According to Gelernter, the American religion has two essential elements: a "Creed" and a doctrine that he calls "American Zionism." The "Creed" consists of "the idea that liberty, equality, and democracy were ordained by God for all mankind." The doctrine of Americanism is that "America is a new promised land richly blessed by and deeply indebted to God."

Essential to his argument is that Americanism was shaped by Christianity and especially Puritan Christianity, that Puritan Christianity was shaped by the Bible, particularly the Hebrew Bible. It was from this biblical Puritan foundation that the American founders developed the American Creed. Abraham Lincoln, also deeply influenced by the Bible and Puritanism, "completed Americanism in practice by transforming American attitudes into American reality. Lincoln did more than anyone else to transform Puritanism into Americanism."

Gelernter then traces the understanding and application of the American religion through a number of American leaders, including Woodrow Wilson, Harry Truman (who believed that he played the role of Cyrus in helping to create the state of Israel), Martin Luther King Jr. (who believed that "except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain"), through Ronald Reagan (whose vision was deeply rooted in the Puritan view that America must always be the "shining city on a hill").

Gelernter believes that our country is facing a tidal wave of secularization. He believes that though secularists may be succeeding in the short term because "the Bible has been temporarily dismissed from American public life," they will not ultimately succeed.

Gelernter sees us at the beginning edge of a great American religious revival. He guesses that this revival will start in the "spiritually dried out land" of college campuses where materialism is rampant but unsatisfying and the thirst for the holy is acute.

"Some day soon someone will remind this whole nation that tolerance is American but secularism is not. That absolute religious freedom is American but contempt for religion is not. That America is a biblical republic and Americanism is a biblical religion. And someone will take up that Bible that was lost and found, and sounds of the Bible will return in full flood to the sullen cracked dry earth of American public life."

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Joseph A. Cannon is editor of the Deseret Morning News.