Here is what looks like a useful new book on FDR’s Christian beliefs and how they influenced his progressive politics: A Christian and a Democrat: A Religious Biography of Franklin D. Roosevelt (Eerdmans), by John F. Woolverton.

“When asked at a press conference about the roots of his political philosophy, President Franklin Roosevelt responded, “I am a Christian and a Democrat.” This volume—part of the popular and widely acclaimed Library of Religious Biography series—tells the story of how the first informed the second, showing how FDR’s upbringing in the Episcopal Church and education at the Groton School under legendary headmaster and minister Endicott Peabody formed him into a leader whose politics were fundamentally shaped by the social gospel.

A work begun by religious historian John Woolverton (1926-2014) and recently completed by James Bratt, A Christian and a Democrat is an engaging analysis of the surprisingly significant religious life of one of the most important presidents in US history. Reading Woolverton’s account of FDR’s response to the toxic demagoguery of his day will reassure readers today that a constructive way forward is possible for Christians, for Americans, for the world.”

We have noted Thomas Kidd’s fine work here before. I’m particularly enthusiastic about his biography of Patrick Henry which, together with Jon Kukla’s book, is one of the few comprehensive treatments of Henry.

In this new book, Kidd investigates the demographics of Christian Evangelicals. The book is Who Is An Evangelical? The History of a Movement in Crisis (Yale University Press), and looks very worthwhile.

“Evangelicalism is arguably America’s most controversial religious movement. Nonevangelical people who follow the news may have a variety of impressions about what “evangelical” means. But one certain association they make with evangelicals in America is white Republicans. Many may recall that 81 percent of self-described white evangelicals voted for Donald Trump, and they may well wonder at the seeming hypocrisy of doing so.

In this illuminating book, Thomas Kidd draws on his expertise in American religious history to re-narrate the arc of this spiritual movement, illustrating just how historically peculiar that political and ethnic definition (white Republican) of evangelicals is. He traces distortions in the public understanding of evangelicals, and shows how a group of “Republican insider evangelicals” aided the politicization of the movement. This book will be a must-read for those trying to better understand the shifting religious and political landscape of America today.”

Here is a new book that explores the idea of American exceptionalism reflected in the Puritan John Winthrop’s famous line that America would be “as a city upon a hill” in the history of America’s urban life. The book is City on a Hill: Urban Idealism from the Puritans to the Present (Harvard University Press), by Alex Krieger.

“The first European settlers saw America as a paradise regained. The continent seemed to offer a God-given opportunity to start again and build the perfect community. Those messianic days are gone. But as Alex Krieger argues in City on a Hill, any attempt at deep understanding of how the country has developed must recognize the persistent and dramatic consequences of utopian dreaming. Even as ideals have changed, idealism itself has for better and worse shaped our world of bricks and mortar, macadam, parks, and farmland. As he traces this uniquely American story from the Pilgrims to the “smart city,” Krieger delivers a striking new history of our built environment.

The Puritans were the first utopians, seeking a New Jerusalem in the New England villages that still stand as models of small-town life. In the Age of Revolution, Thomas Jefferson dreamed of citizen farmers tending plots laid out across the continent in a grid of enlightened rationality. As industrialization brought urbanization, reformers answered emerging slums with a zealous crusade of grand civic architecture and designed the vast urban parks vital to so many cities today. The twentieth century brought cycles of suburban dreaming and urban renewal—one generation’s utopia forming the next one’s nightmare—and experiments as diverse as Walt Disney’s EPCOT, hippie communes, and Las Vegas.

Krieger’s compelling and richly illustrated narrative reminds us, as we formulate new ideals today, that we chase our visions surrounded by the glories and failures of dreams gone by.”

Not strictly speaking a law and religion book, yet nevertheless relevant to both law, which might take a more aggressive regulatory hand, and religion, inasmuch as religious institutions of higher education surely are comprehended. At any rate, here is a new book documenting extensive and deep-seated pathologies in just about every element of the modern university: Cracks in the Ivory Tower: The Moral Mess of Higher Education (Oxford University Press), by Jason Brennan and Phillip Magness.

“Academics extol high-minded ideals, such as serving the common good and promoting social justice. Universities aim to be centers of learning that find the best and brightest students, treat them fairly, and equip them with the knowledge they need to lead better lives. 

But as Jason Brennan and Phillip Magness show in Cracks in the Ivory Tower, American universities fall far short of this ideal. At almost every level, they find that students, professors, and administrators are guided by self-interest rather than ethical concerns. College bureaucratic structures also often incentivize and reward bad behavior, while disincentivizing and even punishing good behavior. Most students, faculty, and administrators are out to serve themselves and pass their costs onto others. 

The problems are deep and pervasive: most academic marketing and advertising is semi-fraudulent. To justify their own pay raises and higher budgets, administrators hire expensive and unnecessary staff. Faculty exploit students for tuition dollars through gen-ed requirements. Students hardly learn anything and cheating is pervasive. At every level, academics disguise their pursuit of self-interest with highfalutin moral language. 

Marshaling an array of data, Brennan and Magness expose many of the ethical failings of academia and in turn reshape our understanding of how such high power institutions run their business. Everyone knows academia is dysfunctional. Brennan and Magness show the problems are worse than anyone realized. Academics have only themselves to blame.”

A relatively new style of criticism is emerging that describes modern commitments to ostensibly non-religious institutions and ideas–for example, the market, the international order, the liberal state, and others–in explicitly religious terms. This kind of criticism is not brand new, but what may be new is that one sees it from both the political right and left, though targeted at different institutions.

Here is a new book that seems to fit within this larger style of critique: The Enchantments of Mammon: How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity (Harvard University Press), by Eugene McCarraher.

“Far from displacing religions, as has been supposed, capitalism became one, with money as its deity. Eugene McCarraher reveals how mammon ensnared us and how we can find a more humane, sacramental way of being in the world.

If socialists and Wall Street bankers can agree on anything, it is the extreme rationalism of capital. At least since Max Weber, capitalism has been understood as part of the “disenchantment” of the world, stripping material objects and social relations of their mystery and sacredness. Ignoring the motive force of the spirit, capitalism rejects the awe-inspiring divine for the economics of supply and demand.

Eugene McCarraher challenges this conventional view. Capitalism, he argues, is full of sacrament, whether or not it is acknowledged. Capitalist enchantment first flowered in the fields and factories of England and was brought to America by Puritans and evangelicals whose doctrine made ample room for industry and profit. Later, the corporation was mystically animated with human personhood, to preside over the Fordist endeavor to build a heavenly city of mechanized production and communion. By the twenty-first century, capitalism has become thoroughly enchanted by the neoliberal deification of “the market.”

Informed by cultural history and theology as well as economics, management theory, and marketing, The Enchantments of Mammon looks not to Marx and progressivism but to nineteenth-century Romantics for salvation. The Romantic imagination favors craft, the commons, and sensitivity to natural wonder. It promotes labor that, for the sake of the person, combines reason, creativity, and mutual aid. In this impassioned challenge, McCarraher makes the case that capitalism has hijacked and redirected our intrinsic longing for divinity—and urges us to break its hold on our souls.”