Buy This Book: “The Christian Past That Wasn’t “by Warren Throckmorton

My favorite books have always been books that told truths that had been previously buried under lies…lies told to further the interests of those seeking control, power, and wealth.

Warren Throckmorton has always been a truth teller…whether exposing the sins of Gospel for Asia or Mark Driscoll, or in this volume, dismantling the lies that Christian nationalists use to further their agenda.

It has been incredibly frustrating over the years to watch people like David Barton and House Speaker Mike Johnson proffer bald faced lies about the founding of America…even repeating such lies when corrected by historians.

“Christian” media loves these lies and repeats them until they sound like truth.

Politicians repeat them…and make policy out of them.

They will be without excuse now…in “The Christian Past That Wasn’t”, Throckmorton, using the tools of the scholar and the legitimate historian, carefully debunks Christian nationalists myths by citing primary sources… tracing each of seven myths back to their source.

MYTH ONE: AMER­I­CA IS A COVENANT HOMELAND FOR ­ EUROPEAN PROTESTANTS

MYTH TWO: AMER­I­CA IS A CHRISTIAN NATION ­ BECAUSE THE COLONIES HAD STATE CHURCHES 

MYTH THREE: AMERI­CA IS A CHRISTIAN NATION ­ BECAUSE THE ­ FOUNDERS ­ WERE ORTHODOX CHRISTIANS 

MYTH FOUR: THE ­ FOUNDERS CREATED A CHRISTIAN GOVERNMENT 

MYTH FIVE: THE CHARTER DOCUMENTS ARE BASED ON THE BIBLE AND CHRIS­TIAN­ITY 

MYTH SIX: AMER­I­CA’S VIRTUES JUSTIFY AMER­I­CA’S SINS 

MYTH SEVEN: CHRIS­TIAN­ITY SHOULD BE PROMOTED IN PUBLIC EDUCATION

In a time when the powers that be want to whitewash our history, the debunking of myth six is of particular importance.

Throckmorton writes of this;

“Despite all the Puritans’ sermons, Ben Franklin’s calls to prayer, Mason Weems’s stories, and David Barton’s artifacts, some voices were silenced throughout the entire period America was supposedly being inspired by God Almighty. While the white men were arguing and agonizing over their religious freedom, Black people had no freedom of any kind. Indigenous people saw their civilization slowly stolen and their families decimated. Women couldn’t vote until long after the founding of the country. The history I have written about thus far has been a white man’s history. The myths I have discussed thus far are in the service of propping up a view of America that ran parallel to the reality of race- based chattel slavery and the theft of land and life from Indigenous people. White culture warriors want to argue about America as a Christian nation based on how many Bible verses a founding father used in a speech, or what orthodox doctrine a white, slave- owning founder admitted to believing in a letter to another white, slave- owning founder. How is it possible to focus on a small matter of what the founders said they believed when the weightier matter of the sin they lived with every day is right there with no comment? Indeed, we come to a central question of this entire project. This question occupies the space between the Christian past that was and the Christian past that wasn’t. It’s the one that no Christian nationalist storyteller has adequately answered. It is this: With deception, theft, racism, enslavement, lynchings, and other atrocities embedded in the heritage and history of the nation, what does it matter how many times God is mentioned in the Declaration of Independence or whether there is some faint echo of a Bible verse in the Constitution?”

‘Christian nationalist history strains out gnats and swallows camels”

There are those among us who want to return to a day when white men held all the power…even or especially at the cost of marginalizing women and minorities.

This book isn’t a “woke” reframing of American history.

It is the truth about our history.

The truth will set you free…

For the sake of transparency, I was provided a pre-publication copy of this book.

You can get your copy here, or wherever fine books are sold.