A Chosen Land for a Chosen People? Matthew Avery Sutton on How Christianity Made America and America Remade Christianity

[0:00] Andrew Keen: Hello, my name is Andrew Keen. Welcome to Keen On America, the daily interview show about the United States.

[0:36] Andrew Keen: Hello everybody. Over the years we’ve done many shows on the relationship between the United States and organized religion, particularly Christianity. Lots of shows about how America has shaped certain kinds of Christianity, or how certain kinds of Christians have been shaped by Christianity. Recently, we did a show entitled Why Smart People Still Believe in God by historian of religion Daniel Williams, who wrote a book called The Search for a Rational Faith in which he collapses, in some ways, reason, the Enlightenment, and Christianity.

[1:15] Andrew Keen: In contrast, the year before, we did a show with another religion expert, Jim Wallis—very influential figure, professor of the practice and chair in faith and justice—about how what he calls the "false white gospel" is threatening America. But we’ve never quite done a show on religion, or at least Christianity, as the "thing in itself" in America. And that’s what we’re focusing on today with my guest Matthew Avery Sutton. He has a new book out; it’s called, appropriately enough, Chosen Land: How Christianity Made America and Americans Remade Christianity.

[1:55] Andrew Keen: Matt is joining us from eastern Washington where he lives. Matt, congratulations on the new book. Is that a fair generalization that your new book, Chosen Land, suggests that Christianity is "the thing in itself" in America?

[2:11] Matthew Avery Sutton: Yeah, and of course I realize that every historian is going to talk about their specialty as "the thing" in America. But yeah, I think religion is really important and we under-appreciate and under-value how important it has been to shaping pretty much all of our lives, whether it's foreign policy, domestic policy, culture, pop culture, laws. So yeah, so Christianity is the thing that has shaped the United States more than anything else is what I’m trying to argue.

[2:39] Andrew Keen: I take your point, and it makes a lot of sense to me. Although I might push back and say that you’re certainly not the first or the last person to make this argument. Isn’t it obvious? The country was settled by one kind of religious sect or another and it’s been dominated by religious Christian figures, and even today, the current American president—last week he gave the State of the Union speech—he spoke endlessly about Christianity even if everybody knows he’s not really a Christian. So is this in any way a surprise, Matt?

[3:12] Matthew Avery Sutton: I mean, I hope it is. That’s why I wrote the book. But I guess the readers will tell us. But I think what I’m trying to show in the book is that what we do see today is not that new and is not that extraordinary. And so as frustrating as it may be, as frustrating as it is to have a president who’s using Christianity in such a kind of crass, overt, and hypocritical kind of way, that that’s the air we breathe. That’s the world we live in and this is the world that generations before us made and erected and constructed. And so I’m trying to show how they did it, why they did it, and really ultimately, I think the thing that is unique is how extraordinarily Christian Americans are compared to, you know, their counterparts in Canada or much of Western Europe. And the irony here is that we do that in a country with a very secular, very godless Constitution. And so, how did that happen is the question I’m really trying to get at.

[4:05] Andrew Keen: And not only a godless Constitution, but one in which there are many non-Christians, from non-believers to Jews and Muslims, Hindus. Matt, the big question, of course, in your thesis: is there any one kind of Christianity? I mean, my understanding—again, I certainly have much less professional knowledge of this stuff than you—is that America was founded by different kinds of Christians. There were the Protestant sects to the north, a more aristocratic, less evangelical version in the mid-Atlantic. When you talk about Christianity, what exactly are you talking about? I mean, Catholics, Protestants, Puritans?

[4:48] Matthew Avery Sutton: Yeah, all of the above, except not really. And the reason is that I’m interested in questions of power, not just Christianity for its own sake. And so I don’t focus on every group that claimed Christianity, but what I focus on are those who had the most influence and how they consolidated power around themselves and around their own movements, and then how they used that power to superimpose their values and their ideas and their norms on everybody else. Now within that, though, I do talk about the outsiders. I talk about Black liberationist theologies, about indigenous revivalists, about outsider sects like the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. But the reason I talk about all those groups is because they’re pushing back and they’re helping us understand how dominant the Protestant establishment paradigm was, that in fact the differences show us the idea of religious freedom or separation of church and state are more myths than realities for much of American history.

