Aiming to separate propaganda and myth from history, historian Lambert takes on Christian Right revisionists who maintain that liberals and secularists have distorted American history and that our founding fathers did not want a separation of church and state. There are five chapters: Christian Right “Historians”: fabricating a “Usable Past”; Massachusetts Bay Colony: Early American model of a Christian nation; Eighteenth-century America: sacred and secular; Constituting religion in the newly independent states; constituting the separation of church and state in the new republic. Chapter one compares the efforts of the Christian Right revisionists and the scholarship of academic historians. Chapter two examines the claim that America was founded as a Christian state. Chapter three takes up the claim that today’s secularists and liberals have distorted the importance and place of religion in America’s past. Chapter four explores the place of religion in the earliest state constitutions. Chapter five examines the federal Constitution vis-á-vis the separation of church and state. There are footnotes. Annotation ©2014 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)