Bill McKibben--award-winning author, activist, educator--is fiercely curious. "I'm curious about what went so suddenly sour with American patriotism, American faith, and American prosperity." Like so many of us, McKibben grew up believing--knowing--that the United States was the greatest country on earth. As a teenager, he cheerfully led American Revolution tours in Lexington, Massachusetts. He sang "Kumbaya" at church. And with the remarkable rise...

In this short primer, Gorski and Perry explain what white Christian nationalism is and is not; when it first emerged and how it has changed; where it's headed and why it threatens democracy. Tracing the development of this ideology over the course of three centuries and especially its influence over the last three decades, they show how white Christian nationalism motivates the anti-democratic, authoritarian, and violent impulses on display in our...

"A scholar of American Christianity answers perhaps the most bewildering question of our time: Why are evangelicals "the Donald's" most fervent supporters? Donald Trump is a libertine who lacks even basic knowledge of the Christian faith. Yet in 2016 he won 81 percent of the white evangelical vote, and continues to rely on white evangelicals as his base of support. While we assume the religious right has pragmatic reasons for backing Trump, in truth...

"White settlers saw land for the taking. They failed to consider the perspective of the people already here. In 'The Land Is Not Empty', author Sarah Augustine unpacks the harm of the Doctrine of Discovery - a set of laws rooted in the fifteenth century that gave Christian governments the moral and legal right to seize lands they "discovered" despite those lands already being populated by indigenous peoples. Legitimized by the church and justified...

"Evangelical Christians are perhaps the most polarizing--and least understood--people living in America today. In his seminal new book, The Kingdom, the Power and the Glory, journalist Tim Alberta, himself a practicing Christian and the son of an evangelical preacher, paints an expansive and profoundly troubling portrait of the American evangelical movement. Through the eyes of televangelists and small-town preachers, celebrity revivalists and everyday...

In One Nation Under God, award-winning historian Kevin M. Kruse argues that the story of Christian America begins with the Great Depression, when a coalition of businessmen and religious leaders united in opposition to the New Deal. As Kruse shows, corporations from General Motors and Kraft Foods to J.C. Penney and Hilton Hotels, poured money into the coffers of conservative religious leaders, who in turn used those funds to attack FDR's New Deal...