"In his Second Inaugural Address, Abraham Lincoln said both North and South "read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other." Lincoln quoted several biblical texts in this address - which, according to Frederick Douglass, "sounded more like a sermon than a state paper." The Bible, as Lincoln's famous speech illustrated, saturated the Civil War. In this book, James Byrd offers the most thorough analysis yet...

In the beginning of American history, the Word was in Spanish, Latin, and native languages like Nahuatal. But while Spanish and Catholic Christianity reached the New World in 1492, it was only with settlements in the seventeenth century that English-language Bibles and Protestant Christendom arrived. The Puritans brought with them intense devotion to Scripture, as well as their ideal of Christendom -- a civilization characterized by a thorough intermingling...

"This book examines the process of recovery, reinterpretation, and reuse of scripture in the early modern political imagination. It focuses in particular on the literary and cultural transformations of the biblical text for political purposes. It thereby attends to Hobbes' concern in Behemoth that independent scriptural reading led to the dissolution of authority by seeking to understand what role the Bible had in shaping early modern political thought....

"As with other terrorist and extremist organizations, religion forms the basis of the Ku Klux Klan's dogmatic philosophy, providing justification for its beliefs and actions. Covering nearly a century of Klan ideology, this book examines the group's religious rhetoric in their literature and songs, from its heyday during the 1920s to 2014"--