The United States did not inaugurate Protestant faith and doctrine. Protestant churches—Anglican, Lutheran, and Reformed—preexisted the American republic. Yet Americanist presumptions have been taken as holy writ by Protestants throughout the history of the United States, with interesting and sometimes horrifying consequences.
Miles Smith
Musings on history, politics, religion, and all the other things we take too seriously in the 21st Century.
Afghanistan, the Reformation, and American Empire.
Americans are not a chosen people; Americans Christians are not special morally or spiritually. Americans are sinful humans just like the rest of humanity.
*The Color of Compromise*, Evangelical Calvinism, and atoning for history.
The unique wedding of Evangelical Reformed moralism to the question of anti-racism might lead to a certain type of radicalism wherein anyone not entirely committed to the antiracist cause might be seen—although never called—antinomian
Moby Dick as Protestant Midrash and the road to Progressive Evangelicalism.
Melville seems to lead us to the conclusion that Ahab’s sin was not his hatred of the whale, but his pursuit of a certain type of moral reckoning with that hatred.
Abraham Lincoln: Common Good AND Liberal Conservative.
Lincoln’s embodiment of the best of the liberal conservative political tradition was illustrated by the cautious but substantive way he sought to end the moral evil of chattel slavery in the United States.
Western Novels, The Good Book, and the Modern Immigration Debate
For all of its imperfections, the American republic did in fact eventually nurture something along the lines of a healthy multiracial and pluralistic community
The Last Liberal Conservative Pt Deux: The French Connection
Liberal conservatism is most often associated with the United Kingdom, but liberal conservative political parties exercised power across Europe from the end of the Napoleonic Wars to the beginning of the First World War. In 1824, Louis XVIII’s successor and younger...
The Last Liberal Conservative
Liberal Conservatives in the Nineteenth Century, unlike latter-day libertarians who claim their mantle, understood that institutional might and power played a role in liberal efforts to expand basic civil rights in a broadly conservative order. Liberal conservatism did not mean tearing down the Christian order or Christian socio-political establishments.
Evangelical Elites, Neoliberalism, and World History
This moment in World History has been playing out on a micro level among so-called Evangelical Protestants. Patricians and plebes are emerging into seemingly ossified castes, and the quickest way at present to move into the patrician class is to publicly denounce the strong gods of the plebes.
After *After Nationalism*
The pursuit of a unitary American identity is undoubtedly something that should be approached with intellectual caution.