Faithful Politics

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Was America founded as a Christian nation, or has that story been repeated so often that it feels true? 

Warren Throckmorton, retired professor of psychology and author of The Christian Past That Wasn’t and co-author of Getting Jefferson Right, joins Will Wright and Pastor Josh Burtram to test popular founding myths against primary sources. Throckmorton walks through claims about the Constitution, religious tests, Benjamin Franklin’s prayer motion, Thomas Jefferson, the Danbury Baptists, the Cape Henry prayer, the 1774 Continental Congress prayer, and David Barton’s influence on modern Christian nationalist history. 

He argues that many Christian nation claims depend on selective quotation, invented stories, or ignoring the actual records of the Constitutional Convention. The conversation also explores why these myths are emotionally powerful. Fear, identity, and power can make bad history feel comforting, especially when people believe their faith or country is being taken away.

Guest Bio
Warren Throckmorton, PhD, is a writer, researcher, and retired professor of psychology at Grove City College. His work examines Christian nationalism, American religious history, psychology, and the misuse of historical claims in public life. He is the author of The Christian Past That Wasn’t: Debunking the Christian Nationalist Myths That Hijack History and co-author, with Michael Coulter, of Getting Jefferson Right: Fact Checking Claims About Thomas Jefferson. In this conversation, Throckmorton brings together historical fact-checking and psychological insight to explain why myths about America’s Christian founding remain powerful, why primary sources matter, and why separation of church and state protects religious freedom

Book Mentioned
The Christian Past That Wasn’t: Debunking the Christian Nationalist Myths That Hijack History by Warren Throckmorton
Bookshop.org: https://bookshop.org/a/112456/9798889835820

Getting Jefferson Right: Fact Checking Claims About Thomas Jefferson by Michael Coulter and Warren Throckmorton
Bookshop.org: https://bookshop.org/a/112456/9798990900622

Relevant Links & Resources
The Throckmorton Initiative
URL: https://warrenthrockmorton.substack.com/
Support Sarah Stankorb’s work and preorder Damned If She Does: Why Women Quit Church and What It Means for the Future of Religion, Releases September 15, 2026.  Bookshop.org: https://bookshop.org/a/112456/9798889837091
Website: https://www.sarahstankorb.com/
Support the show
Keep the conversation going.
Want to learn more about Faithful Politics, suggest a future guest, or connect with us directly?
Visit our website:
faithfulpoliticspodcast.com
Browse our bookstore, featuring books from many of our guests:
faithfulpoliticspodcast.com/bookstore
Support the show and help us keep these conversations going:
patreon.com/cw/FaithfulPolitics
Subscribe for behind-the-scenes content, reflections, and updates:
faithfulpolitics.substack.com
Contact the hosts:
Josh Burtram, Faithful Host: Josh@faithfulpolitics.com
Will Wright, Political Host: Will@faithfulpolitics.com
Follow Faithful Politics:
Instagram: faithful_politics
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Have a comment? Send us a text! (We read all of them but can't reply). Email us: Will@faithfulpoliticspodcast.com
Was America founded as a Christian nation, or is that question usually about today’s politics more than the eighteenth century? 

John Fea, historian of early America and American religion, joins Will Wright and Pastor Josh Burtram to slow the conversation down. Fea explains why many Americans historically believed they lived in a Christian nation, while also showing why that does not settle what the founders intended. 

The discussion moves through state constitutions, religious tests, the First Amendment, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, the Constitutional Convention, anti-Federalist objections, and the difference between religious freedom and religious toleration. Fea argues that Christianity clearly mattered in the founding era, but the federal Constitution did not create a Christian republic. The episode also asks what America’s 250th should mean if we want better history, better citizenship, and a more honest public conversation about faith and democracy.

Guest Bio
John Fea, PhD, is a historian of early America, American religion, and the founding era. He is Senior Fellow at the Lumen Center for the Study of Christianity and Culture in Madison, Wisconsin, and taught U.S. history at Messiah University for more than two decades. He is the author or editor of several books, including Was America Founded as a Christian Nation?, Why Study History?, Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump, and the forthcoming In God We Trust: Was America Founded as a Christian Nation? His work helps listeners think historically about the founders, religious liberty, the Constitution, Christian nationalism, and the difference between using the past responsibly and using it for present-day political agendas.

