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September 17 From Chosen Land to Secular Age — A Conversation with Matthew Avery Sutton

Albert Mohler:

This is Thinking in Public, a program dedicated to intelligent conversation about frontline theological and cultural issues with the people who are shaping them.

I’m Albert Mohler, your host and President of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky.

Dr. Matthew Avery Sutton is the Claudius O. and Mary Johnson distinguished professor of history, and he’s also chair of the history department at Washington State University. Professor Sutton is a widely sought after speaker on religion, politics, and American culture. He has spoken in universities across the US, Ireland, the United Kingdom, Denmark, Germany, Spain, and the Czech Republic. He has received fellowships in the National Endowment for the Humanities, the US Fulbright Commission, and the Woodrow Wilson Fellowship Foundation. He was also appointed a Guggenheim Foundation Fellow in 2015. Professor Sutton’s writings have appeared in numerous publications, including the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, and many peer reviewed journals. He is the author of five previous books on American church history. It is his most recent book, Chosen Land: How Christianity Made America and Americans Remade Christianity. That is the topic of our conversation today. Professor Matthew Avery Sutton, welcome to Thinking in Public.

Matthew Sutton:

Well, thanks so much for having me.

Albert Mohler:

This is a massive book, and I think it’s an important book. I have been looking forward to this conversation. How did you come about writing this? You are a scholar, you’ve been writing as an historian. So how did this project come together in your mind?

Matthew Sutton:

Yeah, so there were a lot of things going on. I’ve been studying American religion since the beginning of my career, since the late 1990s at graduate school, and I’ve always been struck by how important Christianity has been in certain moments in American history, the kind of periods that I’ve studied in my previous books. But I realized there was no really good comprehensive accounting of where Christianity goes from beginning to end. And so I wanted to tell that story. The other thing is, you know as well as anybody, that we are an enormously Christian nation, that vast majorities of Americans identify as Christian. And I don’t think we can look at that without understanding the kind of influence that Christians have had. And so I wanted to trace that story and basically explain how did we get to where we are today?

Albert Mohler:

No, that is a massive story and it has to be organized in some way. And so your story surprisingly, I guess to say, is rather chronological in that it follows American history. And I think that’s fair because it is an unfolding narrative. And so I think that’s helpful for the context. You had to make some really hard decisions about what to put in and what to leave out. I mean, you’re talking about a massive story.

Matthew Sutton:

Yeah. So one thing that religious studies scholars do different from historians is they’ll focus on issues of diversity. And so they might spend as much time on six people worshiping a tree in Oregon as they will on Abraham Lincoln. And I didn’t want to do that. I wanted to focus on power, the people who had the most influence, who shaped the culture, who shaped the economy, who shaped foreign policy. And so for me, this was a story that was very much about white Protestants first and foremost, but also about all those around them who are pushing against them for different kinds of change.

Albert Mohler:

Of course, the 250th anniversary of the United States going back to 1776, I assume that could be some added timeliness to a consideration of this question.

Matthew Sutton:

It is, and it wasn’t on purpose. I wish our marketing team had thought of that six months ago.

Albert Mohler:

Well, it is not a surprise. Publishers Weekly will put out the kind of announcement saying that this is the largest number of books on constitutional studies in American history. And of course that makes sense, but it also means people had to think about 15 years ago that they were going to be doing this.

Matthew Sutton:

Yeah, exactly.

Albert Mohler:

This is a massive book. How long did it take you to write? I mean, in terms of a project, how much of your life, your working life has been invested into this?

Matthew Sutton:

So I’m not a full-time writer. I’m chair of the Department of History here at Washington State University. And so writing is only part-time, but I began this book around 2019. I had done a prior book on missionaries who were recruited as spies during World War II. And as soon as I was finishing that up, I thought I need to take on something else. And then I got excited about this project. And of course, much of that happened during COVID, and so much material is now digitized. I was able to do a lot of reading from home in ways that 10, 15, 20 years ago I just wouldn’t have been able to do.

Albert Mohler:

Yeah, that’s interesting. I want to say as a word of appreciation, you did an awful lot of detailed historical research here. And for instance, when you mentioned some things of the SBC, you’re into the files of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission.

Matthew Sutton:

Absolutely. Yeah. I love going to Nashville and they have the best barbecue. So anytime I can go to the SBC archives, it’s great for me, great for barbecue.

Albert Mohler:

The work of the historian also requires explanation. So let me tell you a bit of what’s in the background of my raising this issue. Years ago I decided, okay, I’m just going to take Martin Marty, longtime professor at University of Chicago, kind of in many ways the dean of American church historians for a good deal of his lifetime. I though, I’m just going to get all of his works and I’m going to read all of them chronologically. And I guess I want to say I found more continuity than I expected. And so I think I was able to more or less figure out what Marty’s theory of the case was. And the answer to his question basically was liberal Protestantism. And so I think Martin Marty, this is my theory. I think he had a very hard time figuring out what American religious life was supposed to look like after the age of mainline Protestant dominance. But he was very much a man of his time. Your book is coming in the year 2026. A lot of debates. I mentioned Marty because I thought of him at several points. There are a lot of historical debates in this period. How did those shape your thinking?

Matthew Sutton:

Absolutely. No, and I grew up an evangelical. My first book was on Aimee Semple McPherson, the Protestant Pentecostal preacher from Los Angeles. So my work, if anything, I erred to the side of the revivalist, the evangelical side, bless the mainline. That was more what I had to catch up on when I wrote this book. That was the reading I had to do. But certainly as somebody who began grad school in 1999 at the tail end of the Clinton years and then saw George W. Bush elected and realized religion is still going to be really important in our politics for many, many years to come, that certainly has shaped it. And then I wrote a book called American Apocalypse in 2014. Never would’ve imagined Donald Trump on the horizon at that point. But when Donald Trump came into office, it became very, very clear that there’s still a lot to understand about how religion and politics intersect in this country, good, bad, and otherwise. And so certainly as much as I don’t want to be driven by presentist issues, you just can’t escape the fact that we’re all products of our time and so the kinds of questions we ask are going to reflect what’s happening around us.

