Religion and the American Revolution

by Yuval Levin (Editor), Adam J White (editor), John Yoo (editor)

The year 2026 marks the 250th anniversary of American independence, yet the founding is controversial now in ways it has not been in decades. The American Enterprise Institute offers a major intellectual and educational project to reintroduce Americans to the unique value of their national inheritance.

In the third volume of this series, scholars of American history and law consider the place of religion in the American Revolution. Many who participated in the American fight for independence viewed the cause as a fundamentally spiritual struggle, one with enormous implications for religion’s future in American civil society.

Exploring the multifaceted ways in which the founding generation understood religious freedom and worked to balance protections for diverse religious communities with the rights of individual conscience illuminates the commitment to liberty at the heart of the American project.

143 pages, Paperback

Published July 1, 2025

About the author

Yuval Levin is an Israeli-American political analyst, public intellectual, academic and journalist. His areas of specialty include health care, entitlement reform, economic and domestic policy, science and technology policy, political philosophy, and bioethics. He holds a BA from American University and a PhD from the University of Chicago.

He is the founding editor of National Affairs, director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a contributing editor of National Review and a senior editor of The New Atlantis.
Levin was vice president and Hertog Fellow of Ethics and Public Policy Center, executive director of the President's Council on Bioethics, Special Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy under President George W. Bush and contributing editor to The Weekly Standard. Prior to that he served as a congressional staffer at the member, committee, and leadership levels.

Reviews

[Geonostalgist · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a solid if a little uneven volume. The emphasis on religion was head-on and theological with some essays (Founded in Revelation, and in Reason Too), but more indirect/socially-based with others. That said, the “Puritan” John Adams and “Quaker” John Dickinson Reassessment essay, while more tangentially related to religion (being more a biographical comparison with religious predilections as its lens) was the best one of the lot by far, making an eloquent case to see two very important figures of the era in a different light. "Religion and Republicanism in the American Revolution" did well in setting up a more "textbook" essay upfront to set the tone, and while I wished for more of that throughout the volume, to be fair that can be found in other treatments of American religion and religious liberty in the late 1700s. Thus while I don't think this volume stands as a definitive (or even pithy) treatment of Religion and the American Revolution, it is certainly a strong and useful contribution to the topic and one well worth the read.