[5:45] Andrew Keen: As you know, the country has a secular Constitution—in some ways, its idea of itself is secular, or at least for some people. And of course, many of the founding fathers were themselves skeptics, deists, some of them weren’t believers. How much of your argument in Chosen Land about how Christianity made America and Americans remade Christianity—how much of the book is about the way in which the foundation, the revolution against the colonial power, how much of this is bound up in Christianity? And were many of the founding fathers, even if at least in your argument, even if they weren’t consciously Christian, were they articulating a kind of Christian ideology, a Christian narrative, a Christian version of history and time?

[6:36] Matthew Avery Sutton: Yes and no. So, many of them espoused Christianity, they were most of them were members of churches, they, you know, participated regularly in the Christian faith, identified as Christian. But what I’m arguing in the book is that they recognized at the moment of the Revolution and then drafting the Constitution that the country was so diverse that they couldn’t pick essentially a winner. They couldn’t decide which church to establish. It wasn’t going to be the Church of England, obviously, because we just fought a war. And so they had to think about, well, is it going to be the Presbyterians, or the Baptists, or the Anglicans, or the Congregationalists? And they couldn’t decide, and they also wanted to avoid violence. And so the disestablishment clause was pragmatic; it was practical. It wasn’t ideological. It was a way to say, "You know what, we’re going to let all these different mainstream sects practice their religion as they want to practice it."

[7:30] Matthew Avery Sutton: But what they didn’t anticipate, what they didn’t realize, is in doing that, they basically opened up the floodgates. And so those Christians who already had the most power and the most influence then seized even more power. And so what they did was they immediately got to work trying to shape the new nation and to try to infuse it with their own ideas and their own beliefs. And, you know, this takes 10, 20, 30, 40 years—a couple of generations—but eventually the folks who we now think of as the mainstream, they come together and they work together. Again, it's the Methodists, the Baptists, the Episcopalians, the Presbyterians, the Congregationalists, the Anglicans, to establish the nation’s norms. And they also decide who’s going to be on the outside. So the outsiders are going to be the Shakers, the outsiders are going to be the utopians in John Humphrey Noyes's Oneida Community, the outsiders are going to be the small number of Black Christians at the time, those who were enslaved. And so they create this paradigm that’s made possible by the First Amendment but wasn’t necessarily what the founders expected or anticipated. And so, and I’ll shut up quickly, but what ultimately happens is they develop an unofficial Protestant establishment in which they’re able to exercise power and they’re able to determine the boundaries and decide who’s in, who’s out, who’s acceptable, who’s not.

[8:55] Andrew Keen: So is your narrative a kind of coup? Do you suggest that the country was originally founded and made and invented, conceived by people who believed in the very sharp division between church and state, many unbelievers or skeptics, and then in the first few decades of the country’s independent history groups of Christians, consciously or otherwise, got together to take the country over?

[9:24] Matthew Avery Sutton: Yes, in some ways. I wouldn’t use language of coup because most of the founders were Christians. I mean, Jefferson had some skepticism, Franklin had some skepticism, but they were the most radical. George Washington, John Adams, Patrick Henry—they were all much more orthodox, much more mainstream. And so, but what ends up happening is not so much a coup by the Christians; it's those who are in power are able to consolidate their power. And so, you know, many of the business leaders in the area, most of the wealthy plantation owners, the people who had the property and the means, were Christians. And so they were able to use their faith, to integrate their faith with their social, cultural, economic interests. And so this is why we’ve never had a really powerful Christian movement to overthrow capitalism, right? That churches in the United States, with a few exceptions—people like Jim Wallis, who try to push against that—but most Christians in the United States are very comfortable with hierarchies and are very comfortable with capitalism. And that should be no surprise because the founders created it this way, and Christianity just became another tool to help support this.

[10:39] Andrew Keen: Although there is a very rich populist, progressive populist tradition, particularly in the 19th century, of believers who question many aspects of capitalism. But maybe we can come to that a bit later. Matt, how does this play into then the way in which American democracy was popularized—Andrew Jackson in particular? Was Jacksonian democracy, was it a consequence, a cause of what you see of what you argue is this takeover of America by Christianity?

