This moment in World History has been playing out on a micro level among so-called Evangelical Protestants. Patricians and plebes are emerging into seemingly ossified castes, and the quickest way at present to move into the patrician class is to publicly denounce the strong gods of the plebes.
Miles Smith
After *After Nationalism*
The pursuit of a unitary American identity is undoubtedly something that should be approached with intellectual caution.
Christian Micronationalism?
I’ve expended a good bit of intellectual energy recently trying to add nuance to the question of so-called Christian nationalism as it relates to the American republic. I’ve been reading Frédéric de Rougemont’s The Individualists in Church and State over the past few...
American Disestablishment: The Conclusion
While the Commonwealth was not the cartoonish inquisition its detractors make it out to be, the Cromwellian regime by no means approached what eventually became the understanding of toleration in the American republic.
The Promise and Peril of Disestablishment: Baptist and Reformed Political Theology in the New Republic
What were the differences between over church and state betwen Baptists and the Reformed in the early US republic?
Distinguishing Before Denouncing: A Review of “Why Liberalism Failed”
Liberalism has failed. Or so confidently declares Patrick Deneen in his obviously named Why Liberalism Failed. Deneen offers one of the more useful and concise attacks on the often vaporously defined liberalism that has, according to Deneen, plagued modern societies for the last several hundred years. Deneen’s proof of liberalism’s failure is not that it failed to change society, but that liberal societies became exactly what they were supposed to be. The liberal state increasingly worked towards removing cultural and social institutions responsible for governing society’s consumer and sexual appetites. Few orthodox Christians dispute that these are woeful problems. And Deneen deserves praise for identifying the ills that plague modern society. The book’s weaknesses are anachronism, and imprecise and lethargic taxonomy.