Albert Mohler:

Yeah, I think that’s fair. I could tell you, I think that by my reading, a lot of American church history was basically coming from the mainline Protestant perspective. It’s kind of a rise and decline narrative in which, for instance, if I could summarize Martin Marty’s argument, it was there’s an awful lot of Christianity in America’s religious history, but don’t worry. And then all of a sudden with the rise of what he called the new Christian right, it was, okay, now worry. And I have to say that he became a personal friend and we had a lot of good personal engagements. So I’m saying that with respect, but it does color the way I look at all of this. You have to have some kind of arc. So what’s your arc? I won’t put it into words. I want you to do so.

Matthew Sutton:

Yeah. So you might read it and say that there is an arc. For me, it’s more of a constant evolution in the sense that Christianity is always affecting American society and American culture. It’s just going to take different forms in different generations and different eras. And at different moments, different groups are going to have power. Other groups are going to be on the outside and then 10, 15, 20, 30 years later, it may flip. So Marty’s mainline folks, they ran much of the 20th century and then they lost and the evangelical surge happened. And so for today, they’re shaping our politics in ways that are very different than who it’s going to be tomorrow, maybe something entirely different from that.

Albert Mohler:

Yeah, it’s a very interesting story. And I want to say, I think you tell it well, which is to say a lot of history is written in ways that are of interest only to historians. I do think a far wider readership will be drawn to your book. I made a lot of notes. I always do in your book, just an awful lot of notes and I’m always reading with a dialogue with a writer. And so a couple of things I want to say at a very early point in your book, you really suggest that the story of the influence of Christianity or the role of Christianity in the United States has been told poorly. And in particular, you really are, I think, making the argument that Christianity is far more central to American identity than many modern historians have wanted to acknowledge.

Matthew Sutton:

Absolutely. That was one of the top goals of the book, and that’s really been one of the guiding issues in my career has been to try to convince folks in the academy who often don’t take religion seriously enough, that you just can’t understand American history without understanding the role that Christianity has played in it in every way, in every part of American culture and American life. And so for me, it’s never just Christianity for Christianity’s own sake. There’s a place for that, but for me, it’s about showing how Christianity is influencing every other thing that we talk about as historians.

Albert Mohler:

And I think you show it, and by the way, you document it, you offer detailed argument. The rather modern secularist claim is that there was this very strong secular alternative to Christianity from the very beginning. And I want to concede there were certainly those who were very much influenced by enlightenment rationalism. But even I think some of your treatment, for instance, of Thomas Jefferson indicates that he is not who the secularists think he is.

Matthew Sutton:

Yeah, I would say it a little different. I would say that he was who the secularists think, but that his influence was much less, that he was one of 15, 20, 30 competing voices and none of them had a monopoly on what the Constitution would say or do or what the First Amendment meant. And so for me, rather than try to get into the minds of each of these people, which we could do all day, we could just cherry-pick to say, how did it actually work out in practice? And how it worked out in practice was that the courts really understood this country to be a Christian nation and they really prioritized and privileged Protestant values and Protestant ideals for much of the 19th and well into the 20th century.

Albert Mohler:

Now I appreciate your point about Jefferson, but I also think it’s fair to say he certainly wasn’t entirely a deist. I mean, he believed to some degree in divine providence, but he also believed in enduring moral truths.

Matthew Sutton:

Absolutely.

Albert Mohler:

And by the way, one of the most interesting things I found in your entire book, is that letter from Reinhold Niebuhr to a young woman on sexual morality. Because a part of my theory is that mainline Protestantism in adopting a far more liberal theology, they were trying to save traditional Christian morality. I think it was a false bargain obviously, but I think that’s at least a part of what they were trying to do.

Matthew Sutton:

Yeah, absolutely. That was a gem. It was a letter I found in Niebuhr’s papers in Washington DC, I think the Library of Congress. A young woman wrote him in the midst of the sexual revolution and said, “As long as she loves somebody, shouldn’t she be able to have sex?” And he said, “That’s not a good idea and it’s especially not a good idea for women.” He was very gendered in his response too. But the larger question I think of what happened to liberalism, you’re right, part of it was that they were trying to reaffirm these traditional values as they held them. It was also that I think their leaders got out too far ahead of the folks in their pews as they were dealing with civil rights, with feminism, with the different social movements of the 60s and 70s. They went too far too fast and they didn’t bring their congregations along with them.

Albert Mohler:

Going back to the beginning of your telling of the story, I want to say even when I mentioned Jefferson, I do not appreciate efforts to make persons of historical consequence more Christian than they were. As a Christian theologian, that is not a pleasing thing to me. I’m not about to try to claim Thomas Jefferson as a Trinitarian Christian. And as a matter of fact, I’m thankful that his influence was not more widespread. As a Christian, I’m very thankful that his influence was not more widespread, but I do not like the very facile, casual way. So many modern secular historians or historians kind of pushing a secular storyline want to make these people out to be what they weren’t. And so I’m not going to claim George Washington as an evangelical, but I’m going to say if anyone is citing scripture and expressing confidence in divine providence, it was George Washington.

Matthew Sutton:

Yeah. I mean, again, it’s complicated though. He was apparently reluctant to kneel in church because he didn’t want to. But you could say Patrick Henry very much does look like a modern day evangelical. So what I try to do in the book is show that it’s a whole lot of people doing a whole lot of things and trying to figure out a pragmatic compromise to make the republic work. They needed to survive. And so things like the disestablishment clause and the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment were not out of some high enlightenment ideals. It was about just making sure they weren’t going to kill each other, that the congregationalists and the Baptists and the Presbyterians and the Anglicans just got along so that they could build this new republic.

