#222 Was America Founded as a Christian Nation? w/ John Fea

The Road to Now

Benjamin Sawyer

Society & Culture, History

4.8 • 628 Ratings

🗓️ 7 February 2022

⏱️ 53 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Bob speaks with Messiah College's John Fea about Christianity in Early America and the ways that the founders viewed the relationship between faith and politics. Fea outlines the "5 Cs" of history, the importance of approaching history with an open mind, and explains why he thinks the title of his book Was America Founded as a Christian Nation? may not be the question in approaching Christianity's role in the establishment of the United States.

John Fea is Professor of American History and Chair of the Department of History at Messiah College and host of the podcast The Way of Improvement Leads Home. He is the author or editor of four books, including Was America Founded as a Christian Nation: A Historical Introduction (Westminster/ John Knox Press, 2011) & Why Study History?: Reflecting on the Importance of the Past (Baker Academic, 2013) and his essays and reviews have appeared in a variety of scholarly and popular venues.

This episode originally aired in February 2018 as part of RTN Theology #2. We are releasing it as RTN #222 because it's an important conversation that we think should be featured on both feeds. A full list of RTN Theology episodes are available anywhere you're listening to The Road to Now.

Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm Ben Sawyer and this is The Road to Now.
0:12.2	Today's episode is a conversation with John Fia.
0:16.4	He's professor of American history at Messiah College.
0:19.2	And in this conversation, Bob spoke with him
0:21.7	about his book, Was America Founded as a Christian Nation? It came out in 2011. This conversation,
0:29.0	it originally aired as Road to Now Theology No. 2 in 2018, but it is so important right now.
0:42.3	John came on last year to talk about the 1776 Commission, this attempt to create a, quote, patriotic history.
0:44.3	The institution that was primarily behind that, Hillsdale College, has recently emerged as pretty important in my own state of Tennessee, where our governor, Bill Lee, has recently announced
0:55.4	that he will be partnering with them to produce new textbooks for our public charter schools.
1:02.6	Bob and I plan to talk more about this on upcoming episodes, but for now, I feel like this
1:07.3	episode, this conversation with John Fiat, is a really good place to start in trying to wrap your head around the issues that come from trying to impose an ideological view of her history.
1:18.4	One of the things I love about John Fia is he's a great scholar and he himself is an evangelical Christian.
1:24.2	He spent time with the documents.
1:26.0	He finds no conflict between a rigorous reading of
1:29.4	history and his own faith. And that to me is really the way it should go. I've never understood
1:36.5	why people feel like they don't tell a story to someone, make sure that they hear it over and
1:41.7	over again, that somehow that story won't work.
1:45.8	People are smart. And the problem becomes that if you tell people a story that doesn't quite
1:51.3	correspond with the way things were, I mean, from your perspective, you should be worried about
1:56.0	losing them. Honestly, once they get a little bit outside of there and read the truth and go into the documents.
2:03.9	But from the other hand, to me, it's scary because this country is all of ours.
2:10.4	It doesn't belong to any one person.
	...

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