Table Of Contents
Warren Throckmorton, The Christian Past That Wasn’t: Debunking the Christian Nationalist Myths That Hijack History. Broadleaf Books, 2026. ISBN: 9798889835837 #
This is a patient, careful, and timely book. It takes aim at a way of imagining the American past that has turned politically dangerous. Throckmorton is not attacking Christianity’s place in American history. He is not questioning the faith of early Americans. Many of them were religious, and he says so. His target is a stronger and more specific claim: that the United States was founded as a Christian nation, under a covenant with God, with founding documents drawn from the Bible and a public order meant to favor Christianity. His answer is blunt. That past is a myth. And the myth matters, because people use it to justify real political projects right now. Learn more about the book on the Christian Past website.
A fact-checker, not a historian #
The book works because Throckmorton knows what kind of book it is. He is not writing a sweeping academic history of religion and the founding. He is writing a fact-checking brief against a set of claims that keep coming back. The preface explains how he got here. He came to this work from psychology, from blogging, and from public fights over figures like Bryan Fischer and David Barton. He did not take the usual historian’s path
The chapters are built around stories you have probably heard and if not enough context is provided to get up to speed.Throckmorton invites wants ordinary readers to do one thing: check what the sources actually say. Fact check him, fact check the news, put in the work checking sources and reading primary documents for yourself. He is especially writing for Christians who first met these claims in church, in school, on a podcast, or in a campaign speech.
The opening example shows the method in miniature. Christian nationalist retellings love the story of Benjamin Franklin’s 1787 motion for prayer at the Constitutional Convention. In the popular version, the founders knelt, prayed, and then produced a God-inspired Constitution. Throckmorton slows the scene down and lets the record speak. Franklin did propose prayer. Roger Sherman seconded it. The delegates debated. Hugh Williamson pointed out that the Convention had no money to pay a chaplain. Edmund Randolph offered a compromise. Then the Convention adjourned without ever voting on it. Franklin himself later wrote that, except for “three or four persons,” the Convention thought prayers were unnecessary (Du Mez's The Conversation). The point is not that religion was missing. The point is that the myth has to turn a failed motion into a sacred founding moment.
The seven myths #
The book moves through seven myths in order:
- America is a covenant homeland for European Protestants.
- Colonial church establishments prove America is a Christian nation.
- The founders were orthodox Christians.
- The founders built a Christian government.
- The Declaration and the Constitution are based on the Bible.
- America’s virtues cancel out its sins.
- Christianity should be promoted in public schools.
Each chapter uses the same move. Throckmorton explores the the claim in details and then he explores Christian nationalist storytellers blow up (whatever kernels of truth there may be) into a false story about the whole nation.
The “limited truth” strategy #
This “limited truth” method is the book’s strongest tool. Throckmorton does not pretend the past was secular. Many colonists were devout. Several colonies had established churches. Biblical language ran through public life. Protestant assumptions shaped early schooling. He concedes all of it.
Then he shows that none of it proves the point Christian nationalists want it to prove. Colonial establishments were plural, local, and unstable. After independence, the country moved toward disestablishment, not toward a national church. The founders’ beliefs varied widely, and several of the most important ones look less like orthodox evangelicals and more like theistic rationalists. The Constitution contains no covenant with God. It bans religious tests for office. It protects religious liberty by refusing to establish any faith at all.
So the reader is not asked to choose between a Christian founding and an atheist one. That is a false choice, and exposing it is half the work. The real founding was messier than either side’s slogan, and the mess is the truth.
The moral core: conquest, slavery, and race #
The most important chapters are the ones that refuse to separate Christian-America mythology from conquest, slavery, and racial hierarchy.
In the chapter on covenant, Throckmorton argues that the “chosen Protestant homeland” story erases Indigenous people and enslaved Africans. It has to. A homeland promised to one people is a homeland taken from another. He traces the line from European Christian claims of discovery and possession, through the doctrine of discovery, into the cleaned-up accounts of colonization that came later (Myth One).
The chapter on virtues and sins presses the same wound. A national story that needs America to be uniquely Christian has only two options when it meets an atrocity. It can shrink the atrocity down to nothing. Or it can recast it as a regrettable exception inside a providential plan. Either way, the myth survives by editing the evidence. This is where Throckmorton meets recent scholarship most directly. Christian nationalism is not just a pile of historical mistakes. It is an ideology about belonging, threat, and power. The bad history is the tool, not the goal.
A live political fight #
Throckmorton’s book is not about dusty arguments. It is about the present.
