A Highly Favored Nation focuses on the ways late nineteenth-century Canadians employed biblical texts to describe Canadian identity and the meanings of their nation. Recognizing that many "ordinary" Canadians who went about their day-to-day lives probably did not have much interest in existential questions, this book focuses on the words of Canada's nationalists, preachers, promoters, and enthusiasts. A Highly Favored Nation challenges the common nineteenth-century Protestant claim that Quebec was a Bible-free zone and it suggests that, by the end of the nineteenth century, Canadians' public use of Scripture had diminished the Bible's cultural authority.

"Jones showsthat Canadian experience illustrates just as much as American experience the beatitude arising from treating God-given 'holy things' as gifts from a merciful Sovereign, but also the enervating peril when these 'holy things' are mishandled as objects of partisan advantage." - Books and Culture, July 2008