John Fea offers a thoroughly researched, evenhanded primer on whether America was founded to be a Christian nation, as many evangelicals assert, or a secular state, as others contend. He approaches the title’s question from a historical perspective, helping readers see past the emotional rhetoric of today to the recorded facts of our past. This updated edition reports on the many issues that have arisen in recent years concerning religion’s place in American society including the Supreme Court decision on same-sex marriage, contraception and the Affordable Care Act, and state-level restrictions on abortion-and demonstrates how they lead us to the question of whether the United States was or is a Christian nation. Fea relates the history of these and other developments, pointing to the underlying questions of national religious identity inherent in each.
“We live in a sound-bite culture that makes it difficult to have any sustained dialogue on these historical issues,” Fea writes in his preface. “It is easy for those who argue that America is a Christian nation (and those who do not) to appear on radio or television programs, quote from one of the founders or one of the nation’s founding documents, and sway people to their positions. These kinds of arguments, which can often be contentious, do nothing to help us unravel a very complicated historical puzzle about the relationship between Christianity and America’s founding.”
John Fea taught U.S. history at Messiah University in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, for over two decades. He is currently Senior Fellow at the Lumen Center for the Study of Christian and Culture in Madison, Wisconsin. He is the author or editor of several books, including Was America Founded as a Christian Nation? A Historical Introduction (2011, 2016), a finalist for the George Washington Book Prize. His work has appeared in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Sojourners, Commonweal, Christianity Today, and other venues. He blogs daily at The Way of Improvement Leads Home.
