Thomas Engeman and Michael Zuckert's unique collection of essays and commentaries, most written specifically for this volume, offer competing interpretations of the relationship between the “spirit of liberty” and the “spirit of religion,” as Tocqueville would put it, in the American Founding. The collection begins with a long essay by Zuckert that sets the terms of discussion of the book to which many of the contributors respond, and it concludes with a response by Zuckert to each of his critics.

Zuckert argues that the Founders sought to ground the public realm in a revision of Martin Luther's two-cities doctrine. Whereas Luther derived the foundations of the political from Scripture, the Founders rejected political theology for political philosophy. Their thinking of the two spheres gives evidence of an amalgam of different ways of understanding the religious and the political spheres (p. 62). In the discourse of the latter, natural rights, the nature of the covenant/social contract, and the justification of political authority are all rooted in a secular rationalism. The result was that although the “Americans were able to bring their still lively religious sensibilities to the sphere of politics,” it was, nonetheless, “in the service of a substantive politics very different from the traditional teachings of Christianity” (p. 69). Zuckert concludes that this substantial difference between religion and politics has been most advantageous to American politics when the two competing spirits avoid the “fall into disharmony and tension” (p. 69).

Excerpts from Tocqueville and Seymour Martin Lipset provide the historical and empirical context for the consideration of the development of religion in relation to politics. Tocqueville's selection emphasizes the role of religion in creating a harmony among religion, liberty, and democracy that is part of America's exceptionalism. But that harmony, always tenuous, was enabled in large part, Tocqueville claims, by the forbearance that clerics exercised in refraining from direct political activity. Lipset's contribution demonstrates the historical continuities of American religion, showing that Americans have always exhibited greater religious affiliation than citizens of other Western countries and that “[s]ecularity has long been cited as a persistent trait of American religion” (pp. 88–89).

Isaac Kramnick and Laurence Moore's previously published essay demonstrates that the Framers intended to produce a constitution based solely on secular principles. They base their argument on the response of the supporters of the U.S. Constitution to the criticisms of its prohibition of religious tests for holding office. The defenders of the rejection of religious tests, from Deists to clerics, all argued in one way or another that, to quote Oliver Ellsworth, the “business of civil government is to protect the citizen in his rights…. [C]ivil government has no business to meddle with the private opinions of the people…. I am accountable not to man, but to God for the religious opinions which I embrace” (p. 140).

Mark Noll and Peter Lawler similarly agree with Zuckert that the Framers sought to separate the political and religious spheres. But whereas Noll argues that the public sphere was “infused with a language of Christian virtue” (p. 247), Lawler sees the separation as a trivialization of and hostility toward religion that is politically problematic. “We do well in our time,” Lawler concludes, “to highlight those aspects of the American founding that dissent from the more extreme and discredited claims of liberalism, and to reconstitute liberalism on a less secular and individualistic foundation” (p. 182). Unfortunately, Lawler's claim that Locke's and Jefferson's secular foundation of politics implies a hostility toward religion does not, as Zuckert points out, hold water (p. 264).

Thomas West argues that Zuckert falls victim to a secularization thesis that sees the American Founding as “not only not religious but … at bottom indifferent or hostile to religion” (p. 188). The root of the problem, West argues, is Zuckert's claim that the Founders substituted political philosophy for the political theology of the early Puritans. Such secularization never took place. Rather, the Second Founding became even more religious than the first, extending the morality of the latter: “What happened was not secularization but the opposite: a sacrilization of what had previously been held worldly or low. For the eighteenth century Christians whom we are discussing, the earlier Puritans had mistakenly limited the sacred to the realm of human life that is found in the next world” (p. 215). Locke and the Second Founding corrected this shortcoming of the early Puritans with a thoroughgoing political theology, argues West, a point that Zuckert contests in his response (pp. 262–63).

Carey McWilliams's essay is close to both Zuckert's and Kramnick and Moore's in seeing the Framers grounding the Constitution in a secular language that did not preclude the recognition of the claims that religion makes upon moral reasoning and the support that it lends to secular government. He demonstrates the extent to which even a devout, conservative Christian thinker such as Nathaniel Niles, starting from religious assumptions and understanding of human sociability radically different from Locke's understanding of natural rights, enlists that understanding in support of the secular justification for separation from England. What makes this effective, McWilliams argues, is Niles's understanding that religion, if it really does have the faith in itself that it purports to have, can afford to pick its battles carefully and not just tolerate but acknowledge the securalism that defines the public sphere.

In this respect, McWilliams's essay diverges from each of the others in a significant way. The other contributors, whichever side of the secular/sacred issue they are located, make their arguments, or seem to, in the name of a greater, more perfect harmony, an unambiguous resolution to the divide between the secular and the sacred. The thrust of McWilliams's position challenges this tendency, and it is previewed in his opening sentence, one that is a beguiling instruction about reading Tocqueville as well as the Founding: “As usual, Alexis de Tocqueville got it right: from the beginning of the republic, American political culture has been incoherent, an unresolved argument—ordinarily implicit and more or less civil—between the ‘spirit of liberty’ and the ‘spirit of religion’” (p. 143). Americans' approach to the politics/religion divide has been marked by ambiguity, compromise, and ambivalence. That ambiguity is not the reason for despair: In many respects it is the occasion of politics. Moreover, the impulse to a perfect uniformity on the issue of religion, from secularists and believers alike, betrays a lack of needed assurance in their own projects. That assurance among the sanctified “moderates any felt need for desperate measures” and “encourages a willingness … to abide by the armed truce of republican life.” “For that matter,” McWilliams adds, “a secular faith in progress can make liberals more willing to conciliate religion, making a place for it at the table of public life, readier to trust democratic politics without insisting as a precondition on a distinctively liberal code of rights and neutralities” (p. 158). And, as he concludes, it is that generosity of spirit on the part of both camps that could encourage a greater civility of political discourse that has been recently lacking.