The last word.

American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation, by Jon Meacham (Random House, 416 pp., $23.95)

THIS book is a great poultice on the simmering antagonism between the ultra-separationists (we must not be required to say "under God" in our pledge of allegiance) and those who plead co-existence. No--Jon Meacham documents--religion was hardly extraneous to the development of the Constitution or the birth of the Republic. But the Founders did not incorporate religion in the Constitution. Church and state would be separate (and only contingently unequal). There was not even, in 1787, church/state division over the philosophically sundering question of slavery. There wasn't anything like a significant corporate challenge by Christian stalwarts to a Constitution that protected slavery, nor was there any serious effort by strict-enforcement zealots to disavow Christian overtones in the republican enterprise (Meacham usefully supplies the Biblical passages selected by every president at oath-taking time). What happened in the 20th century was a polarization on church-state over such issues as busing children to church schools. In some quarters, constitutional hygiene was taken to preposterous lengths. Justice William O. Douglas pointed out that the absolutist position would require the conclusion that public firefighting facilities could not constitutionally be used to douse fires in churches.

What has very much been needed is such a voice as this of reasoned calm. American Gospel confirms that religion had a great deal to do with the genesis of the nation, and Meacham deduces that religion should reasonably continue to inform the citizenry, but always with regard to the protocols of separation. On some conundrums, notwithstanding that lines are clearly crossed, it's wisest just to ignore the syllogistic short-circuits. James Madison, who basically signed on to Thomas Jefferson's unfortunate concept of a "wall of separation," was confronted with such problems when Congress came up with a chaplain--a manifest breach of The Wall. Mr. Madison leaned back and said in effect, Forget the problem. Just do it. And it was done, as also myriad other trespasses, like tax-protected religious enterprises and the presidential inaugural ceremony.

With magisterial sweeps, traveling from the Founding to the beginning of the 21st century, Meacham (who is managing editor of Newsweek) disposes of the internecine absolutists, but acknowledges that there are unresolved and bitter questions brought on--most divisively--by the Supreme Court's intervention into the City of God when it ruled, in Roe v. Wade, that abortion was a constitutional right. President Jimmy Carter would comment privately that he did not believe that Jesus would have accepted abortion (or capital punishment), but as president Carter was under obligation not to the word of Christ, but rather to the word of the Constitution. One has to believe that such reservations as his were privately held by other presidents and lawmakers who, while standing by their Christian faith, defended a Constitution that protected slavery.

Meacham examines, as expected, problems posed by some on the Christian Right. Religion, he reminds the reader, is not in most people an isolatable element of life. "Humankind could not leave off being religious even if it tried. The impulse is intrinsic." He cites implied sanction of religion in the words of William James. "We and God have business with each other," the philosopher told a scholarly audience in Edinburgh; "and in opening ourselves to His influence our deepest destiny is fulfilled. The universe ... takes a turn genuinely for the worse or for the better in proportion as each one of us fulfills or evades God's demands."

But Meacham rebukes severely what he deems the excesses of such as Jerry Falwell and Tim LaHaye (in the latter's book Faith of Our Founding Fathers). "The problem with their reading of history is that it is wrong. There is no doubt, as we have seen, that the Founders lived in and consciously bequeathed a culture shaped and sustained by public religion, one that was not Christian or Jewish or Muslim or Buddhist but was simply transcendent, with reverence for the 'Creator' and for 'Nature's God.'"

This is Correct Thought, but there is revisionist egalitarianism at work here at least the equal of Jerry Falwell's arguing the sectarian opposite. An understanding of a "public religion," as here used, requires us to sit still for transmogrifications of language. U.S. history would be astonished by any suggestion that Judaeo-Christian thought was just one religious tradition present at the founding of the nation.

Meacham quotes Billy Graham: "It is true that we are a pluralistic nation." Well, sure. But, as in political pluralism, you end up voting for a Democrat or a Republican. "We have a Constitution which guarantees to all of us human freedoms, of which religious freedom is foremost." What does Dr. Graham intend here, other than orotundity? There isn't much intercredal tension here--there'd be tension if there were public pressure to profess a religion. "In America any and all religions have the right to exist and to propagate what they stand for." Yes, unless they challenge settled U.S. mores. Religions that postulate the inequality of women or of races, or the right to multiple marriages, are seen as outside the mainstream. "We enjoy the separation of church and state, and no sectarian religion has ever been--and we pray God, ever will be--imposed upon us." That is correct, as also that no sectarian religion has ever got it into its head even to attempt to nationalize its creed.

Randall Jarrell was definitively ironic on the matter of unobtrusive religion, describing one character in his novel Pictures from an Institution as believing in "at most one God." Meacham declines the challenge to examine some of the cliches he passes along from Graham, as in, "In our pluralistic state we have learned to live with each other and to respect each other's religious and political convictions." The phenomenon being celebrated arises from indifference to religion, not from toleration of it. Graham adds: "There's a truth reiterated throughout the teachings of the various religions, but especially in the Bible, that no man rules except by the will of God." But that is either meaningless or wrong. There are no grounds for believing in the pietistic notion that the will of God had anything whatever to do with the advent of Hitler.

The American experience is leached of meaning by platitudinous stress on the freedom of worship. Of primary concern, surely, are the secularist engines that mock the very idea that worship is compatible with higher thought. That subject engaged this reviewer when at Yale, fifty-five years ago. And the subject of religion was once considered worth noting every week in sections of Time and Newsweek. Still, Mr. Meacham's invaluable book serves as a lodestar for original thought on--the American gospel.

Mr. Buckley is Editor-at-Large of NATIONAL REVIEW. His novel Castledown will be published next spring by Regan Books.