Education

Ph.D., 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 is currently writing a book tentatively entitled Chosen Land: How Christianity Made America and Americans Remade Christianity, which will be published by Basic Books. His book will explain why 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 latest book entitled Double Crossed: The Missionaries Who Spied for the United States During the Second World War 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. Sutton draws on newly de-classified government documents and the private papers of some of the nation’s most colorful and intriguing clandestine agents to tell this long-buried story of the godly spooks who fought to balance their religious convictions with their commitment to making war on their nation’s, and their God’s, enemies. Their work inspired American leaders to draw up a new playbook for using religion to craft and meet foreign policy objectives, which then shaped everything from the US’s cold war crusade against “godless” communism to the “war on terror.”

 

           

 

American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014) is the first comprehensive history of modern American evangelicalism to appear in a generation. It was named a Choice (American Library Association) “Outstanding Academic Title of 2015.” He has co-edited a collection of essays entitled Faith in the New Millennium: The Future of American Religion and Politics (Oxford University Press, 2016), which uses history to explore how religion is shaping the modern world. He has written a textbook, Jerry Falwell and the Rise of the Religious Right: A Brief History with Documents, as part of the popular Bedford “History and Culture” series (Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2012). His first book, Aimee Semple McPherson and the Resurrection of Christian America (Harvard University Press, 2007), won the Thomas J. Wilson Memorial Prize from Harvard University Press, awarded annually to the best book in any discipline by a first-time author. The book also 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. 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. Sutton has also written for the New York Times on the Obama presidential campaign and on the origins of Christian fundamentalism, in the New Republic on the Christian Right and the Capitol insurrection, the Washington Post on Putin and the end times, Trump and evangelicalism, and sex scandals in the religious right, the Guardian on the legacy of Billy Graham and on abortion rights, and the Seattle Times (here, here, and here).

Sutton was named a 2016 Guggenheim Foundation Fellow. 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. Sutton has been featured on National Public Radio’s Morning Edition and MSNBC’s The Last Word, among many other news shows. He has lectured on religion, politics, and American culture across the U.S. and in universities in Ireland, the United Kingdom, Denmark, Germany, Spain, and the Czech Republic.