For most of the years I was working on the book that has been so graciously but also insightfully critiqued by these four interlocutors, my working title was Bible Nation: From Tom Paine and Francis Asbury to Francis Grimké and Woodrow Wilson. My plot, as I conceived it, ran from Paine, who inadvertently precipitated an all-but unanimous defense of the Scriptures from a wide swath of otherwise contentious Protestants, and Asbury, who did so much to promote “the Bible alone” in the population at large, to Wilson, who championed the Bible in almost exclusively civil religious terms, and Grimké, who—though a Presbyterian—sustained the earlier African American alteration of apolitical Methodist piety to include what Dennis Dickerson has aptly called “an egalitarian/evangelical thrust.”