In this episode, I’m happy to welcome historian of religion Dr. Matthew Avery Sutton. Matt’s newest book is called Chosen Land: How Christianity Made America and Americans Remade Christianity, following the relationship between Christianity and the nation from the arrival of the first Europeans up to Donald Trump’s second term in office. Matt is the author of three previous books, along with an edited collection and a documentary history, and he regularly writes about the history of Christianity in America for a general audience. We talked about how he thinks about all those different audiences and how he keeps writing so much despite many personal and professional responsibilities—including seven years as department chair.
Mentioned in this episode:
- Matthew Avery Sutton, Chosen Land: How Christianity Made America and Americans Remade Christianity
- Matthew Avery Sutton, Double Crossed: The Missionaries Who Spied for the United States During the Second World War
- Matthew Avery Sutton, American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism
- Matthew Avery Sutton, Aimee Semple McPherson and the Resurrection of Christian America
- American Experience: Sister Aimee
- Jane Sherron De Hart, Ruth Bader Ginsburg: A Life
- Grant Wacker, Heaven Below: Early Pentecostals and American Culture
- David Hollinger
- Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
- John le Carré
- Jill Lepore, These Truths: A History of the United States
- Matthew Avery Sutton, “The antichrist has long haunted American politics. Now it’s rearing its head again,” The Guardian
Note: Links to bookshop.org are affiliate links.
Transcript:
Kate Carpenter 0:00
Hey everyone, this is Drafting the Past host Kate Carpenter. Before we get to today's interview, I have a big favor to ask. Will you fill out a survey about the podcast to help me figure out what is and isn't working for you about the show? You can go to draftingthepast.com/survey and answer a few questions. Your responses will be a huge help to me in making the show as helpful to you as possible. Again, that's draftingthepast.com/survey. Alright, thanks in advance for your help. On with the show.
Kate Carpenter 0:33
Welcome back to Drafting the Past. This is a podcast all about the craft of history, and I'm your host, Kate Carpenter. In each episode, I'm joined by a historian to take a deep dive into how they do the research and writing that goes into their history books. Today, I'm happy to welcome historian of religion, Dr. Matthew Avery Sutton.
Matthew Avery Sutton 0:53
Thanks, Kate. It's great to be here.
Kate Carpenter 0:55
Matthew's newest book is called Chosen Land: How Christianity Made America and Americans Remade Christianity. It follows the relationship between Christianity and the nation from the arrival of the first Europeans up to Donald Trump's second term in office. Matt is the author of three previous books, along with an edited collection and a documentary history, and he regularly writes about the history of Christianity in America for a general audience. We talked about how he thinks about all those different audiences, and how he keeps writing so much despite many personal and professional responsibilities. He has been the department chair for seven years. Here's my conversation with Dr. Matthew Avery Sutton.
Matthew Avery Sutton 1:37
You know, like a lot of PhDs in history, I wasn't really conscious of what it meant to be a writer. When I was in grad school, I was thinking more about, how do I finish this dissertation, and how do I get it by my committee members? And so the plan initially was was just that. And I think, though, there were a few things going on with me. I've never thought I was the smartest guy in the room. And so I've never had a real expansive, sexy vocabulary that just, you know, stuns everybody with the power of my words. And so to compensate for that, I focused on being clear and forthright and trying to write in a way that was accessible. And so when I was working on my dissertation, I was doing that. And so, you know, I I spent, like all grad students do, a lot of time thinking about theory, studying theory, but I wanted to be really careful not to incorporate jargon into it. And I should say that the dissertation was on Aimee Semple McPherson, a revivalist in Los Angeles in the 1920s and '30s, this really charismatic individual. So I write the dissertation, or I was writing the dissertation, and I found out at the time that PBS was just beginning development of a new episode for their American Experience series focused on Aimee Semple McPherson. And so through some mutual friends, I got in touch with the producer there, and in the end, they ended up deciding to use my book as the basis for the show. And so as I was finishing the dissertation and then converting it into a book, I was also simultaneously working with somebody who was a screen writer working on this documentary, and so she helped me really think too about narrative power, about style, about how to entice an audience. And so there were a lot of changes that I made in writing that first book that helped me kind of think about the process and what it means to reach a larger audience than just your dissertation.
Kate Carpenter 3:23
Wow, that seems like a real gift in your first book.
Matthew Avery Sutton 3:25
Yeah, it absolutely was. And then it was just, I mean, it was dumb luck. So the documentary came out. I was on Morning Edition on NPR that that day, the Tuesday the book released. The very first review was by John Updike. It was, you know, the full four page review in the New Yorker, which is not exactly what every grad student expects to have happen to their dissertation. And Updike hated it. And it turns out, Updike was extraordinarily critical of biographies. His review of my book was used later by a literary critic assessing Updike's own career in the way that Updike was apparently pretty gracious, except when it came to biographies and so so my book was one of the many, many biographies he trashed. But nevertheless, what it did was it made me think even more clearly about writing for a general audience, and helped me recognize that as historians, we can talk to everyday people. And so ever since then, I've really thought about my parents as my target audience. My dad has a BA. My mom doesn't have a college degree. I want to make sure, if they don't understand what I'm writing, then I'm doing something wrong. And so that's, that's kind of the goal, and what I try to do.
