The Sunday Interview: How Christianity Shaped America: Matthew Avery Sutton on Power, Evangelicals, and the “Chosen Land”
Dr. Matthew Avery Sutton argues that the U.S. Constitution's pragmatic separation of church and state inadvertently fueled religious innovation, creating an unofficial "shadow Protestant" establishment that privileged white Protestants while forcing leaders like Lincoln and Obama into political conformity. He details how entrepreneurial religious actors mastered marketing to build mega-churches, noting that mainline Protestantism declined as congregants rejected liberal clergy for conservative communities, and reveals that "evangelical" was rebranded by fundamentalists in the 1940s as a political tool. Ultimately, Sutton highlights internal tensions within Christian nationalism regarding Israel and foreign policy, suggesting these theological fractures complicate America's approach to potential conflicts like a war with Iran. [Automatically generated summary]
axis mundi welcome to straight white american jesus Great to be with you today for the Sunday interview.
And I'm welcoming back someone who has not been here for a long time, but has written just an amazing new book called Chosen Land, all about how Christianity formed America and Americans reshaped Christianity.
So welcoming Dr. Matthew Avery Sutton.
He is the Claudius Owen May W. Johnson, Distinguished Professor and Chair of the Department of History at Washington State.
He earned his PhD just like me at UC Santa Barbara.
2016, he was appointed a Guggenheim Foundation Fellow and is also the author of American Apocalypse, Double Crossed, Jerry Falwell and the Rise of the Religious Right, and several other books.
Matt, thanks for being here.
Thank you, Brad.
It's been too long.
Yeah, it has.
And I just realized today, I don't know why I didn't have this clock in my brain, that you are also a UCSB alum.
You're a gaucho.
So that makes this even better.
And all right, I want to jump in here to what is just a rich and fabulous book.
This is an ambitious book.
This is a history of Christianity in the United States in some form, but there is like some very particular and incisive interventions you're making into discussions about Christianity in the United States.
And I want to bring those to the fore for everybody.
So in the introduction, you put it so clearly, so succinctly, that this is a book that really looks into how there's been a 500-year mission to turn North America into a holy land, a prelude to God's millennial kingdom.
And this is remarkable because as many people listening will have in mind, we supposedly have one of the first secular democracies in the history of the modern world and the history of the human species, however you want to frame it.
So the first argument you put forth, and I want to just, you know, get you to explain this, is we have a secular republic.
It seems as if, and I'm going to let you jump in here as the historian, it seems as if the founders wanted to build a wall between church and state.
And yet it is exactly that separation of church and state that in your words stimulated religious innovation, expansion, and integration.
And in many ways, makes the United States today a much more religious place than its counterparts across the globe, especially in Europe.
How does the separation of church and state and a secular democracy actually lead in the last 250 years to a country that's more religious than most of its neighbors and peers?
Yeah, so that's exactly the question I set out to try to answer in this book that I was perplexed by the fact, and as I've spent some time abroad and just kind of thought about how religion functions in Canada and Western Europe, that we are so extraordinarily Christian.
And it's not just in terms of like individuals who go to church on Sundays, but it's the way we shape our politics.
It's the questions we ask of our politicians.
It's the kind of culture war battles we have over everything like always has a religious tinge to it.
And so to answer that question, I realized I needed to really go back to the beginning and go back to the colonial period and then look at the founders and the First Amendment and on and on and on.
And what I argue in the book and kind of what I've the conclusion I've come to is that the Constitution is in fact extraordinarily secular.
In fact, you would call it atheist.
But in crafting the First Amendment, the founders were basically functioning as pragmatists.
It wasn't this kind of high idealism of we're going to create this separation of church and state.
They simply looked at 13 colonies that had their own different religious establishments, in many cases, that had their own religious devotions.
And so they saw Episcopalians and they saw Baptists and they saw Presbyterians and they saw Congregationalists.
And they realized there is no real way that we can create an established church for this new nation that's going to appease everybody.
But we also realized, looking at history, looking back at Europe, we don't want to create a context in which we're going to have religious wars.
We don't want to just do something that's going to incentivize the congregationalists to start killing the Anglicans or the Baptists to start killing the Presbyterians.
And so the First Amendment becomes their pragmatic compromise.
And so, you know, the two parts of it, the disestablishment clause, that there's not going to be no establishment of religion, no official federal state church, but that they're also going to honor free practice, the free exercise of religion.
What they didn't realize is that that was going to open up the floodgates for American religious leaders to jump in and try to fill the gap, to take advantage of the freedom that they had through the First Amendment to try to impose their views on the rest of the nation, on everybody else, to essentially contend for power.
And so what the founders did to be somewhat neutral was then a tool that religious leaders immediately went to work implementing to try to Christianize the nation as they saw fit.
I want to ask you about that in a minute.
I want to stop, though, for a second and just to I'm going to put on my Doug Wilson costume here for a minute.
