The following review is also published at goodreads.com.

AMERICAN GOSPEL: GOD, THE FOUNDING FATHERS, AND THE MAKING OF A NATION
Jon Meachan

In my years as a minister, I came to believe that The United States of America was founded as a Christian nation and, somehow, fell away from the true faith. As most Fundamentalists, I believed that America is the New Israel, chosen by God to be a haven of holiness and a light to the world, the Shining City on a Hill. It took me years to break out of that mindset. In "American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation," Jon Meacham puts order to what I had put together on my own. America was, in fact, founded as a nation where all religions could exist in peace. Americans would be free to worship--or not worship--as they chose, not as dictated by the government. Freedom of religion had long been a sticking point in America. Roger Williams and Ann Hutchinson were expelled from Massachusetts because the Puritans had established a colony that granted freedom for their own religion, not anyone else's. Later, Virginia law decreed that parents could have their children taken away if they did not baptize their children in the Anglican religion. These an d other stories showed the Founders that, "civil societies dominated by compulsory religious rigidity were unhappy and intolerant, while religious liberty seemed to produce more prosperous, stable, and popular cultures. The Founders' own views on religion would not track well with the prevailing conservative view of today's American Church. In the treat with Tripoli, President John Adams wrote that America was not founded on the Christian religion. Franklin and Jefferson did not believe in the divinity of Jesus and, "the Holy Trinity was seen as an invention of a corrupt church more interested in temporal power than in true religion." In the recent Presidential election, religion again became an national issue, from Romney's Mormonism to the religious objections to contraception. Once again, the myth that America was founded as a Christian nation was proffered as truth by the revisionist history of religious ultra-conservatives. "American Gospel" combats this ignorance with clear, well-researched history. Anyone who is repulsed by what is going on in the American church needs to read this book.