Does American democracy have a God problem? While many observers would respond by pointing to the habitual intolerance and loathing of compromise rampant in the orthodox wing of the Christian right, Joseph Viteritti and Hugh Heclo provide a different answer to this question. For Viteritti, the “litigation-prone whims of ardent secularists” (209) have reduced devout religionists in America to a persecuted minority in ways reminiscent of racial discrimination. In Heclo's more nuanced analysis, the displacement of Christian Americans from the public sphere has infinitely impoverished American civil society and its democratic vitality. Once both narratives have exhausted these analytical dimensions, however, they turn into Jeremiads about the complacency of a putatively religious majority that has allowed Christian theocrats and godless humanists to dominate political debates in the United States.

Heclo's book, which also features comments by Mary Jo Bane, Michael Kazin and Alan Wolfe, draws heavily on Alexis de Tocqueville's vision of a partnership between religion and democracy. The author describes in detail the “great denouement” in nineteenth-century America when democracy and Christianity “launched themselves together in a kind of double-stranded helix spiralling through time” (35). He reiterates the standard historical repertoire that sees Protestant traditions of self-government, church–state separation, equality, moral self-discipline, spiritual rebirth and millennialism as the key to the community bonds that facilitated the growth of democracy and eventually opened up access to women and minorities. This contrasted markedly with Europe, where republicanism was defined as secular and anticlerical, against the background of religious warfare and authoritarianism.

For Heclo, two main twentieth-century developments account for the marginalization of the distinctive American Protestant tradition and the growing perception that devout Christians posed a threat to democracy. On the one hand, secularization via public schools, universities, the Supreme Court and the “consumption arts” sidelined the traditional forces of family, church and neighbourhood. This process accelerated in the 1960s and culminated in the estrangement between Christianity and a secularist, mass consumerist democracy. On the other hand, Christians themselves promoted the secularization process. Resurgent evangelicalism, in particular, abandoned the humility and “tortured millennialism” (43) of their Puritan forebears and instead embraced a triumphalist “God-is-on-our-side” rhetoric that sanctified the American experiment and promoted a therapeutic, market-driven Christianity. To make matters worse, the “non-judgemental, quiet faith” (64) of the centrist core of American society preferred a flaccid and vacuous democratic discourse. Democracy, Heclo concludes, needs Christians as good citizens; likewise, religion needs to return to its time-honoured moral compass in order to infuse transcendent reference points into the public debates.

In contrast to Heclo's sweeping examination of the confluence of religion and politics, Viteritti concentrates on the secularization of American society engineered by the Supreme Court. His review of major church–state cases – with a particular focus on schooling – depicts religious liberty as the most vulnerable of freedoms. Viteritti is also highly critical of the nineteenth-century Protestant legacy that Heclo tries to recover. He highlights the repressive aspects of the common-school movement, the fervent anti-Catholicism of church–state separatism, and the pervasiveness of Know-Nothingism. In effect, he regards secularism as the twentieth-century successor of the prejudicial, bigoted and discriminatory dimensions of Protestantism.

In Viteritti's view this also manifested itself in the inconsistencies of Supreme Court decisions. The court, for example, allowed students in public schools an opt-out from the Pledge of Allegiance, but refused release-time for religious training. Only in the past few years has it become more accommodationist, as the rulings on school vouchers indicate. In his analysis Viteritti is as scathing as Heclo about the “hollow middle” of American society, whose “passive, undecided, ambivalent” (177) stance ignores that extreme secularism poses a greater risk to democracy than religious zealotry. His suggestions on how to overcome these problems are likely to be controversial, though. For example, he sees a duty of the state to fund religious education for those who cannot afford it. At times his propositions conflict with his calls for protecting religious freedom. He defends the Amish in their withdrawal from public schools, but denounces Mormon polygamy and argues that drugs should be outlawed even if they are part of a religious tradition.

The two books are indicative of a deep sense of unease about the extent to which “procedural democracy” (Michael Sandel) lacks a shared moral goal. They suggest that American Christianity, maligned by the secular left, corrupted by the religious right, and treated with indifference by the average American, has failed to counter the trend towards a selfish, short-sighted, materialistic mass democracy. Both authors thus reflect the desire to revive an alternative tradition in American political thought. However, their quest is weakened by a lack of engagement with the substance of secular humanist thought. Particularly when they slip into a preaching mode they prefer to stereotype secularism as a mixture of lifeless relativism, indifferent toleration and utilitarian reasoning.