Book Mentioned
In God We Trust: Was America Founded as a Christian Nation? by John Fea
Publisher: https://bookshop.org/a/112456/9780664269579
Support Sarah Stankorb’s work and preorder Damned If She Does: Why Women Quit Church and What It Means for the Future of Religion, Releases September 15, 2026.  Bookshop.org: https://bookshop.org/a/112456/9798889837091
Website: https://www.sarahstankorb.com/
Support the show
Keep the conversation going.
Want to learn more about Faithful Politics, suggest a future guest, or connect with us directly?
Visit our website:
faithfulpoliticspodcast.com
Browse our bookstore, featuring books from many of our guests:
faithfulpoliticspodcast.com/bookstore
Support the show and help us keep these conversations going:
patreon.com/cw/FaithfulPolitics
Subscribe for behind-the-scenes content, reflections, and updates:
faithfulpolitics.substack.com
Contact the hosts:
Josh Burtram, Faithful Host: Josh@faithfulpolitics.com
Will Wright, Political Host: Will@faithfulpolitics.com
Follow Faithful Politics:
Instagram: faithful_politics
Facebook: FaithfulPoliticsPodcast

Have a comment? Send us a text! (We read all of them but can't reply). Email us: Will@faithfulpoliticspodcast.com
Was the American Revolution really a fight for religious freedom? 

Katherine Carté, Professor of History at Southern Methodist University and author of Religion and the American Revolution: An Imperial History, helps separate the national myth from the historical record. Carté explains that the Revolution was not one simple story. It was both a break from British rule and the messy process of building a new United States. Religion mattered deeply, but not always in the way Americans assume. The conflict was not mainly Protestants fighting Britain for religious liberty. It was a political struggle over sovereignty, power, empire, and who had the right to rule. 

Carté shows how British imperial Protestantism connected Anglicans, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, missionaries, donors, and colonial institutions before the war disrupted that order. The conversation also explores religious establishments, loyalists, Catholics, Jews, religious tests, secular citizenship, and why “Was America founded as a Christian nation?” is too narrow a question.

Guest Bio
Katherine Carté is Professor of History at Southern Methodist University, where she studies early American history, the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, the Age of Revolutions, early modern religion, and digital humanities. She is the author of Religion and the American Revolution: An Imperial History, published by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and UNC Press, and Religion and Profit: Moravians in Early America. Her work helps explain how British imperial Protestantism shaped colonial life, how the American Revolution disrupted that religious and political order, and why the founding era cannot be reduced to simple claims about America being either Christian or secular.

Book Mentioned
Religion and the American Revolution: An Imperial History by Katherine Carté
Bookshop.org: https://bookshop.org/a/112456/9781469662640

Relevant Links & Resources
Katherine Carté Faculty Profile
URL: https://people.smu.edu/kengel/
Support Sarah Stankorb’s work and preorder Damned If She Does: Why Women Quit Church and What It Means for the Future of Religion, Releases September 15, 2026.  Bookshop.org: https://bookshop.org/a/112456/9798889837091
Website: https://www.sarahstankorb.com/
Support the show
Keep the conversation going.
Want to learn more about Faithful Politics, suggest a future guest, or connect with us directly?
Visit our website:
faithfulpoliticspodcast.com
Browse our bookstore, featuring books from many of our guests:
faithfulpoliticspodcast.com/bookstore
Support the show and help us keep these conversations going:
patreon.com/cw/FaithfulPolitics
Subscribe for behind-the-scenes content, reflections, and updates:
faithfulpolitics.substack.com
Contact the hosts:
Josh Burtram, Faithful Host: Josh@faithfulpolitics.com
Will Wright, Political Host: Will@faithfulpolitics.com
Follow Faithful Politics:
Instagram: faithful_politics
Facebook: FaithfulPoliticsPodcast

Have a comment? Send us a text! (We read all of them but can't reply). Email us: Will@faithfulpoliticspodcast.com
How did Christianity become so deeply woven into the American story? 

Matthew Avery Sutton, professor of history at Washington State University and author of Chosen Land: How Christianity Made America and Americans Remade Christianity, joins Will Wright and Pastor Josh Burtram to explain why American Christianity and American history cannot be told as separate stories. Sutton traces Christianity’s influence from Columbus, Spanish Catholic missions, Jamestown, Puritans, Quakers, Catholics, enslaved Muslims, Indigenous nations, and the First Amendment to revivalism, slavery, abolition, apocalyptic evangelicalism, and Christian nationalism. 

He argues that disestablishment did not remove religion from public life. Instead, it created a competitive religious marketplace where churches had to persuade, organize, innovate, and grow. The conversation also challenges both oversimplified “Christian nation” claims and overly clean secular founding myths. This episode helps listeners see America’s 250th as a moment for humility, honesty, and a fuller reckoning with the faiths that shaped the country.