Albert Mohler:

No, I think that’s absolutely crucial. And frankly, it puts you out on a limb to some degree in terms of a lot of modern American history in terms of how academically it’s told and how politically it’s used. Let me go back just a moment and say, again, I’m not making George Washington a member of my church, so

Matthew Sutton:

Sure

Albert Mohler:

Want to be very honest about that. But I want to say that when you look, in terms of the citations of scripture and in terms of even the references to divine providence, the point I wanted to make is it was the social fact of Christianity, if nothing else, that expressed the entire universe of meaning in a way that modern secularists just don’t take into consideration.

Matthew Sutton:

And not just that, it was very Protestant infused, right? If you were Catholic, if you were Quaker, not so much for you. I mean, it was a very Protestant kind of Christianity that shaped the politicians and it really shaped the courts. I think that’s the real key, that they understood the First Amendment is very much allowing for a deep and abiding Christian influence in law and policy. The idea of separating church from state really is a modern 20th century idea. Obviously Jefferson expresses it, but it’s not in the constitution. It’s something that the courts read backwards into the constitution in the mid 20th century.

Albert Mohler:

It’s also not in the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence. You take someone like Justice Joseph Story. I mean, he is as clear as an 18th century British jurist about the nature of divine law underlying even constitutional law. I’m not saying that’s not a live debate in America. I’m saying he was uncontroversial at the time.

Matthew Sutton:

Right. No, and that’s what makes it fun for the historian is we have these debates and they still matter today. That’s why I love teaching history is to help my students think about how they got here and why the past matters for understanding how they got here.

Albert Mohler:

By the time you get to page 11 in your introduction, so you’re just getting into the story, you’re telling people what you’re going to do, you make a very interesting theory of the case. And you say that when you’re looking at the story of Christianity in America, you identify four streams, conservative, revivalist, liberal and liberationist. And at subsequent points, you will say this is how that plays out at this point. At least by my reading, that disappears somewhat towards the end of the book and you end up with three ongoing representations. You say the old evangelical religious right, liberationist and what I’ll call secular. But let’s go back to the first four. I find that very interesting. I’m afraid that you have a lot of people who want to say, look, the distinctions you should recognize in Christianity are Protestant, Catholic or denominational Baptist, et cetera, Presbyterian, Anglican. You however say it’s these four streams, conservative, revivalist, liberal, and liberationist. I’d love to hear you unpack that.

Matthew Sutton:

Yeah. So I thought it would make sense to have a taxonomy that was more about the ways in which religion was practiced, Christianity was practiced, rather than focus just on the denominations and especially because the denominations split and split and split again and it gets so confusing. And so I talk about all of those as well, but a few things I wanted to do. One is to make sure that it was clear that a conservative and a revivalist are really two different things, that when I’m talking about conservatives, I’m talking about folks who really believe in conserving the past. They’re going to move very slow, very incrementally. They’re going to privilege the creeds and they’re going to privilege the church community. And often these are immigrant churches, especially in the 19th century. For some of their period, it was Catholics. The revivalists though, they’re the ones who focus on the individual. They want people to be born again, to have a relationship with Jesus Christ, to have an instantaneous conversion. And so they don’t care as much about the creeds. They don’t care as much about the church community. They’re going to be about instantaneous, are you saved or not? That’s really what’s going to matter. The liberals, as you would expect, are the folks who try to engage with the latest thinking, the latest science. They’re going to be quicker to evolve or adapt, maybe sometimes too quick. And then as I was telling the story, I had those three and I was like, but there’s this other group. What about the indigenous preachers who are Christians but calling mainstream Christians to account or the formerly enslaved? And so the liberationists were those who really tried to speak truth to power, who are inspired by Jesus Christ, who are inspired by the gospels, but they’re trying to overturn the social order. They’re trying to do something very different with the gospel than the folks who are more established.

Albert Mohler:

Yeah. Well, you certainly tell some very interesting stories along the way, and a lot of that has to do, frankly, with issues that are very colorful, but weren’t really in the mainstream of the story of American history in terms of Christianity. But you can’t tell the story without them either. I’ll tell you, one historical question came to mind as I was reading your work and I read it twice at two different times. And so it’s interesting to have a debate with yourself as a reader. What did you find interesting this time? What the next time? And I’ll tell you one of the things I thought of, which is not a major issue in your book, but the way you presented Jonathan Edwards, who’s been so much a part of my life and thinking, you could make the argument that Jonathan Edwards is more of the conservative in your typology or that he’s more the revivalist. And I think I had a different Jonathan Edwards between my first and second reading of your book.

Matthew Sutton:

Yeah. And a lot of folks can cross categories and I think he would be a classic, especially because the revivalist tradition is just getting started in that era in the 1730s and 1740s.

Albert Mohler:

And that’s honestly what he’s more remembered for.

Matthew Sutton:

Right yeah. And he himself tended not to be all that emotional, but I think it was his followers, the effect of his ministry that helped launch revivalism in the United States. So he can be both and, I think.

Albert Mohler:

Well, he certainly is very much in the evangelical Protestant Hall of Honor. In other words, it’s not by accident that there’s an oil portrait of Jonathan Edwards in my library. But Jonathan Edwards is sort of, in my mind, like Martin Luther. He’s such a big figure. You really have a part of him at a time and you come back and take another part of him. When I was first elected to this office, my wife gave me the Yale edition of Edwards, which wasn’t completed at that point. It’s that long ago. And so for the first five years I was president here, I had one of those volumes with me all the time when I traveled and was just reading. And so I worked my way all the way through it. And one of my first thoughts was, number one, this is an incredible American story. This is an American story. He is tied to the telling of American Christianity in ways I think the average person just doesn’t have a clue.

