Mark David Hall
Professor, Regent University’s Robertson School of Government
Mark David Hall is a Professor in Regent University’s Robertson School of Government, Director of Religious Liberty in the States, and Chair of the Faith and Liberty Scholars Advisory Council with American Bible Society. He is also a Senior Fellow at the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University and a Senior Fellow at Baylor University’s Institute for Studies of Religion. Mark earned a BA in political science from Wheaton College (IL) and a PhD in Government from the University of Virginia. He has written, edited, or co-edited fifteen books, including Proclaim Liberty Throughout All the Land: How Christianity Has Advanced Freedom and Equality for All Americans; Did America Have a Christian Founding?: Separating Modern Myth from Historical Truth; America and the Just War Tradition: A History of U.S. Conflicts; Roger Sherman and the Creation of the American Republic; The Sacred Rights of Conscience: Selected Readings on Religious Liberty and Church-State Relations in the American Founding.
Talks and Topics
Was the War for American Independence Biblical and Just?
Christian critics of the American founding argue that Patriot resistance to Great Britain was both unbiblical and in violation of the Christian just war tradition. Not only did the patriots rebel against a lawfully constituted authority; they did so for trivial reasons. On the contrary, I show that America’s founders drew from a long tradition of Christian political theology that permitted, or even required, resistance to tyrannical authority. Moreover, they had good reasons to believe that the Crown and Parliament planned to significantly infringe upon the colonists’ constitutional and natural rights, especially the right to worship God according to the dictates of conscience.
Did America Have a Christian Founding?: Separating Modern Myth from Historical Truth
Academic and popular authors regularly assert that America’s founders were deists who created a godless Constitution and desired the strict separation of church and state. In this talk, I explain how and why these claims are false. Affirmatively, I show that the founders were influenced by biblical and Christian ideas when they broke from Great Britain and created America’s constitutional order. Of particular importance, they were motivated by their understanding of the Bible and Christian theology to robustly protect religious liberty for all citizens. Yet, they did not understand religious liberty to require a high wall of separation between church and state.
The Founders and Slavery
America’s founding was profoundly flawed, some critics contend, because the founders owned slaves and, collectively, they did not immediately abolish this horrible institution. In responding to these claims, I am careful not to excuse wrongs done to African Americans, but I show that many founders were motivated by their Christian convictions to oppose the institution of slavery. Indeed, many founders never owned slaves, some of those who did freed them, and collectively they passed laws aimed at ending the institution. As well, between 1776 and 1804 eight states voluntarily abolished the institution or put it on the road to extinction. Although America’s founders were unable to abolish slavery, they took numerous steps to end this evil institution.
