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Matthew Sutton<\/p>\nChristian faith has always played a significant part in American public life. Today nearly two-thirds of Americans identify as Christian, even if many don\u2019t regularly attend church. The story of the United\u00a0States is intertwined with the religion despite being a nation with a secular Constitution.<\/p>\n
Matthew Avery Sutton, Claudius\u00a0O. and Mary Johnson Distinguished Professor and chair of the Department of History at Washington State University, explores that story in his book Chosen Land: How Christianity Made America and Americans Remade Christianity (Basic\u00a0Books, 2026). His expansive history of Christianity in America shows the prominent role of Christian faith and practice in politics, education, popular culture, and law through many examples from all eras of U.S.\u00a0history.<\/p>\n
Matthew Sutton<\/p>\n
A sweeping history of the effort to transform North\u00a0America into a new holy land, Chosen Land chronicles the rise of American Christianity and its continuing influence. A crucial part of that growth came from evolving strains of Christianity battling for potential adherents, because the nation\u2019s lack of a state religion \u201cwas not a barrier to religious influence, but stimulated religious innovation, expansion, and integration in every part of American life,\u201d Sutton writes.<\/p>\n
Sutton talked about the book and its ideas with Washington State Magazine editor Larry Clark.<\/p>\n
How is Christianity ingrained in America and America\u2019s consciousness?<\/p>\n
As a historian who specializes in religion, I\u2019ve always been struck by how much more religious we are than our competitor nations, like Canada and much of western Europe. To understand this story, we have to go back to the First\u00a0Amendment and what the founders were trying to do in intentionally creating a godless, secular Constitution. They looked at European models with their established, official churches, and they realized there\u2019s no consensus in the colonies around a single denomination, but you need to organize together to fight the revolution. So, you can\u2019t choose Presbyterians over Anglicans over Baptists.<\/p>\n
An unintended consequence is that not choosing a single winner opened the doors for those who already had power: mainstream Protestant leaders. But they had a problem \u2014 there\u2019s not a state mechanism providing financial support to underwrite their work, so they have to be relevant.<\/p>\n
They became more effective than Christians in many other parts of the world because they tapped into Americans\u2019 needs, desires, interests, and entertainments. That set the stage for Christian leaders to influence culture, laws, foreign policy, education \u2014 because all those things were going to help ensure their longevity.<\/p>\n
What are some key events and figures that helped keep Christianity infused in society?<\/p>\n
I open the book with this revivalist, Peter Cartwright, because he\u2019s campaigning for a seat in Congress against Abraham Lincoln. The challenge for Lincoln was that he was pretty unorthodox and Cartwright knew it. Lincoln didn\u2019t attend church regularly and was kind of skeptical about the Bible. So, Cartwright made religion central to the Congressional campaign and essentially forced Lincoln to affirm that he was pro-church, pro-Christian, pro-God, and that he would never do anything as a political leader to undermine the power of establishment Christianity.<\/p>\n
But Cartwright wasn\u2019t just working through politics. He was also very entertaining. He would tell these fabulous stories to get attention from journalists to make sure he got good newspaper coverage. So, we see all these themes coming together, of media and innovation and entrepreneurship and politics and religion, then we fast forward and see Billy Graham and Martin Luther King\u00a0Jr. doing the same thing.<\/p>\n
What are some key points for someone who reads Chosen Land?<\/p>\n
I hope to convince those who are more secular to take American Christianity more seriously. For those who are more Christian, I want to help them see that their history is complicated, and that there have been many competing versions of Christianity vying to shape the trajectory of the nation.<\/p>\n
Christianity remains central to all of the things that both unite and divide us. And if we don\u2019t recognize or understand that, then I think we won\u2019t be as effective at building the kind of future we want, regardless of what that future might look like.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Christian faith has always played a significant part in American public life. Today nearly two-thirds of Americans identify…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":558324,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[23,3,21,19,22,20,25,24],"class_list":["post-558323","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-states","tag-america","tag-news","tag-united-states","tag-united-states-of-america","tag-unitedstates","tag-unitedstatesofamerica","tag-us","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/558323","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=558323"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/558323\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/558324"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=558323"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=558323"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=558323"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}