[11:15] Matthew Avery Sutton: Well, and again, I’m a little bit resistant to language of takeover because most of the colonizers were Christians themselves, you know, as you mentioned, the Puritans, the Catholics in the Southwest. I mean, there was never any effort to not impose Christianity on the North American continent from the moment Europeans began to arrive. This is why I call the first chapter "The Christian Invasion." Like, Christians were always at the center of colonizing North American history and then ultimately the crafting of the early Republic. But certainly, there are different versions of Christianity. And in the early Republic, we see the rise of revivalism, which is this form of Christianity that focuses on the individual and the importance of individuals having this conversion experience of, essentially to use today’s language, being "born again." And it is a very democratizing and it is often times anti-intellectual. And so, certainly the rise of a revivalist form of Christianity in which, you know, converts don’t have to memorize creeds, they don’t have to spend years studying their Bibles, they don’t have to be trained and mentored over generations, but can just simply convert, can simply feel, you know, God in their heart—this "strange warming" as John Wesley put it—makes it really easy for them to become Christians. And that goes hand in hand with the rise of democracy among white men—and of course, it's always just white men in this period—but the idea is that a democratic faith fits a democratic population or political system and vice versa, that they’re working together.

[12:56] Andrew Keen: How much was this bound up also in the colonization of the West and what some people might call the mass murder of Native Americans? I want to come to slavery and race in a few minutes. But the way in which America expanded westward and replaced Native Americans was, and that’s really why I guess I brought up Jackson of course, because he’s very much involved with this or at least in justifying it. Were Christian activists of one kind or another, professionally or otherwise, were they very much on the front lines of this westward colonization of the country and of course of the brutal treatment of Native Americans?

[13:38] Matthew Avery Sutton: They were; they were on both sides. And of course there were Native Americans who converted to Christianity and they used Christianity as a tool of liberation. They called for social justice; they emphasized the ways in which Jesus was the liberator, not the enslaver. But at the same time, certainly many of the mainstream denominations were working with president after president after president in trying to shape the West. And so one of the things that I focus on in the book is when we look at the rise of the reservation system, the federal government was paying missionaries, was paying various denominational agencies to send their missionaries onto the reservations, and they basically divvied them up among the Presbyterians and the Quakers, the Catholics, a few other groups. And the purpose was to try to Christianize indigenous peoples. They believed that that would make them more complacent, more compliant, more easily integrated into the American system. But again, there’s always those who are pushing back, there’s always those who are challenging this from within Christianity—both white folks and indigenous folks. But the ones with the most power are the ones who are winning the story, who are winning the battle, and who are conquering the West.

[14:52] Andrew Keen: When you say "the most power," do you mean ideology, military power, economic power?

[14:58] Matthew Avery Sutton: It's really all of the above: social, political, capital. I mean, they’re the ones who have access to government leaders; in some cases, they are the government leaders. They’re the ones who can lobby. They’re the ones who are, you know, and if the government is looking, you know, federal leaders are looking at Indian reservations and trying to say, "What are we going to do with these folks?" the missionaries are stepping up and saying, "We’ll fix this problem for you." And so it's cheap for the government; instead of sending in the army, they can send in the Presbyterians. And the army is there, the army is waiting in forts right on the outside in case things go bad, but it's the missionaries who are at the front lines trying to do this, trying to conquer the West.

[15:40] Andrew Keen: So it's always had this evangelical revolutionary quality. Your last book—or one of your previous books which did rather well—American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism. In the way you’re explaining it, Matt, evangelicalism was the foundation of America, modern or otherwise. Is that fair?

[16:03] Matthew Avery Sutton: Yeah, so this gets a little complicated. I actually don’t use the word "evangelical" to describe anybody before 1940...

[16:10] Andrew Keen: Because it's such a hard word to say on a podcast!

[16:13] Matthew Avery Sutton: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, the word gets used so broadly and is used in, you know, across Western Europe and the United States and it's translated into many different languages...

[16:22] Andrew Keen: And it's usually—sorry to jump in here, and you know this better than I do—it's usually used in a pejorative sense. Most people when they talk about evangelicals are using it, certainly on this show, maybe I don’t get that many evangelicals on the show themselves, but they mean it critically. They don’t like the word, or it suggests something that’s somehow gone wrong.

[16:43] Matthew Avery Sutton: Yeah, that’s funny. So the scholars, though, often the historians, will often use the word in a positive way: that the evangelicals are the folks who are at the forefront of the human rights campaigns, women’s rights, abolition. And I find that problematic because what they’re trying to do is hold up a lens to the modern religious right and say—and Jim Wallis does this—and say, "You’ve forgotten your history, you’ve forgotten your rich tradition, you’ve forgotten all of the things that you did before." And in fact, they’re very different kinds of people doing very different kinds of things. So when I talk about evangelicals, I’m really looking at a 20th-century phenomenon that comes out of World War II that really is fundamentalism. I think fundamentalism is a better word for it, which is also very pejorative, even more so probably than evangelical.

