JMC Resident Historian Elliott Drago sat down with JMC Faculty Partner Mark David Hall to discuss his most recent book, Proclaim Liberty Throughout All the Land: How Christianity Has Advanced Freedom and Equality for All Americans. Dr. Hall is a Professor in Regent University’s Robertson School of Government and a Senior Fellow at the Center for Religion, Culture, and Democracy.
ED: Thank you for taking the time to talk about your wonderful and engaging book! Explain how you came to this project, and what sorts of questions guided you during your research.
MDH: This book was originally conceived as a sequel to my last book, Did America Have a Christian Founding? (Nashville: Nelson Books, 2019). In between the publication of that book and this one, the 1619 Project came out and it made me angry as it was such a profound distortion of American history. For years, academics have been arguing that slavery and racism are central to the American story. And they often suggest that most Christians supported these evils, and that for progress to be made we had to overcome traditional Christian teachings, maybe by rejecting religion altogether, or at least by embracing a progressive manifestation of it. I acknowledge that Christians throughout American history have defended evils such as slavery, racism, and sexism, but I wanted to tell a different story.
My argument is that, on balance, Christianity has been a force for the advancement of liberty and equality from the Puritans to the present day.
