How Christianity Made America—and How America Remade Christianity
4/11/20261 hr 31 min
Why does religion still dominate American politics when so many other wealthy democracies secularized long ago?
In this episode, Michael Shermer talks with historian Matthew Avery Sutton about the long relationship between Christianity and American power. From the Puritans to Lincoln, from the Scopes trial to the Religious Right, from slavery to same-sex marriage, this conversation tracks how religious belief has shaped the country, and how politics keeps reshaping religion in return.
Matthew Avery Sutton is the Claudius O. and Mary Johnson Distinguished Professor and chair of the Department of History at Washington State University. His new book is Chosen Land: How Christianity Made America and Americans Remade Christianity.
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Michael Shermer· Host0:30
To what extent are we a Christian nation or Judeo-Christian, or what about all those pantheists and all that stuff and the Founding Fathers? What do we know?
Matthew Avery Sutton· Guest0:36
The question that I started with is not so much, is this a Christian nation, but why is it that we're so different from our Canadian, you know, brothers and sisters across the border or Western Europeans, folks in the United Kingdom? Think about why it is that every politician we have, we ask make-- to make a confession of faith. Tells me there's something distinctive about the United States, something different. And so what I'm trying to do in the book is just trace the origins of that, trace how it is that we became so different from so many other first world nations, so many of our peer nations. Christianity always plays this dual role in American history, where it's often used by the most powerful to keep people in subjugation, but then people in subjugation can often flip it, turn it to f- call for their own liberation. Lincoln says we're an almost chosen people. Lincoln recognizes that there needs to still be a little humility and that maybe Americans don't quite have a monopoly on God's will, and that maybe they don't entirely understand what it is that God wants