[17:31] Andrew Keen: Let's go back to the 19th century briefly. Of course, it was dominated by the American Civil War which is often... well, I mean, obviously the war was about slavery, but many people have also argued it was a war about economics, ownership, the kind of country America should become. In your view and in Chosen Land, do you argue that the Civil War was also a civil religious war between two versions or more than two versions of American Christianity?

[18:03] Matthew Avery Sutton: Yeah, I would explain it a little bit differently. When I write about the Civil War, Lincoln is at the center of that story and I open the book with Lincoln because he’s such a fascinating figure because the point of calling the book Chosen Land is Americans have this sense that they’re exceptional, that they’re unique, and that we—the new we, Americans—are the new Israel, God’s kind of last greatest kingdom setting the stage for the millennium. And Lincoln wasn’t so sure. I mean, Lincoln actually used the language of Americans as an "almost chosen people." And that was pretty extraordinary to say that the Americans are not quite chosen yet.

[18:43] Matthew Avery Sutton: And so I talk about and I look in the book at how he infused the war with religion, with ideology, but it's a little more humble than actually the Confederates. The Confederates are the ones who craft a constitution that acknowledges God, acknowledges Jesus Christ. They believe the nation has gone off the rails because the Constitution was so secular and was so godless. And the other way that I talk about the Civil War is because it's competing groups of Christians. It's Presbyterians killing Presbyterians and Methodists killing Methodists. And so it really exposes the fragility of this effort to build this Christian utopia when you can’t settle the question of slavery.

[19:28] Andrew Keen: So in a sense the way you’re presenting it, everything American is religious, one way or the other. It's rather like fish writing a history of the ocean or something.

[19:39] Matthew Avery Sutton: Yes and no, but I mean if we poll Americans, the vast majority say they’re Christian. So does it matter?

[19:46] Andrew Keen: When you say "the vast majority," what are the numbers?

[19:49] Matthew Avery Sutton: So today it's just under two-thirds. It has been much more throughout...

[19:53] Andrew Keen: I mean, that’s 60-what? That’s a little over 60%. I wouldn’t call that the vast majority, Matt.

[19:59] Matthew Avery Sutton: Right, but we’re at a low point. It's been more throughout most of American history. And we may be at a moment where we are going to become secular and this is the question: is this the end of Christian America? And this is why I think the religious right and Trump and his supporters are so defensive is because they recognize what’s happening, they can see the handwriting on the wall, and so they’re doubling down on Christian nationalism which may be the last gasp, or maybe we’re going to wake up tomorrow and there’s going to be a massive revival—we don’t know. But certainly, yes, my point is to infuse the centrality of Christianity into the moments, the major turning points of American history, because too often I think scholars of the Civil War, scholars of the Revolution, scholars of the Progressive Era don’t pay enough attention to religion, and vice versa, scholars of religion don’t pay enough attention to what’s actually happening outside of their churches or synagogues or temples to see what it is that’s actually shaping the way we practice religion in the United States.

[21:05] Andrew Keen: Matt, the greatest modern scholar I think of religion was the German sociologist Max Weber, who basically invented I think the field of history or sociology of religion. He, of course, is particularly famous for his thesis on the origins of capitalism, which he associated with certain sects of Protestantism. Do you think he’s right to make sense of capitalism, and particularly American capitalism? Do we have to understand the Weberian thesis about the absence of salvation?

[21:39] Matthew Avery Sutton: Yeah, I mean it's persuasive. Like everything, I mean there’s always going to be nuances and exceptions and challenges to it. But certainly what I discovered in doing my research for this book was the profound and powerful ways that capitalism bolsters Christianity and vice versa, and that it wasn’t a denominational or an ideological thing; that it was the liberals as much as the conservatives, the revivalists as much as anybody else. They all needed money, right? Because if you separate church from state, if you disestablish Christianity—and this becomes one of the central arguments of the book—then those people who are Christian leaders, they need to make Christianity a consumer product. They need to give the American people something they want. They’re competing with entertainments, with sports, with media, with plays and then later television and movies, etc., etc., etc. And so they have to be aggressive and ambitious and current. They have to be relevant. And so they’re continuously reinventing Christianity every generation to make sure that it's current with what’s happening to keep people in their churches. Because if they don’t have people in their churches, the lights are going to go off, the doors are going to close, the furnace is going to crash. And so they tend to be entrepreneurs and they tend to be masters at new technologies and masters at communication because they have to do all these things to compete. And so that’s another thing that sets American Christianity apart from much of the rest of the world is, again, an unintended consequence of the disestablishment clause.

