The American Revolution is a perennial topic for historians, but despite the constant output of books on that subject, there are few good, recent books on religion in the Revolution. Good, that is, in the sense that the book is suitable for undergraduates or general readers and that the author does not have an axe to grind in the style of Glenn Beck. Two new books promise to fill that gap.

The first book is T. H. Breen’s American Insurgents, American Patriots: The Revolution of the People, published this May. The book is not exactly about religion. It is a history of the Revolution from 1774 to 1776, in which Breen argues that the Revolution owes at least as much to the people of the “middling sort” as it does to the founding fathers. A key part of his argument is that the “young, evangelical” colonists started an insurgency because of their religious beliefs. Evangelical, mostly Calvinist religion taught them that their natural rights as Englishmen were in fact given by God; those rights came with God’s command to  preserve them. Religion also explained the duties that monarchs had to fulfill in order to be legitimate. For most people, then, the insurgency was an “appeal to heaven”—in both a Lockean and an evangelical sense. This argument runs throughout the book, but it is particularly the theme of chapter 9, “An Appeal to Heaven: Religion and Rights.”

The second is Thomas S. Kidd’s God of Liberty: A Religious History of the Revolution. This book is still forthcoming, due out in October. Kidd is a professor at Baylor University, and the author of The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America (2007). If God of Liberty is of the same quality as The Great Awakening, then it promises to become the comprehensive history of religion in the Revolution. We’ll have a review when the book comes out.