American Gospel started with a fresh insight and was poised to deliver meaningful content about America’s relationship to the Christian faith…and then utterly failed. The text moved me from inspiration to frustration and disappointment. If it was any longer, I wouldn’t have bothered to finish it. It offers absolutely nothing to the conversation about faith in America. It’s entirely secular and ascribes only negative value to people of Christian faith each time they are referenced. Meacham knows how to use a concordance, but knows nothing about the private practice of faith, which is why his explication on public religion doesn’t make any sense. Secularists will laud this text and be prepared to canonize it and make it required reading in government schools exactly because it doesn’t say anything useful, and therein undermines the private practice of genuine faith. The text relies heavily on Thomas Jefferson as it’s standard for faith, fidelity and moral uprightness throughout, but particularly during revolutionary times. This is hilarious. Then it proceeds in succession to praise only the faith of Democrats and Democratic Republicans, particularly southern ones like James Madison, Andrew Jackson, Zachary Tyler, and Jimmy Carter, but also praises Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt. All the Republican presidents and constituents in turn were ruthlessly maligned and criticized, including Abraham Lincoln, making this merely another hatchet job on the party of America’s working class by the party of America’s wealthy. Republicans and Christians are portrayed as stupid and superstitious, untrustworthy and dishonest hypocrites that American would do better without. Meacham delights in this opportunity to discredit them and to erase any reference or illusion to faithful people of Christian faith in America. Clearly he finds the idea oxymoronic. I would think this text makes him eligible for a number of Ivy League professorships, if he isn’t already a holding such a position. I’m sure his mother is very proud.

A deeply researched work with profoundly un-intellectual conclusions

Religious moderation is the preachment in these pages. To disavow religion in public life would be contrary to the delicate balancing act performed by the Founders, who were occasionally agnostics but more likely Christians or Deists, and skeptics all. Our greatest minds were motivated to varying degrees by religious faith – and now we have a work where Meacham boldly supports it as a core of the American experience (i.e. nothing substantive needs to change in our public discourse). But 18th century knowledge of evolution and cosmology and physics and biology and germ theory was hopelessly primitive! We have abandoned these regressive ideas and surely Meacham’s thesis reflects this! the reasonable among us might rejoinder. Shhh say the promulgators of religious moderation, Meacham unfortunately among them. It’s part of our history. Hush now.

Curiously, he makes no mention of the current public support enjoyed by religious organizations, most visibly in the form of tax incentives. It would prove enlightening to see how he squares this fact with the sentiments of the book. “God” should not be stricken from public life, he argues. Americans are deeply religious. They are not consummate followers of church doctrine, but Americans’ faith remains important to the daily lives of a majority in this country. The separation of church and state and the freedom from religion would seem to exclude religious organizations from public support. It is why churches of Flying Spaghetti Monsterism (FMSism) do not enjoy tax breaks.

Meacham makes a host of platitudes towards the cause of ecumenism, tolerance, and maintaining our collective faith. This tepid religious moderation provides no easy answers for the most pressing of real-world, modern questions to which the faithful among us have no useful things to say. Perhaps facing hard questions was simply too ambitious for a work of this kind. The axiomatically praised Reagan and Carter are not carrying the torches of the Deists Jefferson and Lincoln, with their unhelpful apocalyptic theology. Our next generation of American heroes in religious thought needs to have ideas compatible with modernity. That is to say: nonreligious thought.

