The key to mixing God and country in a way that preserves the proper separation of church and state while allowing the religious character of the American people to flourish is through encouraging the robust, free exercise of individual conscience in the midst of a society-nourished and government-affirmed pluralism, rather than the sterile milieu of state coercion.

Southern Baptist notable Richard Land does an excellent job of unraveling the knots of the free-exercise and establishment clauses, liberal blind spots, conservative blind spots, the thorny issue of American exceptionalism, and in what ways America is and is not a "Christian nation." He even unpacks the catch-word "God Bless America" in a helpful way, and makes the case for the necessity of separation of church and state in a way that I hope would satisfy both Left and Right.

Land's Baptist presuppositions appear from time to time; Presbyterians and other heirs of the Massachusetts Bay Colony will probably disagree, as I did, with his views of the Puritan experiment in America. I came away from the book thankful at the same time that we have scrappy Baptists involved in the public square, and that I'm not one of them. He'll probably also set the theonomists howling.

I recommend it.