Guest Bio
Matthew Avery Sutton is a historian of American religion and politics at Washington State University. His work examines how Christianity, evangelicalism, revivalism, missions, apocalyptic belief, and political power have shaped American public life. He is the author of Chosen Land: How Christianity Made America and Americans Remade Christianity, American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism, Double Crossed: The Missionaries Who Spied for the United States During the Second World War, and Aimee Semple McPherson and the Resurrection of Christian America. In this conversation, Sutton helps frame the Church and State 250 series by showing how Christianity has been both a force for power and reform throughout American history.

Book Mentioned
Chosen Land: How Christianity Made America and Americans Remade Christianity by Matthew Avery Sutton
Bookshop.org: https://bookshop.org/a/112456/9781541646339

American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism by Matthew Avery Sutton
Bookshop.org: https://bookshop.org/a/112456/9780674975439

Relevant Links & Resources
Matthew Avery Sutton Faculty Profile
URL: https://history.wsu.edu/faculty/wsu-profile/sutton/
Support Sarah Stankorb’s work and preorder Damned If She Does: Why Women Quit Church and What It Means for the Future of Religion, Releases September 15, 2026.  Bookshop.org: https://bookshop.org/a/112456/9798889837091
Website: https://www.sarahstankorb.com/
Support the show
Keep the conversation going.
Want to learn more about Faithful Politics, suggest a future guest, or connect with us directly?
Visit our website:
faithfulpoliticspodcast.com
Browse our bookstore, featuring books from many of our guests:
faithfulpoliticspodcast.com/bookstore
Support the show and help us keep these conversations going:
patreon.com/cw/FaithfulPolitics
Subscribe for behind-the-scenes content, reflections, and updates:
faithfulpolitics.substack.com
Contact the hosts:
Josh Burtram, Faithful Host: Josh@faithfulpolitics.com
Will Wright, Political Host: Will@faithfulpolitics.com
Follow Faithful Politics:
Instagram: faithful_politics
Facebook: FaithfulPoliticsPodcast

Have a comment? Send us a text! (We read all of them but can't reply). Email us: Will@faithfulpoliticspodcast.com
How did Manifest Destiny become a Christian story about land, providence, and moral duty? 

L. Daniel Hawk, Professor of Old Testament and Hebrew at Ashland Theological Seminary and author of Undoing Manifest Destiny, joins Will Wright and Pastor Josh Burtram to explain how theology helped justify conquest, removal, and Indigenous erasure. Hawk traces Manifest Destiny through John O’Sullivan’s famous phrase, the Doctrine of Discovery, Lewis and Clark’s “Corps of Discovery,” Genesis 1:28, and the settler belief that land had to be owned, fenced, cultivated, and turned into property before it counted as rightly used. 

He also challenges a common assumption: early Americans did not usually justify westward conquest by directly appealing to the book of Joshua. The deeper story, he argues, was a Christianized vision of dominion, civilization, and national innocence. This conversation helps listeners understand how biblical language shaped American expansion, and why that history still matters for churches, politics, and America’s 250th.

Guest bio
Dr. L. Daniel Hawk is Professor of Old Testament and Hebrew at Ashland Theological Seminary. He is the author of Undoing Manifest Destiny: Settler America, Christian Colonists, and the Pursuit of Justice. His work helps explain how biblical interpretation, settler colonialism, and American national identity shaped Christian justifications for conquest, land seizure, and Indigenous erasure.

Book Mentioned
Undoing Manifest Destiny: Settler America, Christian Colonists, and the Pursuit of Justice by L. Daniel Hawk
Bookshop.org: https://bookshop.org/a/112456/9781514008645

Relevant Links & Resources
L. Daniel Hawk Faculty Profile
URL: https://seminary.ashland.edu/faculty-and-staff/l-daniel-hawk/
Support Sarah Stankorb’s work and preorder Damned If She Does: Why Women Quit Church and What It Means for the Future of Religion, Releases September 15, 2026.  Bookshop.org: https://bookshop.org/a/112456/9798889837091
Website: https://www.sarahstankorb.com/
Support the show
Keep the conversation going.
Want to learn more about Faithful Politics, suggest a future guest, or connect with us directly?
Visit our website:
faithfulpoliticspodcast.com
Browse our bookstore, featuring books from many of our guests:
faithfulpoliticspodcast.com/bookstore
Support the show and help us keep these conversations going:
patreon.com/cw/FaithfulPolitics
Subscribe for behind-the-scenes content, reflections, and updates:
faithfulpolitics.substack.com
Contact the hosts:
Josh Burtram, Faithful Host: Josh@faithfulpolitics.com
Will Wright, Political Host: Will@faithfulpolitics.com
Follow Faithful Politics:
Instagram: faithful_politics
Facebook: FaithfulPoliticsPodcast