American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation

First book we were sent had been on a shelf in a store, so it was a little too roughed up for the purpose we needed it for. I quickly started a return and bought the other copy this seller had. It was wrapped in plastic and new! We ended up buying another book in a store and will use this book for next year’s award. It is presented to an exceptional student and a book plate is made for each student’s award book. I highly recommend this seller!

In a world where strongly held ideas are often viciously defended and many are easily offended, this book holds the wise center intact. This shows the Founders to be vested in protecting religious freedom rather than advocating for any of its myriad flavors and intricacies. Outstanding book and well worth reading multiple times.

Since the founding of the United States of America, one of the biggest principles has always been the separation between church and state. The Founding Fathers believed that the government should not have authority or dictation over the citizens right to worship and follow whichever religion they desire. In recent years, this separation between church and state has become a struggle to maintain. In John Mechams The American Gospel, he makes a noteworthy contribution to the controversy and discussion around the role of religion in America. Mecham’s main arguments are based around his belief that when it comes to religion in America, the positives have outweighed the negatives. Mecham chooses to focus on the roles of faith and freedom of America. To support these claims, he makes credible arguments, providing quotations from the Founding Fathers. Mecham believes that faith and freedom have been conjoined since the founding of the country. He tells the story of how the Founding Fathers viewed faith, and recognized God, while also being able to create a nation where religion and belief in God is a personal choice.Mecham’s thesis is mostly strong, however, his claim about how the benefits of religion outweigh the costs, contains evidence that weakens his argument. Mecham argues that although people suffered, it was all for the greater good of the country. I do not believe that sacrificing people’s happiness and natural human rights for the greater majority is logical. Mecham provides examples of some of the costs he believes were outweighed by the benefits, “It was neither easy nor quick: the destruction of Native American cultures, the ravages of slavery, the horrors of the Civil War, and the bitterness of Jim Crow attest to that. (31)” Instead of choosing to look at the individual harm and destruction our country inflicted, like most Americans, Mecham chooses to look past it since he believes the benefits outweigh the costs.Mecham is able to cover a very wide breadth throughout his book. He begins with his strongest argument, where he analyzes the Founding Fathers ability to create an equal balance between church and state. He states how according to Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence, they ensured that “all men are created equal” (Mecham 7). Meacham provides evidence that since our country was founded on men being equal, this led to religious freedom. Madison states that “we cannot deny equal freedom to those minds that have not yet yielded to the evidence which has convinced us. (Mecham 11)” Through this evidence, Madison is clearly stating that although he may believe in a certain religion, he doesn’t believe that taking away religious freedom and forcing people to believe what he does is the right idea. He will give people the option of following his faith in hope that eventually they will follow his religion and ultimately share the benefits with him.Author Jonathan Woods, reviewed Jon Meacham's The American Gospel, and provides valuable insight in understanding Mechams claims. Contrary to the beliefs of Mecham, Woods believes that the Founding Fathers had nothing to do with the separation between church and state. Woods claims that although there is no formal connection between the two, there are still many Americans who attend church or practice a religion. He then goes on to mention the reasoning for the separation between church and state. “Everywhere the state supported churches in the colonies were surrounded by growing numbers of dissenters whom the churches were forced to recognize and tolerate. (Wood 3)” He is proving that combining the two led to an array of problems, and therefore keeping them seperate was the wisest decision. Later on the American Revolution and Great Awakening allowed the church and state to be separated while still allowing people to practice religious freedom. He then goes on to claim that “We do not, and cannot, base American constitutional jurisprudence on the historical reality of the founding. (7)” In this claim he is stating that we can’t believe that the Founding had anything to do with the separation of wall and state. Meacham claims “the Founders succeeded in assigning religion to its proper place in civil society (6)”, however Woods believes this is not true and can only be claimed because of the misconception in incorporating the First amendment into the fourteenth amendment, and then relating it to the states which was never intended. He claims that Meacham forgets that “back then the First Amendment only applied to the federal government and not to all the states”(Woods 6). He is implying that Mecham did not do enough research on his claims regarding the separation of church and state having to do with the Founding Fathers. Woods commentary is both very persuasive and beneficial to the reader because is able to both provide his own research, and he is able to pick out Meacham’s mistakes and correct him.Although Mechams quotations do provide clear evidence to prove his claims, they end up being very excessive and take up the majority of the book. Rather than being a novel, his writing turns into more of a drawn out essay. If he had added less quotations and more of his own analysis, the book would be far more entertaining to read.After finishing the novel, I gained a new perspective on the role of religion in America, and feel very informed about many of the events that led to our country being the way it is today. I had never been fully informed or aware of the how important the role of religion has been in America and how much history was behind it. Although at times his novel consisted of excessive amounts of quotes, Jon Meacham did a quality job of providing the reader with new insights and perspective. I would recommend this book for people who are seeking a new perspective on the role of religion in America. Since Mechams claims are somewhat controversial, this novel would suit someone who is well educated on the founding of America and can read the novel, while understanding which of Meacham's claims are false, and which ones are able to offer a new insight to the role of religion in America.

