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Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- PART ONE. Religious Regulation -- Introduction -- CHAPTER 1. English Heritage -- CHAPTER 2. Transplanting the Church of England in the Chesapeake -- CHAPTER 3. Puritan Fathers and the "Christian Common-wealth" -- CHAPTER 4. A "Holy Experiment" in Religious Pluralism -- PART TWO. Religious Competition -- Introduction -- CHAPTER 5. "Trafficking for the Lord" and the Expansion of Religious Choice -- CHAPTER 6. Deists Enter the Religious Marketplace -- CHAPTER 7. Whigs and Dissenters Fight Religious Regulation -- PART THREE. Religious Freedom -- Introduction -- CHAPTER 8. The American Revolution of Religion -- CHAPTER 9. Constitutional Recognition of a Free Religious Market -- CHAPTER 10. Religion and Politics in the Presidential Campaign of 1800 -- Epilogue -- Notes -- Index

The delegates to the 1787 Constitutional Convention blocked the establishment of Christianity as a national religion. But they could not keep religion out of American politics. From the election of 1800, when Federalist clergymen charged that deist Thomas Jefferson was unfit to lead a ""Christian nation,"" to today, when some Democrats want to embrace the so-called Religious Left in order to compete with the Republicans and the Religious Right, religion has always been part of American politics. In Religion in American Politics, Frank Lambert tells the fascinating story of the uneasy

The delegates to the 1787 Constitutional Convention blocked the establishment of Christianity as a national religion. But they could not keep religion out of American politics. From the election of 1800, when Federalist clergymen charged that deist Thomas Jefferson was unfit to lead a "Christian nation," to today, when some Democrats want to embrace the so-called Religious Left in order to compete with the Republicans and the Religious Right, religion has always been part of American politics. In Religion in American Politics, Frank Lambert tells the fascinating story of the uneasy relations between religion and politics from the founding to the twenty-first century. Lambert examines how antebellum Protestant unity was challenged by sectionalism as both North and South invoked religious justification; how Andrew Carnegie's "Gospel of Wealth" competed with the anticapitalist "Social Gospel" during postwar industrialization; how the civil rights movement was perhaps the most effective religious intervention in politics in American history; and how the alliance between the Republican Party and the Religious Right has, in many ways, realized the founders' fears of religious-political electoral coalitions. In these and other cases, Lambert shows that religion became sectarian and partisan whenever it entered the political fray, and that religious agendas have always mixed with nonreligious ones. Religion in American Politics brings rare historical perspective and insight to a subject that was just as important--and controversial--in 1776 as it is today.

The author examines several moments in American history--the sectional division of the States over slavery, the conflict between Andrew Carnegie's "Gospel of Wealth" and Walter Rauschenbusch's "Social Gospel," Fundamentalism's debates with Modernism, the Civil Rights Movement, and the rise of the Religious Right and the Religious Left, among others--in which religious movements attempted to shape political movements

How did the United States, founded as colonies with explicitly religious aspirations, come to be the first modern state whose commitment to the separation of church and state was reflected in its constitution? Frank Lambert explains why this happened, offering in the process a synthesis of American history from the first British arrivals through Thomas Jefferson's controversial presidency. Lambert recognizes that two sets of spiritual fathers defined the place of religion in early America: what Lambert calls the Planting Fathers, who brought Old World ideas and dreams of building a "City upon a