of several books on the history of American Christianity, including Double Crossed and American Apocalypse, and the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship. He lives in Pullman, Washington.
Sutton applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Chosen Land: How Christianity Made America and Americans Remade Christianity, and reported the following:
The Page 99 Test poses a fun and unique challenge for assessing a 650-page book. It might make more sense to look at pages 99, and also 199, and 299, but the rules are the rules!Visit Matthew Avery Sutton's website.
Page 99 focuses on the life and work of Franciscan priest Junípero Serra and the creation of the California mission system. Convinced he would fulfill prophecies of mass Indigenous conversion, Serra turned north after failures in Baja and helped plan a new network of missions in Alta California, home to hundreds of thousands of Indigenous people already exposed to European disease. He stripped resources from southern missions to supply the new effort and celebrated early baptisms—often of sick children—as signs of divine promise, even as missionaries used aid to draw Native communities into the system. The passage also captures Serra’s extreme penitenial piety. During a sermon, he scourged himself so violently that a man imitated him and died in front of the crowd.
The larger purpose of the book is to explain why the United States looks so different from its peer nations when it comes to religion. Christianity has profoundly shaped American education, politics, economics, popular culture, and foreign policy. I argue that a godless Constitution and a First Amendment that guaranteed religious freedom did not weaken religion but supercharged it. Disestablisent encouraged religious leaders to become entrepreneurs, master new communicatin technologies, and compete aggressively for influence and authority.
The book traces 500 years of competing Christian visions and efforts to apply those visions to everyday life. I also highlight those caught in the middle, such as the Indigenous peoples Serra encountered, and the enslaved, religious minorities, and many others. Some rejected the faith that various Christians tried to impose on them; others embraced it and reshaped it into a tool of resistance, drawing on the God of Exodus to challenge the religious power structures.
This passage on page 99 matters because it shows that the effort to turn North America into God’s chosen land was not confined to the Atlantic seaboard. It stretched all the way to the Pacific. In fact, I open the book with earlier Catholic efforts in the Southwest to remind readers that the Puritans are not the beginning or source of Americans’ sense of divine mission.
Finally, I’m hoping that readers of my book will recognize that the current debates over American politics, polarization, and the culture wars are not new but have been baked into the nation from its very origins. I don’t think we can understand what’s happening in American culture today without understanding the role of religion in our past and the many ways it has been and is being used by competing groups of Americans.
The Page 99 Test: American Apocalypse.
--Marshal Zeringue
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