Under God

October 1, 2004
This attractive book should win awards for its innovative design and layout even while raising eyebrows with its revisionist text. Mac and Tait, the Grammy and Dove Award-winning members of Christian band DC Talk, move from the tremendous success of their Jesus Freaks series to take a quickie tour of American history. It's certainly more nuanced than some other Christian interpretations of the nation's founding, as the Founders are allowed to have a few flaws. (Benjamin Franklin, for all his teachings on thrift and industry, was a slave-owning dandy, for example.) The authors don't stop with the Founders and Framers, but carry forward the American story in a greatest-hits manner while touching on freedom fighters (Sojourner Truth, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Jr.) and political leaders through the 20th century. But the historical merits of this book are shallow in the area of religion. In their determination to show the Christian foundations of the American nation, the authors strongly overstate the evangelical bona fides of their heroes. Thomas Jefferson appears all through the book, for example, but the authors never discuss his controversial reworking of the Bible with all of the miracles and supernatural elements excised. And Sojourner Truth is cast as a classic evangelical Christian with no mention of her forays into the Kingdom of Matthias cult or spiritualist seances. Still, the lasting appeal of this book is its stunning design, not its one-sided view of history. With jagged-cut pages, Old World backgrounds, "distressed" illustrations and bold sidebars, the book's appearance is both arresting and ingenious.

Digging into the history books in much the same way they have previously uncovered missionary stories (JESUS FREAKS), TobyMac and Michael Tait, Grammy-winning members of the Christian band dc Talk, give voice to the stories of our Founding Fathers. They illuminate the lives of the men and women who believed in the Christian core of American patriotism to make the listener realize that those individuals could not have carried on their struggle without that faith. While the text is vibrant, the readings fail to convey the historical weight of the work, and Toby Mac's style does not translate well to his assigned passages. S.M.M. (c) AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine