• Chapter 1: The American Jeremiad


• Part I: Three American Jeremiads


• Chapter 2: Puritan New England and the Foundations of the American Jeremiad


• Chapter 3: Decline, Slavery, and War: The Jeremiad in Antebellum and Civil War America


• Chapter 4: Taking America Back: The Christian Right Jeremiad


• Part II: The Jeremiad in American Culture


• Chapter 5: Competing Jeremiads


• Chapter 6: Constructing a Usable Past


• Chapter 7: The Jeremiad and the Culture Wars


• Chapter 8: The Past, Present, and Future of the American Jeremiad

Andrew R. Murphy is Associate Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University, New Bruswick. He is the author of Conscience and Community: Revisiting Toleration and Religious Dissent in Early Modern England and America, the co-editor of Religion, Politics, and the American Identity: New Directions, New Controversies, and the editor of The Political Writings of William Penn.

America's supposed moral decline from an imagined golden age, and the threat of divine punishment for the sin of straying from the path of righteousness, have been consistent themes in its political and religious rhetoric. In Prodigal Nation, Andrew Murphy investigates the jeremiad's historical roots and probes the ways in which it continues to illuminate themes and tensions in American social and political life.