Kate Carpenter 4:28
When and where do you like to do your writing?
Matthew Avery Sutton 4:30
So I'm pretty methodical. I have a home office, so I love working at home. You know, it's quiet. I have a 17 year old and a 20 year old, and so the 17 year old is very busy, and the 20 year old is away at college. And my wife works full time. And so, you know, the dream scenario is working at home every day with the cat doing what I want to do. The reality is actually very different. I'm in my seventh year as department chair, and so the expectation is pretty much that I'm at the office every day, and so I end up doing most of my writing in my office here at WSU. I try to stay home on Fridays to write. That doesn't always work out if administrators generate meetings for me on my calendar, and they can just do that, they can just grab a time without without asking. There's no setting up meetings if, if I have time, they'll take it. But the ideal world is to work at home in my quiet office. But the reality for the last seven years has been been in my office with my door open, with faculty coming in and out at all times.
Kate Carpenter 5:25
I was going to ask this question a little bit later, but I'm struck by it now, which is that you're fairly prolific, and yet you obviously have a lot going on, including department chair, which I have always heard from people, is a lot. So how do you keep your writing moving forward, even with all those distractions?
Matthew Avery Sutton 5:41
This is something I spent a lot of time thinking about, because I, you know, I'm 50 years old, and I am aware that that I have published probably more than the average professor at this stage in their career. And for me, there's been a few things. One, I've always seen writing as a job, and it's a job I love, but it is a job. So I don't wait for inspiration. I don't believe in a muse. You know, it's not a matter of waiting until I kind of feel like I've got something to say. For me, my process has been spending lots of time in the archives, finding and locating primary sources. So in the olden days, it was actually like printing them in the archives, and then the next stage was scanning them with a phone. And now I can do a lot of stuff that's available online that has already been scanned for me, but, but for me, it's always been stacks and stacks and stacks of research material, either physical stacks or virtual stacks. And then I'll go through those documents and highlight what I think is important, highlight quotes that I think are telling or fun or interesting or kind of help provide insight into whatever larger issues I'm looking at. And so for me, when I'm working, I can be dealing with, you know, bureaucratic nonsense emails that come in as department chair. Answer that email, then immediately turn and pivot to whatever that stack is, wherever I am in the primary sources, and start writing up those primary sources. And the way I do it is I'll, you know, I'll copy the quote, copy and paste the quote into a document. I'll write some context around it to just make sure I understand, like, what that quote is about, and why I think it matters, and why I, you know, why it struck me as important. And so my first drafts will often be a very long string of these kind of loosely connected, primary source driven ideas. But that process means I don't have to be really deeply invested into the writing in a way that keeps me from, you know, dealing with other distractions. And so I can, I can just pivot back and forth and back. And one habit I have developed is leaving my email open all the time, and so I'll be sitting writing, and then immediately get a notification when an email comes in. And I will often deal with emails right away. And I've grown to hate that. I dream of the day when I'm not chair and I'm going to turn off my email and I'm going to start, you know, spending some time not worried about, kind of, all of the many different kinds of demands so that I can really get into the writing groove. But for now, it really is multitasking.
Kate Carpenter 8:09
What happens once you have that first draft of sort of connected primary sources? What do you do from there?
Matthew Avery Sutton 8:15
Yes, it's always too long. That's one of the downsides. The second downside is, it means I'll have three sources saying the absolute same thing, and an editor will be like, we don't need three people telling us the same thing. And so my writing process is very rough in the first drafts with extensive, extensive rewriting. And so I think other folks who, at least as I've talked to folks, people who are better at setting aside, you know, four or five hours to just write and focus just on that, they probably do much better first drafts than I do. And so my first drafts are just an absolute mess. In like I said, it's just strung together series of, you know, paragraphs, kind of incoherent. And so for me, the real writing is the rewriting. And so it's many, many, many, many, many drafts, and then cutting. It's always been painful for me to cut in a way that feels absolute, and so I always have all these files of all the stuff I cut. And so it's there. Nobody will ever see it again. It's just taking up space on my computer. But it is a little easier for me to part with it when I know it's still there somewhere. So that becomes part of my process, and it also, you can see it in my writing, if you, you know, if you read my stuff, that it is very quote heavy, and I try not to show that as directly. By the time it gets to the final draft, I'm, you know, I'm hoping that there's not more than one or two good quotes per paragraph. But you know, you will not read much of my work and not see quotes in just about every single paragraph. It's going to be driven by those sources.
Kate Carpenter 9:42
Are there people that you turn to for feedback while you're working on those drafts?