[23:23] Andrew Keen: It's a very interesting thesis. It's almost a Trumpian thesis of Christianity, that it's controlled and made by salesmen in their search for power. You yourself are the chair of the history department at your university, Washington State University. You’re the Claudius and Mary Johnson Distinguished Professor—I’m not sure whether they were religious or Christians, one of the two-thirds in America. Are you, are you a Christian, Matt?

[23:54] Matthew Avery Sutton: I tend to try to dodge those questions and focus on the scholarship and not my own personal history.

[23:59] Andrew Keen: But isn’t that central? I mean you’re writing about Christianity.

[24:02] Matthew Avery Sutton: Yes. I grew up, I actually grew up in an evangelical subculture in Southern California, went to Christian schools K-12 and college. I double-majored in history and Bible. I actually started as a Bible major and fell in love with history and realized history was a much more powerful way to understand Christianity. And so, you know, like everybody else I’ve had moments of faith and moments of doubt and questions and... but nevertheless, I feel like in terms of my career, I have a foot in both worlds: that because I was in that world, and much of my family is in that world, I can explain it to outsiders in a way that makes sense to them, but I can also help outsiders, I hope, understand a little bit more of what makes religious people tick, what makes them understand the world the way they do.

[24:55] Andrew Keen: Have you written Chosen Land as a kind of regret, how Christianity made America and Americans remade Christianity? So many of these books on religion are deeply polemical one way or the other. Are you suggesting that perhaps America could have had a happier, better, richer, fairer history if Christianity hadn’t been so dominant?

[25:19] Matthew Avery Sutton: So what my favorite characters in the book are the folks I call the "liberationists." So these are the indigenous preachers who convert and see Jesus as a liberating figure; they’re the Black preachers; they’re, you know, the gay rights activists in the 1960s and 1970s who use Christianity; they’re people like Barack Obama who believe that the Democratic Party needs to take religion more seriously than it does.

[25:46] Andrew Keen: Probably Jim Wallis too, right?

[25:47] Matthew Avery Sutton: And Jim Wallis, yeah, Jim Wallis too. And so for me, the story is not so much a regret, but that there are alternative visions of Christianity, and that if we are more conscious as Americans of our race, of our class, of our gender, we might recognize that we read the Bible, we understand our faith on the basis of our social location. And if Christians were a little more reflective about this, maybe they would help craft a more just, more egalitarian, more human rights-focused world. But that’s not what I was doing in the book; I’m like just trying to tell the story of how we got here. But in terms of my own ideology, I mean, certainly there are heroes in the book, and the heroes are the ones who see Jesus as this radical figure who wants to overturn hierarchies and wants to bring equality across different groups of people.

[26:38] Andrew Keen: But of course that—what you call the ideology, maybe of social justice—you don’t have to be a Christian to believe in that.

[26:46] Matthew Avery Sutton: No. No, you certainly don’t. No. But because so many Americans identify as Christian, those who do identify as Christian can find a social justice message in the Bible. But certainly, it's not exclusive at all. And in fact, I guess I should say the other thing about this is when the Supreme Court began focusing on Jefferson and Jefferson’s idea that the First Amendment represented the establishment of a high wall between church and state—which doesn’t really happen, that’s not basic American jurisprudence until 1947—I like that. I’m glad the Court adopted that rationale; I’m glad they took Jefferson’s idea. And now we’re seeing the Roberts Court roll that back. And I think the argument against the Roberts Court should be about pluralism and about democracy and about human rights; it shouldn’t be about history. Because I think we actually lose the historical argument when Gorsuch says what happened in the 19th century was okay, so we can go back to that. He’s right; he’s a better... has a better understanding of Christianity than a lot of liberals do and of American history. But that doesn’t mean that’s where we should go in the future. I think we need to do things differently in the future to be more inclusive.