Matthew Sutton:

Yeah, no, you’re absolutely right that he’s up there at the very top of the pantheon of really influential, really important Americans. Yeah, there’s no doubt about that, that he shaped American intellectual thought. He integrated Christianity with enlightenment though, with reason, with rationalism. And then as we were just talking about, helped build this revivalist tradition in the United States that’s been so formative.

Albert Mohler:

And so decisive. Not to mention Aaron Burr and all the rest that just becomes up. It also reminds me every time I read a work like this, that when you’re talking about colonial America, I’ll just refer to it that way. You talk about the colonies. It’s not true that everybody knew everybody, but among the elites, it was a pretty small group. It was rare to find company.

Matthew Sutton:

Yeah, it really was. And that’s always surprising to see in the archives when you find letters from one person to another person and you realize how closely connected they are. And that even lasts into the 20th century when people are still corresponding regularly that you find these unexpected coincidence. Well, not even coincidences, but yeah, these worlds were shared and understood and people knew who was doing what and what was going on.

Albert Mohler:

Yeah. It reminds me of the roaring 20s in the United States where you wanted your ancestors to have known an Adams. Right. Exactly. It was a pretty broad network, but if you didn’t know any of the Adams, you’re nobody. Those four streams, you also have liberal and liberationist. So let me go back to how you begin telling the story. I can see the conservatives and certainly in terms of the confessional Protestants, really clear. Let’s just say that basic, very traditional extension of European Christianity in the United States. And as you said, Protestant, largely British Protestant into the United States. The revivalist, I get. Then you say the liberal and the liberationists. How soon do those show up?

Matthew Sutton:

So the liberals are going to be showing up pretty early as Puritans begin to wrestle with or they become congregationalists with Unitarianism. And again, it’s driven by the enlightenment. It’s a recognition that Christianity. Well, they start to question the Trinity, they start to question the miracles, the kind of things that you would think would be the essentials or core of Christian faith, but they don’t want to abandon Christianity. They still consider themselves Christians. The liberationists show up really early. I would say they’re some of the first converts, especially among indigenous people who talk about by the 1740s, 50s and 60s, they say, “If you’re representing the gospel of Jesus Christ, how is it that you’re taking our land?” And so they’re the ones who read the Bible, but they use it prophetically to push back against the very people who had orchestrated their conversions or who had introduced them to the gospel. And then we see it obviously in the Black church, Black preachers really becomes a core of who they are and then jump forward to the 1950s and 60s. It would be at the heart of the civil rights movement.

Albert Mohler:

As your story unfolds, the story of the United States, it’s becoming the United States, the revolutionary period, the early national period, how much does the landscape change during all of that? I mean, you have this massive disruption between Britain and the United States, and yet that is another story of continuity and discontinuity. You’ve got to figure out which is there more discontinuity or continuity? How do you judge?

Matthew Sutton:

Yeah, so for me, the real shift is the First Amendment. It’s the disestablishment and the idea that if tax dollars are not going to fund churches, it’s going to force ministers to go out there and hustle for congregants. They’re going to have to make sure that the average American understands why they should spend their Sundays in church. And so it fosters a kind of entrepreneurial spirit that we see in the revivals that we see with the rise of Methodism, with the expansion of Baptists, with different kinds of revivalist Presbyterians. And so it’s these ministers who recognize that Christianity has to be relevant. It has to be active. It has to be engaged with their everyday lives. And so they make Christianity something that Americans cannot afford to live without, that it’s something that they really want to explain in ways that are really exciting.

Albert Mohler:

Yeah. So I want to know how much would you make that a matter of intentionality and how much of it was actually effect? So let me put it this way. At one point, I think very insightfully, you make the case that the First Amendment was at least in part, at least the Establishment Clause is at least in part to keep Americans from killing one another. And so that made me think of something I really had not though of in terms of periodization, and in particular in the 17th century in the 30 Years War. And so at least a part of the American experience really came to life with the 30 Years War at midpoint when you look at some of these dates. And by the time you get to the 17th century and then the 18th century, it’s clear they want to avoid that. And so the first way they kind of avoided that was by having identified colonies. You had Anglican colonies, congregationalist colonies, all the rest. But then you make the point that the intent of the Establishment Clause was at least in part to prevent something like the 30 years war happening in the United States. Honestly, I’ve not seen another historian make that case. I think it was an incredibly important point.

Matthew Sutton:

Thank you. Yeah, no, that’s exactly it. I started down the same road that every other historian goes down, which is where we started. Is Jefferson a Christian or not? Is Washington a Christian or not? Is Patrick Henry a Christian or not? What are they trying to do? And realized when you step back and look at it, they had been wrestling in the Articles of Confederation to try to figure out how to balance the religious interests of the different colonies, and then they’re wrestling with it again in the Constitutional Convention and then again with the crafting of the First Amendment. And so it becomes for me very clear once you step back and look at the larger context that it was really birthed out of pragmatism. It was intentional, but it was intentionally pragmatic to try to find a way to satisfy all these competing desires for which there would be no other way to satisfy them.

Albert Mohler:

Well, is it fair to say that given the pluralism among those major denominations, and by and large, they were still very establishment denominations, if you take that as the premise, there’s a sense in which by the time you get to the constitution, there’s no way they could establish a national church without creating a civil war. And so in context, it’s a pretty common sensible solution.

Matthew Sutton:

I think so. Yeah. No, I think absolutely. I think it was the one that made the most sense, and yet it was not a strict separation. It was just a recognition we’re not going to have an established denomination, but we are still going to allow Christianity to infuse our public life and in particular forms of Christianity. Again, not Catholicism, not the Quakers as much. Three decades later, not the Latter-day Saints. There’s a real effort to figure out how to create these ecumenical organizations like the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, the American Bible Society, the American Tract Society that bring together the major denominations to say, “We want to shape American culture and we’re going to do it together, and we’re going to put aside some of our differences on baptism or on some other issues in which they disagree.