Matthew Avery Sutton 9:45
I look for different kinds of feedback from different kinds of folks. We can talk, I suspect we'll probably want to talk in a minute about the professional side of like editors and the folks who work for publishing companies. But in terms of early drafts, it's finding friends, colleagues who I know are going to be really critical and sometimes really mean. I had a mentor and an advisor who did not pull her punches. She was very old school and how she was trained. She was trained in the 60s and I've always believed, you know, she focused on women's history. This is Jane DeHart. She's written a wonderful biography of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. But Jane was trained really before the second wave of feminism had really impacted higher education, and so she had to fight so hard to really to survive, and then ultimately to succeed and launch a career as a woman. And so I think what that did for her was create in her a sense of absolute professionalism and extraordinarily high standards that she then held her students to. She was always my first reader through most of my career, and I could always count on her for really rigorous feedback. Another longtime mentor has been Grant Wacker, another historian of American religion. He's a beautiful writer. He's also very smart, but I love having his influence on my early drafts and helping me think about things that I'm not thinking about in the ways that maybe I should. He tends to be a little more conservative than I am in terms of his approach to religion. He's still very much a true believer in the religious traditions that he writes about. And so sometimes he'll, if I'm being too harsh, if I'm being too critical, he'll push me on that. We often don't agree in the end anyway, but it's great to get his perspective. And then on the other side is David Hollinger, the veteran intellectual historian who's extraordinarily cynical and skeptical of religion. And so I sort of feel like he and Grant are the like the two devils, the devil and the angel on each side of my ear, the old cartoons that, you know, Grant is telling me to be nicer to my subjects, David is telling me to be more critical of my subjects. So I have these, you know, these mentors who are, you know, have spent their entire careers. Actually, all three of them are now retired in the profession. And then I have my peers, colleagues, and among those, I have friends who are just really smart. And so I've found people over the years that will you know, when you give them a manuscript, they'll actually read it carefully. And I try and return the favor. Like I realize that's a huge ask, and so I try and always be generous with my time when they need help. And then I'll find people who are specialists in areas that I know I'm weaker. So for this last book, indigenous history is so difficult to do, and it's historic especially difficult for somebody who's just not been trained in indigenous history. So I have a colleague and a friend who's an extraordinarily skilled historian and also a member of the Upper Skagit tribe, and so it was really important for me to have him read how I dealt with tribal issues and tribal history, and be able to assess that and evaluate that. In this latest book, I also spent a lot of time in colonial and early republic, in 19th century history, which I hadn't really dealt with since graduate school. And so for each chunk of the book, I had different readers who are specialists in those areas, and ask them to read it so that they could push me and really they saved me from all kinds of errors, but also helped me think more broadly about what I was trying to do.
Kate Carpenter 10:31
As you've kind of touched on with asking other people, sort of who specialize in different areas, Chosen Land, your new book, is just a massive project. How do you come to a project like this? How do you decide, yes, this is what I'm going to do?
Matthew Avery Sutton 13:22
Yeah, so Chosen Land, 650 pages, just came out. Thinking back over my career, the primary issue that that I have been obsessed with, or that I've tried to explain, if you kind of think about every book, everything I've published, articles, newspaper pieces, op eds, etc, is always trying to explain the role of religion in the broader American culture and why it matters outside of just religion. So it's why religion is affecting politics and public policy and foreign policy and education and economics and pop culture debates over gender, sexuality, race, on and on and on. And so that's what I'm always trying to do. And as I've done that, one of the issues that I have realized is that Americans are more religious. We have a higher religious adherence than most of our peer nations. That secularization just has not been as successful in the US as in Canada or in the UK or in Germany or in France. And I wanted to explain that. So I've done pieces of that. I've done, you know, subsections of it through previous books, but I'd never, kind of swung for the fences, taken on the massive project of, how do we tell this story from beginning to end, to get to the point where, you know, today, any major politician running for office has to explain their religious faith, and they essentially have to conform to mainstream religious ideology, mainstream religious ideas. And so I wanted to trace the long history of how that came to be. And so the colonial era sets up the First Amendment. The First Amendment then sets up what happens after which then becomes the core of the book. And so the book was in part this effort to kind of answer this bigger question, to synthesize a lot of material, and honestly, it was also pitched to me by an editor, the editor I had worked with on my Double Crossed book, Dan Gerstle, whose father is a professional historian, Gary Gerstle. Dan said, we don't really have a major book on American Christianity. Why don't you write one? And initially I didn't like the idea, that seemed boring to me, but the more I got into it, the more excited I got, and in the end, I'm really happy I did it.
Kate Carpenter 15:26
I want to ask just a super practical question. You know, my current project is four decades, one small region, and I still have a hard time like wrapping my head around all the pieces and keeping track of it all. You have undertaken a huge topic, a huge timeline. Walk me through, sort of the steps of putting that together. How do you how do you get all those moving pieces corralled?