[28:02] Andrew Keen: The future certainly seems to be up for grabs. We did a show a few years ago with Margaret Atwood, of course the author of the great novel The Handmaid’s Tale, and she told me in our conversation—I’m sure she’s said it many times before—that she wrote the book, I think she was living in Germany or certainly not in the United States or Canada, with one eye or perhaps two eyes on the United States. And it seems to be a remarkably, in early 2026, remarkably prescient book about some sort of evangelical religious dictatorship with a cult of fecundity. I’m sure you’re familiar with the book. Did Atwood get it right? Was it an effective warning against the victory of the evangelicals?

[28:55] Matthew Avery Sutton: Ah, you know, if you’d asked me this ten years ago, I would have said "no." When I was writing American Apocalypse or publishing American Apocalypse—if you asked me today, I think maybe much more so than I realized at the time, and that was 2014, so before Trump came down the elevator. Today, it's... and this is the whole point, right? This is why you’re asking the question because Margaret Atwood got it right years before most of the rest of us saw it. And even those of us who should have known better, those of us studying this stuff, who had spent our careers immersed in evangelical ideology and Christian ideology. But yeah, I mean, I think there is a tendency in a major part of contemporary American evangelicalism that is pretty threatening to, you know, small-L liberal ideals. And they don’t even pretend that they’re not, that they recognize that they want to create this kingdom of God as they would define the kingdom of God, which is not the way the liberationist preachers would understand the kingdom of God. It's a very hierarchical, very powerful, top-down kind of kingdom of God that also, as you point out, is extraordinarily undermining of any kind of gender equality or equality of folks who have...

[30:17] Andrew Keen: Well, it's rooted in, it seems to be, in one kind of male dominance: sexual, political, economic, or otherwise. You wrote an interesting piece last year for The Guardian on Peter Thiel. I don’t think many of our viewers and listeners are great fans of him—he doesn’t have a lot of fans, I think, on the left in American politics these days. The title was "The Antichrist has long haunted American politics. Now it's rearing its head again." Thiel gave a couple of very, in my view at least, odd speeches in the US, populist speeches about the appearance or reappearance of the Antichrist. What is happening, Matt, with guys like Thiel? I mean, Thiel is a one-off I guess, but he’s a very smart guy but also a very odd guy. How seriously should we be taking speeches by Peter Thiel about the dangers of the Antichrist? It sounds to me as if he’s been watching too many Lord of the Rings movies or reading too many of the books. But he’s an enormously powerful man with a great deal of political and economic influence.

[31:21] Matthew Avery Sutton: So the reason apocalyptic ideas are so powerful is because when we look at a world that’s chaotic and that we don’t understand, in which we don’t know where we’re going, it provides comfort, right? Because then it identifies, it helps you see who are the winners, who are the losers, who are the good guys, who are the bad guys. And of course, in Peter Thiel’s mind, he’s the good guy, he’s the winner, he’s the one who’s going to right the ship. While Greta Thunberg and others, you know, the leftists, the liberals, the environmentalists—that they’re the bad guys, they’re the Antichrist, they’re the demons. And so whether or not he actually believes this stuff or finds it useful is, you know, always hard to determine—I obviously don’t know him. But it was odd; I mean, it was unusual to see somebody of his power and his influence, who has not been real active in religious circles other than, you know, some dabbling in Catholicism as far as I’m aware, to make that kind of argument. But the argument is one that we could trace back to Billy Graham; we could trace back to folks in the 19th century. It's one that has resonated with different groups of Christians throughout US history, and that’s why I find it so fascinating that it's now, you know, being used to justify Silicon Valley’s takeover of the world.

[32:33] Andrew Keen: How fearful, Matt, should we be of the apocalyptic narrative that seems to... that many American Christians seem to be comfortable with? You wrote American Apocalypse. Given the dangerous state of the world—the world’s always been dangerous, but it seems particularly dangerous these days in the context of Ukraine and Taiwan and what’s happening in Venezuela and Cuba—do you think that there’s a danger that this apocalyptic turn in American Christianity can somehow justify or nudge America towards some sort of catastrophic war overseas?

[33:14] Matthew Avery Sutton: In general, no, because the folks who are the leading apocalyptists are not idiots. And so what they recognize—and I’m sorry, I’m not trying to be funny—but they kind of recognize that there’s a tension between believing Jesus is coming back tomorrow but he may not come back for a thousand years. And so Ronald Reagan is the classic example: that he seemed to truly believe the end of the world was imminent, that he bought into this apocalyptic theology, but he was also willing to negotiate arms treaties with the Soviet Union and to try to de-escalate. And so for people like Ronald Reagan, for people like Jerry Falwell, they would say, "We believe the end might come tomorrow, but we need to live as though it's not going to be for a thousand years." What makes me nervous today, though, is somebody like Pete Hegseth. I’m not so sure Pete Hegseth understands theology as well as Billy Graham or Ronald even Reagan did. And so, you know, if you got Pete Hegseth near the... yeah, near the nuclear trigger, I would get very nervous very fast.

