Preston Hotchkis Professor Emeritus, Department of History, UC Berkeley

Education

The Evangelical Capture of the Republican Party and Its Implications for Academia

On evangelical anti-intellectualism in the Republican Party

August 28, 2025 • by David A. Hollinger

For the first time in American history, a major political party has a vested interest in a low-education electorate. This astonishing fact has inspired remarkably little discussion. Religion has a lot do with it. The Republican Party courted evangelical Protestants for decades, but the client eventually captured the patron. The party ...

The Evangelical Capture of the Republican Party and Its Implications for Academia

Religion

Why Christianity and the Fate of American Democracy Are Intertwined

An interview with intellectual historian David Hollinger

September 26, 2022 • by Claire Potter and David A. Hollinger

We're now confronted with a remarkable paradox. Our increasingly secular society is saddled with increasingly religious politics. Religion is ever-more prominent in Supreme Court decisions and in the statements that candidates for political office make. Politics are not only more religious, they are more Christian. ...

Feature

Why John Dewey Should Matter to Historians

The role of knowledge and truth in the Constitutional order was Dewey’s central project

May 6, 2019 • by David A. Hollinger

This essay was originally published on May 6 2019. These Truths: A History of the United States is the book that Henry Steel Commager tried to write forty years ago, but did not. Commager’s 1979 volume, Empire of Reason, took seriously the Enlightenment foundation for the nation, but his account of the many ...

Feature

Protestant Missionaries and Immigrant Jews

Cosmopolitan Allies

December 28, 2017 • by David A. Hollinger

Countless Congregationalists, Methodists, and Presbyterians and other American Protestants were transformed by their experience in Japan, China, India, and the Arab societies of Western Asia. There, the missionaries encountered civilizations of intimidating complexity and power that had survived since antiquity. The same applied to a lesser extent to Africa and ...