(ANALYSIS) Daniel Silliman’s “One Last Soul: Richard Nixon’s Search for Salvation” (Eerdman’s, 2024) is a well-written biography of the president who won a 49-state reelection victory in 1972 and resigned in disgrace two years later.

Silliman’s scenes include Nixon as a 22-year-old working in his dad’s store “peeling grimy leaves off the lettuce and picking out the bruised fruit, which was starting to decay. … The last thing he did was sprinkle a little water on top so the apples looked crisp.”

That seems to me a metaphor for Nixon’s pandering presidential campaigns, but Silliman combines historical accuracy with kindness toward his subject, whom many historians have treated roughly. Silliman sees Nixon as wanting to be loved by God but always feeling he had to earn his salvation.

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The derogatory nickname opponents gave him, “Tricky Dick,” was unfair: Nixon did not try to trick evangelicals into voting for him by asserting he was one of them, even when Billy Graham became a voluntary speechwriter and urged Nixon to win votes by claiming to be what he really was not.

Silliman did Nixon research at the Nixon archives, of course, but he also went through the Billy Graham archives and saw Graham’s attempt to be a Nixon ghostwriter. Graham in 1956 wanted Nixon to tell Baptist and Presbyterian assemblies in North Carolina that “at an early age I committed my life to Christ. … My trust is fully in Him.” Graham sent Nixon a whole speech draft along those lines, told him what Bible verses to quote, and reminded him that winning the favor of these “religious leaders … will be extremely strategic.”

Nixon, to his credit, “avoided Graham’s key phrases about being born again and trusting in Jesus. He wouldn’t say that. Even if that was what he had to say to win these men and secure his political future, he couldn’t. ‘Mine is a different kind of religious faith,’ Nixon would write later.”

Jerome Copulsky’s “American Heretics: Religious Adversaries of Liberal Order” (Yale, 2024) examines those in the 18th century who feared America would become a liberty theme park, and those in the 19th century who saw the South as a Christian civilization or wanted a Constitutional amendment to privilege Protestantism.

Copulsky’s scholarly excavation gets him into the cellar where theocrats emphasized commanding others rather than convincing them. Reconstructionist Gary North, for example, said the Constitution was inherently flawed, and Reconstructionist founder Rousas Rushdoony (North’s father-in-law) was also. North complained, “In a showdown between his theonomic theology and the U.S. Constitution, Rushdoony chose the Constitution.”

Today, those who choose God and the Constitution need to see the problem is not merely Trump or Trumpism: Copulsky concludes, “If it is to endure, America’s liberal democracy will have to be sustained in the absence of a moral consensus or clear-cut spiritual foundations.”

With a month to go until a potentially traumatic election, America desperately needs prayer, and John Peckham’s “Why We Pray” (Baker, 2024) explains how a defense of petitionary prayer is consistent with an emphasis on God’s perfect knowledge, power and goodness. Prayer does not inform God, who knows what we need before we ask him, but it honors him and deepens our commitment to him.

Peckham has written a series of thoughtful books published by Baker, including “Theodicy of Love: Cosmic Conflict and the Problem of Evil” (2018) and “Divine Attributes” (2021). While some say horrendous evil disproves the existence of God, it’s actually evidence for the existence of Satan. We know by their effects the reality of forces in the physical universe that we cannot see, and we learn about the devil when humans do things so devilish (for example, the Holocaust) as to be otherwise unbelievable.

While some complain about the “hiddenness” of God, Peckham points out that Satan’s rebellion is based on the concept that God is a “dictator,” so God can’t win the “cosmic conflict” by becoming more of a dictator: For his own glory, God has to show that compassion wins, and for his glory Christians also should rely on his means — changing hearts — rather than being mean.

The consequences of atheism are everywhere evident, but even when mass murderers like Hitler, Stalin or Mao show what happens when people forget God and worship power, we are often too conceited to realize that our salvation depends on Christ’s compassion. In the process, we miss out on joy. Daniel Silliman quotes one Nixon associate saying he never laughed.

Richard Bauckham’s “The Blurred Cross” (Baker, 2024) is a memoir of learning to see more clearly in the context of almost becoming blind: “Sufferings, contradictions, and difficulties, far from being excluded, are the expected context in which God’s love will be experienced.”

Marvin Olasky is the author of 30 books, including this year’s Moral Vision and Pivot Points. His foundation awards Zenger Prizes for street-level journalism.