Did America Have a Christian Founding? Separating Modern Myth from Historical Truth

Academic and popular authors regularly assert that America’s founders were deists who created a godless Constitution and desired the strict separation of church and state. Professor Hall explains why these claims are false, and shows how the founders were influenced by Christian ideas in important ways. He concludes by arguing that America’s founders shared a commitment to protecting religious liberty, but that there is virtually no evidence that they desired to build a wall of separation between church and state.

Mark David Hall is the Herbert Hoover Distinguished Professor of Politics and Faculty Fellow in the William Penn Honors Program at George Fox University. He is also associated faculty at the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University and senior fellow at Baylor University’s Institute for Studies of Religion. He has written, edited, or co-edited a dozen books on religion and politics in America and is a nationally recognized expert on the religious freedom. His book, Did America Have a Christian Founding?: Separating Modern Myth from Historical Fact, will be available from Thomas Nelson in October of 2019.