What is more infuriating about America’s Providential History is not so much the way its authors ignore primary sources and context, but the way they leap to conclusions about the meaning of what people say. For only one example–practically every page has at least one–consider that after quoting, from a secondary source, radical Christian revolutionary Samuel Adams at the approval of the Declaration of Independence ("We have this day restored the Sovereign to Whom alone men ought to be obedient. He reigns in heaven . . . from the rising to the setting sun, may His kingdom come."), they conclude that the founders "saw in the establishment of America the first truly Christian nation in history" (p. 148).

Not only does the quotation fail to support their conclusion, but once they have affirmed a mistaken interpretation, they repeat it again and again, now as a clear truth. With no quotation needed, they make the same claim in summing up ratification of the Constitution in 1789 (p. 173).

Then when they come to religious liberty, they deny that the Constitution requires religious neutrality, even though the founders carefully failed even to mention the name "God" in their creation, one of the points of attack made by its opponents. Still, they argue it establishes a nation "under God," words placed in quotation marks as though they are from the Constitution itself, rather than from the pledge of allegiance to the flag, revised in the 1950s.

Similarly, on the same page they suggest that the Constitution requires office holders to swear their oaths "with their hand on a Bible" (p. 179) a requirement that appears nowhere in the document. They stretch and strain to make the historical facts fit their thesis, and when they are unable to do so, Beliles and McDowell simply create what they need.

Let’s say it bluntly: they cannot be trusted.

They gleefully exclaim whenever they discover words like "virtue," "learning," or "piety" among the writings of the founders, concepts they claim meant morality, knowledge, and religion, which our authors convert to "Christian character," "Biblical world view," and "Christianity." One of their problems is that deists like rationalist Thomas Jefferson, third president of the United States, could write honestly that "perusal of the sacred volume [the Bible] will make us better citizens" (p. 178)–always a central goal of those in positions of power and leadership–and still reject the miraculous content on which evangelical Christianity depended. (As Christian leaders from the seventeenth century, including Quaker George Fox and Baptist John Bunyan demonstrate, leafing through the Bible might also produce revolutionaries.) Let them encounter "providence," and they gloat that the founders intended precisely what the authors did when they used a adjectival variety of that term as the title for this book two centuries later.

Their treatment of slavery is likewise skewed. (Abortion receives five times more entries in the Index than abolition.) "[E]very one of our Founding Fathers," they confidently assert, "believed that involuntary slavery was an evil institution that needed to be abolished" (p. 226), yet the writers of the Constitution refused to act on their belief, allowing that sinful institution to flourish, ultimately defended by the "often unanswerable" states’ rights arguments of South Carolina’s Christian senator John C. Calhoun. Famed abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison merits not a single mention in the text, but John Brown, the fiery evangelical opponent of slavery who attacked the federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, presents a problem for Beliles and McDowell. No matter how sincere and right Brown was to oppose slavery, he is reduced to "trying to do a good thing, but in an unbiblical way" (p. 230).

When they come to the Civil War–they actually prefer "War Between the States," but they do deign to use the more common one–they are clearly torn. Both sides were religious, but the South, they assert, was "the center of true revival and the bastion of Calvinism and Christian character," while "the North had drifted into Unitarianism and dead formalism." Even so, "God could not allow [slavery] to continue and hinder his long-term destiny on America in the eyes of the world" (pp. 230-31). Counting a full page drawing of southern general Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson at prayer, they devote three pages to the "Christian character" of the South’s generals (p. 233), nary a word to any of those who brought piety from the North, especially commanders like Otis O. Howard, who became head of the Freedmen’s Bureau following the war and for whom Howard University is named.

As for the Reconstruction period, it gets a grand total of four brief paragraphs, a bit over half a page[!], the plight (and postwar achievements) of black Americans not a single word. Beliles and McDowell’s summation of the period is remarkable in its truncated and unhistorical view: to centralize power in the national government, Radical Republicans sought "to remove the force of Calvinism in America," already established as having existed in the states that made up the former Confederacy, and destroy the South’s political power (p. 243). Thus they set the stage for the continued erosion of real constitutional authority on into the future.

Chapter 15 is the one section of the book that would be unfamiliar to many supporters of the policies of the country’s current president; it outlines "Christian Principles of Foreign Affairs." More than in other chapters, this one consists mainly of nearly page-long quotations from sources that represent not the judgment of historians but rather those of obscure writers whose work comes from presses that are even more obscure.

Here the interested student, at least the alert ones, will find an implicit criticism of the incumbent administration and its never-ending "war against terror." Written when most conservatives still condemned American intervention abroad, the book considers much of the foreign policy of the twentieth century to be, in its authors’ words, "a perversion" (p. 221). Rather than treaties and "entangling alliances," they argue that American policy makers should rely instead on missionaries and Christian businessmen to export the nation’s ideals to the rest of the world. Although they ignore the Open Door policy–it is not even clear that they are aware of it and its significance–they represent a point of view that champions using trade to penetrate other countries for America’s benefit.

The remainder of the book fails even more miserably than the previous sections to cover the nation’s past. President Woodrow Wilson, a Christian Calvinist statesman (and Southerner) if there ever was one, gets only one sentence, and that a condemnation of his proposed League of Nations; up to this point, the authors have at least made a pretense of trying to cover the sweep of American history, but that effort now gives way to ideology.

The last two chapters and a conclusion represent an extended tirade against those who reject four primary doctrines: 1) that God created the world; 2) that God is Lord of heaven and earth; 3) that God gives breath to all that lives; and 4) that God is sovereign. Let not the wondering student think that the decline of America resulted from "conspiracies of men: humanists, the ACLU [American Civil Liberties Union], the big bankers, the Trilateral Commission, the New Age Movement, the World Council of Churches, the Homosexuals, the Feminists, the Communists, the Democrats, the Pope, etc." (p. 245). No, we are told, it was not a conspiracy among these groups; the nation’s moral, constitutional, political, and spiritual fabric has frayed because Christians sat idly in their pews and failed to organize and take control of the nation. The book ends with a "Checklist for Reforming America" and of course a plea for contributions to the book’s publisher, the organization of which the authors are leaders.

America’s Providential History is a depressing work. The authors defend the long quotations that take up many chapters by explaining that they want to give readers a sense that writers of the past could turn out good, manly prose, but the effect is dreary at best. There are numerous illustrations, mostly line drawings, and no color at all–a fact that demonstrates how far removed the book is from modern texts.

Its physical make-up, bad as it is, is not the most depressing feature. The factual errors scattered throughout demonstrate that the authors know little of what they presume to write about. (One especially bizarre example is the way they twice hijack Quaker William Penn into the ranks of "clergymen" [pp. 90, 117], even though Penn’s sect considered members of the clergy as "hireling priests.") As a text, it is masquerade; as a repository of knowledge, the well is empty; as a political handbook, it is one-sided, tendentious, almost unbelievable were it not that the same philosophy permeates the administration of George Walker Bush, a graduate of both Yale and Harvard.

If this book is an example of what passes for knowledge, research skills, and intellectual acumen on the fringes of the right wing of American political life, then the republic is not so much endangered as its citizens should be downright embarrassed.