That Religion in Which All Men Agree: Freemasonry in American Culture. By David G. Hackett (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2014) 317 pp. $49.95

Hackett’s book is an attempt to offer a comprehensive account of the history of Freemasonry in the United States. Notwithstanding a few oversights and holes, it is by and large a constructive and welcome history that will not only be useful to scholars who study Freemasonry but also to those who study U.S. politics, political culture, and religion more broadly. Hackett takes as his guiding light Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, Mass., 1989), suggesting that the history of Masonic lodge activity and self-understanding parallels the rise and decline of an eighteenth-century enlightened public sphere. The intellectual and political health of civil society suffered with the triumph of modern, communicative capitalism. Interestingly, through the lens of the Masons, Hackett finds evangelical Christianity and partisan democracy in the antebellum United States to be far more significant than economic transformation...