Jon Meacham’s American Gospel purports to examine religion’s role in the foundation and continued existence of the United States of America, and examine it he does. Unfortunately, this “examination,” while miles wide, is barely a few inches deep, and does little to substantiate Meacham’s bold thesis.
tThe thesis that underlines all of American Gospel is, to put it in Meacham’s own words, that “taken all in all.... History teaches us that the benefits of faith in God have outweighed the costs.” (31) He elaborates that America has always had a “public religion,” some sort of amalgamation of all Abrahamic religions which guided the nation to providential success. After establishing his thesis in the introduction and first chapter, Meacham scans nearly the entirety of American history, mainly in the form of long strings of diary entries and speeches from past presidents, all of which somehow incorporate religious imagery.
tWhile his writing itself is acceptable on a micro level, the way Meacham structures his arguments becomes exhausting. He mostly lets his long-winded quotes speak for him. The constant tonal change is frustrating, and the quotes are often unnecessarily bloated. Meacham rarely digs very deep into the rhetoric of a quote - he mainly glances over its historical context and then lets it be. If the book was framed as an objective look at American history in the context of religion, this approach may have very well worked. And Meacham did manage to cover a significant portion of history, albeit none of it especially comprehensively. Unfortunately, Meacham is caught in the undesired middle ground of a cohesive argument and an objective pan over history. His thesis is simply not supported enough.
tMeacham’s main shortcomings lie in this analysis. He is easily able to prove that most American leaders were theists who drew upon their religion - no one can argue against that. He does not, however, successfully link their triumphs to the “public religion” he so vehemently espouses. In the section on the Civil War, for example, Meacham cites several quotes from Lincoln in which he argued against slavery and used the words “God” or “providence.” He then, to his credit, discusses the biblical justifications that slaveholders used. However, Meacham fails to explain how religion minimized suffering or even meaningfully contributed to abolition, instead simply moving on to the next chapter of history.
t100 or so years of history later, Meacham discusses the Cold War - an epic chess match of clashing ideologies, clashing economic systems, and just as importantly, clashing religious views. It would be easy to argue that America’s “public religion” inspired the greater freedom that ultimately won them the war. Meacham spurns this argument in favor of spending his Cold War-dedicated analysis constructing an argument for which the main takeaway is that John F. Kennedy was, in fact, Catholic.
tEven discounting the stylistic issues and analytical shortcomings, Meacham’s thesis, while compelling, is deeply flawed. It lies on a base of heavy assumptions and logical fallacy. Primarily, as historian Gordon Wood noted in his review, Meacham romanticizes the founding fathers to a dishonest degree. While he acknowledges their questionable (although sadly common for their time) stances on issues of race and gender, he always returns to a perceived “heroism”. “For the Founding Fathers, God’s grace was universal,” (7) Meacham states, a few pages before noting that many of them were slave owners. He even claims that “our best chance of summoning [the best out of people] may lie in recovering the sense of the Founding era and its leaders.” (6) Statements like these, in concert with others of how “trying” current times are, falsely imply that early America was some sort of paradise, with even near the level of advanced thought and peace of today. And as Wood mentions, the Declaration of Independence and Constitution were not the near-sacred documents Meacham made them out to be. They are only as well-perceived now, Wood explains, because of successful interpretations by lawmakers in the 250 years since.
tSecondly, Meacham mistakenly attributes the successes of America to individual men instead of populations of a whole. Meacham’s only real evidence in favor of “public religion” are the constant diary entries shoehorned into every nook and cranny of the book, most of which serve to demonstrate that American leaders looked to God before doing acts of good. It is ironic that, in a book which sings the praises of “public religion”, Meacham hardly mentions the public at all, instead looking to single people to prove his claim. It is almost as if Meacham subscribes to the Great Man Theory of history, which dictates the the course of history is determined by the actions of individuals. While his book may have earned plaudits in the 19th century, this idea of history has been long antiquated.
tFinally, and most importantly, Meacham often fails to meaningfully connect progress with religion. Yes, all of the founding fathers were religious to some extent. Yes, the vast majority of American leaders, of American heroes - your George Washington’s and Abraham Lincoln’s and Martin Luther King’s were all religious. However, it is a stretch to say that their accomplishments were due to religion. There were many factors involved. It would be disingenuous to say that, for instance, the civil rights movement was inspired by God-given wisdom and not decades of social, political, and economic oppression of African Americans. The “Rev.” in “Rev. Martin Luther King” does not change that.
tAmerican Gospel is a promising book - it is a fresh perspective, and even one that can be compellingly written by the right author. Jon Meacham is not that author. Ultimately, it is a glaringly deficient, disappointing book.

