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...
Miles Smith
Musings on history, politics, religion, and all the other things we take too seriously in the 21st Century.
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...
The Idea of the Christian Soldier in America History, 1800-1861
My college recently started its Center for Military History and Strategy. We’ve been able to bring in some of the best historians whose work intersects military history, the Classics, philosophy, and religion. I’m a trained historian of the United States, and spent a...
Charles Hodge, David Platt, and the Evangelicals’ (Dis?)Ordered Loves
In the third volume of Charles Hodge’s 1871 Systematic Theology, the Princeton Seminary professor offered a formula for how Protestants should understand moral responsibility in the context of what is generally known as ordo amoris, or the order of loves. Protestants,...
“I have therefore returned to the faith of my childhood”: Moral Law, Grace, and Nature in the Political Theology of François Guizot
No French Reformed Protestant influenced and informed French politics in the 19th Century more than François Guizot. Best known as King Louis-Philippe’s last prime minister, Guizot served in some political capacity from Napoleon’s reign to the final overthrow of royal...
Kingship and Parliaments in French Reformed Protestant Political Theology
In the 19th century Anglo-American historians—almost inevitably devotees of what Herbert Butterfield called the Whig or Protestant theory of history—inevitably viewed Anglo-American political developments in the 17th and 18th century as the primary foundations for the...
Protestants, the Tsar, and the Holy Alliance: Religious Revival and Politics in Europe, 1800-1830
In the aftermath of Napoleon’s deposition in 1814 a significant political and religious renaissance among French and Swiss Protestants gained disciples across Western Europe, in the German states, and even in the Russian Empire. The very limited anglophone...
Piety, Politics, and Protestantism in the Era of Trump
Donald Trump won reelection this week. A major facet of his electoral coalition was a shift towards the Republican presidential ticket among young men between the ages of 18 and 29, of all races. Statistics on the religious commitments of voters are nigh impossible to...
Race, Religion, and Republic in Herman Melville’s “Redburn”
Herman Melville published his autobiographical novel Redburn in 1849. The work proved to be one of his best, and in many ways remains his most quintessentially American novel. Redburn lacks the exoticism that typified Typee and Omoo, both set in the South Pacific....