As a Harvard student, Theodore Roosevelt used to carry the Bible along on camping trips. As president, Woodrow Wilson once said, “My life would not be worth living if it were not for the driving power of religion.” In August 1941, Franklin Delano Roosevelt met secretly with Winston Churchill for a Sunday morning service and afterward remarked, “We are Christian soldiers.” President Eisenhower said, “Our form of government is founded on religion.”

These are just some of the many fascinating facts that fill Jon Meacham’s wonderful new book, “American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation” (Random House, 399 pages, $23.95). Mr. Meacham has written a lively, accessible, and persuasive rebuttal to the popular left-wing misconception that in America religion and politics are not supposed to mix.

“Properly understood and applied, public religion can be a force for good,” he writes. “Eisenhower understood something many Americans do not quite grasp even now: that ‘Nature’s God’ resides at the center of the Founding.”

Mr. Meacham’s fast-paced 250-page essay (the rest of the pages are devoted to selected documents and source notes) stops short of recommending the establishment of a particular faith as the official religion, and he differs with the unanimous 1892 Supreme Court ruling that America is “a Christian nation.”

“Belief in God is central to the country’s experience, yet for the broad center, faith is a matter of choice, not coercion,” Mr. Meacham writes.

Mr. Meacham, the managing editor of Newsweek and a vestryman at Saint Thomas Church Fifth Avenue, an Episcopal church at 53rd Street in Manhattan, also acknowledges that religion can be used by forces of evil, and that God was invoked not only by President Lincoln, but also by the president of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis.

But beginning with the Pilgrims and continuing through the Reagan administration, Mr. Meacham tells a story of faith inspiring American leaders and soldiers in wartime and motivating those, like the leaders of the civil rights movement, who sought to improve our country.

His book is not without flaws. Mr. Meacham is a bit too quick to dismiss the effort of James Blaine in 1875, amid anti-Catholic sentiment, to amend the U.S. Constitution to ban state funding of parochial schools. Mr. Meacham writes that the effort did not succeed, because “Enough Americans had detected what was really going on” – without noting that 37 state constitutions still have Blaine Amendments. Any book that ranges over such a wide time span is apt to rely heavily on secondary sources, and to be stronger in some areas than others. Mr. Meacham’s treatment of the founding might have benefited had he read Michael Novak’s “On Two Wings” or Harry Stout’s “The New England Soul.” One wishes the volume included an index. And the illustrations of the founders, credited to “Bettman/Corbis” without any further explanation of who drew them or when, are not up to the quality of the text.

But these are mere quibbles with what is a welcome addition to the rapidly expanding library of books discussing the role religion has played in American history – and bearing on what role it should play in our politics today.

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Another volume in that library is “The Faiths of the Founding Fathers” (Oxford University Press, 225 pages, $20) by David L. Holmes, a professor of religious studies at the College of William and Mary. Whereas Mr. Meacham starts with the Puritans, moves through all of American history, and ends, pretty much, with Reagan, Mr. Holmes focuses mostly on the founders, with an epilogue on Presidents Ford, Carter, Reagan, Clinton, and both Bushes. Mr. Holmes’s account doesn’t attempt to deal with the religion of the Roosevelts, Lincoln, and Wilson. Like Mr. Meacham’s book, however, it is a clearly written, and, at 185 pages of text, brief account of the religious beliefs of Franklin, Washington, Jefferson, Samuel and John Adams, Madison, and Monroe.

There are some useful insights here, even for those who have already read biographies of these founders and even works specifically devoted to addressing, say, Jefferson’s faith or Washington’s. Mr. Holmes’s chapter on the wives and daughters of the Founding Fathers, for instance, observes, “Virtually all historical narratives have focused on the spread of Deism among men rather than on its simultaneous failure to spread among women.” The women were more apt to be “orthodox Christians” than their husbands and fathers, Mr. Holmes finds, offering some suggestions about why.

Mr. Holmes’s section on Elias Boudinot, a president of the Continental Congress who wrote a book on the imminent second coming of Jesus, also will come as news to the many Americans who have never heard of Boudinot.

One reason this field has spawned so much interest is that it is the subject of a feud. As Mr. Holmes puts it, “This marked, often contentious division of opinion over the religious views of the founding fathers stems from methodology followed in research, from the educational training of the scholars, from the religious belief or lack of belief on the part of authors, and from the intentions of writers.” And not only are we dealing with events that happened more than two centuries ago, but, as Mr. Holmes puts it, “one person can never quite know the inner faith of another person.”

Mr. Holmes’s account is valuable because rather than issuing sweeping generalizations about the religious views of the founders, it acknowledges that they were diverse. Some of them were deists. Some of them fell into a broad middle category that Mr. Holmes calls “Christian Deist.” Others were what Mr. Holmes calls “orthodox Christian,” meaning not Russian or Greek Orthodox Christian but rather traditional followers of their churches, whether Congregational or Anglican or Presbyterian.

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Categories such as deist or “Christian Deist” – which some might find an oxymoron – can be helpful in making sense of the religion of the founders, but only up to a point. Even those founders often described as deists, as Michael Novak of the American Enterprise Institute pointed out earlier this week in a lecture sponsored by the Manhattan Institute, were a good deal more religious than secular people of today. Mr. Novak, author with Jana Novak of “Washington’s God: Religion, Liberty, and the Father of Our Country,” and one of the most insightful of writers and thinkers on these topics, said that Washington “makes George Bush look secular.”

There are more books on the way about the founders and religion and American politics, including a highly anticipated one by Steven Waldman. But the field is wide and fertile and is one in which there seems to be a great deal of public interest. Witness the phenomenal commercial success of David McCullough’s “1776,” which concludes with the words, “the outcome seemed little short of a miracle.” Even a book about the American Revolution that refrains from much theological analysis or mixing into contemporary politics, it seems, finds it hard to avoid reckoning with the role played by God.

istoll@nysun.com