Christianity Today

Patrick Henry once said, "It cannot be emphasized too strongly or too often that this great nation was founded, not by religionists, but by Christians; not on religions, but on the gospel of Jesus Christ!" Or at least many evangelicals believe Henry said that. It is actually a line from a 1956 magazine article commenting on Henry's faith, but popular Christian writers subsequently attributed the quote to Henry himself. The misquote stuck. Even though countless websites have debunked it, this bogus statement still routinely appears everywhere from Twitter to Facebook to books on America's founding, including presidential aspirant Newt Gingrich's A Nation Like No Other. And Gingrich has a Ph.D. in history!

The eager reception of spurious quotes about our Christian origins is telling. It illustrates the fact that religion's role in the founding is among the most controversial historical debates in America today. Into that debate enters David Aikman's One Nation Without God? The Battle for Christianity in an Age of Unbelief (Baker). Did I not know Aikman, a longtime writer and reporter for Time magazine, who now teaches at Patrick Henry College, I might guess that the book would be the latest of many Christian titles lamenting how America is going down the spiritual tubes. But in Aikman's capable hands, the book turns out to be a wide-ranging, lively survey of the historical background and contemporary relevance of our Christian roots.

New Angles

Aikman leaves no doubt that Christianity has played a strong role in American history, and that modern secularists' efforts to remove every hint of religion from the public square are misguided. But Aikman also shows that our spiritual past was not as uncomplicated and rosy as more polemical Christian writers tell us. Moreover, whatever Christian (or Judeo-Christian) identity we may have once had is at risk today. Aikman thoughtfully addresses whether we were once a Christian nation, but more provocatively, what America will be like if, culturally, we become "one nation without God."

Aikman has read widely, and is conversant with much of the best scholarship that would help us answer these questions. Chapter by chapter, he considers new angles: from the history of religion and the founding, to contemporary conflicts over religion in public life, to the secularization of the American academy. Along the way, he introduces readers to experts that every thoughtful Christian should know but whose work they may not have personally read, including sociologists Christian Smith and Peter Berger, and historians George Marsden, Mark Noll, and James Hutson.

In the chapter on history (the longest section of the book), Aikman reviews modern Christian providentialist literature, led by books such as Peter Marshall and David Manuel's The Light and the Glory, that portrays the American founding as uniquely directed by God. He contrasts this approach with that of academic Christian historians such as Noll and Marsden (my doctoral adviser), who criticized the providentialist approach in their book The Search for Christian America (co-written with another accomplished historian, Nathan Hatch). Aikman seems satisfied neither with the providentialists nor their academic critics. He chides Noll and Marsden for seizing on moral failings of the colonial and Revolutionary Founders as evidence that America never was a "properly" Christian nation. In Aikman's view, the Puritans and Patriot Founders had many faults—as do we all—but these do not fundamentally detract from their accomplishments and the Christian quality of their efforts.

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