Journal: Southern Baptist Journal of Theology
Volume: SBJT 28:2 (Summer 2024)
Article: Interview With Mark David Hall On Christian Nationalism
Author: Mark David Hall

Interview With Mark David Hall On Christian Nationalism1

Mark David Hall

Mark David Hall is a Professor in Regent University’s Robertson School of Government and a Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Religion, Culture and Democracy, an initiative of First Liberty Institute. He is the author of a number of books on religion and politics in America including Did America Have a Christian Founding? (Thomas Nelson, 2020), Proclaim Liberty Throughout All the Land (Fidelis Books, 2023), and Who’s Afraid of Christian Nationalism (Fidelis Books, 2024). He and his wife are members of Church of the Vine (Newberg, OR), and they have three adult children.

David Schrock: The books we are going to talk about today is Did America Have a Christian Founding?2 as well as Proclaim Liberty Throughout All the Land.3 Thinking more today about America’s founding and the debate that surrounds that Christian Nationalism, was America founded as a Christian nation? Some claim that it was a secular nation from the beginning. Others have made middle ground there. Help us to see the lay of the land of what are the arguments for and against America’s founding being a Christian nation.

Mark David Hall: I am treating the question a little bit differently as I do with my book, Did America Have a Christian Founding? And what you see is that you have two sets of answers. Academics are overwhelmingly on the side of “absolutely not.” For them, the founders were deists, it was influenced by a secularized Lockean liberalism, and maybe there were a few Orthodox Christians bouncing around, but they are effectively irrelevant.

Now, that’s not all academics, of course. You have a number of good folks out there making good arguments, but still, most of the literature says that. In reaction to that, you had Christian popular authors—and by that I do not mean anything derogatory—just that they don’t have a background in the academy, they don’t have PhDs, but they kind of sensed intuitively this

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is not right. So, they wrote books published by Christian presses, wherein they said, “No, America had a wonderful Christian founding. Virtually all the founders were Christians, and they were Orthodox Christians. And even ones like Thomas Jefferson were more Christian than we had thought.” They overstate the case way too much on the other side, and since they aren’t academics, they tend to make errors that make it pretty easy for professional academics to poke holes in their arguments.

Now I think th...