noted by the author, Sheen himself was awarded a gold medal by the American Legion of New York for his “exemplary work on behalf of Americanism” (28).

Patterson presents Martin Luther King as something like the cultural “preacher in chief,” calling America back to its original covenant—a covenantal vision which King termed the “Beloved Community” (64). As Patterson argues it, King's reinterpretation of America's national calling included at its very core the belief that God had introduced the church as the vehicle for announcing the vision of that Beloved Community, which was the Kingdom of God. But the Kingdom of God, in turn, “established the legitimacy and limits of secular governments” (69). The author is at pains to emphasize the central role of that “personalist” philosophy he learned at the Boston University School of Theology in redefining both that national covenant and how the “fierce urgency of now” (preached by King most famously in 1963 during the March on Washington for Jobs) required a national conversion “written in the heart” rather than in legal codes. King (the Baptist) utilized the message of Methodist personalism to argue that the “covenant did not begin with writing down laws for people” but rather “began with conversion and only afterwards adopted the laws God expected” godly societies to live by (74). In a radical redefinition of how most scholars have understood civil religion, then, the author presents a King who emphasized that “good laws were an effect, and not a cause of the Beloved Community” because such laws were only the “outward expression of an inward conversion toward God's love.” And this was simply because the “empire of Jesus did not stop at American borders; the empire was the church, not the state” (76–77). Only such a radical reshaping of America's civil religion could address and heal the ravages of racism and prejudice, America's original sin.

As Patterson presents him, Jerry Falwell represents the most recent exemplar of the jeremiad, preaching that the “American dispensation” (a rather singular addition to the older dispensationalist categorization of time laid out in the Scofield Reference Bible) demanded that America return to its original founding as a Christian nation in order to “preserve the American state as long as possible, thus bringing as many souls as possible to Christ before the End Times” (117). The author convincingly argues that what made Falwell unique in the well-worn tradition of jeremiad preaching was his packaging that trope in Moral Majority rhetoric, thereby deemphasizing dogma in favor of morality in order to entice conservative, non-fundamentalist Protestants and Jews to support the Republican Party. Falwell “had to distinguish dogma from morals [because] the morality needed to be accessible to those who did not share a Baptist's concern about dancing and drinking” (122). All of this, the author shows, contributed to a certain fundamental ambivalence in Falwell's treatment of America: the vehicle for this message was the Moral Majority—a political nonprofit to mobilize believers on behalf of the Republican Party. And its message was singular (to say the least) in the history of pulpit religious oratory: it sought to elucidate consensus positions on the traditional family (especially opposition to LGBT issues), support for a strong national defense, and low taxation. It was because of these strangely “secular” concerns in his preaching that Patterson labels Falwell's message as an “American Nehemiad”: Falwell called faithful to emulate Nehemiah, the pious and patriotic Jew who returned from Babylon to preach the absolute necessity of rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem, the earthly kingdom of Israel, while waiting for God to establish the Kingdom while making alliances all the while with surrounding “gentile” tribes in order to keep the Holy City safe for evangelization.

While I think that the author's larger concern with the failure(s) of liberalism failed to hold my interest—in American religious history, Horace Bushnell, Walter Rauschenbusch, and Reinhold Niebuhr were all “liberals” in very different senses—the body of Patterson's book is an insightful and engaging work, useful for religious historians precisely because it entails looking at familiar material from a very different (political science) vantage point.