A City Upon a Hill: How the Sermon Changed the Course of American History

by Larry Witham

From colonial times to the present, the sermon has shaped America’s self-understanding, been the dynamic medium where America conducts its most important debates, and sparked some of its most historic moments.

Genres: History, American History, Religion, Nonfiction

336 pages, Hardcover

First published August 1, 2007

About the author

Larry Witham is an author, editor, journalist, and artist. His new novel, The Haunted Artist (2025) is the fourth in the Julian Peale Art-Crime Investigator Series. Witham is the author of nineteen books (six of them novels), and was a finalist in the 2015 Pen Literary Awards for biography. He began his writing career as a daily newspaper reporter in Washington D.C. Witham has received several national awards for his newspaper work and books, and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for a newspaper series he co-wrote. He was Project Editor for the ten-volume Templeton Press science-and-religion series. A painter by avocation, his new novel character, Julain Peale, investigates crime and intrigue in the artworld. Witham lives with his wife in the Maryland suburbs of Washington D.C.

Reviews

[Nick]

A sweep through 400 years of American history by looking at a factor that is often over looked--Preaching! This book reveals how important preachers and sermons were to the course of this nation. If you are tempted to long for the "good old days", this is a helpful reminder that every age has its own difficulties. A history like this should be essential for all preachers--for those who neglect history are doomed to repeat it.

[Kay]

This is one of the those books, I read slowly. An evocative choice of sermons, their relationship to the events that surrounded them are telling. I am fascinated by how religion shaped the history of United States, some of it's first settlements were both refuge and dream, founded by people who sought a city on the hill, a utopia. Later the Great Awakening rode through the Midwest and South, a fevered brand of evangelical Protestantism, tent revivals and snake handling. Religion informed and shaped the Civil Rights movement of the 60's and other reformist forces. The book provides the raw and original material of these movement, a sense of what moved these individuals into action and belief.

[Naum]

Did you ever read a book and about a quarter or the third a way in, you said to yourself: "Wow, this is just like another book I read a year ago or so, where the title, jacket information, blurb plugs, etc.… indicated the subject theme would be such that your were excited to read and learn about the topic, no matter if you knew anything about the author, or where he/she was coming from, it just sounded kind of intriguing. Then as you digested some of the chapters, you came to the realization that the book really wasn't making an argument or case or even anything close to what the advertising wordage led you to believe, and instead, it was just a lot fact spewage and name dropping that did not tie together in a coherent theme?"

Well, that's this book, and weird that I did not note the author, but the style struck me so -- and it was *Marketplace of the Gods*, another disappointing title that I leaped into with high hopes but was sadly, left bemused on what the author was actually attempting to accomplish.

[Rick Graf]

A City Upon a Hill documents the influence of religion in American Politics from pre-colonial days to the present days. I struggled through the first 40 percent of the book because I didn't find it exciting to read. I put the book down many times and came close to abandoning it, but persisted. For some reason when I reached the antebellum period it seemed to turn a corner for me because I was able to focus more intently on the text.

Because the separation of church & state in American government is argued often & because of the rise (I should say re-rise again) of evangelicals & major religions on politics today, I wanted to expand my understanding on the subject. The book did that for me in many ways. From that perspective it deserves 5 stars. I gave it 3 stars only because it's a dry read. Maybe if I were an academic or professional historian I might think otherwise, but I've read history books that were exciting to read. In some respects making a historical book exciting to read may be a greater challenge to authors who write history books than those who write fiction.

[Timothy E.]

A Bad Book on a Great Subject

By selective reading of history, this author elevates the worst principles of wicked preachers and denigrates good preachers in their greatest strengths. Anachronistic snobbery (CS Lewis) is his weapon of choice against the conservative and orthodox preachers. By praise of wicked preachers' methods and views, he elevates them to status undeserved. Billy Graham's citation and quotes of Scripture were ignored, while Henry Emerson Fosdick's support from magnate Rockefeller was likewise bypassed.
If you are looking for a good book on the history of preaching, this is not it.

[Chris]

Good overview of the role of preaching in America, noting how preaching has changed and adapted over the years and also the impact it has had on changing the country.

[Michael]

This is an excellent book about the religious history of the United States, and about how--for the vast majority of our history--the sermon served as a political, cultural, and social force in America. The book is broken into three sections, covering the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries, with a final chapter that touches on the first five or six years of the 21st century. Many of famous preachers and churches will be familiar to those of us who enjoy history: John Winthrop, Jonathan Edwards, Anne Hutchinson, Williams Jennings Bryan, Charles Coughlin, Billy Graham, etc.

What I found especially fascinating was learning about how sermons served such an important political function, especially during the first half of America's history. Without the preachers of the First Great Awakening, for example, there may not have been a revolution. The Second Great Awakening was in no small part responsible for the Civil War, and the remarkable tension between Northern and Southern preachers who--in dueling sermons--preached that God and the Bible were on their side. Likewise, it was the 'social Gospel'--what some have labeled the Third Great Awakening--that led to the Progressive Period in the later part of the 19th century. I knew a lot of this history, but I learned a lot about connecting the dots between history and politics and religion.

Today, as mainline Protestant churches shrink in both membership and influence, it's a bit disconcerting to wonder where America will find its moral common ground in the absence of a national religious sensibility. People still go to church, of course (and mosque, and synagogue) but in far fewer numbers than any other time in our history. A pastor I know talked about the day, not too far in our future, when a little boy asks his father,"Daddy, what's the plus sign doing on top of that building?" and the father responds, "I don't know." For all of the horrors of religion, America--as G.K. Chesterton said, "is a nation with the heart of a church." I wonder what we will become without a heart.

So...good stuff! Very readable, highly informative, and a lot of fun if you are a history-politics-religion nerd like me.

[Nanette]

I enjoyed this book very much. I read it as the text to my American Heritage BYU IS class. I looked forward to reading each chapter. I only wish every high school student in the nation had & read this book as part of their mandatory U.S. History education. It is sad to me how little I've known of my nation's founding and workings until now. Less than 65% of college students can pass a basic U.S. History test, per educational research. I was one of those people until I read this book. I also like that this is a BYU publication so it treats the subject manner in an appropriately from my perspective.

[Micah Hoyt]

This book looked very interesting at the onset. It was difficult to get into, but I battled through it. Once it got to the Civil War, it picked up. I had hoped for more text from sermons, but there were only snippets here and there. I really liked the connection between historical attitudes and how sermons reflected or influenced those attitudes. This book would be good for someone who wants to understand more about how America has been shaped by it's religious movements.

[Todd Miles]

This book is really how preaching changed American social policies, both at the grassroots and government level. However, there were many interesting stories and it is difficult to separate evangelical preaching from social consciousness, at least in the earlier periods of American history. Very good book.

[Pamela]

You have to be a fan of sermons to really like this, and also a fan of history. Some of the sermons are lyrically beautiful and others are a little dull. Having said that, it's a wonderful book with a very different look at history.

[Mitch]

A tough read, but fascinating. You're gunna need wikipedia for this one & its theological history.

[Dwight Stone]

A very thorough and objective view of the history of influence of the American pulpit.