Description: "In Chosen Land, historian Matthew Avery Sutton chronicles Christians' five-hundred-year endeavor to turn North America into their version of the kingdom of God, revealing the fruitful and dynamic entanglement between the history of America and the history of American Christianity. In the centuries after Christianity first arrived on American shores, colonizers and colonized from New England to Spanish California practiced many varieties of the faith. After the founding of the United States, the nation's lack of a state religion forced new and evolving strains of Christianity to battle for potential adherents, as they still do to this day. As American Christianity has bent, fractured, and adapted to changing times, Christian belief has shaped everything from the promise of Manifest Destiny to Ronald Reagan's approach to the Cold War, the rise of the Southern Lost Cause narrative to the triumphs of the civil rights movement"-- Provided by publisher.
Review Quotes: "No book has ever told us as much as Chosen Land does about the role of religion in the most enduringly Protestant nation in the industrialized world. Not since Martin Marty's Righteous Empire of more than a half-century ago has a single scholar addressed this topic with the analytic acumen Matthew Sutton brings to the task. Building upon the recent generation's excellent body of scholarship but speaking always in his own voice, Sutton has given us a comprehensive narrative that promises to define professional and popular discussions of religion and politics in American life for a very long time."--David A. Hollinger, author of Christianity's American Fate