My almost neighbor, he's only seven miles away.
I was going to say, you teach in eastern Washington.
You are close, very close to Idaho and northern Idaho.
And you probably wouldn't have come if you knew I was going to do this Doug Wilson costume.
But what I'm going to ask you is, as somebody who's read more of his books than I'd like to admit, and he would argue that, oh, no, no, no, no.
The disestablishment clause was not to make sure that we had an agnostic state that was free from religion.
It was just that they wanted the states to decide which denomination would be the Christian religion of their state.
So as you just said, there's Episcopalians here, there's Baptists there, there's Presbyterians here.
Let each state decide its denomination.
And I'm just wondering if what you would say to that, you know, what I think both of us would agree is a bad historical interpretation, but what's the answer to that?
Yeah, so you may not like my answer to that.
I think that the Christian nationalists have some historical basis for making the kinds of arguments that they make.
I do agree that the founders didn't intend to keep religion out of government.
They just didn't want people killing each other over particular sects.
That's going to shift in 1947, and I'm thrilled that it does shift in 1947 with the Everson decision, which is really where we get the language of separation of church and state, because that's not in the Constitution.
That's what Jefferson wrote to a group of Baptists in 1802.
And Jefferson was not a drafter of the First Amendment.
And so what we think of as separation of church and state is really a second half of the 20th century phenomenon and one that I champion.
I want to be real clear that this is what I like.
I think it makes the most sense in our country and our democracy for pluralism for all the reasons you and I would agree on.
But what we see happening with the Roberts Court, and especially Neil Gorsick, is a return to this 19th century sentiment.
So even though Gorsak would do it in a much more sophisticated way than Doug Wilson, he's basically making the same argument when he's deciding that a football coach in my home state in Washington can institute prayers at the end of a football game or that parents should be able to pull their kids out of a library reading time that talks about, you know, gay rights or whatever, that Gorsuch says there's actually a good historical basis for this, and he's right.
And one of my fears with this book was that it could be a tool of the Doug Wilsons, but I think they have good grounds in the 19th century.
The question is, do we really want to go back to the 19th century?
I think not.
Well, and I don't want to belabor this, but one of the things that occurs to me, and I'm curious what you think about this, is that over the course of the 1800s, the first, really, the first half of the 1800s, the states really phase out any sense of a state church.
So any of those colonies turned into states, they don't, by 1830, they really don't have a Baptist state church, religion, denomination.
And so one argument would be that over the course of time, the states and the federal government in sort of conjunction realize that not having state churches, federal churches, government churches was the best practice.
We don't have to wait until 1947.
How does that line up with your view?
I mean, what do you think about that?
Yeah, I 100% agree.
And so what they decide to do, though, is we see all these ecumenical groups developing in the 1830s, 1840s.
So as soon as you're just establishing state churches, the most powerful Christian groups come together and form the American Tract Society, the American Bible Society, the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions.
And so these are ecumenical organizations intending to put their stamp on the United States and then through missions, their stamp on the rest of the world.
And so they're explicitly determining who is in and who is out.
And so who are in are the Presbyterians, the Methodists, the Baptists, the Episcopalians, Congregationalists.
And who is out are the Shakers, the Unitarians, the Latter-day Saints, the Catholics.
And so there's still this hegemony.
There's still this, what I call a shadow Protestant, you know, unofficial establishment that is ruling the day.
I mean, their power is just incredible.
But once we get to the 1880s, 1890s, and we have this surge of immigration of Jews and Catholics, the nation grows more diverse.
The Protestant power begins to wane.
The courts begin to recognize how much more diverse the nation is getting.
They begin to really truly think about what the free exercise clause means in a way that's more modern that we would support today.
And then this accelerates in 1965 with the Immigration Reform Act.
And this gets back to your Doug Wilson point.
What I think we have happening today is the last gasp of that old Christian nationalism.
They recognize the demographics are not on their side.
And so they're doubling down on trying to superimpose their vision for the country on the rest of us.
But it's the fact that they're working so aggressively is the tell, is that they realize they've lost.
And so it's the last gasp of these, you know, really baby boomers who are on their way out.
I want to just come back to one more point here before we move on to the second main argument you make in the book.
And that is the point about the Protestant power that emerges alongside a government that is meant to be neutral and free from state control or sanction.
You argue that essentially there was an ability for Protestants to put their thumbs on the scale and really make it such that culturally and politically to be a white Protestant was to be privileged and to have your form of religion privileged in the United States for a long, long time.
And what that means is that while we've had a secular democracy since our founding, to put it in reductive terms, there has always been a privileging of the white Protestant over any other form of religiosity in the United States.
Is that a fair submission of what you're arguing here?
Absolutely.
So I opened the book with Abraham Lincoln running for Congress in 1846 against a revivalist, a preacher, a Methodist.
