Musings on history, politics, religion, and all the other things we take too seriously in the 21st Century.
Intellectuals and ministers debated the meaning of religious liberty throughout the Early Republic. Almost every observer and writer vigorously supported religious liberty, but there was not significant agreement on what…
I recently weighed in (again) on the questions surrounding the debate over so-called Christian nationalism in the United States. The debate seems to overlap significantly with the question of populism…
In 1846 an obscure French schoolteacher, Peter Stewart Ney, died in Rowan County, North Carolina. He served in the various small home schoolrooms scattered among the Presbyterian gentry in Rowan…
19th Century ministers regularly preached to men carrying guns. Politicians and military figures in the Nineteenth Century United States publicly and enthusiastically committed to the so-called separation of church and state also regularly ordered government workers, soldiers, and militiamen to attend religious services.
During the late Eighteenth and early Nineteenth Centuries, North American Baptists joined their Congregationalist, Methodist, and Presbyterian counterparts in creating colleges and seminaries institutions to teach and train laypeople and…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
