Nineteenth Century Protestant intellectuals embraced a positivistic vision of liberty in the Early Republic. Liberty in the era generally meant the freedom to pursue societal good. This American religious order was not in any meaningful way theocratic, but it was...
Miles Smith
Anglicans and Education in the Early Republic
Changes in education remain among the most significant alterations in intellectual life in the United States. The growth of colleges and universities from primarily liberal arts and religion institutions into credentialization bodies chiefly aimed at procuring...
Early Republic Evangelicals, Abortion, and the Culture Wars
In 1823, Hugh Lenox Hodge became a lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania’s medical school. Hodge hailed from a well-known Philadelphia family. His father, also Hugh, served as a physician in Early Republic Pennsylvania. The elder Hodge’s sons made their family...
More Than Protestant, But Never Less Than Protestant: An Addendum to Timon Cline
Timon Cline has offered a very good piece at The American Reformer on the Protestant foundation of the states that formed the American Union in 1788. It’s a worthwhile piece that touches on a broad range of historical realities in the Early Republic. Cline...
Be for the City: 19th Century Evangelicals and Progressive Urban Theonomy
Nineteenth Century Evangelical Protestant reformers foreshadowed their late Twentieth Century co-religionists by their heavy influence on social and moral reform particularly in northern cities. In his Evangelical Gotham, Kyle Roberts noted that Evangelicals in early...
The Purity of the Church of England
In 1852 the bishop of Exeter charged his chancellor, E.C. Harington, with preaching on the foundations of the Church of England. Harington used the opportunity to proclaim what he believed were the explicitly apostolic and biblical origins of the English Reformation....
Woodrow Wilson, the Bible, and Liberalism in 2022
In his religious biography of Woodrow Wilson, Barry Hankins notes that Wilson’s father—prominent southern Presbyterian minister and professor Joseph Ruggles Wilson—stated after his son’s election as a ruling elder that "I would rather that he held that position than...
Family Worship and Christian Nationalism in the Early Republic
John Stark Ravenscroft served as bishop of North Carolina from 1823 to 1830. He hailed from an old Virginia family noted for their Tory sympathies during the American Revolution. Although he was born in Virginia, Ravenscroft’s earliest memories were from Scotland,...
Leithart on empire and Russia/Ukraine
Segments of the Christian right have flirted with a sort of schadenfreude during the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The West, they believe, is so bad and the American regime so benighted that anything must be better. That anything, in this rendering, is the Russian...
Liberalism contra Secularism and Theocracy: A Reply to Mark Tooley
I recently read with interest Mark Tooley’s piece “Democracy vs Theocracy.” Tooley argues that for some “magisterial Protestants” and Catholic integralists, modernity is corrupt and the aberrant exception to the human story. A return to “traditional” societies, in...