And because of Lincoln's unorthodox views, he's essentially forced as the campaign continues to basically lie about who he is, to hide his unorthodox ideas and claim that he supports traditional Christianity.
He supports the churches, like that he supports orthodoxy.
And then I end the book with Barack Obama in 2008 in the controversy over Jeremiah Wright.
And one of the things in the book I do is show that there's always this subversive kind of Christianity, this liberationist.
tendency to see Jesus as the liberator who's going to turn over the tables in the temple, who's going to challenge this power structure.
They use Jesus against the established Protestant hegemony.
But for Barack Obama, he had to denounce Jeremiah Wright.
He could not acknowledge that he was part of this black liberationist tradition.
He had to claim the mantle of orthodoxy.
And so, you know, we can talk about being a secular republic, but from Abraham Lincoln to Barack Obama, they were forced to conform.
Like we force our politicians to conform to this traditional idea that's set by white Protestants.
Yeah.
All right.
Let's go to the second argument that really shaped in the book.
And that is that because we have a secular democracy, because religion was written out of the Constitution in many ways, that the religious actors we have in this country are entrepreneurs.
They're innovative.
They're people that have to be creative about how to bring religion into public life.
And I will say, as somebody who spent part of his grad years in England, who has dear friends in Copenhagen, European countries that have state churches, there is a lot less creativity on the part of religious actors.
You know, when you go there, there's this sense of the English vicar who's sort of, you know, there, but much, much, much different than anybody who's paying attention to Robert Schuler and the Crystal Cathedral or Jerry Falwell and his radio show or any number of prosperity gospel folks we could get into.
Would you talk about the ways that, again, a secular democracy leads to religious actors who are really genius entrepreneurs, capitalists, marketplace fillers who are kind of unrivaled in many of our peer nations?
Totally.
Yeah.
So that's that was this, as you pointed out, second part of the argument.
But as I was trying to answer this question of how did Americans become so Christian and how are they shaping the culture, I realized that if you don't have an established church, like if tax dollars are not paying to keep your doors open, your lights on, your furnace working, then you have to make Christianity attractive.
You have to find a way to draw people to you.
You have to, and you're competing because people could do anything else on Sunday.
And so what we see happening over the course of American history is that the most successful movements are the ones who master two things, technology.
And so they're always at the cutting edge, whether it's early forms of mass media, written communication and printing, to then radio in the 10s, especially the 1920s, 30s, to TV in the 50s, to satellite broadcasting in the 70s, to the internet in the 21st century.
And so these Christian leaders are always on the front end of technological revolution.
And tied to that, it's always communications.
And so they're always making Christianity a form of entertainment, something that can rival what's happening in Hollywood or what's happening on the stage or what's happening in the sports world.
They have their own celebrities.
This is why we have these whole series of celebrity preachers.
And even the non-Protestant traditions, the, you know, the Catholics have their own celebrities, Father Coglund, Fulton Sheen, that they have recognized that to survive in the United States or to succeed in the United States, you really have to package Christianity into something people want to consume.
And so they're very effective at doing that, at marketing it.
One of the things I couldn't get away from thinking about all of these actors throughout the American centuries is No one does capitalism better than us.
Decline of Mainline Church00:15:01
And that in many ways is tragic.
And again, when you go to somewhere like Western Europe, you really understand that, that there's things in Western Europe that are under the purview of the state.
And because of that, they're not marketed.
They're not gimmicked.
They're not sold to you with the same flair, the same advertising allure, the same hooks and ladders to get you interested and desirous of whatever it is that is on offer.
American religion is full of people from, you know, we've mentioned Jerry Falwell or Robert Schuler, but there's Amy Semple McPherson.
There's, I mean, there's the Wesleys.
I mean, there's people who filled a marketplace with religion rather than doing it in conjunction with the state.
And I just can't get away from the fact that that is somehow such an engine for the ways Americans have reshaped Christianity.
One of the things you argue is that this is not just simply upholding a traditional Christian faith or a perennial practice of a Christian tradition.
This is an invention and a reinvention of the faith itself, given the times, given the technology, given the market.
I mean, is that a fair takeaway again from what you have here?
Absolutely.
Yeah.
And every generation has to reinvent it.
They have to redo it.
They have to connect it to whatever the broader trends are in this broader American society because they have to stay relevant.
And some fail.
So those churches are going to disappear.
They're going to close.
And then somebody's going to step into the gap and they're going to fill that need.
And so it's a way to think about the fact that like Americans, well, I guess another way to look at this is Americans church shop.
You go to the church that you find most entertaining, where you like the worship service, where you have the best kids programming.
You don't just go to the local parish in your neighborhood because that's your parish unless you're Catholic.
And so Catholics move a little bit away from this consumerism.
At least they don't do it to the same extent that many Protestants do.
But it is this very specifically American phenomenon, but it's one, of course, that we've exported for generations now.
Well, it seems like this is a place, too, where we might talk about how and why conservative forms of Christianity have really become the brand name of American religion, especially over the last 75 years.