Matthew Avery Sutton 15:48
Double Crossed was published in 2019 and I was just starting on this book as we were, you know, finalizing Double Crossed, just doing the last pieces. So, so I always think about what's next as I'm finishing up a project. I, this was something I was trained to do by my mentor. And also, again, because I like it, I'm always excited to start jumping into the next thing. And so, so I'd started Chosen Land in 2019. Double Crossed came out in, I think, October of 2019, so I was just beginning. And then, of course, we hit March and COVID hits. And so like everybody else, I was confined to my home, to my office, my home office, actually. And the benefit of the digital revolution was that so much material that is outside of copyright, so really outside of the 20th century, has been digitized that I just didn't even realize, because it wasn't relevant to my previous projects, which were almost all focused on the 20th century. And so I could sit at home during COVID and read every pamphlet or tract or, you know, book of sermons or political manifesto that was written in the 18th and the 19th centuries through the HathiTrust or through Internet Archive, or, you know, online university libraries. And so I ended up essentially just starting at the beginning, just starting chronologically in doing the same process we talked about. But I tried to identify what would be the most important sources for a project this big. Of course, I had to reread the secondary literature, or, well, reread the stuff I hadn't read since grad school, and then catch up on all the new stuff that had been published in the last 20 years since grad school is getting further and further away, and so it was a combination of both familiarizing myself with the trends in the fields and the separate eras, and then diving back into those primary sources. And I, this gets back to your question about productivity. One flaw to my process is I'm not patient enough, and I don't spend as much time in the historiography as I should, and I'm always aware that there are people who I'm not citing that, because I just, I just didn't know about their book. And I always feel bad about that. I'm always embarrassed when I realized later that, oh my gosh, here was this really important, monumental book, and I just didn't realize it was there. And so that that really is a problem, that I'm not patient as patient as I should be when it comes to staying current on literature. Obviously, I do stay somewhat current, but just not as current as I should or could.
Kate Carpenter 18:11
There are a lot of books out there.
Kate Carpenter 18:12
To dig into his writing a little more closely, I asked Matt to read an excerpt from his newest book. Here's Dr Matthew Avery Sutton reading from Chosen Land: How Christianity Made America and Americans Remade Christianity.
Matthew Avery Sutton 18:29
Chapter 20, "Making the World Safe for Democracy." "Presbyterian revivalist Billy Sunday loved to preach both Armageddon and Americanism. He had gained fame in the 1880s as a gutsy base runner for the Chicago White Stockings, but when he converted to Christianity he abandoned the ballpark for the revival tent. He would no longer be stealing bases from other teams, but souls from the devil. By the early twentieth century, Sunday’s revivals filled the largest auditoriums in the country’s greatest cities. In part his success—like that of most revivalists in American history—derived from his populist style. Like his predecessor Dwight Moody, he had little formal education. He was a common guy, a man of the people. He described himself as ‘proud’ to be from the ‘corn rows of Iowa.’ ‘The mal-odors of the barnyard are on my feet,’ he boasted. ‘I have greased my hair with goose-grease; I have blackened my shoes with a cob; I have wiped my probiscis with a gunny sack; I have drunk coffee out of my saucer and eaten peas with a knife…I am a graduate from the University of Poverty and Hard Knocks.’ The Atlanta Constitution praised the evangelist’s form. He preached to his audience ‘in the vernacular; he exhorts them in the style of vigorous directness common to the baseball diamond and the street; he translates the Bible into the slang of the day and paraphrases the sacred text with a freedom that is startling in its realism.’ Sunday’s populist impulses inspired some revivalists to better connect with the public, while they embarrassed others as uncouth. As Christians debated their obligations to the state during World War I, Sunday rallied hundreds of thousands of Americans behind the military. ‘If you turned hell upside down,’ Sunday famously preached, ‘I’ll bet you’d find ‘Made in Germany’ stamped on the bottom of it.’ He promised that the United States would ‘back the old Kaiser off the map.’ According to a New York Times reporter, he concluded a Manhattan revival service by leaping ‘up on top of his pulpit’ and ‘wildly waving a flag with both hands while every soul in the audience was on his feet cheering.’ During his wartime sermons he often ‘went off on a tangent’ to ‘flay ‘Kaiser Bill’ and ‘his dirty bunch of pretzel-chewing, limburger-eating highbinders.’ When invited to give a benediction before the US Congress, Sunday concluded, ‘We pray thee that thou wilt bare thy mighty arm and strike that great pack of hungry, wolfish Huns, whose fingers drip with blood and gore.’ Congressmen broke decorum by responding to the prayer with yells, cheers, and clapping."
Kate Carpenter 21:18
You know, most of your chapters start with a memorable character or a scene. This one is particularly memorable, but they all, they all set the stage for the chapter's focus and you choose them really well. I was struck that, you know, it's not a secret that historians like to start with, like an anecdote, but sometimes it feels like just a gesture and then, and then they get on to the real meat, whereas these are all very good. I mean, if you could have made up characters who perfectly fit each chapter's theme, they wouldn't have been better. How did you choose those moments?
