In Faith in Freedom, Andrew R. Polk argues that the American civil religion so many have identified as indigenous to the founding ideology was, in fact, the result of a strategic campaign of religious propaganda. Far from being the natural result of the nation's religious underpinning or the later spiritual machinations of conservative Protestants, American civil religion and the resultant "Christian nationalism" of today were crafted by secular elites in the middle of the twentieth century. Polk's genealogy of the national motto, "In God We Trust," revises the very meaning of the contemporary American nation. Polk shows how Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S Truman, and Dwight D. Eisenhower, working with politicians, advertising executives, and military public relations experts, exploited denominational religious affiliations and beliefs in order to unite Americans during the Second World War and, then, the early Cold War. Armed opposition to the Soviet Union was coupled with militant support for free economic markets, local control of education and housing, and liberties of speech and worship. These preferences were cultivated by state actors so as to support a set of right-wing positions including anti-communism, the Jim Crow status quo, and limited taxation and regulation. Faith in Freedom is a pioneering work of American religious history. By assessing the ideas, policies, and actions of three US Presidents and their White House staff, Polk sheds light on the origins of the ideological, religious, and partisan divides that describe the American polity today.

A collection of works by nineteenth-century Russian religious philosopher V. S. Soloviev, critic of secularization, anti-Semitism, and the religious life of his time.

The recent renewal of the faith-reason debate has focused attention on earlier episodes in its history. One of its memorable highlights occurred during the Enlightenment, with the outbreak of the "Pantheism Controversy" between the eighteenth century Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn and the Christian Counter-Enlightenment thinker Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi. While Mendelssohn argued that reason confirmed belief in a providential God and in an immortal soul, Jacobi claimed that its consistent application led ineluctably to atheism and fatalism. At present, there are two leading interpretations of Moses Mendelssohn's thought. One casts him as a Jewish traditionalist who draws on German philosophy to support his premodern Jewish beliefs, while the other portrays him as a secret Deist who seeks to encourage his fellow Jews to integrate into German society and so disingenuously defends Judaism to avoid arousing their opposition. By exploring the Pantheism Controversy and Mendelssohn's relation to his two greatest Jewish philosophical predecessors, the medieval Rabbi Moses Maimonides and the seventeenth century heretic Baruch Spinoza, Michah Gottlieb presents a new reading of Mendelssohn arguing that he defends Jewish religious concepts sincerely, but gives them a humanistic interpretation appropriate to life in a free, diverse modern society. Gottlieb argues that the faith-reason debate is best understood not primarily as an argument about metaphysical questions, such as whether or not God exists, but rather as a contest between two competing conceptions of human dignity and freedom. Mendelssohn, Gottlieb contends, gives expression to a humanistic religious perspective worthy of renewed consideration today.

It isn't very politically correct to say America is a Christian nation. However, the Founding Fathers were Christians and their core convictions were the bedrock upon which this country was built. These principles include the belief that as divine creations of God, we are all equal before the law, each citizen has intrinsic worth and value above any government, and our rights are endowed onto us by our Creator. These beliefs are not politically correct. Political correctness is an extension of cultural Marxism that seeks to remove every aspect of God and religion from American public life, including how we are governed. If they are successful, and they have been very successful so far, we lose what made America great in the first place. Our concept of the rule of law disappears, and the elite play by different rules than the rest of us. The belief that our rights come from God is removed. Our rights then can be twisted, manipulated, or stripped from us for political expediency. Worst of all, the divine nature of the creation of mankind with an immortal soul is gone. They can then do whatever they want. With no God, there is no objective right, wrong, good, or evil. The ends justify the means, and the perpetrators can execute their evils with a clean conscience because there is no sin. Cultural Marxism has been a powerful force in American culture for almost a century, shaping institutions such as school, family, and government. In the 1920s and during World War II, socialist ideas that originated at the Frankfurt School, also known as the Institute for Social Research, began to seep into the social fabric of the US. As the cultural Marxist movement gained power, the reach of the federal government expanded, and the basic value of each individual citizen was diminished. The role of the Judeo-Christian belief system, which emphasizes absolute truth and the dignity of the individual, has been ignored""with disastrous consequences. Using the Ten Commandments and the Bill of Rights, author Joe Gilbert lays out the relationship God intended family, government, and individuals to have with each other and guides readers to a renewed hope and vision of American ideals shaped by objective biblical truth. Fans of Glenn Beck and Mark Levin will find Of Faith and Freedom a useful companion in the fight against the malevolent social forces that have so negatively influenced America.

Virtually every trouble spot on the planet has some sort of religious component. One need only consider Iraq and Afghanistan, Iran, Israel and Palestine, Turkey, India, Pakistan, Russia, and China, to name but a few. Looming behind national issues, of course, is the problem of regional Islamist extremism and transnational Islamist terrorism. In all of these sectors, religious tensions, ideas and actors are of great geo-political importance to the United States. Yet, argues Thomas Farr, our foreign policy is gravely handicapped by an inability to understand the role of religion either nationally or globally. There is a strong disinclination in American diplomacy to consider religious factors at all, either as part of the problem or part of the solution. In this engaging and well-written insider account, Farr offers a closely reasoned argument that religious freedom, the freedom to practice one's own religion in private and in public, is an essential prerequisite for a stable, durable democratic society. If the U.S. wants to foster democracy that lasts, he says, it must focus on fostering religious liberty, especially in its public manifestations, properly limited in a way that advances the common good. Although we ourselves have developed a remarkably successful model of religious freedom, our foreign policy favors an aggressive secularism that is at odds with the American model. It is essential, says Farr, that we take an approach that recognizes the great importance of religion in people's lives.

"Faith and Freedom in Galatia and Senegal" reads Galatians 2:11-15 and 3:26-29 through the lens of the 19th-20th century experiences of French colonialism by the Diola people in Senegal, West Africa, and portrays the Apostle Paul as a "'sociopostcolonial hermeneut who acted on his self-understanding as God s messenger to create, through faith in the cross of Christ, free communities' -- a self-definition that is critical of ancient Graeco-Roman and modern colonial lore that justify colonization as a divine mandate." Aliou C. Niang ingeniously compares the colonial objectification of his own people by French colonists to the Graeco-Roman colonial objectifications of the ancient Celts/Gauls/Galatians, and Paul's role in bringing about a different portrayal.