Dr. Kidd, thanks for taking the time to introduce us to your latest book God of Liberty: A Religious History of the American Revolution. What is the basic premise of God of Liberty?

There is no historical topic more debated in America today than the role of faith in the American Founding. In God of Liberty, I show that religion was everywhere in the era of the Revolution, from days of prayer and fasting called by the Continental Congress, to the chaplains who served in Washington’s army, to the political principles of religious liberty and equality by God’s common creation of humankind. Unlike in today’s political arena, public principles of faith tended to unite Americans of very different personal beliefs.

Your book The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America was released in 2007. Did your decision to write about the role of religion in the American Revolution flow from your research on the Great Awakening? Was there a connection between the First Great Awakening and the Revolutionary War?

Yes, there is a connection between my research on the Revolution and on the Great Awakening. One of the last chapters in The Great Awakening deals with evangelicals’ reactions to the American Revolution, which served as a springboard to my new research on the Revolution. The connection between the Great Awakening and the American Revolution is much debated, and I deal with it head-on in the first chapter of God of Liberty. The Great Awakening did not cause the Revolution, but it certainly shaped the culture that produced the Revolution. Among other things, the Awakening put a powerful new emphasis on the dignity and rights of the individual before God. It represented the first major uprising in America against political authority, especially against the state-sponsored churches of the colonies, which many revivalists criticized as cold and lifeless. It gave many Americans a stronger sense that there were fundamental rights—especially religious liberty–on which the government should never intrude. And, as Harry Stout of Yale University argued more than thirty years ago, the revivals inaugurated a revolutionary form of popular rhetoric in America, where speakers addressed common people directly in biblical language they easily understood. That rhetorical style was adopted by leading Patriot orators such as Patrick Henry, who was deeply influenced by the Great Awakening in Virginia.

Do you see this book has having an audience both among the general public and among academics? What does the book have to say to each audience?

I would certainly hope that more than just academics would read God of Liberty, especially since I wrote it for Basic Books, which in my opinion is one of the best “trade” presses at producing engaging but intellectually robust books. For academics, especially those who study American religious history or the history of the American Revolution, I would hope that the book becomes a standard resource and course text for understanding the role that faith played in the Revolutionary era. For more general readers and students, I hope that God of Liberty will offer an entertaining and historically responsible answer to the question of faith and the American Founding. This debate has been filled with much sound and fury (on both sides) but has often missed the vibrancy and diversity of American belief in the Founding period.

For all the attention given to the American Revolution and especially the Founders, your book is one of the few general treatments of religion in the Revolution. What work still remains to be done on this topic?

I am sure that I have left many things undone in the book. Some topics I would like to know more about are the religious lives of Continental soldiers, and the religious dimensions of the Federalist/Antifederalist split.

Your book is rich in stories about people and in analysis of primary texts. Was there a story or a text that you found particularly useful or surprising in your research?

One of my favorite stories from the book is when the Baptist evangelist John Leland brought President Jefferson a 1200-pound block of cheese—the “mammoth cheese”—as an expression of appreciation from New England’s Baptists in 1802. Leland was thoroughly evangelical, yet he loved Jefferson, the Deist, because of his advocacy of religious liberty. Conversely, Jefferson believed in a “wall of separation,” yet he was comfortable with a strong public role for religion, as exemplified by Jefferson’s attendance at a church service, with Leland preaching, in the House of Representatives chambers the same weekend that the pastor delivered the cheese.

What were the implications for the Revolution and the new United States that the country was home to pluralism within Christianity, as well as a small but significant minority of Jews?

The Revolutionary era featured both religious diversity and religious strength, and those were the conditions that the Founders sought to protect and preserve in their church-state arrangements. Sometimes I think that the advocates of America as a “Christian nation” forget just how varied Americans’ faiths were at the time of the Founding, while modern secularists underestimate the pervasiveness of belief, as varied as it was.

In your conclusion you take a moderate position between people who mistake the Revolution as being completely secular and those who read too much orthodox Christianity into the Revolution. I was not surprised to learn that you’ve received commendations from reviewers like George Marsden, Mark Noll, and Harry Stout. I was surprised that Peter Lillback has recommended God of Liberty. How does your book speak into the current debate over the role of Christianity among the Founding Fathers?

I hope that my book will demonstrate that the extremes of the debate over religion and the Founding both overreach, in certain ways. There is no point in acting like all the major Founders—especially Franklin and Jefferson—were traditional Christians, but it is equally as silly to argue that the Founding was fundamentally “secular.” Even the most skeptical of the Founders, including Jefferson and Franklin,  believed that religion and morality were critically important for the preservation of “virtue” in the life of the republic, and would never have endorsed what we call a “strict separationist” position.

You also find revolutionary principles that are of use in politics today. How would you sum up the political point you’re making in this book?

On one hand, I am trying to show that the Founders would never have endorsed the notion of an entirely secular political sphere. On the other, I hope that traditional Christians will see that religious liberty and religious diversity did not negate religious vitality in the Founding period.

God of Liberty is available new at Amazon for just $17.79. If you’re interested in hearing Dr. Kidd speak on the role of religion in the Revolutionary War, his lecture at Indiana Wesleyan University can be viewed online.