Matthew Avery Sutton 21:49
I do love anecdotes, and I do think they're great literary tools for setting up a chapter. For me, it varied, and because the book is 20 something chapters, late, low, high 20s. I had to come up with a lot of them, and so I tried to balance sort of classic stories like this Billy Sunday story, any historian of American religion would know like Billy Sunday was one of the most famous revivalists of the era. His role in World War One is pretty well known. I still wanted to use it, though, because I was thinking about how my audience is not just specialists in American religion. People who might not know who Billy Sunday is probably don't know, and because he's such a colorful character that it would be a good, good way to open up this question of what is the relationship between religion and war that was going to be central to the chapter on World War One, and to illustrate the complexity of this question of patriotism and nationalism and Christian faith. I also, in other chapters, though, I purposely tried to find stories that were not going to be familiar, that were, you know, derived from truly original research, things that I had uncovered in the archives, things that maybe people weren't familiar with. And so that became another focus. And then at one point, an editor had told me that the opening anecdotes should not be formulaic, like they shouldn't all be predictable, that you're going to bore a reader if every time they start a new chapter, it's going to be the same, like, here's the person, here's what they do, you know, in exactly two and a half pages, and then you move on. And so I vary the length. So I think some of them go as long as four, maybe five pages. Some of them will just be one page. I also shifted between individuals like Billy Sunday, a policy issue like the development of the ratings code for Hollywood films was the opening for another chapter to also the rise of particular groups. And so the idea was that readers, I always wanted to keep readers guessing so they wouldn't know what the next chapter was going to do, that even though, behind the scenes, the like structure is yes, anecdote makes a point to illustrate the larger issue of the chapter, they wouldn't know quite as they were reading an anecdote, what it was. And the other thing, of course, I try to do is draw readers into the story that way, to make it as compelling as possible. So I work really hard at never using passive verbs. There's probably some in the book, but I go through and do everything I can to have active verbs and to find the most kind of funny, illuminating quotes, entertaining quotes possible. And so again, me having to read Billy Sunday's words, I walked all over those. I butchered them, but, but they're, you know, if you're reading them on paper, they're pretty funny. And his kind of sarcasm and his insults and his jabs are all entertaining. And that's intentional, that anytime I can find an outrageous quote by one of my characters that I'm going to make sure and use it.
Kate Carpenter 24:43
I mean, you've you've touched on a lot of ways that you make sure that this book is really easy to read. You know, clear language, that you think about people like your parents when you were writing, that you go for active verbs, clear and funny examples. You also have really short chapters, which I always appreciate in books. Were there other ways that you tried to think about you know, despite being 600 pages, making this a book that actually reads at a really fast pace?
Matthew Avery Sutton 25:09
I did, and that exactly is it. And part of it is that pain of trimming, cutting. I have always in my career, unlike a lot of my friends and colleagues, I've been pretty good at hitting word counts, like when, when you do a contract and the editor says this many words. This, though, is my epic fail. I decided if I was going to fail, I was going to fail big. So I think the contract here was 150,000 words. The final book is just over 200,000. At one point it was 250,000 words. And my editor just said, I'm not going to read that. You have to get it down to 200 before I'll even look at it. And so I made that painful choice. And part of what I did in doing that was I built an Excel spreadsheet with a word count for every chapter so I could see which chapters were too long, were longer than the other ones on a relative scale. And that was where I started my cuts was to really just think about, you know, I knew each chapter had a distinctive point that I felt like was essential to the book, like I wasn't going to be able to cut chapters without leaving gaps, but I realized I could cut the length of those chapters. And then to your larger question, certainly, I just feel like shorter chapters are always more readable. They're just easier. You keep your audience longer, keep your readers more engaged. I feel like that just even dates back to my own experience as a grad student. You know, when you're reading a 50 page chapter, it's just painful, it's just hard, and even though it's just psychological, like, what's the difference between 150 page chapter and three 15, 16 page chapters? It's the same number of words. But for some reason, three 16 page chapters feels easier than one 50 page chapter. I should also say that in, you know, for for I always think of it as four real books, plus one edited collection, plus one document reader. I don't think I've ever published a block quote. I'm very religiously opposed to block quotes, and I apologize to listeners who like block quotes. But I was told early in my career, and I think this is true, that often people just read right over them. They don't actually read a block quote. They see that as license to move on. And so I will still have long quotes, but I will break them up and just have those little transitional words, you know, she continued, or whatever, to essentially make it two quotes instead of one quote, to avoid it being a block quote, just because I'm afraid if it's a block quote, it's not going to get read.
Matthew Avery Sutton 25:09
This is like the question, maybe for historians generally, but especially for a book like this. But how do you decide what to keep in and leave out? I mean, you can't, despite length, you can't tell everything. So what hits the cutting room floor, what stays in and what's kind of the guiding principle in your decisions?
Matthew Avery Sutton 26:48
So for this book, I was focused really on issues of power, and that's what I think sets me apart from some folks in the discipline of Religious Studies. I did a lot of cross training. My PhD is history, but I did a lot of work at UC Santa Barbara in Religious Studies when I was a grad student. They have an excellent Religious Studies program, but this is going to be a huge reductionistic stereotype, but the religious studies folks tend to focus on like diversity of religion, without paying a lot of attention to hierarchy and power in the sense that, like they will find real importance in a very small movement, because it might illustrate broader things that we need to understand about how religion functions in the world. I am more interested in those who have power and exercise it, and how they deploy religion as a way to do that. And so for this book, and I try to be clear about this in the introduction, it's not about every Christian movement in North America, from colonial till now. It's about those who exercise the most power. So it's predominantly a white Protestant story. But to make the white Protestant power make sense, we have to have the perspectives of those who are outside of power. So there are always those pushing back. You know, the indigenous communities, the enslaved communities in late to the 1960s and 70s, gay rights activists were pushing for equality within American religious institutions. And so I try to be very explicit that I can't cover everybody, but I'm going to focus on those who have the greatest influence in the greatest role in our public life, because that's what the focus of the book was, but again, the caveat to that is those who have a lot less power help explain those who have power, and so they're in there too.
