Between 1785 and 1788 two major Protestant groups—parishioners in the Church of England and Presbyterians—confronted the political changes that occurred because of the founding of the American republic in the preceding decade and the promulgation of the United States’...
Miles Smith
Musings on history, politics, religion, and all the other things we take too seriously in the 21st Century.
Tim Keller’s Ecclesiocentric Postliberalism
When Timothy Keller published The Reason for God in 2008, the work was widely understood to be an apologetic for Christianity to secular liberal society. The work’s title alludes to an age of skepticism, a phrase that in itself conjures—at least for the historically...
Antebellum Southern Presbyterians Against Southern Politics
In the 160 years between the US Civil War and 2025, history and literature of the American South have offered an ahistorical blending of the politics and religion of the South in to a single united socio-cultural whole that acted with a single intellectual mind. The...
Difference but not Disagreement: A Rejoinder to Kevin DeYoung and James Baird on the 1788 Revisions to the Westminster Confession
Rev. Dr. Kevin DeYoung and Rev. James Baird, two teaching elders in the Presbyterian Church in America, have recently carried on a civil but substantive debate on the nature of the 1788 revisions to the Westminster Confession. Deyoung posits that American...
Nationhood and Old High Churchmen in the pre-Tractarian Church of England
By the late Victorian Era, Church of England and to a lesser extent Protestant Episcopal Church clerics and intellectuals began to write works aiming to present a sort of post-mortem on the Tractarian movement that ripped Anglican unity apart in the 1830s and 1840s....
Darwinism and Race in Gilded Age Southern Presbyterianism
The aftermath of the Civil War saw a significant rethinking of racial theory among southern Presbyterians. Benjamin Morgan Palmer Jr. and Robert Lewis Dabney in particular took up "a defense of separate southern Presbyterianism and religious segregation after...
Christianity, Free Trade, and Nationalism in 19th Century Political Theology
Mid-19th Century Britain and to a lesser extent the United States of the same era became the arenas of the great debates over the relationship between Christianity, free trade, nationalism, and nationalism as each of those propositions both intellectual and social...
An Evangelical Protestant on America and Russia in the Civil War Era
A year after the defeat of the Confederacy, Evangelical Presbyterian-turned-Congregationalist minister Charles B. Boynton, professor at the Naval Academy, Chaplain to the House of Representatives, and president of what became Howard University, laid down his thoughts...
The President as Protestant Warlord
This week US President Donald Trump wielded the startling powers of the United States presidency when he dismissed senior generals and replaced them with handpicked successors. While there was nothing unconstitutional about the act, Trump’s opponents argued that he...
“Sons of the Greeks, Arise!”: Christianity, the Classics, and War in the 19th Century
The question of the Bible and Biblical authority defined debates among nineteenth century American Protestants as they appealed to the Christian scriptures to justify positions in political debates. Most Protestants in the Early Republic understood that the Scriptures...