Despite a wealth of martial imagery in traditional Anglophone hymnody and in English-language religious discourse broadly, modern Americans flinch at the notion of churchmen acting in a martial manner, particularly if they do so by arguing for divine sanction to back...
Miles Smith
James Theodore Holly: A 19th Century Evangelical Episcopalian and Black Nationalist
In 1874, the American Church Missionary Society, with the sanction of the presiding bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States, consecrated James Theodore Holly as missionary bishop to Haiti. Holly lived previously in the Black Caribbean republic...
Celts, Calvinists, and Culture War
In 1982 Grady McWhiney, then one of the deans of southern and Civil War history, and his student Perry Jamieson published Attack and Die: Civil War Military Tactics and the Southern Heritage. The controversial book made a splash in the military history and in Civil...
William Gilmore Simms, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Calvinism, and the Novel in Antebellum America
In his The Novel: Who Needs it? Joseph Epstein proposes that Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin was “beyond doubt the most important novel published in the United States.” The novel’s importance lay, says Epstein, in its effect. But “important though Uncle...
Protestants, Sea Serpents, and the Biblical Leviathan in the 19th Century
In the nineteenth century the rise of more advanced technology for oceanic exploration, the subsequent increase in maritime traffic, and the first major discovery of fossils of dinosaurs and related prehistoric reptiles, reignited the question of sea serpents and sea...
“Warfare has its place, its office”: Protestant Theology of War, 1861
As the scale of the American Civil War became clear to Americans north and south, Protestant clerics engaged the subject of war more regularly in their preaching. By the Fall of 1861 the conflict’s first major battle—called variously First Manassas or First Bull...
Politics and the Prayer Book Revisions of 1785 and 1789
In the aftermath of the American Revolution the newly Americanized Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States—the successor to the colonial Church of England, revised the Book of Common Prayer for American usage in 1785 and in 1789. The reasons given were to...
Napoleon: Strongman of the Evangelicals?
How have evangelicals related to the “Big Men of History”?
“Union and War”: William G.T. Shedd on Divine Sanction for War and Nationalism, Pt 1.
In the third week of November, 1862, William G.T. Shedd mounted the ornate pulpit of New York City’s Brick Presbyterian Church. Historian Mark Noll calls Shedd a high Calvinist comfortable with relying on Christian history to correct substandard teaching. His...
Liberal Empire and the Limits of Religious Toleration: The Abolition of Suttee in India, 4 Dec 1829
On 4 December, 1829, the Governor-General of Britain’s state-run monopoly and de-facto government of colonial India—the East India Company—issued what became the most controversial mandate of his administration. Lord William Bentinck, scion of one of Britain’s most...