| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.1

You have not been recognized as a subscriber to the AHR online. About 240 words from this article are provided below; about 588 words remain.

If you are a individual member of the American Historical Association, you may:: • login here if you have already registered for online access.; • Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
• Set up your online account for the first time. AHA members can go to the AHA individual membership section to locate their member numbers.
If you are not a member of the American Historical Association, you can:: • Join the AHA and receive many member benefits including print and electronic issues of the American Historical Review.
• Purchase a research pass to gain two hour access to the entire History Cooperative web site. You will have full access to current issues of the American Historical Review (104.3-present). Note: the Research Pass does not provide access to JSTOR's holdings of the American Historical Review.
Instititutions can:: • Subscribe to this journal and receive print and electronic issues.
• Activate your existing subscription so that we recognize your IP number ranges.

| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Frank Lambert. The Founding Fathers and the Place of Religion in America. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2003. Pp. xii, 328. $29.95.

The "central paradox of religion in America," Frank Lambert maintains, inheres in the contest between two historically embedded views of the United States. The first—"belief in the superiority of one faith as the foundation of a moral nation"—energized New England's Puritans, while the second—a free society's desire for "unfettered religious liberty"—guided the "Founding Fathers" (p. 23). Controversialists on all sides of contemporary culture wars over church and state polemically conflate the Saints with the Framers, Lambert contends, whereas the two groups in fact stood on opposite shores of a sea change in thinking about religious liberty. Holding axiomatically that public worship should conform to a single scriptural standard which would ensure political stability, churches' seventeenth-century "nursing fathers," Virginians as much as New Englanders, sought to bind religious freedom in conformity's service. Such efforts collapsed during the eighteenth century as immigration increased denominational diversity while revivalists touting converts' ability to obtain grace outside their establishments and deists extolling conscience's natural rights affirmed that religious affiliation was a matter of personal choice, not state imperative. The American Revolution solidified the shift from a "regulated religious economy" to the "free marketplace of ideas." Allied with evangelical dissenters, the Constitution's rationalistic authors created a secular polity far different from Queen Elizabeth's Erastian state.

. . .

There are about 588 more words in this article. Please log in (or, if you are not yet an authorized user, please go to the User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.