You're listening to a bonus episode of the Daily Article podcast, presented by the Denison Forum.

The following bonus episode of Denison Forum's interview with author Mark David Hall was recorded in early 2020.

Hall refers to a couple of court cases that were then underway, which have just recently been decided.

Please enjoy this interview with the author of, Did America Have a Christian Founding.

Dr. Hall, thank you so much for joining us today and very much looking forward to the conversation where we get to discuss your book.

To start off with, I would love it if your book kind of seems like it came out of

the 2010 lecture you gave entitled, Did America Have a Christian Founding? And I was curious,

did you expect it to turn into a project that would go beyond that or something that has been

the next decade working on? No, not at all. In fact,

yeah, I've worked broadly on religion in the American founding for probably 10 years before I

gave that lecture. But I was invited to give a lecture at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C.

And when I showed up, I was pleasantly surprised to see C-SPAN had shown up to cover it.

And so that was a nice surprise.

And then I gave the lecture, and I came up with a polished version that was then published

by the Heritage Foundation.

And we discovered a few years ago that it had been downloaded 300,000 times, which is astronomical for an academic who's used to writing books sell maybe 600 copies. And so I was able to use that number to get a contract with Nelson Books to write my first book for the general reading public. So I've done a dozen academic books, either written or edited, But this is my first book for the general reading

public. And it's a great book, too. You do an amazing job of boiling down the research in a way

that it's clear and concise and very easy to understand whether you have a background in history

or not. And why do you think it struck a chord with so many people?

You know, I think if you look at the academic literature and a lot of the popular literature,

just time and time again, scholars are popular writers who should know better, say things like

most of America's founders were deist. They created a godless constitution.

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