Matthew Sutton

Biography

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Education

• PhD, University of California, Santa Barbara, 2005

Research and Teaching Interests

Sutton teaches courses in 20th century United States history, cultural history, and religious history.

Publications

Sutton’s latest book, Chosen Land: How Christianity Made America and Americans Remade Christianity (Basic Books, 2026), explains how Christianity has been so central to American history, and why Americans have been so tied to the Christian tradition in terms of their politics, culture, economics, and foreign policy. Sutton’s previous book, Double Crossed: The Missionaries Who Spied for the United States During the Second World War (Basic Books, 2019) is the never-before-told story of the missionaries, priests, rabbis, and other religious activists who went to work as spies for the United States government during World War II. His 2014 American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press) offers a comprehensive history of modern American evangelicalism and its role in American life. His first book, Aimee Semple McPherson and the Resurrection of Christian America (Harvard University Press, 2007), served as the basis for the Public Broadcasting Service documentary Sister Aimee, part of PBS’s American Experience series.

Sutton has published articles in the Journal of American History, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Religion & American Culture, Church History, the Journal of Policy History, and the Public Historian as well as in numerous edited collections. Sutton is a frequent commenter on current events and regularly appears in the media. He has written for the New York Times, New Republic, USA Today, Washington Post, Guardian, and Seattle Times.

He has also won numerous awards, prizes, and professorships. His article, “Was FDR the Antichrist? The Birth of Fundamentalist Anti-liberalism in a Global Age,” won the Organization of American Historians’ Binkley-Stephenson Award for the best article published in the Journal of American History in 2012. He spent the 2012-2013 academic year in Ireland as the Mary Ball Washington Professor of American History at University College Dublin (on a Fulbright U.S. Scholar Grant) and the 2014-2015 academic year in Germany as the Marsilius Kolleg Visiting Professor and Scholar-in-Residence at the Heidelberg Center for American Studies, Heidelberg University. He has also held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation. In 2016, Sutton was named a Guggenheim Foundation Fellow.