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...
Miles Smith
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.
The Protestant Mind of Young Henry Adams
The Harvard education of the mid Nineteenth Century was still demonstrably Protestant and even conservative.
Protestants Against Biblicism and Racialized Science in the Early Republic
Protestant intellectuals, particularly those involved in colleges, universities, and seminaries, denounced phrenology and racialized science as incompatible with Christianity.
“The men, to make a State, must be religious men”
Evangelicals are not the only ones who have assumed the need for a religious body politic in America.