Reitman offers the first full, journalistic history of the Church of Scientology, in an even-handed account that at last establishes the astonishing truth about the controversial religion. She traces Scientology's development from the birth of Dianetics through to the present day.

The culture wars have distorted the dramatic story of how Americans came to worship freely. Author Waldman, cofounder of Beliefnet.com, argues that the United States was not founded as a "Christian nation," nor were the Founding Fathers uniformly secular or Deist. Rather, the Founders forged a new approach to religious liberty, a revolutionary formula that promoted faith--by leaving it alone. His narrative begins with early settlers' stunningly unsuccessful...

In the decades before the Civil War, Americans appealed to the nation's sacred religious and legal texts - the Bible and the Constitution - to address the slavery crisis. The ensuing political debates over slavery deepened interpreters' emphasis on historical readings of the sacred texts, and in turn, these readings began to highlight the unbridgeable historical distances that separated nineteenth-century Americans from biblical and founding pasts....