You know, one of, I want to get to your argument about the mainline and the sort of end of the mainline church in the end of the 20th century.
But one of the things that I think I want to bring to the fore for people is there has been always on the side of conservative Christians in this country, an investment in celebrity, an investment in technology, an investment in selling the faith because they know that we're shopping for the faith.
And I don't think that folks on the mainline side of Protestantism really like that all that much.
When I visit my Episcopalian friends and my United Methodist friends and my ELCA friends, they're like, I don't want to sell Christianity.
I want to like offer people a genuine iteration of what I take to be our tradition.
But then I go over to the mega church that I used to be at and there are lasers.
There are people repelling from the ceiling.
There are, you know, rock bands.
And, you know, my wife didn't grow up in that tradition and she visited and she's like, yeah, I had a really good latte.
And like there was a, there was a climbing wall.
You know, is part of the selling and the capitalistic ethos here a way to explain how we get something like the name brand of Christianity being white evangelicalism.
I think that's part of it.
And certainly in the last couple of decades, absolutely, that evangelicals have been the ones who have mastered these kinds of communication techniques.
But in earlier periods, the liberals were doing it too, whether it was Henry Ward Beecher in Brooklyn in the 1880s, 1890s, Harry Emerson Fostick in Manhattan in the 1920s.
Robert Schuler was theologically not all that conservative in the 50s and 60s.
And sorry, Norman Vincent Peel.
Sorry to mix up those guys.
But nevertheless, the point being that whether you were liberal or conservative for much of American history, you had to be entertaining.
But yes, in recent years, evangelicals have been better at it.
They've been more sophisticated.
And I think as evangelicals have become more aligned with, not so much with capitalism, but with particular corporate interests, they've probably doubled down on this, while the liberal mainline has become a little more critical, a little more skeptical of the big money.
But at the same time, one of the things I discovered in the book, and I argue about it, is that how tied the mainline was to big corporations as well.
And we see that, especially with the Rockefellers.
And the Rockefellers paid for all kinds of liberal Protestant projects.
The liberal mainline folks could not critique capitalism without being very concerned that they were going to hurt their income.
And so it's these folks on the margins, it's these liberationists, whether it's indigenous preachers or black preachers or gay rights activists in the 60s.
They're the ones who can speak to power because they're not beholden to corporate interests.
But the mainlines, just as much as the evangelicals, very much are depending on people with deep pockets.
Well, and that leads to one more aspect of this part of the book that I think is really important for people to see.
And one of your arguments is that over the course of the 1970s and 1980s, even earlier than that, there was a decline of the mainline church.
And that decline has been precipitous.
It has been documented.
It has been chronicled.
But the liberationist ethos of many mainline clergy did not line up with some of the centrist politics of the people sitting in their pews.
And I'm thinking of like John Compton's book, The End of Empathy, where he does a great job showing you that if you're in 1972 and you're in the Midwest and you have a clergy member at your ELCA church or your UUCC church, your Congregationalist church,
who is talking about radical political ideas, whether those be reparations, whether those be gay rights, et cetera, that many centrists, for better or for worse, and I definitely have my opinions on this, were like, this is not my church and I'm going to go church shopping now because the leader of my church seems to be so invested in a politics that is to the left of me that I'm not sure I belong here anymore.
You know, is that the main thrust of why we should understand the mainline decline at the end of the 20th century in your view?
That's what I argue, is that the politics in the mainline got ahead of the people in the pews.
And I've taken some crap for that argument from friends who really want to defend the mainline.
And this is, I think, you're exactly what you're saying, that I'm sympathetic to these mainline leaders in the 60s and 70s who are saying, we really screwed up on civil rights.
Like the white mainline leaders say we didn't do enough.
And then in trying to do more, the pendulum swings pretty far to the other side.
So one of the stories I tell in the book, which was something I stumbled across in the archives, was Angela Davis gets indicted for a murder.
She's the black radical in the 60s and 70s.
She gets indicted for a murder that she has nothing to do with.
And so the Presbyterians officially, like the denomination, their social justice committee gives $10,000 to help her legal defense.
And just there's letter after letter after letter in the Presbyterian archives of these outraged churchgoers who are saying, how am I going to tithe to this church when this church is going to be supporting this self-described communist, this black radical?
And so there are story after story after story like that of these folks, like you said, Midwestern pews, suburbs, who are maybe more theologically and politically moderate.
Maybe they're more centrist, but they're not entirely comfortable with a radical politics of the 1960s or the new left of the 1970s.
And so, and actually, the other part of this is that this is not me making this argument on my own, but there are sociologists in the 60s and 70s in real time who are watching this happen, who are writing books and articles who are saying like these seminarians, like these new young clergy are just radical and they're driving people to the evangelical churches.
And so we see this flip.
And the evangelical churches, of course, are more than happy to welcome these folks, to draw them in.
