Chosen Land
How Christianity Made America and Americans Remade Christianity
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Chosen Land
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About this listen
In the United States today, there is no faith more dominant than Christianity. In Chosen Land, historian Matthew Avery Sutton chronicles Christians’ five-hundred-year endeavor to turn North America into their version of the kingdom of God, revealing the fruitful and dynamic entanglement between the history of America and the history of American Christianity.
In the centuries after Christianity first arrived on American shores, colonizers and colonized from New England to Spanish California practiced many varieties of the faith. After the founding of the United States, the nation’s lack of a state religion forced new and evolving strains of Christianity to battle for potential adherents, as they still do to this day. As American Christianity has bent, fractured, and adapted to changing times, Christian belief has shaped everything from the promise of Manifest Destiny to Ronald Reagan’s approach to the Cold War, the rise of the Southern Lost Cause narrative to the triumphs of the civil rights movement.
A landmark work of narrative synthesis tracing the faith’s major figures and currents, Chosen Land confirms the unique place that American Christianity—always both steadfast and precarious—occupies at the center of our shared history.
Critic Reviews
“With a sweeping narrative and soaring prose, Matthew Sutton makes a powerful argument that the history of American Christianity is inextricable from the history of America itself. Chosen Land is a must read for anyone concerned about the past, present, and future of the Christian faith in the United States.”—Kevin M. Kruse, author of One Nation Under God
“Matthew Sutton has written a sweeping, riveting history of how Christianity and America have been perilously entwined. Chosen Land shows us how faith has been both a balm and a weapon, a force of unity and division, and how it remains at the very heart of the American story.”—Kate Bowler, New York Times–bestselling author of Everything Happens for a Reason
“Fast-paced and lucidly written, Chosen Land should be required reading for anyone who wants to understand American religion, and for anyone who wants to understand America.”—Kristin Kobes Du Mez, New York Times–bestselling author of Jesus and John Wayne
“No book has ever told us much as Chosen Land does about the role of religion in the most enduringly Protestant nation in the industrialized world. Not since Martin Marty’s Righteous Empire of more than a half-century ago has a single scholar addressed this topic with the analytic acumen Matthew Sutton brings to the task. Building upon the recent generation’s excellent body of scholarship but speaking always in his own voice, Sutton has given us a comprehensive narrative that promises to define professional and popular discussions of religion and politics in American life for a very long time.”—David A. Hollinger, author of Christianity’s American Fate
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