[34:16] Andrew Keen: There is a reading, particularly on the left, of all these people, that they’re just to put it politely, hypocrites, and you could make... you could come up with some much more impolite words for people like Falwell and often the narratives around them, the sexual scandals, the financial scandals, justify that. To what extent, Matt, in your book in Chosen Land, do a lot of these people... are they just scoundrels of one kind or another? Simply on the make who recognize that preaching to people less smart than themselves will make them powerful politically and economically, culturally and sexually, and that they basically turns them into Jeffrey Epstein and allows them to do whatever they want?

[35:04] Matthew Avery Sutton: Yeah, so I very much disagree. I mean, to say that if we look at which populations in the US have the highest religious adherence, one of them is Black Christians. So are we saying that Black folks are too dumb to think for themselves and to buy into...

[35:22] Andrew Keen: No, I’m not saying that.

[35:23] Matthew Avery Sutton: No, I know you didn’t, but that’s the conclusion, right? If people who take religion seriously are idiots, then the groups that take religion more seriously then are the dumbest. And so no, so I think the vast majority of them are true believers who are really just trying to figure out a way to give meaning to their lives, and religion for some offers it. For others it's yoga, for others it's mindfulness, for others it's Zen. There are lots of ways to do these kinds of things. But within that, of course there are the scoundrels, of course there are the hucksters, of course there are the, you know, the confidence men...

[35:57] Andrew Keen: The grifters, the Trump...

[35:58] Matthew Avery Sutton: The grifters, absolutely! And I definitely tell their stories too in the book. You know, I spend one of the readers of the book pushed back—early reader—pushed back on how much time I spent on Jim Jones and David Koresh and on the prosperity preachers. These guys are all hucksters. I mean, they’re all looking to enrich themselves and I certainly don’t shy away from that. But I do think there are also earnest believers who are trying to do the right thing across Christian worlds.

[36:31] Andrew Keen: Finally, Matt, if all this is cyclical and Christianity made America and Americans remade Christianity, it's not something that’s going to disappear in the wash. How much of this is generational? How realistic is another revival? I mean, you could I guess interpret the counterculture as a kind of revivalism, maybe not particularly Christian but had Christian elements. You’ve written an interesting piece about how Ozzy Osbourne taught kids to rebel by subverting Christianity, but of course when you subvert Christianity, you probably are being a Christian of one kind or another. To what extent are you hopeful that young people will come along and perhaps make America more Christian or remake American Christianity to make it slightly more palatable for those of us who don’t believe?

[37:26] Matthew Avery Sutton: Yeah, you know, it's a great question. And I... we know that the demographics are changing, that more and more people are identifying as the "nones"—N-O-N-E—non-Christian, agnostic, atheist. It may well be that we’re at the end of Christian America, that it's at its last gasp. I suspect, and I think the polling data bears this out, that Trump is so outrageously hypocritical, that he’s so clearly using Christianity and Christian people for his own enrichment, for his own narcissism, that I think young people are seeing that even more so than, you know, Gen X folks my age or boomers even older. And so, it may well be that in the religious right anointing Trump as their savior, they’ve hammered the final nail into their coffin and this is it, that we’re going to become more secular, we’re going to become more like Canada or the UK. But at the same time, every time scholars say that, every time we say we’re at the eve of a new secular paradise or utopia, we have a revival. And so I don’t know what the future is going to hold, but I certainly, you know, the way things are trending, I suspect we’re going to get more secular and that’ll be just fine.

[38:43] Andrew Keen: Well, a very interesting thesis. It's out this week: Chosen Land: How Christianity Made America and Americans Remade Christianity. Interestingly enough, it's not entitled Chosen People; maybe it could be Chosen Land for a Chosen People. But Matthew, that was interesting conversation. Matthew Avery Sutton, author of Chosen Land, congratulations on the new book. And this—as I always say at the end of every show, sometimes I half mean it, this one's for sure—this story has no end yet. Thank you so much.

[39:19] Matthew Avery Sutton: Thanks, Andrew. It was a lot of fun.