Frank Lambert, professor of history at Purdue University, describes the continuous intersection of religion and politics in American life in this well-informed and accessible volume. A survey based on a synthesis of existing secondary sources, rather than an archives-based exploration of a specific religion and politics topic, the book stands out as perhaps the most engaging and accessible of a recent crop of similar works, most of them by political scientists rather than historians. Lambert’s book is also a somewhat original entry into this literature because it successfully deploys a marketplace approach to the history of religion and American politics. Most authors of works on politics and religion designed for classroom use and general readership still construct their narratives in relation to a more or less explicit modernization theory, according to which religion and the sacred are gradually displaced by science and the secular. According to this "secularism thesis" the faith-based political movements in the United States since the 1970s would appear to be aberrant departures from, and attempts to deconstruct, modernity. Lambert draws on a tradition of theorizing that counters the secularism thesis by emphasizing how from colonial times to the present "the presence of a multitude of religious groups, each free to pursue its own moral vision and each relying only on its own members for support, ensures a vigorous competition among those groups." (10) Lambert develops this approach with two central arguments. First, the history of religion and politics is a contested one. Contests among religious groups and between them and their secular opponents have always been with us, waxing and waning at key moments of intense engagement, since colonial times. Second, and Lambert takes particular care to underscore this point at the outset of his book, religious politics has been a subversive enterprise. "Religious coalitions seek by political means what the Constitution prohibits, namely a national religious establishment, or, more specifically a Christian civil religion." (5)

Lambert begins by describing the political process by which advocates of Protestantism, republicanism and libertarianism vied with one another in the colonial political cultures and in the political process that created the Constitution. Students will come away from this opening chapter with a well-informed answer to questions that have swirled around in the media about the Founding Fathers and religion, and they will understand why when the "Constitution separated church and state, it did not keep religion out of politics." (34) Chapters follow on the challenges to Protestant unity in the antebellum years; the disagreements among churches and believers regarding the Gospel of Wealth and the Social Gospel; the 19^th and early 20^th century clashes within the churches and between believers and nonbelievers over science and the Bible; the ways that Catholics, Protestants and Jews developed their respective discourses on the role and responsibility of government during the wars and depressions of the twentieth century; how advocates and opponents of civil rights movements deployed their arguments and rallied their followers. The final two chapters cover the rise of the "Religious Right" and – in what is perhaps the most original departure in synthetic works of this kind – the counter movement of the "Religious Left." Lambert concludes this chapter by highlighting the degree to which the polarization of politics attendant upon "the politicization of religion" has returned the nation to the kind of divisive and overheated political culture that existed after the American Revolution. Although he avoids levying a moral indictment himself, Lambert closes his account of religion and American politics by giving the floor to "critics of both the Religious Right and the Religious Left [who] think the delegates were wise to keep religion out of national politics." (250)

The book is written in a lively style, well-informed by the latest historiography and – in the final chapters – by recent social surveys and other internet-based sources, and upper level high school as well as college and university students will find it a very good "quick fix" on the topic. Instructors who would like to read up in order to "bring back religion" into their courses beyond the embarrassingly slight coverage available in almost all of the major United States history textbooks will find Lambert on religion and politics a good place to begin.