Understand how Christianity made America — and how America made Christianity

If you have ever found yourself sensing that American history and American Christianity are inseparable — that you cannot really understand one without the other — then you already have the instinct that drives everything I teach.

The difficulty is that most of us received these two stories in separate containers. History class gave us wars and politics and economics. Sunday school, if we had it, gave us heroes and villains selected for their inspirational value. Neither prepared us to sit with the genuine complexity: the Puritan settlers who built extraordinary intellectual institutions and also hanged Quakers on Boston Common; the revivalists who electrified the frontier and whose emotional methods still shape worship two hundred years later; the denominations that split over slavery and spent the next century and a half slowly, painfully reckoning with what that split revealed. Real history is messier than either the secular or the devotional version of it. I think that messiness is where the most important understanding lives.

What I have tried to build here is a course that respects both the subject and the student. That means using precise theological vocabulary — you will know what distinguishes a Calvinist soteriology from an Arminian one, what the Holiness movement meant by entire sanctification, why Vatican II's aggiornamento was so disorienting to American Catholics — because vague language produces vague thinking. It also means engaging contested territory honestly. The school does not paper over the Church's entanglement with slavery, its ambivalent record toward Native peoples, or the ways religious language has been wielded in the service of political power. But it also does not reduce American Christianity to its failures. The tradition produced Frederick Douglass's prophetic Christianity, the institutional infrastructure of the civil rights movement, and a global missionary movement whose consequences for world Christianity are still unfolding. All of that belongs in the story.

My approach throughout is the approach of the historian: to understand actors in their own contexts before passing judgment, to follow the evidence wherever it leads, and to remain genuinely curious about why people believed what they believed and how those beliefs shaped the world they lived in. I think that curiosity is the most important thing I can model for you — more important than any particular set of facts. The facts will settle in once the framework is in place.

Whether you are a seminary student building your foundational knowledge, a history enthusiast who has always wanted to go deeper, a believer trying to locate your own tradition in a longer story, or a thoughtful skeptic trying to understand a phenomenon you find puzzling — you belong in this school. Come in with your questions. The material can hold them.