Barry Alan Shain

Did America Have a Christian Founding?

Ethics, Culture & Social Issues

“In Did America Have a Christian Founding?, Mark Hall grants the modern reader a window into the predominant worldview of our Constitution’s many framers and ratifiers, through dozens of original sources and hundreds of scholarly references. In contrast to the bias-driven mythologies he exposes, Hall leads his readers to reasoned conclusions about historical truth through objective scholarship in the vein of storytelling. He is humble enough to acknowledge legitimate separationist claims, while bold enough to demonstrate how the preponderance of historical evidence begs an affirmative answer to his title question. With many implications for today’s challenges, Did “In this book, Professor Hall powerfully and thoroughly rebuts—claim by claim—the consistently errant assertions by a never-ending stream of prominent and popular commentators who report that the American Founding was a wholly secular and enlightenment affair. His work builds from his impressive thirty-year scholarly corpus on how the American Founding was importantly influenced by Protestant Christian theology and institutions. Here he convincingly shows that the putative hostility of the American Founders to Christianity and their embrace of a secular philosophy is ‘unequivocally false’ for all but a small handful of men and, in most cases, for only part of their lives, often years before or after the Founding period. Hall demonstrates that these claims about a secular founding are consistently made without convincing (or, in some cases, any) supporting evidence, in a manner that prevents the formation of an accurate understanding of America, then and now, to the detriment of all.”