Mark David Hall on Christianity and American History

In this episode, we welcome Dr. Mark David Hall to discuss his book Proclaim Liberty Throughout All the Land: How Christianity Has Advanced Freedom and Equality for All Americans. Who were the Puritans and did they fit the stereotypes modern people often have of them? What was the context of the Salem Witch Trials? Did the American War for Independence fit within or violate the Christian tradition of Just War Theory? Does the evils of slavery define American ideals? How do we properly evaluate the orthodoxy of the Founding Fathers and/or the principles that motivated them? Mark takes us through questions such as these, and more – as he demonstrates that Christianity has been a force for good and a reason for progress in our history, in spite of secular narratives on the contrary. 

Book: Proclaim Liberty Throughout All the Land: How Christianity Has Advanced Freedom and Equality for All Americans 

Dr. Mark David Hall’s website 

Other books written and edited by Dr. Hall: 

• Did America Have a Christian Founding?: Separating Modern Myth from Historical Truth 
• Who’s Afraid of Christian Nationalism?: Why Christian Nationalism is Not an Existential Threat to America or the Church 
• Roger Sherman and the Creation of the American Republic 
• America and the Just War Tradition 
• Great Christian Jurists in American History (also edited by Daniel Dreisbach) 
• Collected Works of Roger Sherman (also see here) 

• Other resources: 

Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World by Tom Holland 

Victory of Reason by Rodney Stark 

Destroyer of the Gods by Larry Hurtado 

The Puritans: A Transatlantic History by David D. Hall 

The Witch: A History of Fear, from Ancient Times to the Present by Ronald Hutton 

The Hebrew Republic by Eric Nelson 

Reading the Bible with the Founding Fathers by Daniel Dreisbach 

The American Revolution; The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin by Gordon Wood 

Thomas Jefferson – Revolutionary: A Radical’s Struggle to Remake America; James Madison and the Making of America by Kevin Gutzman 

The Fearless Benjamin Lay: The Quaker Dwarf Who Became the First Revolutionary Abolitionist by Marcus Rediker 

Separation of Church and State; Liberal Suppression: Section 501(c)(3) and the Taxation of Speech by Philip Hamburger 

Christianity and Liberalism by J. Gresham Machen 

E.g. John Locke: here; Thomas Jefferson: here and here; John Adams: here; Rev. King: here and here 

“The Disturbing Legacy of Charles Finney”; Christless Christianity by Michael Horton