Quick Facts
Biography
Mark David Hall (born 22 February 1966), is Herbert Hoover Distinguished Professor of Politics and Faculty Fellow in the William Penn Honors Program at George Fox University. He is the author of a number of books on religion and politics in American life. The majority of his research has been in religion in the American founding era.
Education
In 1988, Hall received a BA in political science from Wheaton College (Illinois) and in 1993 received his PhD in government from University of Virginia.
Early career
Prior to his 2001 hiring at George Fox University, he taught from 1993 to 2001 at East Central University, first as an assistant and then an associate professor. He has served as Herbert Hoover Distinguished Professor of Politics at George Fox since 2005, and Faculty Fellow in the William Penn Honors Program since 2013. His primary teaching fields are great books, political theory, constitutional law, and religion and politics in America.
Later career
Hall’s scholarly work is focused on issues of religion in the American founding era. In particular, his writing is often concerned with dispelling misconceptions that the Founders were deists who desired the strict separation of church and state. Instead, he argues that there are good reasons to believe many Founders were influenced by orthodox Christianity and that virtually none of them favored anything approximating a contemporary understanding of the separation of church and state. See, for instance, his 2010 lecture at the Heritage Foundation that was covered by C-Span. Hall demonstrates that these distortions are of more than scholarly interest, arguing that they have had a profound impact how the Supreme Court has interpreted the religion clauses of the First Amendment.
In addition to teaching at George Fox University, Mark is Associated Faculty at the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University, Senior Fellow at Baylor University’s Institute for Studies of Religion, and an Affiliate Scholar at the John Jay Institute. As well, he contributes regularly to the blogs Law and Liberty and Learn Liberty.
Selected bibliography
Books
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