I appreciate the book. It points me in specific directions to do more research. And I appreciate the tone he takes. But I would have preferred that he either focus on the founding fathers, or do a broad look at how their religious views influenced all of the presidents. Instead he devotes about half the book to the founders, then skims a few selected presidents up to the present. It's a bit too scattershot.

Reading American Gospel by Jon Meacham, I really had no idea what to expect. A friend had recommended this book to me, and I had previously purchased Meacham’s book on both Andrew Jackson and Thomas Jefferson.
The book, to my surprise, did not focus solely on the founding fathers, though it did dedicate a large chunk of it to the Revolutionary War period. It also covers the Civil War, the Civil Rights Movement and World War II. The book is well researched, though the thesis is poorly developed. Meacham includes several points to back up his thesis, but by the end of the book, readers are still left asking the question: what exactly was the thesis?
Meacham quotes such figures as Washington, Adams, Madison, Jefferson, Patrick Henry, Samuel Adams, Lincoln, Luther King Jr., Franklin Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt, Kennedy, Eisenhower, LBJ, and Harry Truman. The quotes are good, and, in my humble opinion, the one most obvious redemptive quality of this book.
Meacham’s entire book is focused on public religion, an underlying belief in God, though whether that God is Jehovah, Budha or Allah, he doesn’t really specify. He also makes almost no mention of Jesus Christ, even though this played a fundamental role in the faith of the founders.
Furthermore, he strongly criticizes the so-called “right-wing fundamentalists.” Mentioning Pat Robertson, Tim LaHaye, and Jerry Falwell by name. He states that focusing on abortion or same-sex marriage is what divides, and that, as Americans, we should focus on the things we agree on (what exactly do we agree on?).
The book is written from a center-left perspective, and I would enjoy a more conservative viewpoint on future reads. That said, this book was enlightening as to the beliefs of the radical left, which the author neither defends nor condemns. The author claims to be unbiased, is clearly not unbiased, but is more unbiased than the progressives you and I are accustomed to hearing in the media, mocking Christianity. Meacham mocks a literal six-day interpretation of Genesis, as well as the literal interpretation of the miracles of Jesus, while still defending Christianity from the onslaught the left is perpetrating. Meacham also presents a favorable view of Billy Graham, though criticizing him briefly for being friends with someone so obviously devoid of character and morals as Richard Nixon. He also condemns the Vietnam War in no uncertain terms and praises Lyndon Johnson’s war on poverty, all talking points the left uses against conservatives.
The style is engaging, interesting, and accurate in that it portrays the quotes of the people mentioned correctly.
Positive elements:
Underlying message: 2/5: Thesis is poorly written and explained.
Morals: 4/5: Author defends most Biblical morals, including the ten commandments and the Sermon on the Mount, while denying the pro-life, pro-traditional marriage elements of the faith.
Faith: 3.5/5: The author invokes his own faith several times and acknowledges that most of the founding fathers would have claimed to be Christians.
Negative elements:
Language: 3/5: A few swear words used in quotes. “D**n, “H**l”. An outright blasphemous quote is cited but condemned. The Lord’s name is taken in vain in several instances, though always in quotes and never by the author.
Violence: 1/5: Descriptions of the Revolutionary War and World War II. Talk of Pearl Harbor and Nazi Germany.
Sex: 2/5: Rumored affair between Franklin Roosevelt and other women briefly mentioned. Sally Hemings scandal discussed.

