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  • Pulpit and Nation: Clergymen and the Politics of Revolutionary America by Spencer W. McBride
  • William Harrison Taylor (bio)
Pulpit and Nation: Clergymen and the Politics of Revolutionary America. By Spencer W. McBride. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2017. Pp. 272. $39.50 cloth; $39.50 ebook)

For the past couple years, students of early American religious history, especially those focusing on the Revolutionary era, have been flooded with quality scholarship such as Mark Noll's In the Beginning Was the Word (2016), James Byrd's Sacred Scripture, Sacred War (2013), and Jonathan Den Hartog's Patriotism and Piety (2015). Fortunately, the water has only gotten deeper with the addition of Spencer W. McBride's debut work, Pulpit and Nation. McBride takes on the perpetually contested question of religion's role in revolutionary America, and he makes a compelling argument that religion, Christianity especially, was vitally significant to shaping the era. Specifically, he examines how religion was used in the political sphere, and he contends that through the work of "politicized clergymen" and politicians, who often wielded faith as a convenient tool, Christianity was intimately involved in transformative events of the period, including the war for American independence, ratifying the Constitution, and the first national elections. Their work not only shaped Revolutionaryera political culture, but it also helped lay the foundations for how future generations would struggle over American identity.

Christianity, politics, and identity, McBride argues, were inseparable in Revolutionary America. Marshaling a diverse set of sources—letters, diaries, personal papers, local church and ruling-body [End Page 105] records, sermons, newspapers, and pamphlets—to his cause, the author reveals the intended and perceived roles of congressional fast days throughout the period and across the colonies/states, before considering the work of chaplains both on the war front and in Congress in the same light. His examination of the political/ecclesiastical experience of three clergymen, Samuel Seabury, James Madison, and John Joachim Zubly, who took different positions toward the war, illustrates that the fates of these ministers in the new nation depended more on their specific political environment and abilities than their stance toward American independence. This multifaceted use of religion within the political realm, two chapters in particular make clear, was taken on by both "politicized clergymen" and politicians during the constitutional debates as well as the party ferment of the 1790s. McBride concludes his study by exploring "the myth of the Christian president," an exemplary process of the contested, but effective, use of religion to shape the era's, and the subsequent era's, political culture (p. 148).

Where, then, does McBride stand on the question of whether the United States was founded as a Christian nation? In a sense, we are left with the same answer as Ned Flanders when he asked Reverend Lovejoy whether the destruction of his home was the result of unrepented sin: "Short answer, 'yes' with an 'if.' Long answer, 'no' with a 'but.'" The difficulties in this question, McBride contends, are twofold. First, there are the realities of the era. Instead of portraits of unified and like-minded evangelicals or deists pursuing a common goal of promoting or destroying a Christian nation, the individuals in McBride's study reveal "the interplay of politicized religion and religiously infused politics, as well as the institutional complexity and cultural ambiguity at play in the founding era" (p. 173). Complexity, in other words, was as characteristic of the revolutionary generation as it is of the current generation. The second difficulty, the author rightly notes, is that the roots of the question itself generally lay more in a contest over national identity than in earnest historical inquiry. According to McBride, yes or no will simply not work and efforts to [End Page 106] force the period and people into tidy answers for identity's sake are themselves heirs of the process begun during the Revolutionary era. Pulpit and Nation is an engaging and provocative work and one that is a welcome addition to a crowded field.

William Harrison Taylor

WILLIAM HARRISON TAYLOR is an associate professor of history at Alabama State University. He is the author of Unity in Christ and Country: American Presbyterians in the...

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