Proclaim Liberty Throughout All the Land: How Christianity Has Advanced Freedom and Equality for All Americans

Mark David Hall

abr 2023 · Fidelis Books

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Scholars and popular authors regularly claim that Christianity, at least orthodox Christianity, has fostered oppression and intolerance. A common narrative is that liberty and equality have been advanced primarily when America’s leaders embrace progressive manifestations of religion or reject faith altogether.

Proclaim Liberty Throughout All the Land demonstrates that Christianity is responsible for advancing liberty and equality for all citizens. Throughout American history, Christians have been motivated by their faith to create fair and just institutions, fight for political freedom, oppose slavery, and secure religious liberty for all. 

The New York Times’s 1619 Project is only a recent and prominent manifestation of the tendency of journalists, academics, and popular writers to portray American Christianity as a force of oppression and intolerance. Without shying away from the ways in which the Christian faith has been used to defend and even encourage harmful practices, Proclaim Liberty Throughout All the Land shows that it has far more often been a force for good.

 

From the American Puritans—who created some of the most republican and free institutions the world had ever seen—to America’s founders’ opposition to slavery, to contemporary Christian legal advocacy groups that fight to protect religious liberty for everyone, this volume offers an important corrective to those who would downplay the role Christianity has played in advancing liberty and equality for all citizens.

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Mark David Hall is Herbert Hoover Distinguished Professor of Politics and Faculty Fellow in the Honors Program at George Fox University. He is also Associated Faculty at the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University and a Senior Fellow at Baylor University’s Institute for Studies of Religion. In 2022–2023, he is a Visiting Fellow at Princeton University’s James Madison Program and a Visiting Scholar at the Mercatus Center.

Mark earned a BA in political science from Wheaton College (IL) and a PhD in Government from the University of Virginia. He has written, edited, or coedited a dozen books, including Did America Have a Christian Founding?: Separating Modern Myth from Historical Truth (Nelson Books, 2019); Great Christian Jurists in American History (Cambridge University Press, 2019); Faith and the Founders of the American Republic (Oxford University Press, 2014); Roger Sherman and the Creation of the American Republic (Oxford University Press, 2012); and The Forgotten Founders on Religion and Public Life (University of Notre Dame Press, 2009).