Kristin Kobes Du Mez places the book in the long shadow of David Barton. She notes that Throckmorton and Michael Coulter’s criticism of Barton’s The Jefferson Lies helped push Thomas Nelson to withdraw that book in 2012. CBS Texas reported the cancellation at the time. Du Mez also points to a current effort: using the country’s 250th anniversary to sell a “Christian America” story to a new generation.
Baptist News Global’s interview drives home the policy stakes. The same myths now feed religious liberty commissions, Ten Commandments laws in public schools, anti-Muslim politics, abortion bans, and the claim that church-state separation is a lie. So this is not antiquarian work. It is an intervention in a live fight over who gets to claim the power of the state.
Why the myths feel true #
The book is also smart about emotion. Throckmorton knows a myth survives because people want it, not because it checks out.
Chapter 2, “Hijacking History,” works through the Washington-at-Valley-Forge prayer scene and Parson Weems’s invented Washington stories. These are case studies in how a flattering fiction hardens into public memory. David Barton runs through the whole book as the modern heir to that tradition: a popularizer who hands his audience certainty, heroes, and political permission (“Hijacking History”).
Here Throckmorton’s psychology training quietly does its work. He is not only asking whether a claim is false. He is asking why people need it to be true. In the conclusion he names the reasons. Group identity, fear, and the desire for power make these myths attractive. They are most attractive to white Christian Americans who want a usable story of national greatness (Conclusion).
Where the book falls short #
The book’s weaknesses come straight out of its strengths.
Because it is built to debunk, it says less about the real and sometimes good role of religion in American public life. The Presbyterian Outlook review makes this case well. The reviewer wishes Throckmorton had spent more time on Lincoln’s “almost chosen people,” and on the honest, democratic uses of biblical language in movements for justice. Religious speech built the abolitionist and civil rights movements too. A debunking book has little room to say so.
If you want that fuller picture, read Throckmorton alongside other work. Philip Gorski’s American Covenant takes civil religion seriously. Michael Walzer’s Exodus and Revolution shows how biblical narrative fuels political liberation. Randall Balmer maps the rise of the religious right. The older Noll, Hatch, and Marsden volume The Search for Christian America covers much of the same ground from inside evangelical scholarship. These books help you separate Christian nationalism from other kinds of religious politics, including the kind that frees people rather than dominates them.
The second weakness is tone. Naming today’s mythmakers is part of what makes the book useful. But it can narrow the view down to bad actors and bad claims. Publishers Weekly, quoted on the book site, praises the evidence but says the book sometimes slides into personal attacks on figures like Barton (cf. Christian Past). Do not overstate that complaint. Naming the people who spread these myths matters, because the myths travel through real institutions and media networks. Still, the strongest version of the argument is not that a few people are uniquely dishonest. It is that a whole audience, a whole set of institutions, and a whole structure of political incentives keeps rewarding distorted history. The individuals are symptoms.
The conclusion #
The conclusion is the most theological part of the book.
Throckmorton does not ends with the Golden Rule. If Christians do not want another religion to rule them through the state, they should not want their own religion to rule everyone else. He calls America an unfinished experiment. He calls church-state separation a practical achievement that protects both the government and the church.
The counter-truths he leaves you with are sober and clear:
- America was formed through conquest and colonization.
- Colonial establishments do not define the national founding.
- The founders’ beliefs varied.
- The charter documents separate church and state.
- Those documents were not drawn from the Bible.
- Honest history has to include the atrocities done to marginalized people.
- Public schools may not put Christianity above other faiths.
(Conclusion)
Verdict #
That final posture is why The Christian Past That Wasn’t deserves a wide readership. It is not the last word on American religion or civil religion or Christian nationalism. It does not try to be. It is a well-documented handbook for answering one specific political and theological myth.
Its best readers are pastors, teachers, students, journalists, and church members who need compact, sourced answers to claims that sound true only because they get repeated so often. Throckmorton’s central lesson is simple and bracing. The real past is rarely as neat as the myth needs it to be. And Christians who care about truth should not need a fake history to defend their faith.
Sources #
- Kristin Kobes Du Mez, “The Christian Past That Wasn’t,” Substack, https://kristindumez.substack.com/p/the-christian-past-that-wasnt.
- Book website, The Christian Past That Wasn’t, https://christianpast.com/
- Presbyterian Outlook, “The Christian Past That Wasn’t,” https://pres-outlook.org/2026/06/the-christian-past-that-wasnt/.
- Baptist News Global, “Author debunks America’s ‘Christian past that wasn’t’,” https://baptistnews.com/article/author-debunks-americas-christian-past-that-wasnt/
- CBS Texas, “Publisher Cancels Barton’s ‘The Jefferson Lies’,” https://www.cbsnews.com/texas/news/publisher-cancels-bartons-the-jefferson-lies/
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