250 - Faith of Our Fathers: Religion and the New Nation

Faith of Our Fathers: Religion and the New Nation
By Edwin S. Gaustad
San Francisco, Harper & Row, 1987. 196 pp. $15.95.

This volume was originally the Sprunt lectures at Union Theological Seminary in Virginia. It is written by one of the foremost historians of religion in the United States, and is one of the clearest and most accessible accounts of American religion in the period from 1776 to 1826. This is a particularly timely book, since Gaustad's primary concern is the development of the separation of church and state and the religious beliefs and attitudes of five key figures of the revolutionary generation: Jefferson, Madison, Franklin, Washington, and John Adams. Though he devotes some attention to religious developments in American society more generally, Gaustad does not delve deeply into the debates about the role of religion in shaping American revolutionary thought or religious and political movements. Gaustad's lucid style and his command of the scholarship on the Revolution and the early national period make this a marvelous distillation of research on the American experiment in church and state.

John M. Mulder,
Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary,
Louisville, Ky.