:Historian and Newsweek editor Meacham's third book examines over 200 years of American history in its quest to prove the idea of religious tolerance, along with the separation of church and state, is ""perhaps the most brilliant American success."" Meacham's principal focus is on the founding fathers, and his insights into the religious leanings of Jefferson, Franklin, Adams and Co. present a new way of considering the government they created. So it is that the religious right's attempts to reshape the Constitution and Declaration of Independence into advocating a state religion of Christianity are at odds with the spirit of religious freedom (""Our minds and hearts, as Jefferson wrote, are free to believe everything or nothing at all-and it is our duty to protect and perpetuate this sacred culture of freedom""). Meacham also argues for the presence of a public religion, as exemplified by the national motto, ""In God We Trust,"" and other religious statements that can be found on currency, in governmental papers and in politicians' speeches. Subsequent chapters consider a wartime FDR and a Reagan who grew increasingly enamored of Armageddon. All are well-written, but none reach the immediacy and vigor of the chapters on the nation's birth. Two extensive appendices reprint early government documents and each president's inaugural bible verses. Meacham's remarkable grasp of the intricacies and achievements of a nascent nation is well worth the cover price, though his consideration of Reagan feels like that of an apologist." - Publishers Weekly

Historian Jon Meacham's third book examines over 200 years of American history in its quest to prove the idea of religious tolerance, along with the separation of church and state, is ""perhaps the most brilliant American success."" Meacham's principal focus is on the founding fathers, and his insights into the religious leanings of Jefferson, Franklin, Adams and Co. present a new way of considering the government they created. Meacham also argues for the presence of a public religion, as exemplified by the national motto, ""In God We Trust,"" and other religious statements that can be found on currency, in governmental papers and in politicians' speeches. I first read this book about 2008 and thought it might feel dated today. Quite the contrary! This book seems more relevant than ever in today's America. Rereading this book was time well spent! (Note:parts of this review are borrowed from publishers weekly.com)

Interesting writing... I really like the stance that religion is a moral compass on which to guide the country, but there is no "right" religion.

One of the trickiest subjects to discuss at any time is that of religion and, in these currently divisive and angry times, it is even more of a delicate matter.

As an American historian -- one who taught college early in my adult life and then a person who has always read deeply in history -- I frequently hear two equally false statements about "religion in the United States."

The first, also the oldest, is that the United States was founded as a Christian nation. Nope! The Founders wanted to avoid the entanglements that came with the state recognizing one or more religions as preferential. The first amendment to the Constitution makes this very clear.

The second, of growing currency in the midst of Christian conservatives asserting the former, is that the Founders hoped to keep religion entirely out of the public sphere. This is also wrong.

Most of the Founders were religious men, many of them formally affiliated with one or another of the Protestant churches then in existence. Even Washington and Jefferson -- two of the most prominent Founders who strictly avoided any public display of religion -- were Christians, albeit Jefferson admired Jesus of Nazareth for his moral code while being suspicious of his alleged divinity. Others were Deists, men who believed that the universe had a Creator but made no special claims about that Creator's nature.

Meacham's book ranges widely over this nation's history, and gives some attention to showing how the Founders came to incorporate the First Amendment provisions about religion in the Constitution. They were informed not only by their knowledge of the horrific wars of religion that had been fought for centuries following the 16th century Reformation, but also of the tensions and grievances that existed in some of the colonies which had various types of "established churches" prior to the Revolution.

Meacham repeatedly asserts that the Founders -- and a remarkable number of men and women after them prominent in public life -- did believe in what Meacham calls a "public religion," that is one that acknowledges the existence of a (undefined) deity in the Judaeo-Christian tradition and to whom they sought guidance during stressful times of this nation's history. He cites several examples that cover the spectrum of our history.

Such public religion -- seen in such manifestations as oath-taking on Bibles, the ritual invocation by presidents and the clerk of the Supreme Court in asking for God's blessings on the United States -- is a crucial glue, Meacham maintains, in helping bind what are really quite a disparate people as one, especially during times of crisis.

I suspect that modern secularists will find Meacham's conclusions unfortunate, but I think that he makes a convincing, truthful case for what will always be a contentious matter: some will think we are "too religious," especially as what faction or another appears to have the ear of those in power, and others will think we are not religious enough, even, God forbid, slipping into atheism.

