Steven K. Green explores the historical record that supports the popular belief about the nation's religious origins, seeking to explain how the ideas of America's religious founding and its status as a Christian nation became a leading narrative about the nation's collective identity.

The teaching of history has long been the subject of partisan warfare. Religion often plays a prominent role in these debates, as secular progressives and conservative Christians disagree over which historical figures are worthy of study, how (or whether) certain events should be portrayed, and ultimately how tax dollars should be spent. But what about students who are educated outside the public schools, either in religious schools or at home? How are they learning history, and what effect does that have on our democracy? Hijacking History analyzes the high school world history textbooks produced by the three most influential publishers of Christian educational materials. In these books, the historian, informed by his faith, tells the allegedly unbiased story of God's actions as interpreted through the Bible. History becomes a weapon to judge and condemn civilizations that do not accept the true God or adopt "biblical" positions. In their treatment of the modern world, these texts identify ungodly ideas to be vanquished-evolution, humanism, biblical modernism, socialism, and climate science among them. The judgments found in these textbooks, Kathleen Wellman shows, are rooted in the history of American evangelicals and fundamentalists and the battles they fought against the tide of secularism. In assuming that God sanctions fundamentalist positions on social, political, and economic issues, students are led to believe that that the ultimate mission of America is to succeed as a nation that advances evangelical Christianity and capitalism throughout the world. The Christianity presented in these textbooks is proselytizing, intolerant of other religions and non-evangelical Christians, and unquestionably anchored to the political right. As Hijacking History argues, the ideas these textbooks promote have significant implications for contemporary debates about religion, politics, and education, and pose a direct challenge to the values of a pluralistic democracy.

The Handbook of Contemporary Christianity in the United States is a one-volume examination of Christianity in its role, contributions, and embattled engagements with the contemporary culture of the postmodern United States. While Christianity has been a sustaining force and dominant storyline of the historical foundations of America, obvious social, political, and scientific inroads have lessened its influence and altered the issues considered. The handbook explores the strengths and weaknesses of the Christian faith and traditions in the United States and its rich and textured history with a discernable eye toward how the message, strategies, and initiatives of Christianity has adapted to contemporary American life.

The surprising history of how Americans have fought over the meaning and legacy of the Revolution for nearly two and a half centuries Americans agree that their nation's origins lie in the Revolution, but they have never agreed on what the Revolution meant. For nearly two hundred and fifty years, politicians, political parties, social movements, and a diverse array of ordinary Americans have constantly reimagined the Revolution to fit the times and suit their own agendas. In this sweeping take on American history, Michael D. Hattem reveals how conflicts over the meaning and legacy of the Revolution--including the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution--have influenced the most important events and tumultuous periods in the nation's history; how African Americans, women, and other oppressed groups have shaped the popular memory of the Revolution; and how much of our contemporary memory of the Revolution is a product of the Cold War. By exploring the Revolution's unique role in American history as a national origin myth, Hattem shows how the meaning of the Revolution has never been fixed, how remembering the nation's founding has often done far more to divide Americans than to unite them, and how revising the past is an important and long‑standing American political tradition.

Religion and nationalism are both powerful and important markers of individual identity, but the relationship between the two has been a source of considerable debate. Much, if not most, of the early work done in Nationalism Studies has been based, at least implicitly, on the idea that religion, as a genealogical carrier of identity, was displaced with the advent of secular modernity, which was caused by nationalism. Or, to put it another way, national identity, and its ideological manifestation nationalism, filled the void left in people’s self-identification as religion retreated in the face of modernity. Since at least the late 1990s, this view has been increasingly challenged by scholars trying to account for the apparent persistence of religious identities. Perhaps even more interestingly, scholars of both religion and nationalism have noted that these two kinds of self-identification, while sometimes being tense, as the earlier models explained, are also frequently coexistent or even mutually supportive. This collection of essays explores the current thinking about the relationship between religion and nationalism from a variety of perspectives, using a number of different case studies. What all these approaches have in common is their interest in complicating our understandings of nationalism as a primarily secular phenomenon by bringing religion back into the discussion.

An award-winning scholar’s sweeping history of American secularism, from Jefferson to Trump “An essential book for understanding today’s culture wars. Sehat’s clear-eyed and elegant narrative will change how you think about our supposedly secular age.”—Molly Worthen, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill In This Earthly Frame, David Sehat narrates the making of American secularism through its most prominent proponents and most significant detractors. He shows how its foundations were laid in the U.S. Constitution and how it fully emerged only in the twentieth century. Religious and nonreligious Jews, liberal Protestants, apocalyptic sects like the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and antireligious activists all used the courts and the constitutional language of the First Amendment to create the secular order. Then, over the past fifty years, many religious conservatives turned against that order, emphasizing their religious freedom. Avoiding both polemic and lament, Sehat offers a powerful reinterpretation of American secularism and a clear framework for understanding the religiously infused conflict of the present.

"Among the most enduring themes in American history is the idea that the United States was founded as a Christian nation. A pervasive narrative in everything from school textbooks to political commentary, it is central to the way in which many Americans perceive the historical legacy of their nation. Yet, as Steven K. Green shows in this illuminating new book, it is little more than a myth. In Inventing a Christian America, Green, a leading historian of religion and politics, explores the historical record that is purported to support the popular belief in America's religious founding and status as a Christian nation. He demonstrates that, like all myths, these claims are based on historical 'facts' that have been colored by the interpretive narratives that have been imposed upon them. In tracing the evolution of these claims and the evidence levied in support of them from the founding of the New England colonies, through the American Revolution, and to the present day, he investigates how they became leading narratives in the country's collective identity. Three critical moments in American history shaped and continue to drive the myth of a Christian America: the Puritan founding of New England, the American Revolution and the forging of a new nation, and the early years of the nineteenth century, when a second generation of Americans sought to redefine and reconcile the memory of the founding to match their religious and patriotic aspirations. Seeking to shed light not only on the veracity of these ideas but on the reasons they endure, Green ultimately shows that the notion of America's religious founding is a myth not merely in the colloquial sense, but also in a deeper sense, as a shared story that gives deeper meaning to our collective national identity. Offering a fresh look at one of the most common and contested claims in American history, Inventing a Christian America is an enlightening read for anyone interested in the story of--and the debate over--America's founding"--

Compromising Positions argues that political sex scandals aren't really about sex. Rather, they are a form of cultural theater --moments of highly visible, public storytelling--that use racial and gendered symbols to create a collective sense of national worth and strength. The book shows that Americans condemn or excuse the sexual indiscretions of their politicians depending on the degree to which those politicians reinforce longstanding evangelical symbols associated with "American values" and a "Christian nation."

How the billionaire owners of Hobby Lobby are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to make America a “Bible nation” The Greens of Oklahoma City—the billionaire owners of the Hobby Lobby chain of craft stores—are spending hundreds of millions of dollars in an ambitious effort to increase the Bible’s influence on American society. In Bible Nation, Candida Moss and Joel Baden provide the first in-depth investigative account of the Greens’ sweeping Bible projects. Moss and Baden tell the story of the Greens’ efforts to place a Bible curriculum in public schools; their rapid acquisition of an unparalleled collection of biblical antiquities; their creation of a closely controlled group of scholars to study and promote the collection; and their construction of a $500 million Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C. Revealing how all these initiatives promote a very particular set of beliefs about the Bible, the book raises serious questions about the trade in biblical antiquities, the integrity of academic research, and the place of private belief in public life.

Explicates the way the Christian just war tradition shaped modernity and modernity's blindness to the interpenetration of nature and politics. This book sits uniquely at the intersection of just war thinking, environmental history, and theological ethics.