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Associate Professor of American Christianity
Dr. Heath W. Carter is the Associate Professor of American Christianity and the Director of PhD Studies at Princeton Theological Seminary. He earned his PhD in United States history from the University of Notre Dame in 2012. Prior to that, he received an MA from the University of Chicago Divinity School in 2005 and a BA in English and Theology from Georgetown University in 2003.
Carter is the author of Union Made: Working People and the Rise of Social Christianity in Chicago (Oxford University Press, 2015), which was the runner up for the American Society of Church History’s 2015 Brewer Prize. He is also the co-editor of three books: The Pew and the Picket Line: Christianity and the American Working Class (University of Illinois Press, 2016), Turning Points in the History of American Evangelicalism (Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2017), and A Documentary History of Religion in America, 4th Ed. (Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2018).
He is currently working on a new book entitled On Earth as it is in Heaven: Social Christians and the Fight to End American Inequality (under contract with Oxford University Press), which retells the story of the American social gospel. By the nineteenth century, some American Christians had come to see participation in fights against structural inequality as essential to their faith. Over the course of roughly one hundred years, stretching from 1865 to 1965, these believers — women and men, Catholic and Protestant, black and white and Latinx — cultivated a proud, if fractious, social Christian tradition that transformed not only the churches but also the nation as a whole. This books tells the story of how little-known activists, eminent theologians, radical preachers, and progressive politicians powered faith-filled movements for a more egalitarian United States of America.
Carter is an editor-at-large for William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company and the co-editor, with Kathryn Gin Lum and Mark A. Noll, of the press’s award-winning Library of Religious Biography series. He is also the senior co-editor, with Nancy J. Taylor, of the Journal of Presbyterian History. Carter serves on the advisory boards of the Louisville Institute and the Hispanic Theological Initiative. He teaches regularly in congregational contexts. He and his family are active members of Nassau Presbyterian Church (PCUSA) in Princeton, New Jersey.