Matthew Avery Sutton 25:18
I'm hoping you can tell us a little bit more about what the editorial process was like for this book. You mentioned earlier that your editor helped to even sort of suggest, suggest you bring it into being. So, what was that relationship like?
Matthew Avery Sutton 27:59
So I, as I mentioned, the first book was with Harvard, the book on Aimee Semple McPherson. My second book, I stayed with Harvard because I recognized that some academics look down on commercial presses, that they don't treat them real seriously. And so I figured, until I was promoted to full and had really established my career as more than just, you know, my first book that it was important to stay with the university press. But at that point, I hired an agent, and so I've also like all this, I don't think we can really separate from the role that an agent plays in this but, but after my second book, I realized I probably wanted to move in a more commercial direction, because I felt like commercial books would market the product better, would market the book better, and probably allow me to reach a larger audience and help me just grow grow readership. And so I looked at a few presses, ended up going with Basic for Double Crossed. And Basic is really good because they focus on intellectually driven books that make serious arguments but that can reach a crossover audience. So if you look at their list, it's often professional historians or journalists or scientists who are writing, you know, broader work for general audience and so, so they really straddle both worlds of academic but also public, popular. My editor there now, Brian Distelberg, is a PhD in history from Yale. They have a great tradition of working with historians and taking the historical process very, very seriously. So, so I did Double Crossed with him. Was happy with that. Did Chosen Land with them. Was thrilled with it. And this is where you know to get your question, the editorial process, I've been extraordinarily impressed. So the book went into Brian, and he helped think about the big ideas. And so he sent me really substantial feedback about, you need to expand here. You need to cut here. These are the important themes. You need to double down on these. This is not as important or not as clear, kind of just big picture, careful reading of the whole thing. So then I made that set of edits, then it went back. They have another person who's a freelancer, who worked for many, many years at, think it was Random House, one of the other major commercial presses, and he was the line editor, which was not for dealing with, like grammar, but really just dealing with clarity. So, like, this paragraph could be clearer. This seems inconsistent. You talk about this in this paragraph, but this thing in this three paragraphs later would make more sense if we moved it around. And so it was really focused on the writing more than the content, but in a big picture, structural kind of way. And he also, the great thing about having a senior editor was he also found some factual mistakes, and he also was able to give me, you know, more substantive feedback on that. Then from there, it went to a third person, who was the copy editor, who essentially was doing the grammar. So then we got into the very nitpicky nuance of making sure tenses match, making sure subject predicate matches, all that, that kind of stuff. Then I had to respond to that. And then there was a production editor who compared my responses to the copy editor. So that was the fourth person who had to look at the entire manuscript production editor, then cleaned up any discrepancies between me and the copy editor. And then it went to a fifth person, the final proofreader, who went through to make sure all those changes were done. And I don't know how many other presses give a manuscript of 200,000 words to five different professionals to read it at that level, but, but I've been so thrilled with the kind of care and time and effort that they put into it. And so, you know, it's only been out for two weeks, no doubt I'm going to get emails about typos and factual errors and all the mistakes that still slip through that are entirely my fault. But it was really great having so much professional help, and it really is a statement to the value of a press like Basic.
Kate Carpenter 33:13
You know, I'm thinking back to our conversation about your your schedule and in the life of a department chair and full time professor and writer, how do you think about fitting in marketing and publicity for your books in the midst of all of that?
Matthew Avery Sutton 26:04
Great question. So in 2019 when Double Crossed came out, podcasts were just taking off, and I said no to a bunch. In retrospect, I really regret it. I mean, I just thought, what the heck, like what you know, I had done, I'd done Morning Edition in 2007. I thought, if it's not Terry Gross, why am I doing this? I've never been on Terry Gross, but obviously since 2019 I've realized that podcasts are really important ways to talk about your work and to reach new audiences and to engage with different groups of people who otherwise might not encounter your stuff. And I love your and I love your podcast. I love talking about writing because I actually spend a lot of time thinking about it, and have spent a lot of time thinking about it, and so it's fun to be able to reflect on it. So that part of it was that the other part of it is, I'm, you know, I'm Gen X, and so I'm a little older than the social media revolution, like I was, I saw it. I was part of it. I was never on Facebook for a variety of reasons, even though Gen X is obviously very Facebook, the Facebook generation. I was on Twitter back when Twitter was good, and I found Twitter extremely useful. But then when things went crazy with Elon Musk and DOGE, I canceled it. I had never been on Instagram. I moved over to Bluesky, and then as I was getting closer to pub date for this book, I realized I've got to get back on social media. So I turned my X account back on, got on Instagram, still not on Facebook, you know, still on Bluesky, on Threads, but frankly, I'm now turning into the old man who doesn't know how to do social media. So like to repost something on Instagram, which I don't think is even what you call it on Instagram, like I had to talk to the media expert at Basic Books and like this person, put this thing out. How the heck do I get my followers to see it? So it's been clunky. It's not been very good. And so I'm also trying to figure out that balance of wanting to make sure people are aware of my work, but without that kind of obnoxious self promotion. And it probably is already obnoxious self promotion. But you know, when I put something out there and my wife's aunt is the first person to tell me how proud she is of me, it's, you know, it's, it's very sweet, but also kind of embarrassing, because I'm trying to put this out for academic professional purposes, not for Auntie Karen to tell me how proud she is of me, even though it's so sweet that she does that.
