Is America a Christian Nation?

Is America a Christian nation? By looking carefully at the texts of a dozen seminal authors from America's literary history, the author tests assumptions about the centrality of religious motivations in the formation of the nation's cultural identity. In addition to explicating key passages from the works of seminal figures such as Bradford, Winthrop, Edwards, and Franklin, the author provides important insights into those writers' lives and historical contexts. Eschewing the simplified but misleading binaries that typically fuel contemporary debates about Christian Nationalism, he argues that such debates are not new, but rather continuations of clashes recorded in many of America's earliest and most cherished narratives.