'Church History for Everyone' lives up to its title
Christianity Today
October 30, 2026
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Illustration by Christianity Today
This piece was adapted from CT’s books newsletter. Subscribe here.
Kevin DeYoung (Author), Peter Voth (Illustrator)
Crossway
416 pages
$23.98
Kevin DeYoung, Church History for Everyone: The Story of Christianity from the Fall of Jerusalem to the Dawn of the Reformation (Volume 1) (Crossway, 2026)
Kevin DeYoung, a conservative Presbyterian pastor with a PhD in history, offers an accessible history of the Christian church from the fall of Jerusalem (AD 70) to the dawn of the Protestant Reformation. Rather than writing in narrative form, as most church history textbooks do, DeYoung takes a biographical approach. The volume covers most major early church fathers and medieval Christian thinkers, including Irenaeus, Athanasius, John Chrysostom, Augustine, Cyril of Alexandria, Benedict, Anselm, Bernard of Clairvaux, and Thomas Aquinas. He also includes political figures such as Titus Vespasian, Constantine, and Charlemagne, who influenced the church’s growth.
DeYoung reminds us that church history is meant to edify the church. He thus writes for Christians. While this is primarily a celebratory book, it does not ignore the tragedy and failures of Christian leaders during this period. DeYoung does an impressive job of bringing current scholarship to a lay readership. (His “Notes on Sources” at the end of the book provide rich resources for those who want to dig deeper.) In his foreword, historian Mark Noll praises the book as a “gift of advanced scholarship, a gift of patient distilling of that scholarship, [and] a gift of readable prose communicating complicated material clearly.”
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Church History for Everyone is a nice introduction to the history of Christian doctrine, missionary work, persecution, and church-state relations. The chapters are short and end with discussion questions. If tasked with teaching a Sunday school course on early Christianity, I would seriously consider using this book.
## Revolution: The Birth of the Greatest Nation in the History of the World
Eric Metaxas (Author)
Simon & Schuster
640 pages
$26.32
Eric Metaxas, Revolution: The Birth of the Greatest Nation in the History of the World (Odysseus Books, 2026)
Like DeYoung, Eric Metaxas is also writing for Christians. But he is less concerned with his subjects’ flaws and failures than DeYoung. Metaxas tells a story of American exceptionalism and triumph that fits in the same category as Christian nationalist approaches to history—the kind of material produced by WallBuilders, the nonprofit in Aledo, Texas, run by David and Tim Barton.
To be fair, Metaxas tells the story of the American Revolution through topics one would find in most one-volume accounts. We read about the Stamp Act, the Boston Tea Party, the Declaration of Independence, Lexington and Concord, the Battle of Trenton, and Valley Forge. As Metaxas notes in the book’s acknowledgments, he draws heavily on well-respected narrative historians of the American Revolution, including Thomas Fleming, Rick Atkinson, John Ferling, and Robert Middlekauff.
But when Metaxas insists on forcing his belief that America was founded as a Christian nation onto his narrative, it goes astray. We end up with a Revolution portrayed as a battle between good and evil. (Metaxas illustrates the evil of the British Empire by pointing to George III’s sexual dalliances with women but says nothing about American sins such as slavery.) He also leans into the debunked view that the evangelical revivalist George Whitefield influenced the American Revolution. And he even advances the idea that the founders wanted to restore God’s “Sinai Covenant,” replacing Israel with an independent United States. (He supports this with out-of-context quotes from John Adams.)
Christians interested in the history of the American Revolution and religion can find more responsible treatments—start with works by Mark Noll, Thomas Kidd, Katherine Carté, and Jon Meacham.
Daniel Walker Howe (Author)
Oxford University Press, USA
928 pages
$14.36
Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848 (Oxford University Press, 2007)
Like Metaxas, the late historian Daniel Walker Howe also studied American nation-building, but he approached the subject as a trained historian, without a political axe to grind. The Pulitzer Prize–winning What Hath God Wrought is part of the prestigious Oxford History of the United States series. This is a thick book (904 pages), but Howe writes in compelling prose. Last summer I co-led a discussion of this classic with a group of history buffs, and we all benefited from sustained engagement with the argument and its implications for our current understanding of American identity. The book rewards the careful reader.
Most historians have understood the early decades of the 19th century as a period of emerging democracy and the rise of a capitalist or market economy in America. Howe does not ignore these topics, but his primary focus is on how new developments in communication and infrastructure—roads, bridges, canals, telegraphs, newspapers, and eventually railroads—turned localized and disparate American settlements into a nation. The title comes from the first message sent over Samuel F. B. Morse telegraph in 1844: “What Hath God Wrought.”
Howe connects this new emphasis on building and innovation to the growth of evangelical Christianity during the Second Great Awakening. The gospel spread through roads and communication networks, and the era’s most important moral reform movements—abolition, temperance, women’s suffrage—would have been impossible without this fusion of economic, cultural, and spiritual growth.
John Fea is a senior fellow at the Lumen Center in Madison, Wisconsin, and the author, most recently, of In God We Trust: Was America Founded as a Christian Nation?
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