Earnestly Contending: Religious Freedom and Pluralism in Antebellum America . By Dickson D. Bruce Jr. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2013. 210 pp. $35.00 cloth; $35.00 ebook.

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)Earnestly Contending: Religious Freedom and Pluralism in Antebellum America . By Dickson D. Bruce Jr. Charlottesville : University of Virginia Press , 2013. 210 pp. $35.00 cloth; $35.00 ebook.Book Reviews and NotesDickson D. Bruce Jr. wrote Earnestly Contending with unabashed presentism. Bruce contends that modern debates over a range of issues concerning religion's place in public life often prove vexing because protagonists fail to fully comprehend the demands that religious faiths impose on their adherents. Such misunderstandings, Bruce worries, reflect an even greater failure by contemporary Americans to acknowledge that religious convictions breed certainties that regularly conflict with ideals of religious toleration. Bruce's book seeks to address this modern dilemma by exploring its historical development in the antebellum era. Bruce asserts that antebellum religious writers never successfully reconciled "faith, freedom, and difference" (8). He seems doubtful that such reconciliation is possible in our time. For as Bruce argues, the history of religious debates in the antebellum period provide "an important case study that helps us understand a fundamental incompatibility between faith and tolerance that must be confronted rather than evaded in our own volatile religious world" (8). Earnestly Contending is a worthy book even though much of Bruce's evidence ultimately belies his pessimism.Bruce's book centers on the concept of a "normative discourse of freedom and toleration." This concept describes a widely held view in the early United States that religious liberty was the essence of American law, culture, and belief. Bruce locates the origins of this discourse in a fairly standard historical context. The discourse had its roots in Protestant teachings but gained new political resonance as religion was disestablished under federal law and in most states by the early nineteenth century. To explore this discourse, Bruce analyzes a wide array of published religious writings such as newspapers, orations, sermons, and religious dictionaries and histories authored from vastly different religious perspectives including freethinking deists, Unitarians, Methodists, Baptists, Jews, Catholics, and Mormons. Indeed, one of the book's greatest strengths is Bruce's ability to incorporate the vast complexity of antebellum religion into his interpretation. As a result, Bruce persuasively demonstrates the broad appeal of the "normative discourse." Bruce also explains that antebellum religious writers could not agree on the discourse's relationship to diverse and competing faith claims. The authors of antebellum religious writings thus often grappled with tensions between normative ideals and faith. Efforts by such writers to address conflicts between toleration and faith provide the interpretive thread that ties together Bruce's seven thematic chapters. Bruce begins with a general overview of intellectual and political developments reaching back to the seventeenth century. He then explores how religious writers confronted tensions between toleration and faith in contemporary debates over human nature; the basis and standing of religious truth; the search for religious unity and essentials; religion's moral role in society; national identity; and, finally, the relationship between religious belief and the era's larger intellectual trends from fields such as science to biblical criticismBruce's thematic focus yields several fascinating insights. His chapter on religious truth is illustrative. Bruce recounts anti-Mormon writers who labeled Joseph Smith an "American Mahomet" (61). …