David Sehat

Assistant Professor
Ph.D., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2007
phone: 404-413-6362
e-mail: dsehat@gsu.edu

David Sehat is a cultural and intellectual historian of the United States. His work focuses on the role of religion in law and politics from the First Amendment to the present.

Sehat is currently at work on his first book, An American Heresy: The Myth of Religious Freedom, which is under contract with Oxford University Press. He argues that the United States had, in effect, a state-supported religion for much of its history. U.S. law particularly on the state level enforced Protestant Christian moral ideals until the 1960s. Through blasphemy law, sodomy prosecutions, obscenity and vice squads, and other ubiquitous forms of moral regulation, Protestant Christians erected a proxy religious establishment. When this proxy moral establishment crumbled in the late 1960s, the United States began experiencing the religiously driven politics of the present. Ultimately, the book looks to past forms of moral regulation in the United States in order to explain goals of the contemporary Religious Right.

At Georgia State, he teaches courses on U.S. cultural and intellectual history, nineteenth-century U.S. history, and the history of American religion.