Albert Mohler:

Well, I mentioned Martin Marty earlier. He took the argument so much so that he went into the 20th century arguing that even in the American Age of Empire, it was a Protestant empire. That’s what he calls it. So it wasn’t just Protestantism shaping the United States. And you make reference to this. Protestants had designs upon reshaping the Philippines as a part of that American Imperial project.

Matthew Sutton:

Yeah. Hawaii, the Philippines, and then religion becomes crucial to the world wars. Franklin Roosevelt, one of his advisors reminded him that religion is really important to the American people. And so it was no coincidence that when he identified the four freedoms to try to explain to Americans why they were fighting, that one of them was freedom of religion, freedom of worship. And so That was less Protestant for Roosevelt. At that point, he was beginning to recognize a tri-faith, Protestant, Catholic Jewish America. But certainly in the 19th century with the Philippines, with the expansion into the North American West, with Hawaii, it was about helping open the door and protect missionary activity abroad.

Albert Mohler:

Yeah, I guess the point I just want to underline is that still overwhelmingly Protestant to the extent that you could just call it a Protestant empire. It’s not to deny that there were Catholics and Jewish citizens and others, but that really begins to be a transformative question in the 20th century and with ways of immigration and other patterns. Let me go back to when you really begin telling the story. When you talk about Christianity in the American story, the subtitle of your book is “How Christianity Made America and Americans Remade Christianity.” So which one is it or is it both or are they equal?

Matthew Sutton:

It’s both. And I realized I needed to clarify. When I say how Americans remade Christianity, it’s not that Christianity is always different and evolving and changing in terms of its essence. It’s about, it’s going to always be made relevant to the particular culture. And this comes to, you know this, I’m sure you’re training ministers at the seminary, what they’re going to do in an urban area is different from what they’re going to do in a suburban area, which is different from what they’re going to do in a rural area. And so it’s not saying Christianity changes, but the way you’re going to speak to people is going to change. And so what I was trying to show in the book was that how Americans understood the gospel and how they taught the gospel and how they practiced the gospel is different. So Jonathan Edwards, if he walked into a Dallas megachurch today, I don’t know that he would be very comfortable, but it’s still the same Christianity, but it’s going to take a very different kind of form based on the time and the place.

Albert Mohler:

Yeah, but I don’t want to understate the case either because you mentioned Unitarians and others who are a part of the story. And so they are remaking the essence of Christianity and the Protestant liberals. And you actually make this clear by the end of your book, the mainline Protestants were, I mean, you cite several of them. And by the way, I can understand why any historian is drawn to Harry Emerson Fosdick, such a fascinating figure. And I find myself in a lot of ongoing conversation with him at times. I became fascinated with him as a very young theologian. And he starts out pretty boldly by saying everything’s going to change. Everything is going to change. And then by the time you get to a John A. T. Robinson, et cetera, or in the United States, even a Harvey Cox, someone like that, you’re dealing with the fact that no, they’re ready for everything to change. So in that sense, I think your subtitle is quite accurate.

Matthew Sutton:

Yeah, no, I appreciate that. And I try not to weigh in on the theological debates to decide who’s the more authentic Christian, the less authentic Christian. But nevertheless, you’re absolutely right that certainly it is always changing and taking different forms and different shapes. And then the theologians can decide when have you stepped too far? When have you gone too far away from what you might identify as the authentic gospel?

Albert Mohler:

Yeah. I think that was a harder question at previous eras of American history. And I think that’s reflected in the way you end the book because without jumping just to conclude the story, you do end up with three alternatives. You say the old evangelical religious right and then the liberationist and then the secular. So you only have two real alternatives there and they do understand how different they are in terms of Christianity. The religious right, as you might call it, and the liberationist. We really do understand each other, I think.

Matthew Sutton:

Yeah, I think so. Although maybe I overly simplified it. That was certainly about the contemporary political moment, this idea that there are different groups competing. And then again, the secularists who just may be Christians themselves, but they want to rigidly separate church from state. But absolutely. And the other issue is that there are still what I would say conservatives, a lot of Lutheran denominations, some of the old Dutch reform denominations, they’re just not as engaged in contemporary American life in a public way. And so if this was just simply a church history for church history’s sake, they would be just as relevant to the story. But they’re kind of on the margins and in the shadows in terms of what we think of as who’s shaping the trajectory of the nation. And so that was why I was focusing on those particular groups at the end of the book to think about who’s got the influence today and who’s fighting for influence today.

Albert Mohler:

In the modern academy, which of these eras is the most controversial?

Matthew Sutton:

Well, with the 250th anniversary, like you said, we’re back to the founders. We’re back to arguing about what they were trying to do. I think for me, the pushback that I’ve gotten with the book, and you’ve already touched on it indirectly, is the 19th century story, is the fact that I’m telling a story that doesn’t say we had radical church state separation, but in fact we had Protestantism infusing our school curriculum, infusing our foreign policy, infusing our politics, infusing our court decisions. So for me, that tends to be the most controversial. I’ve also had pushback from people recently. They feel like I’m picking on the mainline. When I talk about the mainline ministers getting too far out in front of their congregants, they feel like, but they were doing the right thing. They were embracing civil rights. That was a good thing. But again, I’m not trying to adjudicate right or wrong, I’m trying to explain what happened and that’s what happened.

