The book as a whole is thoroughly researched and effectively argued. Hall’s work is a needed reminder that even if America never was, and is not now, “Christian” in every sense of the word, we can never fully separate—nor should we want to separate—Christianity from America. The fight for liberty, not least of all religious liberty, is ongoing and should be the concern of all Americans.

There are few artifacts more enduring in the American imagination and more symbolic of our national ethos and essence than the Liberty Bell. The bronze “State House bell” was ordered from the Whitehouse Foundry in London by Isaac Norris, the Speaker of the Pennsylvania Assembly, in 1751. After the bell cracked on its first ring, local metal workers John Pass and John Stow melted down the bell and cast a new one. Famously, after 90 years of hard use, their “Liberty Bell” also developed a crack—a crack made more noticeable in 1846 when technicians attempted (unsuccessfully) to repair the bell and stop the crack by making it wider. Today the 2,000-pound bell sits in the Liberty Bell Center in Philadelphia and is viewed by more than a million visitors every year.

The bell is so well known as a historical artifact, and “liberty” has such a universal and positive ring for most Americans, we forget that the Liberty Bell is a manifestly Christian artifact and symbol. The name “Liberty Bell”—first employed, in 1835, by an anti-slavery publication—comes from the biblical inscription that runs around the bronze exterior: “Proclaim Liberty Throughout All the Land Unto All the Inhabitants thereto” (Leviticus 25:10). During the nineteenth century, the bell’s inscription became a rallying cry for abolitionists. After the Civil War, the bell traveled across the country for displays and commemorations, helping to remind the fractured nation that the colonies once fought together for liberty from British tyranny. If there was anything that could bring the country back together after four years of conflict and 600,000 deaths it was an appeal to the nation’s past—a shared history that believed in freedom and believed in the Bible, even if both of these beliefs were sometimes held to with tragic inconsistency.

A Narrow Purpose

Mark David Hall’s new book Proclaim Liberty Throughout All the Land: How Christianity Has Advanced Freedom and Equality for All Americans (Fidelis Books, 2023) seeks to remind us of this shared history. Hall, a Professor of Politics at George Fox University and a Visiting Fellow at Princeton University’s James Madison Program, is no stranger to his subject matter, having written or edited books on America’s Christian founding, on faith and the founders, and on religion and public life in the founding era. The best way to read this new work is to understand that Hall is making an argument. That is to say, Hall does not attempt anything like a comprehensive analysis of freedom and equality in American life, nor does he seek to provide an exhaustive evaluation of Christianity’s contribution to public life in America.

No doubt, the biggest criticism of the book will be along these lines: that Hall has given a truncated, one-sided, overly rosy picture of Christian influence in America. Such criticisms, however, miss the point of what Hall is trying to accomplish. If Hall pushes hard in one direction—defending the salutary effects of Christianity in America and defending the American experiment more generally—it is because so many have pushed hard in the other direction. From academics claiming that the Enlightenment triumphed over Christianity in the American Founding, to the 1619 Project asserting that the American Revolutionary War was fought to preserve slavery, to Christianity Today’s former editor insisting that America was positively not founded on Christian principles, it has become commonplace for many Americans, even religious ones, to assume that the American founding was negligibly Christian and that Christianity has had an overwhelmingly negative influence when it comes to freedom and equality in this country. Hall disagrees:

This book…focuses on the ways in which Christians have advanced liberty and equality in the American context. Contrary to many academics and popular authors, I show that Christians have regularly been motivated by their faith to create fair and just institutions, fight for political freedom, oppose slavery, and secure religious liberty for all. Of course, some Christians have appealed to the Bible and Christian theology to oppose such reforms or to justify evil practices. Americans of other faiths and no faith have also worked to advance liberty and equality for all. Proclaim Liberty Throughout All the Land cannot tell all of these stories; its more modest goal is to put to rest the myth that Christianity has been a regressive force with respect to positive political, legal, and societal reform in the United States. (2)

In this “modest goal,” Hall is successful.

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