The SWAJ Briefing: "How Christianity Shaped America—and How America Remade Christianity"
Newsletter + The Longform Interview
Contents:
Read: The Interview
Podshots: This Week on SWAJ
Watch: YouTube Clip of the Week
Connect: Where to Find Us
Network: What’s Happening at Axis Mundi Media
Reasons for Hope
The Spotlight: People, Organizations, and Events You Should Know About
SWAJerati: What We Are Reading
SWAJJER: Discord Comment of the Week
Shoutouts: Welcoming New Members
Read: The Interview
How Christianity Shaped America—and How America Remade Christianity
A Conversation with Historian Matthew Avery Sutton
The Paradox of Religion in a Secular Republic
Brad Onishi: Your book makes a bold claim right at the start—that for roughly five centuries there has been a mission to turn North America into a kind of holy land, a prelude to God’s millennial kingdom. That’s fascinating because the United States is also often described as one of the first secular democracies.
The founders built what appears to be a wall between church and state. Yet you argue that this separation actually stimulated religious innovation and expansion, making the United States more religious than many other countries. How does a secular system produce such a deeply religious society?
Matthew Avery Sutton: That question was really the starting point for the book. I’ve spent time abroad—in Canada, in Western Europe—and I was struck by how different religion looks there compared to the United States. Here, Christianity isn’t just about people going to church on Sunday. It shapes our politics. It shapes the questions we ask of our politicians. It shapes our culture wars. Religion is woven deeply into American public life.
To understand why, I realized I needed to go back to the beginning—to the colonial period and the founding of the republic. The Constitution itself is actually extraordinarily secular. In fact, you might even call it atheist in its structure. But when the founders wrote the First Amendment, they weren’t necessarily trying to create a philosophical model of separation between church and state. They were acting pragmatically.
They looked at the thirteen colonies and saw a wide range of religious establishments—Episcopalians, Baptists, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and others. There was no realistic way to create a national church that everyone would accept.They also looked at European history and thought: we do not want religious wars here. So the First Amendment becomes a compromise. There will be no established national church, but people will have the free exercise of religion.
What the founders didn’t anticipate was that this arrangement would open the floodgates. Religious leaders suddenly had enormous freedom to promote their own visions of Christianity and to compete with one another for influence. In effect, they entered a religious marketplace.
…The Interview continues at the end of the post.
Podshots: This Week on SWAJ
3/15: The Sunday Interview: How Christianity Shaped America: Matthew Avery Sutton on Power, Evangelicals, and the “Chosen Land”
3/16: Brad Unfiltered: The Right Says James Talarico is a “Liberal” Christian Nationalist. Is That True?
3/18: It’s In the Code Ep. 184
3/20: The Weekly Roundup
Watch: YouTube Clip of the Week
Connect: Where to Find Us
March 23: Live Recording - SWAJ Bonus Episode: Reaction to Louis Theroux’s “Inside the Man-o-Sphere” - 7:15pm ET
April 2: Dan Miller Office Hours in the SWAJ Discord - 12:15pm ET.
Network: What’s Happening at Axis Mundi Media
Coming Soon - One Million Neighbors:
Reasons for Hope:
On Thursday an Indiana court blocked the state’s draconian abortion ban on the grounds of religious freedom. The ruling is the result of class action lawsuit filed by the ACLU on behalf of Hoosier Jews for choice and a group of anonymous women.
In what The Guardian is calling a “stunning flip,” Democrat Bobbi Boudman won a New Hampshire house seat in a special election—in a district she previously lost by more than 13 points back in 2024. Democrats have now flipped 28 seats since Trump took office, while Republicans have failed to do the same even once.
In a response to Turning Point USA’s planned visit from Erika Kirk at a Charlottesville high school, the local school board in Albemarle County, VA overwhelmingly passed a new policy banning extracurricular clubs from hosting speakers during the school day and barring all clubs that promote harassment or hatred towards an identifiable person or group.
