Religion in American politics : a short history / Frank Lambert.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 251-269) and index.

Providential and secular America : founding the republic -- Elusive Protestant unity : Sunday mails, Catholic immigration, and sectional division -- The "gospel of wealth" and the "social gospel" : industrialization and the rise of corporate America -- Faith and science : the modernist-fundamentalist controversy -- Religious and political liberalism : the rise of big government from the New Deal to the Cold War -- Civil rights as a religious movement : politics in the streets -- The rise of the "religious right" : the Reagan revolution and the "Moral Majority" -- Reemergence of the "religious left"? : America's culture war in the early twenty-first century.

The author examines several moments in American history--the sectional division of the States over slavery, the conflict between Andrew Carnegie's "Gospel of Wealth" and Walter Rauschenbusch's "Social Gospel," Fundamentalism's debates with Modernism, the Civil Rights Movement, and the rise of the Religious Right and the Religious Left, among others--in which religious movements attempted to shape political movements.