Albert Mohler:

Yeah. It makes me think of the novelist, Peter Devries, from the Dutch reform tradition, along with John Updike and others of that age, novelist and the worldview is infused with Protestant Christianity. And he describes what you’re talking about in his novels in which you have these clergy who are just astounded at how conservative their church members are because they’re produced in an incubus of much more progressivist thought in the liberal seminaries. And then they come back and they’re pastor of even a suburban church in Detroit. And the next thing you know, they’re faced with opposition. So I mean, what you’re telling here is a dynamic that even drove American fiction in the 1970s.

Matthew Sutton:

Absolutely. And I saw this in the archives. I mean, these letters going into the Presbyterian general board, just people were furious that their ministers were marching against Vietnam, were supporting Black power radicals in Oakland, California.

Albert Mohler:

A lot in the sexual Revolution.

Matthew Sutton:

Absolutely. And certainly the sexual revolution. And the mainline was, as we talked about Niebuhr, they tended to be relatively conservative, but they were launching investigations, they were launching studies, they were trying to understand it. And just even doing that was enough to get people really upset with, not all people, but some people really upset with what they were doing.

Albert Mohler:

Well, I was born in 1959, and so I’m very much a product of the Cold War. And when I was a boy and I was in Florida, but I was in the part of Florida that’s an extension of the deep south at this time and right down to the town square and all the rest. It was a very Protestant culture. It was an incredibly Protestant culture. Religious pluralism was Presbyterians living on the block. It was a different world. But in that dating, there just wasn’t any really strong secular presentation at all. And then my family moved when I was 13 down to Southeast Florida, which was really the transplanted northeast of the United States. And then I was confronted with a completely different world. And so I tell people somewhere between 12 and 14 in my life, I entered the modern age and it was a quite disorienting kind of thing, honestly, for a kid. And as I read your book, I thought there were just a lot of Americans during that time in the 20th century, they had to think the entire world is changing around them and they weren’t wrong, right?

Matthew Sutton:

Right, exactly. So in urban areas, it would’ve changed much earlier as you pointed out, not in rural parts of the deep south, but with the Catholic and Jewish immigration that comes in the late 19th century is a massive change. But then with immigration reform in 1965, in the opening of the United States to folks from the Middle East, from Africa, from Asia, that’s going to create another transformation. And the vast majority of immigrants have still been Christian, documented or undocumented, but nevertheless, there’s enough diversity that it’s not just going to be the Presbyterians down the block, but it might be a Hindu or a Buddhist or somebody practicing some other religion. And so there’s a sensibility that the nation has changed and has changed pretty radically. At the same time, more and more Americans are comfortable, as you know better than anybody, identifying as nones. To be an atheist or an agnostic was just forbidden through much of US history, but now people can do it quite comfortably, and that’s having an effect as well on the culture in lots of different ways.

Albert Mohler:

I like to use the structure of Charles Taylor in terms of the social imaginary. I find that very, very helpful. There are certain things that are imaginable at any given age, and there’s a limit to what’s imaginable. And I think it’s important, and this is rather implicit in the way you tell the story, that kind of secularism wasn’t a part of the social imaginary of Americans until quite recently. And so you have certain people in elites who might be a part of a European social imaginary in terms of their thought life, but in terms of American culture, there was really not a space in the imaginary for that kind of secularism.

Matthew Sutton:

No, absolutely not. And this is why the book begins with Columbus, but I opened the book with Abraham Lincoln in his campaign against a Methodist revivalist, Peter Cartwright, because Lincoln was pretty unorthodox and he didn’t go to church and he had some pretty radical views, and this almost cost him his political career. You could not afford to be a politician in the United States and deviate too far from orthodoxy because that was as much as Americans could imagine, is they could sort of forgive him for not going to church as long as he affirmed the value of church and the value of Christianity and supported the local ministers. And so he did all of those things for the sake of salvaging his career. And I don’t know that we’re that far apart. I ended the book with Barack Obama having to denounce Jeremiah Wright and Jeremiah Wright’s sermons were something that you might’ve heard in different Black churches in much of American history, but for Obama to have mainstream success or mainstream credibility, he could not identify with that kind of radical Black liberationist theology. And so he too had to conform.

Albert Mohler:

I want to go back to Lincoln for a moment and I want to go back to the social imaginary and just point out that Lincoln, who again, as an evangelical theologian, I do not want to make his religious expression more than was indicated and authentic at the time. But in terms of the social imaginary, the man had memorized vast, vast segments of the King James Bible. His moral imaginary was drawn from scriptural illustrations. This shows up in both of his inaugural addresses. It shows up in his anguished speech. I just want to say again, that makes the point that I tried to assert, and that is that regardless of whether or not this was a regenerate believing, confessing, creed affirming Christian, this is someone whose entire moral imagination was steeped in scripture.

Matthew Sutton:

Absolutely. And one of the things I love about him, and the reason I called the book Chosen Land is because so many Americans have had this sense that the United States is the new chosen land, and especially because for much of the US history, Israel as a modern state didn’t exist. And so there was no Israel counterpoint. It was just the United States or nothing. And Lincoln was the only one who talked about the United States as God’s almost chosen people.

Albert Mohler:

But isn’t that brilliant? Yeah.

Matthew Sutton:

The kind of humility and the recognition.

Albert Mohler:

It’s just brilliant. Yeah.

Matthew Sutton:

So I find that’s, again, why I love him as a historical character, why I opened the book with him.

Albert Mohler:

Yeah. But I mean, the notion of an almost chosen people, which by the way is a phrase that has resounded through the decades after Lincoln’s time, that requires a biblical foundation. The only sense in which almost chosen nation makes sense is if biblical Israel is central in your imagination here.

Matthew Sutton:

Absolutely. And as you know, he always talked about worried, he worried that he wanted to make sure he and the union were on the side of God rather than trying to assume that God was on their side. It was always an earnest striving to figure out what was right and what was righteous and to do that.

Albert Mohler:

So you’ve done an awful lot of work in different areas. You mentioned Aimee McPherson. What was the hardest part of this book for you? What was the toughest going?

