The faiths that formed the United States

In Chosen Land, Matthew Avery Sutton weaves together 500 years of American history to examine how the Christian faith, in its myriad forms, has played an integral role in the American story. He aims to show how the United States, with its immense diversity of religious expression and lack of a state church, has developed a culture of fervent religious activism that distinguishes it from other Western nations.

Sutton, who is a historian at Washington State University, has written several other books on American Christianity, particularly on contemporary evangelicalism. He achieved some notoriety in 2024 when he wrote an article for the Journal of the American Academy of Religion that critiqued some of the most prominent scholars of American evangelical history, including Mark Noll and Randall Balmer. Sutton argued that they are wrong to cast post-WWII evangelicals as the heirs to 18th- and 19th-century American Protestantism, and in the introduction to Chosen Land, he says refuting that historiography is one of the goals of the book. He shows how the evangelical label was chosen in the 1940s to replace “fundamentalist,” and how prior to the 20th century, “evangelical” could be used to describe almost any Protestant belief system.

Plenty of the figures in Chosen Land fill any standard textbook of American religious history, such as Jonathan Edwards, Frederick Douglass, and Aimee Semple McPherson. But Sutton also introduces new elements to the mix. Perhaps unsurprisingly for someone from Southern California, he includes a fairly lengthy section on Spanish colonization. He also tries to show how the religious landscape of early America was far from homogenous, and even among Protestants, there was significant infighting about what correct belief looked like. America may once have been more of a Christian nation than it is today, but it has never been one in the same way a country with a state church is.