Heaven Can Wait: Against Michael Kazin

Kazin, whose new biography of William Jennings Bryan should be a major corrective to the cartoonish stereotype based entirely on Bryan's role in the Scopes "monkey trial," is absolutely right in his contention that "evangelical Protestantism has always been an integral part of American political history." But he fails to make a crucial distinction between eighteenth-century evangelicals, who supported the godless Constitution because they regarded any government involvement with religion as an insult to God, and later evangelicals, who, as their numbers grew, did everything they could to write their religious views into law, on matters ranging from Sunday postal service to the outlawing of alcohol.