(FāVS News) — America is largely a Christian nation but it’s complicated, argues Matthew Avery Sutton in his new book, “Chosen Land: How Christianity Made America and Americans Remade Christianity.”
The book claims to be a 500-year historic survey of Christianity in America just in time for the nation’s 250th anniversary, which marks the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
“I started off with the question … ‘Why are Americans more Christian than our peer nations?’” Sutton said, adding that his goal was to explain historically why that matters. “The book was my effort to go back into the archives, go back into the sources and try to figure out what it is that’s unique or distinctive about the United States and its history that has led us to today.”
With 20 years of professional work at the intersection of religion and politics, Sutton now chairs Washington State University’s history department.
Prior to “Chosen Land,” he wrote five other history books that focus on specific areas of American Christianity, including “American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism.”
To the source
As a historian, Sutton demonstrates his expertise. Each of the book’s 31 chapters includes a curated list of works alongside footnotes, so readers can trace the scholarship behind his arguments.
“To tackle a book like this, I was essentially doing two things. One was building on [an] entire generation of scholarship — folks who are much more specialized in certain eras to try to figure out how they understood the particular periods they were studying and then combine that with archival research,” S …