How Christianity Made America—and How America Remade Christianity

To what extent are we a Christian nation or Judeo-Christian or what about all those pantheists and all that stuff and the Founding Fathers? What do we know? The question that I started with is not so much, is this a Christian nation, but why is it that we're so different from our Canadian, you know, brothers and sisters across the border, our Western Europeans, folks in the United Kingdom? Think about Why it is that every politician we have we ask make to make a confession of faith tells me there's something distinctive about the United States, something different.

And so what I'm trying to do in the book is just trace the origins of that, trace how it is that we became so different from so many other first world nations, so many of our peer nations. Christianity always plays this dual role in American history where it's often used by the most powerful to keep people in subjugation, but then people in subjugation can often flip it, turn it to call for their own liberation. Lincoln says we're an Almost chosen people. Lincoln recognizes that there needs to still be a little humility and that maybe Americans don't quite have a monopoly on God's will, and that maybe they don't entirely understand what it is that God wants for the world, and so he famously says, you know, he doesn't know which side of the Civil War God's on.

He wants to make sure he is on God's side. Early founding religious leaders and their attitudes toward Native Americans. What did they think? blacks were and what did they think of slavery and how did they justify that and what were the big debates about the religious implications? So the idea is that they're children and that the job of the white folks is to, you know, raise them as children and to kind of educate them in the Christian faith, but that they have no independence or autonomy or ability to think on their own.

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