Yesterday we did a post on the most highlighted passages in Kindle e-books. In the wake of that post I thought I would list the most highlighted passages from the Kindle edition of Was America Founded as a Christian Nation?: A Historical Introduction:
1. “First, the past can inspire us. Second, the familiarity of the past helps us to see our common humanity with others who have lived before us. Third, the past gives us a better understanding of our civic identity.”
2. “The people of the Confederate States of America believed that they were citizens of a Christian nation precisely because they upheld the institution of slavery.”
2. “One of my goals in writing Was America Founded as a Christian Nation? is to get Christians to see the danger of cherry-picking from the past as a means of promoting a political or cultural agenda in the present.”
3.”The past is the past—a record of events that occurred in bygone eras. But history is a discipline—the art of reconstructing the past.”
4. “For Beecher, the United States was a Christian nation not because it followed the teaching of the Bible or church tradition, but because of the moral voice of God—the conscience—that could be found in every human being.”
5. “The writings of these constitutional skeptics present an interesting dilemma for those today who want to argue that the Constitution was a Christian document. In the eighteenth century it was those who opposed the Constitution who made the strongest arguments in favor of the United States being a Christian nation.”
6. “The idea that the United States was a “Christian nation” was central to American identity in the years between the Revolution and the Civil War.”
7. “One of my goals in writing Was America Founded as a Christian Nation? is to get Christians to see the danger of cherry-picking from the past as a means of promoting a political or cultural agenda in the present.”
8. “When ministers, politicians, and writers during these years described the United States as a “Christian nation,” they were usually referring to the beliefs and character of the majority of its citizens.“
9. “If there was one universal idea that all the founders believed about the relationship between religion and the new nation, it was that religion was necessary in order to sustain an ordered and virtuous republic.”
10. “Historians are concerned with contingency. This is the notion that “every historical outcome depends upon a number of prior conditions.”
Read more highlighted passages from Was American Founded as a Christian Nation here.
RECOMMENDED READING
FORUM: The New Shape of Christian Public Discourse 
Was America Founded as a Christian Nation? 
Anyone who wants to believe that Independence Day is a Christian holiday should read Frederick Douglass’s “What to a Slave is the Fourth of July?” David Barton speaks at First Baptist-Dallas. 
How to Be an Activist Historian
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