America's Book: The Rise and Decline of a Bible Civilization, 1794–1911 by Mark A. Noll.

Noll also tracks how religious consciousness shifted in the scripture passages clergy chose to memorialize American presidents upon their deaths. If his formal subject is the Bible, Noll's greater story is how the social custodial Protestants (Congregationalists and Anglicans) lost out to the sectarian Protestants (Methodists and Baptists) who did not initially wish to run society, but only their own churches. $39.95 Noll knows a lot about the history of religion in America and frames the Bible as his protagonist in this engaging, complex, and telling account of how Protestant America became Bible-obsessed in the long nineteenth century. [Extracted from the article]