In an 1848 election sermon to the Massachusetts legislature, Alexander H. Vinton, rector of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Boston, told the state legislators the state had a divinely ordained function in moral government. Interestingly, Vinton rejected Locke and the...
Miles Smith
“This Combined Secular and Religious Training”: Charles Hodge on Public Education in the Early Republic
Early Republic Protestant divines saw the implementation of a public educational system as a necessity for a healthy republican order. Charles Hodge, principle of Princeton Seminary and perhaps the most prestigious Protestant intellectual in the United States in 1850,...
Hierarchy, Not Binary: Early Republic Episcopal Conceptions of Sacred and Secular in the Civil Order
Early Republic and Early National Protestant conceptions of the sacred-secular distinction in some ways were less a binary or a distinction than values in a single divine hierarchy. Few religious leaders in the United States denied that the government was secular, but...
Anglican vs Evangelical Education in the 19th Century
In August 1879 the Episcopal bishop of Mississippi, William Mercer Green, addressed the gathered trustees of the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. Sewanee, then only two decades old, nonetheless had become a leading institution of higher learning in the...
Fears of a Setting Sun: The Disillusionment of America’s Founding Fathers
Washington, Hamilton, Adams, and Jefferson all gravely doubted the future of the nation they created.
Christ Between Secularism and Theocracy: Samuel Smith Harris’ John Bohlen Lectures on Church and State, 1882
How did 19th century Episcopalians views the relationship between church and state?
Frederick Jackson Turner, Frontier, and Protestantism
The subjugation of the frontier seems to have been done through institutions that were at best ambivalent about democracy, liberalism, and individualism.
Philander Chase’s “Plea for the West”: Episcopalians and the Early Republic Frontier
In 1835 Lyman Beecher wrote his Plea for the West, urging Protestants to settle and proselytize the American West lest Roman Catholics convert the whole region. Eight years earlier, Philander Chase, first Episcopal bishop of Ohio, published a pamphlet of the same...
Progressives and the Bible in the Gilded Age
The United States’ centennial celebrations in 1876 took place in a republic barely a decade removed from a civil war that killed over 700,000 men. The ensuing decade that followed Appomattox convinced many Americans that their society was progressing materially,...
Episcopalians in the Early National Midwest: Against Rome and Revivalism
Anglicanism represented the best chance of making the American West civilized and Protestant.