Proclaim Liberty Throughout All the Land: How Christianity Has Advanced Freedom and Equality for All Americans
By Mark David Hall
JMC faculty partner Mark David Hall releases a new book this April, Proclaim Liberty Throughout All the Land: How Christianity Has Advanced Freedom and Equality for All Americans:
Scholars and popular authors regularly claim that Christianity, at least orthodox Christianity, has fostered oppression and intolerance. A common narrative is that liberty and equality have been advanced primarily when America’s leaders embrace progressive manifestations of religion or reject faith altogether.
Proclaim Liberty Throughout All the Land demonstrates that Christianity is responsible for advancing liberty and equality for all citizens. Throughout American history, Christians have been motivated by their faith to create fair and just institutions, fight for political freedom, oppose slavery, and secure religious liberty for all.
The New York Times’s 1619 Project is only a recent and prominent manifestation of the tendency of journalists, academics, and popular writers to portray American Christianity as a force of oppression and intolerance. Without shying away from the ways in which the Christian faith has been used to defend and even encourage harmful practices, Proclaim Liberty Throughout All the Land shows that it has far more often been a force for good.
From the American Puritans—who created some of the most republican and free institutions the world had ever seen—to America’s founders’ opposition to slavery, to contemporary Christian legal advocacy groups that fight to protect religious liberty for everyone, this volume offers an important corrective to those who would downplay the role Christianity has played in advancing liberty and equality for all citizens.
Mark David Hall is the Herbert Hoover Distinguished Professor of Politics at George Fox University and the Director of the John Dickinson Forum for the Study of America’s Founding Principles, a JMC partner program. Professor Hall’s primary research and writing interests are American political theory and the relationship between religion and politics. He has written or co-edited several books besides Proclaim Liberty Throughout All the Land, including Did America Have a Christian Founding? and is the author of more than 100 journal articles, book chapters, reviews and sundry pieces. In addition to teaching at George Fox University, Hall is Associated Faculty at the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University, Senior Fellow at Baylor University’s Institute for Studies of Religion, and an Affiliate Scholar at the John Jay Institute.
Professor Hall is a JMC faculty partner.
Learn more about Mark David Hall >>
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