Kate Carpenter 33:27
I want to ask you, too, because you write for lots of different audiences, whether it's students or op eds, how do you think about the differences between writing a book and writing in those kinds of ways?
Matthew Avery Sutton 27:13
That's an important question. It's one I spend a lot of time thinking about, especially working in a public university, where I have to be aware of the many different audiences. And you know the fact that my salary is paid by the taxpayers of the state of Washington. So I feel like I have four different voices. I feel like my classroom voice with students is the one that I try to be most neutral. And of course, none of us can be neutral, none of us can be objective. But I certainly go into the classroom encouraging students to read primary sources and to tell me what they think. And then I feel like my job is to just push back on driving them to think about their own preconceived ideas, their own, you know, ideological commitments, their own beliefs. And so the idea really is for me to help them think for themselves, not for me to tell them what to think. Then there's the audience of academics. So when I write a journal article, it very much is not something that I imagine somebody is going to take down to the beach to read for fun during the summer, unless they're very strange person like me. I guess I could see doing that, but that's going to be focused on, you know, historiography. I still try to avoid jargon, but it's going to be very didactic. Here are, here are my arguments. Here's the significance of those arguments, here's the roadmap I'm going to use to support the argument. And that's it. That's not going to be sexy, or I'm not going to worry about my metaphors, or about painting word pictures. Then there's the books in the genre of writing a crossover book that's still academically serious, but also reaches a larger audience. That's where I really think about still talking about an important historical argument, but trying to embed it in a narrative that's lively and engaging, and so more and more of my voice comes through on that. And I found with each book too, I'm also more comfortable bringing in more and more of my own voice and my own opinions. And so, you know, there are moments in each of my books, and I think even more so in Chosen Land, where you can really see me step out of the kind of aspiring, neutral, objective historian to know this is Matt Sutton, and this is what he likes and doesn't like, or who he likes and doesn't like it basically, because I work on religion, who is the fraud, who is the con man, who is the huckster, you know, who, who is just disreputable. And then finally, the Op Ed. And when I've written op eds, I feel like those are exaggerated versions of my voice, that to write a compelling op ed, you really have to be argumentative, you really have to be controversial. And I don't mean Donald Trump on Truth Social trying to trigger people. But, I mean, you need to make an unapologetic argument in 800 words. You don't have space for nuance. You don't have space for a lot of qualifications to kind of contextualize. And so for those I, you know, I essentially go for the jugular. You know, they're short, they're biting and the idea is that I'm going to make a clear point, you have to get to the point immediately. Like no editor will take seriously an op ed if you don't know two or three sentences in what the takeaway is going to be. And so in some ways, though, when I look back on them, I'm a little bit embarrassed, because I know a historian can read it and say, Well, wait a minute, there's all these, you know, complicating factors that you didn't deal with there, and they're 100% right. 100% right there are, but you just can't worry about that in an 800 page op ed. So for me, it's thinking about the different kinds of writing I do, whether it's a journal article or a book or an op ed, and they're all very different.
Kate Carpenter 35:16
Is it hard to get, I'm thinking about how an actor sort of has to get into character. Is it, is it challenging to switch between voices?
Matthew Avery Sutton 36:24
I guess not for me, because I like, I've always liked the kind of argumentative style, so I find that fun. Again, sometimes I regret it a little bit. You know, as you I'm sure you know that for famous people, obituaries are often written ahead of time, and then they're published when somebody dies. I had written one for Billy Graham that was a little mean spirited. The title was Billy Graham was on the wrong side of history, and The Guardian had accepted it before he died, and then it was one of the very first publications to hit right after news of his death came out. And so that I kind of felt a little bit guilty, because it was like, Do I really need to be trashing this guy on the day of his death? Because when I was writing it, he was very much alive. Alive, and I was annoyed by his politics. So there are those kinds of things, but in general, it's not hard for me to do. I just don't want to be an asshole. And sometimes I realize I come off as an asshole in the Op Ed voice. And so that's that's the thing I have to just live with and accept. Oh well.
Kate Carpenter 36:49
I want to ask a little bit about your influences. What's the most influential writing advice you've ever gotten?