Because again, the more people they get, the more they can do with their ministries.
And they're very clear about this.
Yeah, I mean, there's so much to unpack there and so much to think through.
And I don't want anyone listening to think that I, you know, I'm anyway, I think we've been over it.
It's not something I'm happy about.
Right, me neither.
And, you know, and a lot of the things that I think you would find the clergy in the 60s and 70s doing, you would think, right on.
One last point on this that I want to get your thoughts on is, and this might be more of a sociological question than a historical question, but a lot of the folks, especially the younger folks who might have been aligned with the politics of those new generations of clergy, the radical politics, somebody who would have said, no, no, right on, let's support Angela Davis.
I've always thought of those folks as thinking to themselves at some point, I'm not sure I need to go to church to maintain these politics.
Like I'm a leftist.
I'm a socialist.
I'm on board with everything Angela Davis is doing.
The Black Panthers, the civil rights movement, Stonewall.
And I'm kind of done with church because I'm just going to go do it over here.
And that's another reason you see some of the decline of what we call the mainline church.
Do you buy any of that?
Or what do you see there?
Absolutely.
And that's the argument that David Hollinger, who's a good friend and mentor of mine, has made, is that the liberals were so successful at building a culture that celebrated pluralism, that celebrated individuality, that left room for religion, but said we shouldn't be imposing that religion on everybody else, that in fact they inadvertently sealed their own doom.
They made themselves irrelevant because you could find those kinds of things on your own.
You could have your spirituality without your religion.
You could take seriously the social gospel demands of Jesus and of the New Testament without having to practice it in the form of a Sunday morning Methodist church, church community.
So I think you're right.
And then the other part of this with the social activism tends to be that the churches used to be the center of the social gospel of kind of social justice movements, of the civil rights movement of MLK.
But now we have all these secular NGOs that are doing that very same work.
And so a lot of religious liberals are very active.
They're being driven by their faith, but they're exercising their faith through more secular organizations, which can in some ways be more effective in trying to accomplish the ends that they want to accomplish.
Yeah.
And I know I got many mainline friends listening right now, and there's many mainline folks who are going to be tuning into this conversation.
And none of this is, for me, downplaying the beauty of those traditions, nor is it saying that you've done anything wrong.
It's more to say, how do we explain why a certain form of Christianity has become kind of the brand name over the last 75 years?
And then how do we approach the problem of the fact that in many of the churches that do have what I would take to be pro-social, pro-democratic, pro-pluralist politics, when I visit those churches, when I speak at those churches, a lot of the folks are baby boomers.
It's hard to find the 20-year-olds, the 30-year-olds, and even the 40-year-olds because they're just not there in large numbers.
And that's just sort of what the stats show us and what lived experience shows us.
All right.
Let me ask you about the final argument.
Yeah, yeah.
But I 100% agree with you.
And the challenge of being a historian is telling a story that you don't always like.
And so, you know, it's not that I didn't empathize with these mainliners in the 60s and 70s who are repenting for their sins of racism and sexism and homophobia.
I think they were doing the right thing, but it cost them.
Like that was the cost.
And of course, that exactly is part of the point that if you're living out the authentic faith, maybe it's not going to be easy.
Maybe you're not going to be popular.
Maybe you're not going to draw the throngs to you.
And maybe evangelicals should think about why they're so popular in the Trump White House today and give them pause about whether or not, you know, if that's something that really tells you that you're succeeding or maybe that you're actually failing.
Prophets are really popular.
Right, exactly.
And I think that I think it's a great point.
Okay, last part of last main argument is that Christianity has been key to the national development of the United States.
And as much as we, you know, at least I am interested in the stunning diversity of American history, the ways that different people groups, different folks from all over the world have contributed to it.
As somebody who's from the West Coast and his family is Asian American, thinking about, you know, Japanese and Chinese communities on the West Coast, in Hawaii, in other places, thinking about indigenous folks, thinking about Latin folks, et cetera.
And not to say that those aren't Christian stories, but there's so much in the way of American religious history.
But if Christianity is key to the distinctiveness of our nation, is it fair to say that the growing number of non-religious people in this country, the growing displacement of Christianity as the driving cultural ethos, has led to what we see in our politics today, which is something you mentioned earlier, a kind of extinction level backlash to Christianity not being what it has always been in some sense throughout our history,
which is the kind of driving engine of American culture for better and in many cases, for worse.
Is that a way, is the argument you're making a way to understand our current moment in terms of the battle lines that are being drawn?
Or what am I missing there?
No, absolutely.
And, you know, I say in the beginning of the book that I'm most interested in questions of power.
And so the story is going to focus on these white Protestant leaders because they have the most power.
But throughout the book, I'm always showing the folks who are pushing back against them, whether, again, it's the indigenous folks, black leaders, Mexican Americans in the 20th century, Asian Americans who are getting involved in battles over civil rights, segregation, et cetera, et cetera.