Matthew Sutton:

Boy, probably since most of my work has been post-Civil War, it was going back and rereading all that colonial literature and 19th century literature that I hadn’t read since grad school, and then also reading the last 25 years of scholarship that has really built on that. So it was just grounding myself there and then getting back into the archives, as we mentioned, being the Southern Baptist Archives and the National Archives and the Library of Congress and the Pentecostal Archives in Springfield, Missouri, and just traveling around the country to figure out what stories could I tell that other people don’t know and to really capture the richness of everyday people, of everyday Christians and how they were understanding these huge macro events that are the crux of the story, but I want to know how it affected the everyday person living in their everyday home wherever they lived at that time.

Albert Mohler:

Right. If I were reading your book as a Catholic reader, I think I would feel like you come up short in telling the story of Catholicism in the United States. I’m an evangelical theologian, so you understand, but I’m just saying, I think though, if I were a Catholic reading this, I would think there’s not enough here.

Matthew Sutton:

Yeah. And I’ve had a few Catholic friends tell me the same thing, so this is why I’m laughing. And again, it was a selective choice about power that for much of the 19th into the early 20th century, Catholics were on the margins. They were intentionally and explicitly excluded from positions of power. They were persecuted and marginalized. And so for me, they’re in every part of the book. The first chapter starts with the Franciscans in the Southwest and the rise of the mission system to remind everybody that the West matters and that Catholics matter. But yes, it is very much a heavily white Protestant story because they’re the ones who are calling the shots. They’re the ones shaping the trajectory until we get into really the post-Kennedy era, the post Vatican II era. And at that point, Catholics really are equal players in the American story.

Albert Mohler:

Yeah. I think when you go to see say San Luis Obispo, I think the date on the wall is 1776. When you talk about ironies, there’s one right there. Yeah. On the Catholic side, I think, by the way, you deal with the anti-Americanism of someone like Pope Leo XII, which you can’t help but notice that the current Pope took his name as Leo XIV. And I’m sure a part of that is because of the much larger scope of Leo XII’s work. I do think when you’re talking about modern America, this is where Catholics are more of the discussion that a lot of Protestants understand. Someone like John Courtney Murray, I think is just an incredibly important figure. And I would say it kind of rivals Reinhold Niebuhr in some ways as a seminal figure, but Reinhold Niebuhr was the establishment Protestant. And again, as an evangelical, I think he was theologically outside the sphere, but his massive cultural influence and his Augustinian tradition that still shows through The Children of Light and The Children of Darkness. Anyway, I think that conversation is just really neglected by a lot of historians.

Matthew Sutton:

Yeah, it is. And I talked about Dorothy Day, the social radical reformer during the Great Depression and Bishop Fulton Sheen, who’s a pioneer with television, that there have been a lot of Catholics who have had really important roles to play in American history. John Carroll signing the Declaration of Independence. So they’re part of that story, but they were always having to fight to get whatever influence or whatever power they had to have. And this is part of why we have a parochial school system in the United States is because education was so heavily Protestant that they believe they needed an alternative. And so that was how they took a different trajectory in the US.

Albert Mohler:

Yeah. I can tell you that I was a product of the public schools in Polk County, Florida in the early 1960s. And I can tell you it was exclusively Protestant, pervasively Protestant. Like I say, religious pluralism to me as a Baptist was a Presbyterian friend. It was a very small world. When I moved as an adolescent, my family moved to a much more cosmopolitan area. I was on a street with Catholics and Jewish neighbors, and by the way, various types of Catholics, which was my first introduction was not to Catholicism as a thing, but Irish and Italian. And so anyway, it just makes all of this very interesting to me. I think even more interesting is the fact that right now, I go back to how you ended the book with, you say “the old religious right, the liberationists and the secular streams.” And you really don’t name the last one, but I hope I’m accurate when I say secular. It’s the rejection of all the above and sometimes in the milder form of the nones. But anyway, going back to the other two, you’ve got the old religious right you say and the liberationist. I think what’s really interesting is that in what you would have to classify as that polarization, you’ve got evangelicals and conservative Catholics and Orthodox Jews very much together in a way that would’ve been bizarre at any other moment in American history. So I’ll just be very honest, a lot of my conversation partners on a daily basis in terms of cultural engagement and theological concerns and all these things, it’s a different world. It’s a world in which it’s quite natural for me to be in conversation with a prominent Roman Catholic figure.

Matthew Sutton:

And I imagine a latter-day saint also, which would not have happened even in the 80s

Albert Mohler:

Not in the same way. Honestly, not in the same way, but on some issues there, and let’s put it this way, the voters tend to vote a lot alike, but there is not so much cross-fertilization. I think it’s simply because of the historical tradition. And I just think that Will Herberg’s book in the 1950s, Protestant Catholic Jew, there is a tradition of which these are three representations. And among conservative evangelicals, some of the last people on planet earth who really care about the Old Testament other than the Jewish people. So it’s a very different America, very different world.

Matthew Sutton:

Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, no, it very much is. And then that begs the question of how did we get here and is it our politics that are shaping our philosophy or our theology or our theology that are shaping our politics? And this is where I think we probably run in circles, but it is interesting, and you’ve nailed it, that this is a marriage birthed out of a particular kind of politics and out of the work of Republican party operatives like Paul Weyrich, a Catholic, reaching out to Jerry Falwell in the 1970s and 1980s and saying, “There’s some things we could do together, even though we have other things where we disagree.”

Albert Mohler:

So I was a part of this. I understand you’re talking about my life, and so I understand that you’re talking about people I knew in the case of Dr. Falwell I loved. And I want to say as someone inside that, there’s something deeper than I think most historians see. There’s something far deeper. And I will just tell you, I think a lot of religious historians, American historians, want to treat this as merely a marriage of convenience. I just want to tell you it was always more than that.

