For all the heated debate over the Founders' faith—or lack of faith—the American Revolution is often treated as exclusively a political affair, overlooking how thoroughly a range of religious convictions, yearnings, and forebodings suffused the spirit of '76. Reckoning with the Revolutionary era's many religious dimensions is the mission undertaken, and carried off marvelously, in Thomas Kidd's God of Liberty. A prodigiously productive professor at Baylor University, Kidd—already the author of a Great Awakening history and a forthcoming Patrick Henry biography, among other volumes—has established himself as a leading student of early American religion. In all likelihood, he'll soon be mentioned in the same breath as luminaries like Mark Noll, George Marsden, and Harry Stout, all of whom grace the book's star-studded roster of endorsers. God of Liberty effortlessly straddles the divide between scholarly and popular history, uniting academic rigor with a pleasing readability. It deserves, and hopefully will receive, an audience well beyond the ivory tower.

Readers might naturally expect an explicitly "religious" history of the Revolutionary period to challenge certain secularist interpretations, and if so, they will not come away disappointed. In particular, Kidd debunks the notion that the founders sought to immunize American politics and public life against the influence of religion. Even Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, the early statesmen most habitually invoked by contemporary advocates of rigid church-state separation, would have recoiled at the dogmas promulgated by groups like the American Civil Liberties Union. Elements of secularist mythmaking, then, receive a solid thrashing, however politely administered. Nor, it should be added, does this unfailingly fair-minded book hesitate to puncture extravagant conservative claims about the Christian character of the American experiment. Kidd wisely refuses to portray the Revolution as a merely ...

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