But yeah, I think we're at the moment that's accelerated by the 1965 Immigration Reform Act with the real expansion of American diversity in the second half of the 20th century.
And so we're living in this weird moment where all the pulling data tells us fewer and fewer people are identifying as Christians, that people are leaving churches.
Religion is less important in their daily lives than it has been in generations, if not in most of American history.
And so this is what has put the Protestant leaders, especially the conservative folks, the leaders of the religious right, what's put them on the defensive.
And this is why they've amped up the culture war.
And I think this is what has created space for the white Christian nationalists, because many folks have realized that, you know, white Christian America is at its very end.
Modern Evangelicalism Defined00:09:00
Like this is not going to last much longer, that this is, you know, the final nail is going to be pounded into the coffin.
But I say all of that to say every time we write off the religious right, there's a resurrection, right?
There's a there's a revival.
And so I end the book by basically saying it may well be that we are finally reaching the point that we're going to start looking more like Canada, that we can really separate our politics from our religion, that Trump is the last gasp, that his hypocrisy and outrageousness has so turned off folks who are younger, who just can't abide by the duplicity of what's happening, that this is it, that they've sealed their own fate.
But I've been a historian long enough to realize that I don't really know the future and that tomorrow something new may happen.
Yeah, wow, so much there.
Okay.
I want to get to a part of the book, and we'll come back to that, but I want to get to a part of the book that is really, I think, something that people listening are going to want to try to understand.
And that is an argument you've made previous to the publication of this book.
If you're an American religion nerd like me, you know that Matthew Avery Sutton wrote an article about six months ago.
Let me get the timeline off here that appeared six months ago that, you know, every one of your favorite authors was reading and saying, oh man, that taught me a lot.
You know, it could have been Christian Kobas-Dume.
It could have been, you know, it could have been Matthew Taylor.
It could have been whoever.
And in that article, you argued something like this, that the notion that we have of evangelical is really misguided.
The idea that the evangelical of today can trace their lineage to the 1740s, the 1840s is inaccurate.
That what we know today is an evangelical is really a modern invention, a modern iteration, a modern something, rather than a carrying on of a legacy that goes back one, two, three centuries.
Would you explain that for us?
Because I think a lot of people are going to be interested in why when we think of evangelicalism today, we should think of something that is really a modern phenomenon rather than the good old-fashioned God-country kind of stuff that we hear people try to sell us.
Yeah, so the article came out of the research and writing of the book.
The book's written for a general audience of non-specialists, non-academics.
And so I was not going to spend time in the book talking about these kind of obscure historical arguments.
And so the article does that.
But what I do in the book is show the alternative, what I think is the better narrative.
And to get your point, so the word evangelical appears all over the place, basically since the Protestant Reformation.
It appears in multiple languages, and it gets used by all kinds of different groups who have all kinds of different beliefs and ideas and core essentials.
And whenever they use it, they always use it as a way to distinguish themselves from others to say that what they believe is more true than what their particular ideological opponents at the time believe, that they're the authentic Christians, the true Christians.
And so the word appears throughout the 18th and 19th century in the United States, but it's used so broadly and so generically that the people who are defining it talk about Unitarian evangelicals.
They talk about Quaker evangelicals.
They talk about liberal evangelicals.
It just becomes pointless to use the word.
And so it essentially dies by the early 20th century, 1920s, 1930s.
It hits its absolute low point where Americans just aren't using it.
And so the fundamentalists, the folks who really are building a new movement in the 1910s, 1920s, they decide in the 40s that they need to rebrand.
And so what better way to rebrand than to appropriate this older, long-running term that we can date back to essentially Martin Luther.
And so they take the term, they infuse it with entirely new meaning, entirely new power, entirely new ideas.
And then what they masterfully do is by doing that, they say, we are the true Christians.
We're the folks who have always been around, that we are the centerpiece of American history and really of Protestant history.
And for generations, a lot of Protestants bought that.
And I think it was, in some ways, it was a lot of excellent historians who were themselves evangelicals who recognized that what Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson were doing to their faith was not something they were really comfortable with.
They were centrists, but they weren't defenders of the religious right.
And so they said, you know, we shouldn't, when we talk about evangelicals, we shouldn't look at Jerry Falwell.
We should go back to Charles Finney or we should go back to George Whitfield or we should go back to Jonathan Edwards or we should go back to William Lane Garrison, the abolitionists.
So it became a political tool useful for historians to distinguish what they saw as true evangelicalism from its use by the religious right.
But what I argue is that this was an entirely invented history that is really about modern politics and about kind of inter-Nicene evangelical debates about what is an authentic evangelical today that is then superimposed backwards.
So for me, it's just not a useful term before 1940.
It's useful after 1940 when we have these fundamentalists who use the term, but it's not helpful for understanding earlier periods of American history.
