Matthew Avery Sutton’s lively new book, Chosen Land: How Christianity Made America and Americans Remade Christianity, is less a narrative than a counternarrative to how American religious history has been done for the past century and a half.
Beginning with the Spanish Catholic missions to Mexico and the American Southwest (the reader immediately gets where the first chapter is going by its title, “The Christian Invasion Begins”), Sutton takes the readers all the way up to the religions of Barack Obama and Joe Biden. And despite the fact that it is a very big book (570 pages of text plus 46 pages of endnotes), the narrative voice throughout remains pretty much the same. That voice is a rollicking combination of critical distance, prophetic indictment and a tone that at times comes close to anger about the way the story has been told—or mistold—in the past by white males (and a few women).
Sutton’s book has been thoroughly researched using archival material from sources as diverse as Bob Jones University, the Martin Luther King Papers Project, Union Theological Seminary in New York and the Farmworker Documentation Project at the University of California, San Diego. The documentation is, in fact, quite impressive, and Sutton often descends into historical details that witness to his mastery of large amounts of data. Much of his narrative is compelling and makes the reader want to plough on.
Sutton’s most basic thesis is offered at the very beginning of his text: American Christians took an ancient religion “and reconstructed it over and over again, tuning it to their times and places and to the demands of the public—even as they claimed to be doing nothing more than upholding the ‘traditional’ faith. They fashioned a version of Christianity that was thoroughly American—and made America, in turn, profoundly Christian.”
He quite creatively divides the American Christian groups he focuses on into four basic streams: conservative, revivalist, liberal and liberationist, each of which carved its own path through the American religious terrain. The first stream emphasized tradition, creedal formulations of belief and the importance of the church as an institution. The revivalist strain emphasized individual autonomy, the pre-eminence of emotions and the importance of an individual relationship with God. The third (liberal) stream emphasized rationality in belief and worship and worked relentlessly to keep religion up to date with contemporary intellectual trends. The fourth stream saw the liberation of people and groups as central to the Christian message and emphasized a Jesus who was a liberator of the oppressed.
The research is thorough, and the narrative voice is vibrant. And the sheer range of the persons, movements and groups included in Chosen Land equals that in Sidney Ahlstrom’s 1968 epochal work, A Religious History of the American People, which invited scholars working on American religion for the first time to address the luxurious pluralism of the U.S. religious past in a magisterial way. In a sense, Sutton has done that but in a way that often crosses the line into a perhaps-overdone editorial voice that grates on the reader. (At least it grated on this reader.)
For instance, in “Sanctifying the West,” the chapter narrating the attempts by Spanish Franciscans to evangelize the Native peoples of California, the author reports how the friars vacillated between seeing the natives as ignorant and childlike and, on the other hand, as devilish and savage. The report is undoubtedly true, but Sutton then goes on to explain how they worried about Native superstition, “which they viewed as something entirely different from their own superstitious beliefs in bread and wine that transformed into Jesus’s body and blood.”
Sutton is not a theologian but a historian (evident at a number of points, where he gets the theology wrong). But the analogy he draws here, even as a historian, limps rather badly. One might reasonably critique the doctrine of transubstantiation (a word he never uses) in a number of theological ways: as a misreading of the Last Supper narratives in the New Testament, or as a misapplication of Greek philosophical concepts to Christian liturgy, or as the overreach of high medieval theology transforming a simple commemorative meal into something else entirely. One could reasonably apply those explanations—and many others—to what Catholics believe happens in the course of the Mass. But “superstition”? That is not a theological explanation but an anthropological one. How can Catholics read that line as anything other than insulting—almost intentionally insulting?
One cannot help but get the impression that Sutton wants to right the wrongs done by dead white men to “others” in the religious past by treating the white “winners” in the same way they treated enslaved people, Hispanic peoples and Native Americans. The result is, unfortunately, a text full of historical anachronisms that at times approaches the embarrassing (and the unintentionally humorous). To judge the actions and motives of historical actors by the standards of the 21st century is neither good theology nor good history. But this is precisely what the author does throughout his narrative.
Sutton describes, for instance, how the Franciscan friars “likely sold some children into slavery while justifying their sale by claiming to have made Christians of them. This was not the first time, and it would not be the last, that colonizers used Christianity as a rationale for subjugating non-Christian peoples.” (The emphasis on “likely” is the author’s own.) Or in narrating the founding of Plymouth: “the men and women on the Mayflower were religious extremists in an era of religious extremists.” Huh? Again, in describing George Whitfield’s itinerant preaching schedule: “He proved that revival could be a thriving business, not just for souls, but for cash too.”
The list of such quotes would be long and wearisome, and oftentimes the reader gets the impression that he or she is at a D.E.I. convention for the historically flatfooted.
Further, at certain points in the book the author appears to think theology as a discipline is usually just window dressing for other, more important (and more interesting) categories that actually fuel history’s energies: race, gender, class, ethnicity, etc.
For academics who teach American religious history, my advice is this: Don’t buy this book, but rather check it out of the library and give certain pages to your students to identify and critique for historical anachronisms. This would not be an overly difficult exercise.
This article appears in July/August 2026.
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