Faithful Politics Podcast
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Church & State 250: Faith, Empire, and the American Revolution
Posted
July 7, 2026
Views
36
July 7, 2026
36
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Was the American Revolution really a fight for religious freedom?
Katherine Carté, Professor of History at Southern Methodist University and author of Religion and the American Revolution: An Imperial History, helps separate the national myth from the historical record. Carté explains that the Revolution was not one simple story. It was both a break from British rule and the messy process of building a new United States. Religion mattered deeply, but not always in the way Americans assume. The conflict was not mainly Protestants fighting Britain for religious liberty. It was a political struggle over sovereignty, power, empire, and who had the right to rule.
Carté shows how British imperial Protestantism connected Anglicans, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, missionaries, donors, and colonial institutions before the war disrupted that order. The conversation also explores religious establishments, loyalists, Catholics, Jews, religious tests, secular citizenship, and why “Was America founded as a Christian nation?” is too narrow a question.
Guest Bio
Katherine Carté is Professor of History at Southern Methodist University, where she studies early American history, the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, the Age of Revolutions, early modern religion, and digital humanities. She is the author of Religion and the American Revolution: An Imperial History, published by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and UNC Press, and Religion and Profit: Moravians in Early America. Her work helps explain how British imperial Protestantism shaped colonial life, how the American Revolution disrupted that religious and political order, and why the founding era cannot be reduced to simple claims about America being either Christian or secular.
Book Mentioned
Religion and the American Revolution: An Imperial History by Katherine Carté
Bookshop.org
Relevant Links & Resources
Katherine Carté Faculty Profile
Support Sarah Stankorb’s work and preorder Damned If She DoesWhy Women Quit Church and What It Means for the Future of Religion, Releases September 15, 2026. Bookshop.org
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