For anyone interested the American history of the church-state debate, I highly recommend this book for several reasons, however I also caution readers that this effort is a highly flawed report on our history that requires supplemental reading from other authors in order for one to have a more complete understanding of the history and current state of church-state relations.Meacham is a wonderful writer and the volume of source material and anecdotes was impressive making for a quick enjoyable read. Meacham, a self-proclaimed devout Christian, adds to the debate because this book, which I believe will appeal to the religious right by celebrating the religiousity of some of our founders, also addresses and condemns the deceptions and propaganda fostered by LaHaye, Barton, and Roy Moore regarding the objectives and worldviews of the framers of the Constitution who most certainly intended to create a secular government where private institutions and citizens enjoyed "freedom of conscience"; Meacham accomplishes this like many before him by using an extensive amount of primary source material, unlike Barton et. al who merely repeated legendary tales or created misleading "statistics" to support a preconceived policy objective meant to deceive their gullible constituents.Currently, there is no debate regarding religious freedom in American, the vast majority of Americans support a broad interpretation of the religious freedom clause; even the ACLU spends a considerable amount of effort defending Americans' individual rights in court when the occasionally ignorant bureaucrat mixes up government restrictions on religion with individual freedoms regarding such. Where the debate is currently focused, and some would say rages, is how broad or narrow to interpret the establishment clause, with secularists and liberal christians defending our founding American ideal to broadly interpret this clause like we do with the religious freedom clause, and thereby limiting government power in this area with the most eloquent methaphor being Jefferson's "wall" which became precedent in 1947's Everson case. The religious right now lobby for a narrow interpretation of the establishment clause without stating so explicitly; their efforts are to further expand government power to: financially support their institutions, endorse their religious beliefs, and proselytize subjects of American government power, both here and abroad even though the three latter areas have been deemed unconstitutional numerous times by numerous courts (the Lemon Test).Meacham's flaw is that he employs a similar rhetorical trap that the religious right employs, combining the protection of the establishment clause with the clause of religious freedom and naming it "public religion", which appears to be closely related to the right's frequent use of the term "public square". This approach perpetuates a muddying of the water regarding the debate by not clearly delineating, like our framers did, the difference between limiting government power regarding religion and protecting the rights of individual Americans to not be discriminated against by their government. Meacham ignores this dilemma by appropriately including anecdotes of our framers supporting "freedom of conscience" without also providing anecdotes of our framers clearly being suspicious when government and religion join forces. One excellent example not included in book could have been to include the fact that President Madison, the architect of the Constitution, vetoed a bill that would have government financially supporting faith-based charities, even though the bill was designed to support his own Episcopalian church. Meacham could have included the reasons why Madison thought this was a dangerous notion and compared that to the effects realized today by our government financially instituting faith-based charities and the resulting influence church and state have had due to this co-mingling.Another bias of the book is not providing both sides of several stories: Meachum appropriately celebrates liberal Christians joining with secularists who supported the American ideal of expanding civil liberties to an increasing number of Americans (abolitionists, women's rights, voting rights, non-Christians, Catholics, etc.). However Meachum ignores the events where conservative Christians opposed such efforts along with how a nation of Christians treated native Americans, causing the book to come off very biased in favor of his public religion leveraging government power by conveniently ignoring the events that would argue for limited government power who would deny minority groups of their rights.Meacham also fails to discuss the Lemon Test, the Supreme Court precedent that currently defines how broadly we interpret the establishment clause and why secularists support this precedent and why social conservatives want to overturn this precedent even though this precedent has done an excellent job of supporting equal protection under the law for all Americans. He also fails to discuss why social conservatives couch their rhetoric by claiming victim-hood under the religious rights clause when in reality, their issues are in no way related to the religious freedom clause, instead they really want to narrow the establishment clause and empower government to promote their particular worldview even if it deprives other Americans of their religious freedom rights and denies equal protection under the law.If you are interested in the whole story, I would recommend ordering this book along with Forrest Church's "The Separation of Church and State", Mark Whitten's "The Myth of Christian America", and Isaac Kramnick's "The Godless Constitution" to clarify the debate regarding the interpretation of the establishment clause. Church's especially is an excellent collection of primary source material. All three of these books were also secondary sources for this book. In defense of Meacham, he does admit in the acknowledgements section that the book is "not a work of historical or theological scholarship", however this book will be used as such so adding the missing elements is the responsible action he should have taken.The last flaw I'll mention is the lack of an index. One reason I recommend this book is the volume of wonderful stories contained therein that are so well written by Mr. Meachum. Using the book for sources after reading the first time will be severely limited until the "search inside this book" feature is implemented. I'm disappointed because I was impressed with many of the stories he reported yet have no practical way of finding them again. I do commend him on the extensiveness of his source notes, bibliography, and appendix of several primary source documents like Madison's Memorial and Remonstrance essay which was instrumental in defeating Patrick Henry's efforts to establish a state religion and cause Virginia's legislature to vote 67-20 for religious freedom, passage of which subsequently provided the model for the federal protections established in the body of the U.S. Constitution and in the I, X, and XIV amendments.

This is very good. I did know a lot of the background - about public religion in American society & politics from the days of the Founding Fathers onwards. Good to compare with Britain. I was going to Billy Graham in London in about 1990 but suddenly got too much work to do so didn't make it! I see the Margaret Suckley Papers are in the Wilderstein Collection, Rhinebeck, New York.