America's Four Gods: What We Say About God–and What That Says About Us. By Paul Froese and Christopher Bader. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. 258 pp. $24.95 cloth.

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)This efficient volume reports on the first two waves of data from the Baylor Religion Survey, funded by the Templeton Foundation. Conducted in 2005 with 1,721 respondents and 2007 with 1,648 respondents, the survey provided data that sociologists Paul Froese and Christopher Bader used to constructs profiles of America's gods. They argue that "the kind of God we believe in is incredibly important," and that "God continues to be the clearest and most concise reflection of how the average American perceives his world" (8, 10). Knowing who America understands God to be is more important than any other piece of information when attempting to understand someone's viewpoint, they explain. A person's image of God is "more important to their worldview" than their race, gender, or class (57). "Pundits tell us the wrong story about our culture wars," Froese and Bader believe, writing that "the country is not divided into the religious and the irreligious but rather by specific images of God" (144, 55).Previous surveys of American beliefs about God have been inadequate because the survey questions failed to access the ways God functions in the lives of believers. For example, knowing that nearly all Americans (85%) feel that the term "loving" describes God well does not access the ways that loving is a variable term in practice--for some people, loving a child might include corporeal punishment, whereas for others such a discipline would be understood as an anathema to love. Froese and Bader found that the two questions that were most illuminating in their effort to identify a three-dimensional theological dynamism within a given surveyed believer were those that focused on God's approach to humanity: To what extent does God interact with the world? To what extent does God judge the world? Using the responses they received to these questions, as well as follow-up inquiries and some congregational sampling, Froese and Bader identify America's four Gods: the Authoritative God (who is engaged in the world yet judgmental of it), the Benevolent God (who is engaged yet nonjudgmental), the Critical God (who is judgmental yet disengaged), and the Distant God (who is nonjudgmental and disengaged). Froese and Bader also account for atheist ideas about the world, which they return to throughout the volume as a point of contrast (and, at times, connection, especially to those adhering to a Distant God).The four Gods are, in many ways, redactions that seem right, cleanly cutting through notions of contradictory diversity with familiar types. The Authoritative God is the God of Pat Robertson, a God who makes the good and bad things that happen to us (29). "Evangelicals tend toward belief in an Authoritative God," Froese and Bader found, adding later that "believers in an Authoritative God are the most absolutist" (51, 67). The Benevolent God is the God of certain self-help entrepreneurs, like SQuire Rushnell, author of When God Winks at You (2009), who sees signs everywhere that God is taking care of us. "Believers in a Benevolent God can be amazingly upbeat," Froese and Bader summarize (31). The Critical God is the God that Pope Benedict XVI invokes when he tells drug dealers that "God will call you to account for your deeds" (32). Believers in the Critical God see the afterlife as the site of reckoning, but do not imagine the present world as a punishing one. The Distant God is for those who like "meditation, contemplation, and the beauty of nature," but "rarely speak of miracles or judgments" (34). Believers in a Distant God tend to be somewhat laissez-faire on certain hot-button political issues, believing that homosexuality is just "a part of the natural order of things, and that the decision to have an abortion should be left to the woman (71, 77). …