The Spotlight: People, Organizations, and Events You Should Know About
In response to Trumps reelection, Phoenix New Times launched The Arizona Watchdog Project and hired two reporters—Stephen Lemons and Beau Hodai—to do full-time anti-corruption reporting in Arizona. You can read a recap of their biggest stories of 2025 or check out the most recent installment of their The Big Takeover series: Insurrectionist Brunch: Trumpists plotted to deploy military on U.S. soil.
SWAJerati: What We Are Reading
After you listen to this week’s Sunday Interview, be sure to check out Matthew Avery Sutton’s Chosen Land: How Christianity Made America and Americans Remade Christianity.
SWAJJER: Discord Comment of the Week
Dawson Fisher: What might Trump have learned from the Bush/Cheney administration? Trump learned you could lie to the American public to start a war with zero consequences. He learned you could use the CIA to torture people with zero consequences. He learned the majority of the US public would dutifully support a president that started a war under these pretenses: another likely motive for his war on Iran. The failure to hold Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and others criminally accountable for their crimes arguably paved the way for Trump’s present-day lawlessness. And the ability to wield such immense power without consequence is irresistible for a malignant narcissist. I keep expecting Dick Cheney to rise from the dead and endorse Trump for a third term.
Shoutouts: Welcoming New Members
Michael L.
Lygia C.
Travis P.
Natalie B.
Tim K.
Bob B.
Henry S.
Amanda O.
Christine P.
Nora E.
Welcome! We’re glad you’re here.
Read: The Interview (cont.)
A Conversation with Matthew Avery Sutton
The Emergence of a Protestant Cultural Dominance
Brad Onishi: Let me push on that a bit. Even if the government stayed neutral, Protestants still had enormous cultural influence in the United States. In many ways, White Protestant Christianity became the dominant framework for public life. Is it fair to say that while the government was formally secular, Protestant Christianity enjoyed a kind of unofficial privilege?
Matthew Avery Sutton: Absolutely. One of the examples I use in the book is Abraham Lincoln’s 1846 congressional campaign. Lincoln had somewhat unorthodox religious views, and his opponent was a Methodist revivalist preacher. During the campaign, Lincoln essentially had to hide his skepticism and present himself as a supporter of orthodox Christianity.
If you fast-forward to 2008, you see something similar with Barack Obama and the controversy over Jeremiah Wright. Obama had to distance himself from Wright’s theology and present himself as aligned with mainstream Christianity. So even though we talk about the United States as a secular republic, there has long been pressure for political leaders to conform to a particular kind of religious orthodoxy—one historically shaped by white Protestant culture.
Religion in a Free Marketplace
Brad Onishi: Another big argument in your book is that once religion was separated from the state, religious leaders had to become innovators. They had to attract followers the way businesses attract customers. When you visit countries with established churches, you often see the opposite—religious institutions that are stable but not especially dynamic. In the United States, by contrast, religious leaders become entrepreneurs. Can you talk about how that dynamic shaped American Christianity?
Matthew Avery Sutton: Yes, and it’s one of the defining features of American religion. If the government isn’t paying your bills—if tax dollars aren’t keeping your doors open—you have to find ways to attract people. You have to persuade them that your church is worth attending. And you’re competing with everything else people could do on Sunday.
Over time, the most successful religious movements mastered two things: technology and communication. American religious leaders have consistently been early adopters of new technologies—from print culture to radio to television to satellite broadcasting and the internet. At the same time, they turned religion into a form of entertainment. They built charismatic personalities, celebrity preachers, and elaborate productions designed to capture people’s attention. That’s why you see figures like Jerry Falwell or Robert Schuller becoming household names.
In the American religious marketplace, success often depends on how effectively you can package and communicate your message.
The Marketplace and the Reinvention of Faith
Brad Onishi: Reading your book, I kept thinking about how deeply this entrepreneurial culture connects to American capitalism. In the United States, religion is often marketed and packaged in ways that resemble other consumer experiences. Churches compete for attention, and people “church shop.”
Does that consumer dynamic actually reshape Christianity itself?
