An Age of Infidels: The Politics of Religious Controversy in the Early United States . By Eric R. Schlereth. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013. vi + 295 pp. $55.00 cloth.

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)An Age of Infidels: The Politics of Religious Controversy in the Early United States . By Eric R. Schlereth . Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press , 2013. vi + 295 pp. $55.00 cloth.Book Reviews and NotesDeists, skeptics, and freethinkers are making a comeback--at least those who lived and wrote in America between the 1770s and 1840s. After a generation or more of relative neglect, the infidels of the revolutionary and early republic eras are once more in the historical limelight thanks to Amanda Porterfield's Conceived in Doubt and Eric Schlereth's new study of religious contest and political formation in the new nation. Persuaded that the roles of Christianity's opponents "are largely unaccountable in religious histories that emphasize democratization" (10; think Nathan Hatch's The Democratization of American Christianity here), Schlereth asserts that deists and the controversies they generated played an essential part in shaping early national religion and its effects on American politics. For that reason, he proposes that the spectrum between belief and disbelief be seen as nothing less than an alternative paradigm for plotting the evolution of American religious history in the early national period.As Schlereth tells the story, when the United States began, it had to sort out how its religious diversity and all its competing claims to religious truth could be made compatible with republican political institutions. In other words, what would be the "relationship between belief and state power" (240) in the new nation? Disputes quickly arose in the revolutionary and constitutional periods between deists (broadly defined) and their opponents over the bounds of tolerable religious belief and expression. But soon America began to move beyond toleration and commit itself to religious liberty in the late eighteenth century. As that happened, the arbiter of religious truth shifted from the state to the marketplace of ideas, American public opinion. Controversies over infidelity quickly became situated firmly within the public sphere, as evidenced, for example, by the fury aroused by Thomas Paine's The Age of Reason and by the prominent place of religious attacks within Federalist-Republican political contests. In the early republic, the power of persuasion became preeminent and over the course of the next half-century, opportunities for politicized religious expression multiplied with the rise of political parties, the growth of print media, and the formation of voluntary associations. Within these communication contexts, Americans may have occasionally debated one another's actual religious truth claims but far more often, they wrestled over the likely political and social consequences of one another's beliefs. Hosts of American Christians came to see deism and infidelity as irreconcilable with republican virtue; in their view, citizen deists "brought subversive religious opinions into public life, thereby threatening the nation's very being" (108). Conversely, in the eyes of some deists, "Christianity was incompatible with republicanism, thus Christians were potentially traitors" (108). …