This is the Executive Director of the Brazos Fellows Program and he's a lecturer in history

at Baylor University.

As Director of the Brazos,ows, Professor Gutaker oversees a residential fellowship for college

graduates to deepen their study of Christian theology and history. He earned his PhD in history from

Baylor University and has authored numerous peer-reviewed articles and essays.

But today we're going to be talking about his book, The Old Faith and a New Nation, American

Protestants and the Christian Past.

That book's the topic of our conversation today. Paul Guttinger, welcome to

thinking in public. Thanks so much for having me. Yeah, you know your book is

really fascinating and I think the first question I want to ask is the

genesis of the book so how exactly in working in American church history

did you come up with using the idea of history as American denominations, for example, sought to define themselves.

Yeah, this, you know, many stories I think of scholarship are both intellectual and personal.

And I think that's true for me with this project.

I grew up in Bible churches and Baptist churches and was always interested in this question of how Protestants

understood themselves in relationship to the rest of the church and especially church history in part because this was just not something that my tradition

growing up talked much about and so as I started studying church history in college and then in

grad school one of my first questions was, you know, where does

evangelical Protestantism, where does it locate itself in the story of the church?

And I first started to press into that question

by researching some 18th century evangelicals

who wrote church histories

...