Matthew Avery Sutton: Yes, it does. Every generation ends up reinventing Christianity in some way. Religious leaders have to connect their message to whatever broader cultural trends are happening in American society. If they don’t, they risk becoming irrelevant. Some churches fail. They disappear. Others step into the gap and offer something new.
And Americans participate in this process as consumers. They choose congregations based on factors like the style of worship, the quality of programming for their children, or the charisma of the pastor. That kind of religious consumerism is very specifically American.
The Decline of the Mainline
Brad Onishi: Your book also addresses the dramatic decline of mainline Protestant denominations in the late twentieth century. Many scholars have argued that this decline had political roots—that clergy in the 1960s and 1970s moved toward more radical positions on issues like civil rights, war, and economic justice, while many church members remained more moderate. Do you think that political gap played a major role?
Matthew Avery Sutton: Yes, I do. White mainline leaders in the 1960s often felt they had failed during the civil rights movement. They believed they had not done enough to confront racism. So they began embracing more radical forms of activism.
In many ways, they were trying to correct earlier mistakes. But in doing so, they sometimes moved faster than the people in their pews. In the archives, you can see this tension very clearly. For example, when the Presbyterian Church contributed money to support Angela Davis’s legal defense in the early 1970s, many church members were outraged. They wrote letters asking how they could continue donating money to a church that supported someone they saw as a radical.
At the same time, many politically progressive Americans concluded that they didn’t need church institutions at all. They could pursue activism through secular organizations instead. So the mainline churches lost people from both directions.
The Invention of Modern Evangelicalism
Brad Onishi: You’ve also made a fascinating argument about the history of the term “evangelical.” Many people assume today’s evangelicals are part of a continuous tradition stretching back to the Great Awakening in the eighteenth century. But you argue that the modern movement is actually much more recent. Can you explain that?
Matthew Avery Sutton: The word “evangelical” has existed for centuries, but it has meant very different things at different times.
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it was used by a wide variety of groups—including some that modern evangelicals would strongly disagree with. People spoke of Quaker evangelicals, Unitarian evangelicals, liberal evangelicals. Because the term was so broad, it gradually lost its usefulness. By the early twentieth century, it had almost disappeared from common usage.
Then in the 1940s, fundamentalist leaders looking to rebrand their movement revived the word “evangelical.” They infused it with new meaning and presented themselves as the heirs to a long historical tradition. It was a very effective strategy. By claiming that label, they could say: we are the true Christians who have always been here. But historically speaking, the modern evangelical movement is a twentieth-century creation.
Christianity and the Current Political Moment
Brad Onishi: Let’s end with the present moment. You argue that Christianity has been central to American national development. But today we’re seeing a growing number of people identifying as non-religious, and Christianity appears to be losing its cultural dominance. At the same time, Christian nationalism has become more visible and more aggressive. Do you see those trends as connected?
Matthew Avery Sutton: Yes, I do. Over the past several decades, the United States has become dramatically more religiously diverse. Immigration patterns changed after 1965, and the country now includes far larger populations of Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and others. At the same time, fewer Americans identify as Christian.
For many conservative Christian leaders, that shift feels existential. They see a world in which white Christian America is disappearing. And that perception has fueled a powerful backlash. But history also teaches us that religious movements in the United States are remarkably resilient. Time and again, groups that seemed to be fading have reinvented themselves. So while it’s possible that the United States will become less religious over time—perhaps resembling Canada or Western Europe—we can’t assume that outcome is inevitable.
As historians know, the future often surprises us.
Closing Thoughts
Brad Onishi: Your book offers an extraordinary tour through American religious history. It’s sweeping, deeply researched, and incredibly illuminating. For readers who want to understand how Christianity shaped the United States—and how Americans reshaped Christianity—Chosen Land is essential reading.
Matthew Avery Sutton: Thanks so much. I really appreciate it.
The Interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Great podcast!!!!!So informative…as a life long mainstream ELCA Lutheran…gave me pause.