So Help Me God; The Founding Fathers and the First Great Battle Over Church and State

[10], 530, [4] pages. Includes Introduction, as well as chapters on George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe. Also includes Epilogue; Appendix: Did George Washington Say "So Help Me God"? Acknowledgments, Endnotes, Bibliography, and Index. Frank Forrester Church IV (September 23, 1948 - September 24, 2009) was a leading Unitarian Universalist minister, author, and theologian. He was Senior Minister of the Unitarian Church of All Souls in New York City, until late 2006 when he was appointed as Minister of Public Theology. His father was elected to the United States Senate in 1956 and served four terms, until January 1981. Church was a graduate of Stanford University and Harvard Divinity School. He received a Ph.D. in early church history from Harvard University in 1978. In a revelatory look at the birth of our nation, Forrest Church re-ceates our first great culture war--a tumultuous yet nearly forgotten conflict that raged from George Washington's presidency to James Monroe's. Would we be a nation under God, or with liberty and justice for all? With the Bible and the Declaration of Independence competing for American affections, the Fourth of July itself became a battleground, with conservative pastors scorning the "Red, White, and Blue" as anti-Christian and anti-American, while Baptists, on the religious left, led the vanguard for church-state separation. This is an illuminating study of the complex connection between religion and politics. Derived from a Kirkus review: Religious historian and minister Church examines freedom of religion in late-18th- and early-19th-century America. In this fascinating and subtle study, Church shows that the issue of church and state is not simple. Some early Americans believed that the new nation needed "a strong Christian government" to survive, and others favored a clear separation between church and state. Central to the victory of the latter view-and thus to the story Church tells-is Thomas Jefferson's drafting of the "Statute Establishing Religious Freedom in Virginia," which disestablished the Anglican Church and created a model for the religious freedom later enshrined in the First Amendment. Church is especially good at revealing small but significant episodes: George Washington's insisting his troops honor the Sabbath during the Revolutionary War, James Madison's thoughts on the constitutionality of chaplains in Congress. Perhaps the most fascinating character in this narrative is John Adams, who, though himself disdainful of orthodox Christian teaching, believed that religion was necessary to maintain virtue in the new nation. Church also investigates the seeming irony that a nation with no established religion should remain so religious. There's no contradiction there, he suggests; in fact, disestablishment guaranteed that churches would not be manipulated by politics, and thus freed them to focus on matters of faith, not statecraft. The author's discussion of Jefferson's letter to the Danbury Baptists-a letter that includes the phrase "a wall of separation between church and state". An important, nuanced book.…