For most of the years I was working on the book that has been so graciously but also insightfully critiqued by these four interlocutors, my working title was Bible Nation: From Tom Paine and Francis Asbury to Francis Grimké and Woodrow Wilson. My plot, as I conceived it, ran from Paine, who inadvertently precipitated an all-but unanimous defense of the Scriptures from a wide swath of otherwise contentious Protestants, and Asbury, who did so much to promote “the Bible alone” in the population at large, to Wilson, who championed the Bible in almost exclusively civil religious terms, and Grimké, who—though a Presbyterian—sustained the earlier African American alteration of apolitical Methodist piety to include what Dennis Dickerson has aptly called “an egalitarian/evangelical thrust.”

Tom Paine, it turns out, may have done almost as much to shape public discourse in the early national period of the United States as he did in moving aggrieved colonists to take up arms against King George III in the Revolutionary period. As historians have documented time and again, the arguments in Paine's Common Sense (1776), especially “On Monarchy and Hereditary Succession,” worked as an elixir to transform mixed opinions about dealing with Parliamentary overreach into an unalloyed determination to throw off the king. The four books reviewed here point to the same sort of conclusion about the importance of Paine's The Age of Reason, published in two parts in 1794 and 1795 and then reprinted almost as often over the next few years as Common Sense had been at the outset of the War of Independence. With the latter work, however, Paine accomplished more through the opposition he generated than by the readers he convinced. Although a few doughty Loyalists had ventured to take on Common Sense, that opposition was as nothing compared to the groundswell of denunciation that arose in the 1790s to defuse what Americans of many stripes considered Paine's incendiary provocations. Thoroughly researched and persuasively argued monographs from Eric Schlereth, Jonathan Den Hartog, and Sam Haselby provide, in effect, an account of why The Age of Reason caused such a stir, how those who regarded its arguments as threatening damnation for individuals and poison for the republic mobilized for their own counterpurposes, and then what resulted from the ambiguous success that this mobilization achieved.

The young scholars who proposed a dialogue between John Modern and myself, and who then contributed sparkling insights of their own to that dialogue, deserve hearty thanks. They have taken seriously the main arguments, along with many of the details, in Modern's Secularism in Antebellum America and my America's God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln. In so doing, they spotlighted lacunae, advanced new perspectives, and proposed the best kind of questions for probing the complicated religious-political-personal-social-economic relationships in antebellum America. I am particularly indebted to them for pointing out aspects of my work that require clarification and for helping me see more clearly what John Modern's work accomplished.