The University of Kansas Press is known, for good reason, to be one of the most consistently interesting and high quality presses for American legal and political history. Here is a fascinating new book about religious arguments against the American Revolution–a kind of obverse of what one sees in the Declaration of Independence (see, e.g., all that talk about what unalienable rights “endowed by their Creator” required of early Americans). The book is God Against the Revolution: The Loyalist Clergy’s Case Against the American Revolution (University of Kansas Press), by Gregg L. Frazer.

Because, it’s said, history is written by the victors, we know plenty about the Patriots’ cause in the American Revolution. But what about the perhaps one-third of the population who opposed independence? They too were Americans who loved the land they lived in, but their position is largely missing from our understanding of Revolution-era American political thought. With God against the Revolution, the first comprehensive account of the political thought of the American Loyalists, Gregg L. Frazer seeks to close this gap.

Because the Loyalists’ position was most clearly expressed by clergymen, God against the Revolution investigates the biblical, philosophical, and legal arguments articulated in Loyalist ministers’ writings, pamphlets, and sermons. The Loyalist ministers Frazer consults were not blind apologists for Great Britain; they criticized British excesses. But they challenged the Patriots claiming rights as Englishmen to be subject to English law. This is one of the many instances identified by Frazer in which the Loyalist arguments mirrored or inverted those of the Patriots, who demanded natural and English rights while denying freedom of religion, expression, and assembly, and due process of law to those with opposing views. Similarly the Loyalist ministers’ biblical arguments against revolution and in favor of subjection to authority resonate oddly with still familiar notions of Bible-invoking patriotism.

For a revolution built on demands for liberty, equality, and fairness of representation, God against Revolution raises sobering questions—about whether the Patriots were rational, legitimate representatives of the people, working in the best interests of Americans. A critical amendment to the history of American political thought, the book also serves as a cautionary tale in the heated political atmosphere of our time.

Here’s a wonderful looking collection of essays on some of the major figures in Spanish judicial history, focusing on their Christian thought. It includes better known judges such as Francisco de Vitoria and Juan Donoso Cortes, as well as several that are new at least to me. A very interesting project: Great Christian Jurists in Spanish History (CUP), edited by Rafael Domingo and Javier Martínez-Torrón.

The Great Christian Jurists series comprises a library of national volumes of detailed biographies of leading jurists, judges and practitioners, assessing the impact of their Christian faith on the professional output of the individuals studied. Spanish legal culture, developed during the Spanish Golden Age, has had a significant influence on the legal norms and institutions that emerged in Europe and in Latin America. This volume examines the lives of twenty key personalities in Spanish legal history, in particular how their Christian faith was a factor in molding the evolution of law. Each chapter discusses a jurist within his or her intellectual and political context. All chapters have been written by distinguished legal scholars from Spain and around the world. This diversity of international and methodological perspectives gives the volume its unique character; it will appeal to scholars, lawyers, and students interested in the interplay between religion and law.

In the “I knew it!” department. More seriously, here is a new book that argues for common origins, intellectual dispositions, and weaknesses as between atheism and fundamentalism, all deriving ultimately from the Protestant Reformation: Atheism, Fundamentalism and the Protestant Reformation: Uncovering the Secret Sympathy (CUP) by Liam Jerrold Fraser.

In this study of new atheism and religious fundamentalism, this book advances two provocative – and surprising – arguments. Liam Jerrold Fraser argues that atheism and Protestant fundamentalism in Britain and America share a common historical origin in the English Reformation, and the crisis of authority inaugurated by the Reformers. This common origin generated two presuppositions crucial for both movements: a literalist understanding of scripture, and a disruptive understanding of divine activity in nature. Through an analysis of contemporary new atheist and Protestant fundamentalist texts, Fraser shows that these presuppositions continue to structure both groups, and support a range of shared biblical, scientific, and theological beliefs. Their common historical and intellectual structure ensures that new atheism and Protestant fundamentalism – while on the surface irreconcilably opposed – share a secret sympathy with one another, yet one which leaves them unstable, inconsistent, and unsustainable.

John Stuart Mill is an absolutely critical thinker for understanding so much of the philosophical basis of contemporary American law. From balancing tests to ideas of “harm” to the defense of free speech (at least a defense in a particular libertarian vein–see, e.g., Book II of On Liberty), one must know Mill to see how law speaks in the ways that it does.

Here is a new book that emphasizes the secularism of Mill’s thought: John Stuart Mill: A Secular Life (OUP) by Timothy Larsen. But in doing so, it also illuminates (as Maurice Cowling once did from, as it were, the other direction) the deeply religious quality of Mill’s philosophy as the great “Saint of Rationalism.”

John Stuart Mill observed in his Autobiography that he was a rare case in nineteenth-century Britain because he had not lost his religion but never had any. He was a freethinker from beginning to end. What is not often realized, however, is that Mill’s life was nevertheless impinged upon by religion at every turn. This is true both of the close relationships that shaped him and of his own, internal thoughts. Mill was a religious sceptic, but not the kind of person which that term usually conjures up. The unexpected presence and prominence of spirituality is not only there in Mill’s late, startling essay, ‘Theism’, in which he makes the case for hope in God and in Christ. It is everywhere–in his immediate family, his best friends, and his vision for the future. It is even there in such a seemingly unlikely place as his Logic, which repeatedly addresses religious themes. John Stuart Mill: A Secular Life is a biography which follows one of Britain’s most well-respected intellectuals through all of the key moments in his life from falling in love to sitting in Parliament and beyond. It also explores his classic works including, On Liberty, Principles of Political Economy, Utilitarianism, and The Subjection of Women. In this well-researched study which offers original findings and insights, Timothy Larsen presents the Mill you never knew. The Mill that even some of his closest disciples never knew. This is John Stuart Mill, the Saint of Rationalism–a secular life and a spiritual life.

Here’s one in the style of Mark Noll’s The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind–a book by an Evangelical Christian historian that is extremely critical of Evangelical politics, particularly the embrace by some Evangelicals of Donald Trump. The book is Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump (Eerdmans), by John Fea.

“Believe me” may be the most commonly used phrase in Donald Trump’s lexicon. Whether about building a wall or protecting a Christian heritage, the refrain has been constant. And to the surprise of many, a good 80 percent of white evangelicals have believed Trump—at least enough to help propel him into the White House.

Historian John Fea is not surprised, however—and in these pages he explains how we have arrived at this unprecedented moment in American politics. An evangelical Christian himself, Fea argues that the embrace of Donald Trump is the logical outcome of a long-standing evangelical approach to public life defined by the politics of fear, the pursuit of worldly power, and a nostalgic longing for an American past.

As insightful as it is timely, Fea’s Believe Me challenges Christians to replace fear with hope, the pursuit of power with humility, and nostalgia with history.