"Can religion be a force for unity, not division, in the nation and the world?" Meacham asks. He goes on: "The Founders thought so, and so must we. As a force in the affairs of nations it must be managed and marshaled for good, for faith will be with us, as the scriptures say, to the end of this age. For many, reverence for one's own tradition is not incompatible with respect for the traditions of others...."

"Humility and a sense of history are our best hopes of avoiding the self-satisfaction of" of those convinced that only they have the truth. "Interpreting and ruling on the establishment and free-exercise clauses of the First Amendment will never be simple; there is no convenient three-point plan to offer as a way forward. Instead faith and politics and religion and public life will present each generation with dilemmas that are, in Augustine's phrase, so old and so new."

As always, it is up to us -- each generation -- to make the aspirations and guidelines set forth in the Constitution actually work. As today's roiling civic mess makes clear: this is far from being an easy task, but it is one to which we must always rally if our democratic republic is to survive.

The book starts strong offering a nimble examination of public religion in the United States. The back half of the book is a serial account of religious anecdotes across a dozen American presidencies. The most interesting of these accounts in the D-Day prayer offered by FDR (with which I was unfamiliar). While Meacham definitely challenges the historical revisionism of secularists, he underestimates the facile manipulations of Christian nationalists who are sometimes guilty of confabulation where the Founding Fathers are concerned.
Here are the notes that I will share with AP US History class
American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation by Jon Meacham
p.5 The great good news about America—the American gospel, if you will—is that religion shapes the life of the nation without strangling it. Belief in God is central to the country’s experience… It does so because the Founders believed themselves at work in the service of both God and man, not just one or the other. Driven by a sense of providence and an acute appreciation of the fallibility of humankind, they create da nation in which religion should not be singled out for special help or particular harm.
p.6 America’s early years were neither a golden age of religion nor a glowing hour of Enlightenment reason. Life was shaped by evangelical fervor and ambitious clergy, anxious politicians and determined secularists … The Founding Fathers struggled to assign religion its proper place in civil society—and they succeeded.
p.7 For the Founding Fathers, God’s grace was universal. In his first draft of the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson linked fundamental American ideals—that freedom is the gift of “Nature’s God,” that “all men are created equal,” and that all “are endowed by their Creator with inherent and inalienable rights” – to a religious vision of the world with roots both in classical philosophy and in holy scripture.
p.15 Our finest hours—the Revolutionary War, abolition, the expansion of the rights of women, fights against terror and tyranny, the battle against Jim Crow—can partly be traced to religious ideas about liberty, justice, and charity. Yet theology and scripture have also been used to justify our worst hours—from enslaving black people to persecuting Native Americans to treating women as second-class citizens.
p.17 “I hate polemical politics and polemical divinity,” said John Adams. “My religion is founded on the love of God and my neighbor; on the hope of pardon for my offenses; upon contrition; upon the duty as well as the necessity of [enduring] with patience the inevitable evils of life; in the duty of doing no wrong, but all the good I can do, to the creation of which I am but an infinitesimal part.”
p.18 Properly understood, both religion and America were forged through compromise and negotiation. They are works in progress, open to new interpretation, amendment, and correction.
p.22 The nation’s public religion, then, holds that there is a God, the one Jefferson called the “Creator” and “Nature’s God” in the Declaration of Independence. Te God of public religion made all human beings in his image and endowed them, as Jefferson wrote, with sacred rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
p.22 Properly understood, the God of public religion is not the God of Abraham or God the Father of the Holy Trinity. The Founding Fathers had ample opportunity to use Christian imagery and language in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution, but did not.
p.23 Public religion is not a substitute for private religion, nor is it a Trojan horse filled with evangelicals threatening the walls of secular America. It, rather, a habit of mind and of heart that enables Americans to be at once tolerant and reverent.
p.24 For believers, God may guide history, but men remain its makers
p.27 To my mind, public religion is less about the veneration of the idea of country and more about the sacred origin of individual rights, the virtue if the populace—virtues that require constant cultivation—and the American sense of duty to defend freedom at home and, at times, abroad.
p.33 A tolerant, pluralistic democracy in which religious and secular forces continually contend against one another may not be ideal, but it has proven to be the most practical and enduring arrangement of human affairs—and we must guard that arrangement well.
p.41 The First Charter of Virginia (1606) is 3,085 words long; only 98 of those words, or about 3 percent, are about God.
p.47 The allusion to the Sermon on the Mount—that we are “a city upon a hill” – is one of the most oft-cited images of the United States as a kind of Promised Land hat the early New England settlers, playing the part of the ancient Israelites, reached after an exodus of peril and crisis. ... Winthrop was no blithe optimist. He understood that he powers of darkness were often more formidable than the forces of light, and like the prophets of old he thought that God’s favor could be withdrawn at any time.
p.48 If a community (or a nation) is dominated by the idea that God specifically punishes sinners and the milieu in which they live, then it is all too easy for that community (or nation) to demand absolute adherence to certain moral codes on the grounds that the well-being of all is dependent on the personal conduct of the individual.
p.53 From the early seventeenth century to the revolutionary era, America’s religious spirit was more sectarian than ecumenical, more closed than open, more likely to look inward rather than outward.
[Cotton Mather] Mather believed America was in the grip of evil; he played a critical role in the Salem witch trials.
p.56 As the seventeenth century gave way to the eighteenth, and more people believed and practiced faiths falling outside legislated religion (usually Anglicanism inn the South and Congregationalism in the North), politics began to change too, for America was becoming religiously diverse. Created by Christians dissenting from the first generation of English dissenters, the upheaval in the world of faith helped produce a democratic spirit, for people who chose their own spiritual path wondered why they could not choose their own political path as well.
p.74 The founding religion—at least in the Declaration—was based more on a religion of reason than pf revelation. From Bolingbroke to Jefferson, even the most cerebral of Deists were making a leap of faith when they ascribed the discernible attributes of nature to a divine author… The Founding Fathers made the choice, linking the cause of liberty to the idea of God while avoiding sectarian religious imagery or associations.
p.118 [Second Inaugural Address] Lincoln’s words were an honest, even brutal acknowledgment that man is not always able to arrange the world as he would like. The religious see this plight as the inevitable consequence of the Fall and, as Lincoln noted, as the workings of the mysterious mind of God; the secular as the vagaries of fate or chance. Whether viewed through the lens of faith or the prism of secularism, the point is the same: we are subject to forces beyond our control.