Matthew Sutton:

Oh yeah. No, and I’ve never doubted that it was authentic. That’s one of the things I do as a historian is I always assume that people are acting authentically and in good faith. And I trust when they say that they believe something and this is why they believe it that they do. And every once in a while there’s the charlatan or the huckster. In the book I talked about Jim Jones. I mean, someone who from beginning to end was just trying to deceive and manipulate people. But for the most part, no, I believe that the folks I talk about, whether I agree with them or disagree with them, are earnest, well-meaning people who are truly trying to do the right thing for their families, for their churches, and for their nation. There’s no doubt about that.

Albert Mohler:

In your book, you deal with obviously a lot that just about anyone familiar with the territory is going to know, but you do decide to include some very colorful figures. How did you decide who to include and why?

Matthew Sutton:

So for me, first and foremost, it’s always the folks who have the most influence or who say or do something unique that I think helps us understand those others who do have the most influence. And so I’ve been attracted to folks, we’ve talked about Aimee Semple McPherson or Charles Finney, George Whitefield, these kind of larger than life, very colorful kinds of folks who help us understand either because of their success or because of their lack of success, what it means to be a Christian in the United States. I do spend some time on some despicable characters, Jim Jones is one, because I think he’s important to understand, to see the ramifications of the Free Exercise Clause, that if you’re going to have free exercise, this is one of the dangers. And I wouldn’t trade Free Exercise Clause for anything, but nevertheless, in the American story, this means he’s going to have free reign where in certain other countries he may not have had that kind of freedom. And so it’s a way for us to think about what American freedom and liberty actually means on a daily basis.

Albert Mohler:

Let me ask you a blunt question. In the age of social media, the internet, Twitter or X and all the rest, is it Jim Jones now possible again?

Matthew Sutton:

Boy, I hope not, but I certainly fear that it would be. Yeah. And I think we’ve seen different incarnations of him not as bad, but I worry about it. I have two college age kids and the ways in which social media can compartmentalize people in groups and communities and present them with only one version of reality, that certainly terrifies me for the future.

Albert Mohler:

Yeah. I think the scariest thing about that is that because if you just look back at Jim Jones and all that, you had to go to hear him. Now you can have a teenager down the hall who’s listening to someone like that.

Matthew Sutton:

Yeah, absolutely.

Albert Mohler:

I think the biggest take home of your weighty book is the fact that church state separation is claimed by the separationists in the 20th century was never a reality. And I appreciate your candor in taking that thesis apart, but there’s a story behind that argument and you do cover it. And it was largely an anti-Catholic argument with Protestants and others united for separation of church and state. And look, I know a lot of these people. And so I can just tell you that they really have sold themselves on this secularist version of history, but I don’t know where in the world they’re finding it.

Matthew Sutton:

Yeah. I really do wonder and worry that it’s imagined thinking that certainly Thomas Jefferson, when he wrote the letter to the Danbury Baptist where we get that language, talked about the First Amendment establishing a high wall of separation. And then the courts picked this back up a few times in the 19th century, but then they really doubled down on it in 1947 in this Everson decision. And so then going forward, I think the courts really made a concerted effort to separate religion from public life in a lot of ways, not in all ways, but certainly the Roberts Court is now pushing back on that. Neil Gorsuch has made very clear that he does not think that’s the guiding principle for understanding the First Amendment. And so it’s this battle. I am a strict separationist, but I realize I can’t make that argument on the basis of history, that I have to be honest about the 19th century and the fact that most jurists didn’t understand the First Amendment that way.

Albert Mohler:

All right. So let me ask you a question I’ve never posed this way before. As we come to a conclusion here, I’ve been able to ask you lots of questions. Let me ask you a question. What am I missing in all of this? What to a conservative evangelical theologian engaged on these issues, what am I missing that I need to see?

Matthew Sutton:

Boy, that’s a great question, and I wouldn’t presume to know what you are and aren’t missing, but I will say this is I’ve been thinking about the book and the reception of the book and the ways in which it’s resonating with the 250th anniversary. I think the story is that Protestants had far more influence in the 19th and early 20th century than historians have given them credit for. But for the Protestants themselves or for modern day evangelicals, if they’re going to claim that story, I want them to own all of it with the kind of humility that Abraham Lincoln did and to recognize that when they had power, sometimes they didn’t get it right, that sometimes it meant dispossessing indigenous folks. Sometimes it meant Jim Crow. Sometimes it meant foreign policy excursions that restricted the rights of other folks. And so it’s a both and. It is a more Christian story than I think we realize, but with it, there needs to be a humility in recognizing what Christians got right and what they got wrong.

Albert Mohler:

I wrote my honors thesis in college on Elton Trueblood, Quaker theologian, who wrote a book on Lincoln that has really shaped my understanding of Abraham Lincoln. The title of his book was Abraham Lincoln: Theologian of American Anguish. And it’s deeply Augustinian, an understanding of Lincoln’s heaviness as he considered these things. And that keeps us, I hope, from a wrongful triumphalism. It’s a good corrective. Professor Matthew Avery Sutton, thank you so much for joining me for Thinking in Public.

Matthew Sutton:

Thank you for having me on. This was really fun.

Albert Mohler:

God bless you.

Many thanks to my guest, Professor Matthew Avery Sutton, for thinking with me today.

If you enjoyed today’s episode of Thinking in Public, you will find more than 200 of these conversations at albertmohler.com under the tab, Thinking in Public. For more information on the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, go to sbts.edu. For information on Boyce College, go to boycecollege.com.

Thank you for joining me for Thinking in Public, and until next time, keep thinking.

The post From Chosen Land to Secular Age — A Conversation with Matthew Avery Sutton appeared first on AlbertMohler.com.

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