“If you disestablish Christianity, then Christian leaders need to make Christianity a consumer product. They need to give the American people something they want.” — Matthew Avery Sutton
With America in the midst of another seemingly religious war in the Middle East, the crusading nature of American democracy is once again in the headlines. So how did Christianity make America and how has America remade Christianity?
Historian Matthew Avery Sutton’s new book, Chosen Land: How Christianity Made America and Americans Remade Christianity, suggests that Christianity is not just part of the American story—it is the American story. The founders created a godless Constitution not out of liberal principle but because of their pragmatic acknowledgement that they couldn’t pick a winning denomination. The unintended consequence was to open the floodgates (of hell?) to every Christian denomination. The American story then is of invented and reinvented Protestant groups seizing more and more power, building an unofficial establishment that shaped everything from westward expansion to the Civil War to the rise of the contemporary religious right.
Sutton argues that disestablishmentarian arrangement transformed Christianity into a classic consumer product. Forced to compete for attention with entertainment, sports, and media, American churches became entrepreneurial, technologically savvy, and relentlessly current—creatively reinventing themselves every generation. In a word, American Christianity is innovative. And that’s what distinguishes it from the rest of the Western world.
It also helps explain Trump: a President who uses Christianity in a “crass, overt, and hypocritical” way, but who is innovating a new kind of crusader Christianity for the 21st century. Whether this is American Christianity’s last gasp or the prelude to another great revival, Sutton says, nobody (not even God) knows. But the language we speak in America is the language of the Christian church. It’s the language of a chosen people from a chosen land.
