An Age of Infidels

Eric R. Schlereth places religious conflicts between deists and their opponents at the center of early American public life. This history recasts the origins of cultural politics in the United States by exploring how everyday Americans navigated questions of religious truth and difference in an age of emerging religious liberty.

"[Schlereth] has lucidly described the strategies and practices through which early Americans sought to bring religious convictions, Christians and deist, to bear on politics and culture."—American Historical Review

"[An Age of Infidels] offers anyone curious about the vexed relationship between American religion and politics a compelling explanation of how that relationship became established."—Journal of the Early Republic

"Fresh and insightful. . . . [An Age of Infidels] should remain required reading on church-state relations, and religion in the early republic, for quite some time."—Journal of Church and State

"In this important study of deism and free enquiry in the early United States, Eric Schlereth shows how religious "infidelity," whose specter had once terrified Americans, became a living, breathing—and not altogether terrifying—reality. Both broad in conception and judicious in its use of evidence, Schlereth's rigorous account of infidelity and religious controversy offers an exciting and original interpretation of early American cultural politics."—Chris Beneke, Bentley University