For those who might be interested in exploring the “pastoral presidency” and the role of religion has shaped rhetoric and policy, I recommend the following for further reading.

Jon Meacham, American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation (Random House, 2006; paperback 2007). 448 pp.

Meacham’s Pulitzer Prize–winning narrative examines the role of faith in the lives and public rhetoric of the Founding generation, arguing that the Founders charted a middle course between theocracy and secularism that constitutes America’s essential religious inheritance. A New York Times bestseller, it remains the most prominent accessible treatment of religion and American political origins.

Kevin M. Kruse, One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America (Basic Books, 2015). 384 pp.

Princeton historian Kruse’s revisionist account argues that the idea of a fundamentally “Christian America” was not a founding inheritance but a mid-twentieth-century invention, driven by corporate interests seeking to sanctify free-market capitalism against the New Deal. His account of the Eisenhower era’s Christianization of American civic culture is especially important.

John Fea, Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump (William B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2018). 224 pp.

Historian and evangelical Christian John Fea examines how white evangelical Christians came to embrace Donald Trump, arguing that fear, nostalgia for a mythologized Christian past, and a desire for political power drove the alignment. A measured, historically grounded critique from within the evangelical tradition.

Andrew Preston, Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith: Religion, War, and the American Experience (Alfred A. Knopf, 2012). 815 pp.

Cambridge historian Preston’s monumental work traces the relationship between religion and American foreign policy from the colonial period to the present, arguing that religious conviction has been a persistent and underappreciated driver of American international behavior. A landmark of synthesis and scope.

Stephen Mansfield, The Faith of George W. Bush (Tarcher/Penguin, 2003) and The Faith of Barack Obama (Thomas Nelson, 2008).

Mansfield has produced a series of accessible biographical accounts of individual presidents’ personal faith journeys. His books have found large audiences among evangelical readers interested in the spiritual lives of political leaders, and they demonstrate the market for religion-and-presidency titles.

Tim Alberta, The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism (Harper, December 2023). 512 pp.

Journalist and practicing Christian Tim Alberta’s instant New York Times bestseller examines the radicalization of American evangelicalism through the lens of individual pastors and congregations, charting how the movement’s entanglement with Republican politics and Trumpism has fractured communities of faith and corrupted the church’s witness. One of Barack Obama’s favorite books of 2023.