Meacham's book provides a useful corrective to folks who think the United States was founded as a specifically Christian Nation, and to folks who think the United States was founded to keep God out of the lives of its people. In other words, I feel that he may have upset fundamentalists both sectarian and secular but appealed to folks like me. The American Gospel is built around Robert Bellah's notion of "civic religion," where political leaders have drawn on the power of myth and narrative to appeal to and unite a wide range of people around a set of common goals including liberty and equality. It is a quick read, about 250 pages, but also includes a great set of appendices of speeches from George Washington, letters from other American leaders, etc. I picked up this book on a whim and was very glad I did.

Jon Meacham's "American Gospel" is a detailed and comprehensive look at America and the influence religion has had throughout our country's existence from the time that the Mayflower landed at Plymouth to the present (2007). The "Separation of Church and State" (Also referred to as the Wall) is a theme discussed heavily throughout the book and if one comes away with anything, it is the importance in keeping the two separate that is one of the main reasons America has remained a democracy, not a theocracy, and the envy of the world. Welcoming people of all faiths and allowing the free practice and worship of the religion of your choice, is a hallmark that distinguished our country from other countries for centuries. 

Unlike other novels by Mr. Meacham, I found "American Gospel" quite a cumbersome and unwieldy book to read, possibly because of all the quotes. In truth, I could not wait to finish the book, and yet I cannot deny the importance of the subject and great analysis the author offers.