So what I say in the book is that there's no evangelical through line, that evangelicalism is not a stable category from the 1740s to 2026.
So just to clarify for folks listening, even if I say, hey, the bastardization of evangelicalism in the religious right, the moral majority in the New Apostolic Reformation or the Doug Wilson University, whatever, whatever I want to say has taken evangelicalism astray.
Whatever is the aberrant form that is a mutant and not the real genuine thing, and we want the real genuine thing, and that's in the Great Awakening.
That's in Jonathan Edwards.
I mean, we're talking, we need to go back and really bring back the evangelical tradition.
And what you're saying is even that line of thinking is a historical fallacy because there is no through line that, yes, Jonathan Edwards is one form of Calvinist Christianity, or we can go to the Great Awakening.
We can go to Whitfield, whoever, but you're not going to find a connection to something called evangelical today.
That's just not how it works.
So whatever it is you're trying to recover, whatever it is you're trying to renew, it's not evangelical as such.
It's something else.
Is that the argument?
Exactly.
That there might be things that today's evangelicals, more moderate evangelicals would find valuable in Edwards or Whitfield or Finney or Garrison, but that it's a different thing.
And the kind of two easy ways to make the argument is obviously if you brought them into today's megachurch, they would not recognize it at all.
They would denounce everybody there as a bunch of heretics who are going to burn in hell.
And then at the same time, the folks at the time that evangelicals today would like to claim as their own were fighting with each other, hated each other, were battling with each other.
And so, you know, they're superimposing a category that just wouldn't have made any sense to people in the 1840s or in the 1740s.
And so it really is a political tool for today's moderate evangelicals to separate themselves from the religious right.
So the better argument they could make is to say, well, is Billy Graham the authentic evangelical or is Jerry Falwell?
And they can have that debate.
But Jonathan Edwards and Charles Finney have nothing to do with that debate.
Got it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, that makes sense.
And I think that, so I'll just throw one more example in here is if there's an evangelical out there listening and they're like, well, I'm an evangelical in the sense of the 1973 Chicago Declaration.
I was that evangelical that was for women's rights and against war and against all kinds of things that are now hallmarks of the marriage of the GOP and MAGA Trumpism and MA Christianity.
Even them, even that 1973 Chicago Declaration evangelical, in your view, is not an evangelical in the sense of someone like whoever we want to point to in the 18th or 19th century.
It's just, you just really cannot make that connection by using the word evangelical.
They might have family resemblances in other ways, but tracing that by way of the category of evangelical is just a fool's errand and it doesn't make sense historically.
Right, because they could just as easily trace their origins to the social gospel, to other liberationists in the 19th century, to those who were advocating for equal rights, to many of whom tended to be more theologically liberal.
And I always try to be real careful, you know, when I think about, and I know you do, the, you know, the 81% of evangelicals who voted for Trump in 2016 and then even more in 2020, 2024, that there's always still the 19%.
And so there still is that room for those socially active, more moderate, centrist, progressive evangelicals, like they're real.
Apocalyptic Politics and Iran00:06:18
And I wish them luck.
Like, I hope they can reclaim the name, reclaim the movement.
But at the moment, they're, you know, only 20%.
And so they're losing.
So I, you know, if they can, if they can grab some power, I'm all for it.
Yeah.
All right.
I know you're a historian, and I warned you I was going to do this.
And so if we can finish up on this, on this kind of, you know, current event topic here that is at the top of everyone's mind, we are in a war with Iran.
It's not supposed to be called a war or an invasion, but it's a regime change.
I don't know what it's called, an engagement, something.
Coming with any American involvement with Iran in any way comes a whole lot of theology and end times discussion.
And we have gotten our fill of that in the last weeks, whether that's Mike Johnson, whether that is Pete Hegseth, whether that is, I mean, Mike Huckabee was on Tucker Carlson saying that Israel could take all of the Middle East and that would be fine.
We could talk to any number of Republican senators, congresspeople, et cetera.
There are folks who are in the Christian universe, Sean Foyt, Lance Walnow, John Hagee.
They see the war, the engagement with Iran as part of the end times.
You've written a book about the United States as a chosen land, the creating a kingdom that will make way for the millennial reign of Christ.
In your long survey of this country's understanding of itself, what do you make of these kind of end times prescriptions when it comes to the geopolitics of dealing with Iran?
I mean, it's fascinating, of course.
It is troubling in a real world sense, and it's totally engaging in an academic sense.
One of the things I try to do in the book is show how kind of millennial and apocalyptic thinking is one of the trends that we see kind of ebbing and flowing throughout American history.
And certainly right now is a moment where, again, we're at this period where there's, you know, it's supercharged in all kinds of fascinating ways.
And I think it ties back to the war in Gaza and the role of Israel in the American imagination and this idea that Americans are the new chosen land, that Americans are the new Israel, that the United States is the new Israel.
And so all of these things are running into each other like right now in real time as we're talking.
