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...
Miles Smith
Musings on history, politics, religion, and all the other things we take too seriously in the 21st Century.
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....
“Men of all descriptions will, to a great degree, be transformed into business men”: Businessmen’s Preaching in the 19th United States
In 1857 James Waddel Alexander, prominent Presbyterian minister and former professor at what is now Rutgers University, and later at Princeton Seminary, spearheaded the publication of a short work called The Man of Business Considered in His Various Relations that...
Thomas Chalmers and the Expulsive Power of a State Church
Conversations among conservative Christians in the United States pertaining to questions of political theology tend to revolve around cultural or social politics and the retention of a Christian socio-moral order. The relationship of church and state to economics, in...
Hierarchy and Separation: Anglican Political Theology in the Early 20th Century
Historically-rooted works on Anglican political theology, particularly political theology of American Anglicans, remain in relatively short supply. Michael Bird and N.T. Wright have published their Jesus Among the Powers but its relatively contemporaneous and oriented...
A.A. Hodge on the Cultural and Social Benefits of Biblical Christianity
In a series of lectures begun at the end of the American Civil War, Hodge offered evidences for what he believed were incontrovertible proofs of Christianity’s social and cultural benefits to society. Hodge’s definition of Christian was ultimately somewhat sectarian,...
Post-constitutionalism and the Christian Right to Revolution in Anglican Political Theology, ca 1776
In the Spring of 1776, Anglican priest and academic Richard Watson—then Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge and later the Anglican bishop of Llandaff from 1781 to 1816—wrote a short tract designed to address what was then a civil war between the British Empire...
R.L. Dabney on Politics and Christian Moderation, c. 1860
In November 1860 Robert Lewis Dabney addressed the young men of Hampden-Sydney College. The Governor of Virginia called a fast day for 1 November, a not infrequent occurrence in the Nineteenth Century. Governors appointed a day for the state to fast; this did not...