So Help Me God

After serving almost three decades as Senior Minister, Dr. Church is now Minister of Public Theology at All Souls Congregation. He was educated at Stanford University, Harvard Divinity School and Harvard University, where he received his Ph.D. in Early Church History. He served two terms at Dartmouth College as Montgomery Fellow and visiting professor.

Dr. Church has written or edited 23 books, including: Father and Son: A Personal Biography of Senator Frank Church of Idaho. Fifty of Dr. Church’s columns for The Chicago Tribune are collected in Everyday Miracles: Stories From Life. Eight of Dr. Church’s sermons have been selected for inclusion in the annual anthology Representative American Speeches. One of these addresses, Fear and Terror, is also included in Representative American Speeches 1937-1997 Dr. Church's 1988 interview with Bill Moyers is included in A World of Ideas.

Dr. Church’s work is not only intellectual. He is also a member of the Executive Board at the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute and serves on the Board of Bridges toward Justice, dedicated to strengthening the Chinese criminal justice system. Mayor Giuliani appointed him Chairman of the Council on the Environment of New York City in 1995. Serving in his tenth year as chair, he directs, among other programs, the city’s 44 Greenmarkets.

Publisher’s Weekly describes So Help Me God as follows: “Today’s dispute over the line between church and state (or the lack thereof) is neither the first nor the fiercest in our history. In a powerful retelling of the birth of the American body politic, religious historian Forrest Church describes our first great culture war . . . In this vigorous history, Forrest Church offers a new vision of our earliest presidents’ beliefs, reshaping assumptions about the debates that still reverberate across our land.”