And I also found a very interesting critical review of the book online by Michael Kazin (a prof a Georgetown) at the extropy-chat mailing list site. Here are a few choice excerpts:

"Ms. Jacoby is no polemicist. She appreciates the pull of
religion - as community and creed - while criticizing her
own side for taking refuge in rational disdain. Beliefs,
she knows, cannot promote themselves: "Values are handed
down more easily and thoroughly by permanent institutions
than by marginalized radicals," she writes. To change
minds, "secular humanists must reclaim passion and emotion
from the religiously correct."

But as that last phrase suggests, Ms. Jacoby's book is
often more persuasive as a manifesto than as history. Not
surprisingly, she echoes some of the rickety prejudices of
her secular heroes and heroines. She tends to regard the
devout as thoroughly conservative in their politics and
views the Bible Belt as a benighted region needing external
deliverance.

American believers have never formed a reactionary bloc.
Both John Brown and the Christian socialist Edward Bellamy
- author of the best-selling utopian novel, "Looking
Backward" - yoked the language of the prophets to radical
causes. The Populists, who formed the largest third party
in United States history, were led by pious egalitarians
like Ignatius Donnelly, who preached that "Jesus was only
possible in a barefoot world, and he was crucified by the
few who wore shoes."

Ms. Jacoby plays down the spiritual motivations of civil
rights activists in the 1960's, pointing out that atheists
and Unitarians also marched and died for the cause. But for
most black Southerners, their freedom movement was a great
revival, as David Chappell explains in his compelling new
book, "A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of
Jim Crow." "Don't talk to me about atheism," Fannie Lou
Hamer, field-hand-turned-activist told Northern students in
1964. "If God wants to start a movement, then hurray for
God."

It is also disappointing that Ms. Jacoby defends a popular
and controversial 1948 book, "American Freedom and Catholic
Power," by Paul Blanshard, a former Protestant minister,
which portrayed the the Roman Catholic Church as an enemy
of American freedom because it opposed birth control and
demanded that parochial schools receive a share of public
funds.

Blanshard, she claims, was blaming just the institution,
not the laity. But parochial schools were originally
established to provide an alternative to public ones where
students routinely learned only the virtues of the
Reformation and recited from the King James Version of the
Bible, commissioned by a Protestant monarch. And Ms. Jacoby
neglects the anger that Blanshard provoked with his
description of nuns as relics of "an age when women
allegedly enjoyed subjection and reveled in
self-abasement." Freethinkers can be intolerant, too.

One lesson that secularists might draw from Ms. Jacoby's
challenging book is to pick battles they can win. The task
of walling off state from church, synagogue or mosque has
always been distinct from and far less marginal than the
attempt to persuade Americans that religion is just a stew
of unprovable myths. Michael Newdow wins praise for arguing
that the Supreme Court should delete "under God" from the
Pledge of Allegiance. But his atheism appeals to a far
smaller audience.

On the other hand, freethinkers in the United States are
unlikely to talk many people into abandoning their belief
in an afterlife and their reverence for Scripture. In 1892
Ingersoll gave a lovely eulogy for his friend Walt Whitman,
whom, he said, "accepted and absorbed all theories, all
creeds, all religions, and believed in none." But this is a
difficult stance to take, and few Americans have ever taken
it."