The Sunday Interview: How Christianity Shaped America: Matthew Avery Sutton on Power, Evangelicals, and the “Chosen Land”

In this Sunday Interview, Bradley Onishi sits down with historian Matthew Avery Sutton to discuss his sweeping new book Chosen Land. Sutton argues that from the colonial era onward, Americans have pursued a centuries-long project to transform North America into a “holy land” that could usher in God’s millennial kingdom. Paradoxically, the founders’ decision to create a secular Constitution and protect religious freedom through the First Amendment helped fuel the explosive growth and innovation of American Christianity. Without a state …