Losing our religion? Progressives should know that faith has been a part of the liberal vision for the country since our founding.

• Author: Buntz, Sam

The Religion of Democracy: Seven Liberals and the American Moral Tradition

by Amy Kittelstrom

Penguin Press, 448 pp

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If you developed your views of American life entirely from television and the Internet, you would get the impression that our national philosophic-spiritual life is divided into two distinct spheres. In the religious sphere, ecstatic worshippers speak in tongues, handle snakes, deny marriage licenses to gay couples in Kentucky, and believe that the Rapture is going to whisk them off to heaven without the inconvenience of actually dying. In the secular world, haughty overeducated elites sip fine wines in their high-rent apartments, bonding over the witty anticlerical bon mots of Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins. With religion, as with our politics, in America today you're either with us or against us.

Of course, like all harsh dualities, this one is bogus, and Amy Kittelstrom's book The Religion of Democracy arrives in order to quietly but firmly dismantle it. Despite the claims of Dawkins & Co., all Christians at all times haven't spent most of their weekends gathering up the pitchforks and storming various bastions of freedom and tolerance. In fact, America's democratic, liberal heritage is chock-full of tolerant, progressive Christians who had a major impact on the country's formation. Kittelstrom, an associate professor of history at Sonoma State University, traces the New England strain of this form of religious liberalism with exacting detail and insight, revealing that much contemporary secular thought actually has a liberal Christian underpinning.

Kittelstrom has a special fondness for the staid and sober New England Christians, the Unitarians, and liberal Congregationalists like John Adams and Mary Moody Emerson (Ralph Waldo's aunt). She makes a strong case for the importance of this liberal variety of Christianity, tracing its origins from the eighteenth-century Congregationalists. Despite being the direct descendants of Puritans, members of this denomination gradually drifted away from the Puritanical belief in predestination and the inevitable damnation of certain unlucky souls, instead emphasizing a more positive strain in Calvinism--the sense that every individual possessed a direct relationship with God through the Holy Spirit. They were more concerned with cultivating this relationship by working for social reforms than with worrying about whether they were eternally damned to hell...