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 the perception 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. Hall argues that this has impacted how the Supreme Court has interpreted the religion clauses of the First Amendment. Hall 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 John Jay Institute. He contributes regularly to the blogs Law and Liberty and Learn Liberty.
Selected bibliography
Books
Hall, Mark David. Did America Have a Christian Founding? Separating Myth from Historical Truth. Thomas Nelson, forthcoming.
Hall, Mark David and Daniel L. Dreisbach, ed. Great Christian Jurists in American History. New York: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming.
Hall, Mark David and Daryl Charles, ed. America and the Just War Tradition: A History of U.S. Conflicts. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2019.
Hall, Mark David, ed. Collected Works of Roger Sherman. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund Press, 2016.
Hall, Mark David. Roger Sherman and the Creation of the American Republic. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013.
Hall, Mark David. Roger Sherman and the Creation of the American Republic. Oxford Scholarship Online: Oxford University Press, 2013.
Hall, Mark David and Gary L. Gregg II. America's Forgotten Founders. Wilmington: ISI Books, 2011.
Hall, Mark David and Daniel L. Dreisbach, ed. The Sacred Rights of Conscience: Selected Readings on Religious Liberty and Church-State Relations in the American Founding. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund Press, 2009.
Hall, Mark David, Daniel L. Dreisbach, and Jeffry H. Morrison, ed. The Forgotten Founders on Religion and Public Life. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009.
Hall, Mark David, Kermit L. Hall, and James Wilson, ed. Collected Works of James Wilson, 2 Vols. Indianapolis: Liberty Funds Press, 2007.
