Reviewing a book review: In the Beginning Was the Word by Mark Noll

I quibble with Peter Thuesen's review of Mark Noll's book, In the Beginning Was the Word: The Bible in American Public Life, 1492-1783, in the November/December 2015 issue of Books & Culture.

Thuesen reports

...during the American Revolution, ... clergy of many stripes, along with secular pamphleteer Tom Paine, appealed to Scripture to justify the Patriot cause.  Ironically, the same Bible had been used earlier in the colonial era not to attack the British monarchy but to defend it as a bulwark against Catholic (especially French) tyranny.

Is it really ironic, though?  If a text is in favor of liberty (and any reading of the Pauline epistles can hardly help but come away with the impression that the New Testament is), can it not be profitably employed against a more authoritative regime in favor of a less, as well as against the less authoritative in favor of the democratic?  One can plausibly use medical research to argue that steak and mashed potatoes make a more healthy meal than a fast-food hamburger and fries, even if grilled fish and rice with steamed vegetables are more healthy than the steak and potatoes.

Later, Thuesen (and presumably Noll) bemoans that the freed slave and abolition activist Olaudah Equiano wrote an autobiography which, while rich with biblical allusions and quotation of Scripture, was "overwhelmingly a story of personal redemption.  As such, it typified the mostly apolitical uses of the Bible by other 18th-century evangelicals."  This is one of the rare instances I've seen of scholars criticizing people for failing to exploit Christianity for a political end.

Thuesen concludes that the book under review is "the most profound treatment ever written of the Bible in public life" [my bold].  While this may well be true -- I certainly haven't done the research to contradict it -- the extravagance of the claim gives one pause, particularly when the reviewer follows up by strawmanning, "All too often, histories of the Bible in America have uncritically glorified the American project, stopping just short of assuming that Moses and Jesus were Americans whose teachings were everywhere in harmony with the nation's imperial ambitions."  Such hyperbole demands citations to back it up, or it didn't happen.