San Antonio College Library

Scholars David Domke and Kevin Coe offer a study of the rise of religion in American politics, examining the public messages of political leaders over the past seventy-five years-from the 1932 election of Franklin Roosevelt to the early stages of the 2008 presidential race. They conclude that U.S. politics today is defined by a calculated, deliberate, and partisan use of faith that is unprecedented in modern politics. Sectarian influences and expressions...

In Pulpit and Nation, Spencer McBride highlights the importance of Protestant clergymen in early American political culture, elucidating the actual role of religion in the founding era. Beginning with colonial precedents for clerical involvement in politics and concluding with false rumors of Thomas Jefferson's conversion to Christianity in 1817, this book reveals the ways in which the clergy's political activism--and early Americans' general use...

"When the Founding Fathers drafted the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, they debated the establishment of a state religion and a separation of church and state. Over two hundred years later, the debate over the place of religion in American society continues and nearly every major societal issue seems religiously charged. Carrying the banner for an increased focus on religion and leading the attack are the fundamentalists from the Christian Right,...

"Dershowitz accuses the Religious Right of using words and phrases found in the Declaration of Independence as indications that the founding of the nation--the intentions of our Founding Fathers, that is--was based on Christian precepts. The major step he takes in refuting this idea, which he finds dangerous, is to negate the concept that the Declaration, despite such language as "Creator" and "Divine Providence," is a document of equal legal state...

"At the dawn of the Revolutionary War, America was already a nation of diverse faiths-the First Great Awakening and Enlightenment concepts such as deism and atheism had endowed the colonists with varying and often opposed religious beliefs. Despite their differences, however, Americans found common ground against British tyranny and formed an alliance that would power the American Revolution. In God of Liberty, historian Thomas S. Kidd offers the...

"Historian Eric R. Schlereth places religious conflict at the center of early American political culture. He shows ordinary Americans--both faithful believers and Christianity's staunchest critics--struggling with questions about the meaning of tolerance and the limits of religious freedom. In doing so, he casts new light on the ways Americans reconciled their varied religious beliefs with political change at a formative moment in the nation's cultural...

For two centuries, Catholicism has played a profound and largely unexamined role in America's political and intellectual life. Emphasizing the community over the individual, Catholics have alternately challenged and supported American liberals on a variety of controversial issues, including slavery, public education, economic reform, the movies, contraception, the nuclear arms race and abortion. The story of Catholicism is also international, as Catholics...

Places John Brown, the man who led the raid on Harper's Ferry, West Virginia, in 1859, within the religious and social context of the nation's political atmosphere and traces the roots of his beliefs to Puritan abolitionism.

This timely book describes the historical roots and political motives of America's most organized and outspoken political interest group, the Christian Right. Duane M. Oldfield examines the dilemmas within the Republican Party faced by the movement as it attempts to both mobilize its base membership and participate effectively within broader coalitions. The author assesses the Christian Right's profound influence on the Republican Party platform and...

"In Patriotism and Piety, Jonathan Den Hartog argues that the question of how religion would function in American society was decided in the decades after the Constitution and First Amendment established a legal framework. Den Hartog shows that among the wide array of politicians and public figures struggling to define religion's place in the new nation, Federalists stood out--evolving religious attitudes were central to Federalism, and the encounter...