Prior to his career in academic administration, he was a historian who was a leading scholar on issues related to the history of religion in the United States.
[1] Born and raised in Columbia, South Carolina, Hatch graduated summa cum laude from Wheaton College (1968) in Illinois and earned his master's and doctoral degrees from Washington University in St.
[citation needed] Earlier Hatch had published The Sacred Cause of Liberty: Republican Thought and the Millennium in Revolutionary New England, also with Yale University Press, and with historians George Marsden and Mark Noll co-authored the 1983 volume The Search for Christian America (Crossway Books).
He has co-edited two books with (Oxford University Press), The Bible in America (with Mark Noll, 1981) and Jonathan Edwards and the American Experience (with Harry Stout, 1989).
In 1982, along with Mark Noll, he co-founded the Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals (ISAE) at his undergraduate alma mater, Wheaton College.