But certainly the apocalyptic tendencies of American leaders are a little bit disturbing.
And I think that, you know, Ronald Reagan seemed to flirt with apocalyptic ideas.
He had read late great planet Earth and he told Wolf Blitzer that maybe we were lining up towards the end times, but then he turned around and cut deals for nuclear disarmament to try to, you know, create arms control.
And so there wasn't a sense that he was edging us towards Armageddon on purpose.
In fact, he believed that we shouldn't be edging towards Armageddon.
He just thought it was what it was.
But, you know, I don't trust that Mike Huckabee or Pete Hegseth or Mike Johnson are as moderate in their approach, which it's strange to be calling Ronald Reagan a moderate.
But I think what we're seeing this week is that they make Ronald Reagan look pretty pretty tempered, pretty measured in his approach.
So it is scary to think about whether or not biblical end times thinking is influencing how they're understanding the war.
One last thing on this that is interesting to me, and I'm wondering if you have any, you know, any thoughts on this, is that I've tried to make the case that there's also a significant wing of MAGA Christians who have become post-millennialist, who do not see the end times as near, who are not awaiting Jesus coming back.
And as a result, their view of Israel is much less as a key player in the end of the world and thus in American foreign policy and really is kind of similar to any other foreign nation.
And that leads to questions of, well, why should we give Israel billions of dollars?
Why should we fight wars with or for or alongside Israel and so on?
Why should we protect Israel's safety over American citizens?
And, you know, that also unfortunately and tragically leads many of these folks into anti-Semitism, whether open or covert or implied.
But I think that's significant.
And for me, what's shaping up is a Mike Johnson kind of ethos, a Mike Huckabee ethos that does see some of these themes in what's happening with Iran.
But on the other hand, a kind of JD Vance, who's a darling of traditional Catholics and also a darling, strangely enough, of Doug Wilson-aligned, you know, kind of Christian theonomists who were kind of like, yeah, I didn't sign up for Endless War.
I didn't sign up for foreign entanglement.
I didn't sign up for sending American boots on the ground.
Are you seeing some of that?
Does some of that strike you as important?
Or is there a chance I'm overblowing that wing of the MAGA Christian universe?
No, you're absolutely right.
I mean, it's been fascinating to watch the Reconstructionists, the post-millennialists, the kind of neo-reform folks growing in power and influence and how that is converging or not converging over what's happening in the Middle East right now.
Because presumably Pete Hegseth, if he, you know, I cannot imagine he's a very sophisticated theologian or has, you know, read theology very deeply.
But if we assume he's aligned with Doug Wilson and post-millennialism, then why would he have any interest at all in seeing the Middle East as part of this prelude to Armageddon?
Armageddon is a thousand years away at the soonest.
So it is this weird moment in which we have post-millennialists and pre-millennialists who are coming together to champion war in the Middle East for somewhat different, but reasons that seem to converge.
Well, then we have this more extreme anti-Zionist wing that's also developing power that doesn't want anything to do with it at all.
And so I am curious to see how it plays out and if these people start, you know, when the internal battles, and obviously the internal battles have already been developing over Israel, but this may well blow them into the open.
Like I don't know how sustainable the tensions are that are developing among the different wings that you just described.
Catch Up on Chosen Land00:01:51
Yeah, it is.
I mean, it really is one of these moments where I don't think people understand how different some of the like Doug Wilson under 40 pastors are reacting.
They hate this.
I mean, honestly, they really think what's going on and around is like a huge mistake.
And then you have the new, you know, some of the old school religious rite types, the new apostolic reformation related folks.
Some of them, not all, but many of them are like, oh, no, no, no, this is what was predicted in the in the book of Revelation.
Sean Foyt's talking about Purim and a blood moon and how it's all lining up.
And Lance Waldown's convinced there's the, you know, the feast is always a sign of revelation.
And here we go and blah, blah, blah.
So anyway, we'll keep an eye on it.
We need to stop.
Where can people find you?
Where can people find your book?
Are there stops they can come see you speak at?
What's the best way to do all that?
Yeah, we've got a few local things, nothing real major, but just, yeah, any of the any local bookstores, all the online retailers all have it.
So the books, yeah, books everywhere.
This is a magisterial book, friends.
It's a big book and it covers the history of Christianity in the United States in a way that is both comprehensive and illuminating.
You're going to want to check it out.
And so make sure to do that.
For those of you outside of academia, you know, Dr. Sutton is sort of a scholar scholar, you know, the kind of person that historians in the field look up to.
So, you know, sometimes there's just folks within a guild that are respected by their peers.
And Dr. Sutton's one of those people.
So check out the book.
Do me a favor.
Subscribe to our newsletter, which you can find in the show notes.
Make sure to subscribe to Reign of Error with Sarah Posner, which is just finishing its first season.
And catch us later this week with the weekly roundup.
It's in the code and great content on Monday from me.