Chosen Land: How Christianity Made America and Americans Remade Christianity

A sweeping history of Christianity in America, from the arrival of the first Europeans to the political triumphs of evangelicalism, showing the powerful, singular role the faith has always played in American public life.

“Fast-paced and lucidly written ... Required reading for anyone who wants to understand American religion, and for anyone who wants to understand America.” —Kristin Kobes Du Mez, New York Times–bestselling author of Jesus and John Wayne

In the United States today, there is no faith more dominant than Christianity. 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.

A landmark work of narrative synthesis tracing the faith’s major figures and currents, Chosen Land confirms the unique place that American Christianity—always both steadfast and precarious—occupies at the center of our shared history.