Matthew Avery Sutton 37:23
Boy, I think it's probably just bits and pieces here and there that I've picked up over the years in grad school at Santa Barbara. One of my dissertation committee members was Elliot Brownlee, who was an economic historian, or is an economic historian, writes about, you know, intriguing tax policy. Couldn't come up with a funner topic than that, but he taught one of my graduate seminars, one of the research writing seminars, and he had like a list of rules, and that's where I first began to think about passive voice and not using passive voice. He really drilled that into us. I mentioned Grant Wacker earlier, one of my early mentors. His big book on Pentecostalism came out in 2003 while I was wrapping up my dissertation. It is a beautifully written book, and he, too, has these really fabulous metaphors and similes. And it made me realize the importance of kind of painting a picture for your readers of the stories you're trying to tell. And so I've always modeled my work on his. I've read Stephen King's book On Writing a couple of times, and I spent a lot of time thinking about his talking about writing. He's made me try to cleanse most of my books of adverbs. He hates them, and I've tried to not use them. The bad news with that, though, is Stephen King is just a master at metaphors, like you can't read a paragraph without him making a comparison of whatever it is he's describing is like, or a simile is like whatever else. And so I peppered my manuscript with trying to trying to do that. And apparently I'm not nearly as effective, because that second round of editing, the line editor, excised almost all of what I thought were my beautiful metaphors from this manuscript. So I'm apparently no Stephen King, but I have spent some time, you know, reading those folks. When I was writing the Double Crossed book, which is about missionary spies, I was reading John le Carre kind of spy novels, and thinking about the language of spy craft, and trying to make sure that I understood the terms. And again, trying to think about, you know, if an audience reads spy novels, and then they read my book about real spies. You know, there's obviously massive differences, but hopefully there is some crossover. Hopefully, you know, I can make my story as compelling as John le Carre, which, again, I cannot make it as compelling as John le Carre. But that's at least the goal.
Matthew Avery Sutton 37:35
Are there other, aside from sort of trying to understand the genre that you are maybe writing in relationship to, are there other writers or historians that you look to for inspiration, you like to read?
Matthew Avery Sutton 37:35
You know, I'm always impressed with Jill Lepore, her use of words. When I was working on the introduction to my book, I pulled up the introduction to her more recent big US history, and just thought about like, how do you set up a massive book like this? That's going to be kind of argument driven, but also kind of synthetic. And you know, clearly, with her success at The New Yorker, she's somebody who has figured out how to still do serious history, but to reach a larger audience. So she's another model. I remember well, I guess another thing that I learned early on, and this was back working with the PBS documentary, was thinking about writing in the way that people write about stage shows with acts, and thinking about like, if it's going to be long, if it's going to get to a point where you're really going to have to ask readers to stick with you for a long period of time. You want to kind of think about narrative arcs, ups and downs, but you also want to have to build drama into the text. And so you don't want to do what we're trained to do in graduate school, which is to begin, you know, your introduction in every chapter, telling the reader where it's going to end, because then they really don't have to read it. But you also, if you're not going to do that, you have to compel them to want to read it, to keep them engaged, to keep some mystery, some suspense, into the text. And so I've certainly tried to do that as well, to kind of tease readers about where it's going without kind of telling them what the end is going to be until I get there. So in that case, it also is just thinking about novelists and people who write fiction and the ways that they tell dramatic stories, and trying to apply that to the historical profession. And I've actually, um, as I finished up Chosen Land, I've been talking to editors again about the next project. And some of the editors I've been talking to have really reinforced that idea, also, that you really have to keep readers curious. And if you can't keep readers curious, there's just, there's no point, you're going to lose them. And again, this is, this is the general nonfiction readers, not the grad students who have to finish whether they want to or not.
Kate Carpenter 44:45
Where do you go from here? How do you think about what you work on next after writing the history of Christianity in America?
Matthew Avery Sutton 44:52
So I'm turning 180 degrees. You know that one of the thesis theses of the book is that Americans believed that the United, many Americans, not all Americans, obviously, but many Americans believe that the United States is God's new chosen land. That's where the title comes from. John Rolfe described North America that way in the 1610s when he was helping settle the Virginia colony. And then Herman Melville used the term in the 1850s and then Ronald Reagan uses it in the 1980s and so I played with this metaphor of chosen land throughout the book. So then the question becomes, well, if you think you're God's new chosen land, if you think you're building the kingdom of God on earth, what happens when things go wrong? How do you deal with problems? And so the new book is going to be on the Devil and Satan in American history, but I'm not going to write another 650 page book. And so this one's just going to focus on the 1960s to the present. And essentially what I'm thinking about it is organizing it as the long Satanic Panic. That the Satanic Panic doesn't really end in the 1980s but goes on to the present day. And I did an op ed for The Guardian on Peter Thiel, who's been doing these Antichrist lectures. And so thinking about the ways in which some of these issues of Satan, the devil, the Antichrist, continue to be with us in ways that are really surprising and unexpected. And I certainly would have never guessed that Peter Thiel would be talking about the Antichrist if you'd asked me a year ago. So again, I'm going to publish this one again with Basic partly because I was, well, very much because I was so impressed with the editing work and the time, the care they put into Chosen Land, and I've just been so happy with the editorial team there. So so it'll be another book with Basic.
Kate Carpenter 46:29
Awesome. Well, I can't wait to read it, and I'm glad to have read Chosen Land, and I think that other people will enjoy it too. So I'm looking forward to seeing where it goes and to seeing what you're up to next. So Dr. Matthew Avery Sutton, thanks so much for joining me on Drafting the Past.
Matthew Avery Sutton 46:43
Thanks, Kate. This was really fun. I really appreciate it.
Kate Carpenter 46:46
Thanks again to Matt for joining me and to you for listening. Find links to his books and more in the show notes at draftingthepast.com and don't forget to go to draftingthepast.com/survey to tell me what you like about the show and what you think I could be doing better. I really appreciate your help. Until next time, remember that friends don't let friends write boring history.
