In 1835 Lyman Beecher wrote his Plea for the West, urging Protestants to settle and proselytize the American West lest Roman Catholics convert the whole region. Eight years earlier, Philander Chase, first Episcopal bishop of Ohio, published a pamphlet of the same...
Miles Smith
Musings on history, politics, religion, and all the other things we take too seriously in the 21st Century.
Progressives and the Bible in the Gilded Age
The United States’ centennial celebrations in 1876 took place in a republic barely a decade removed from a civil war that killed over 700,000 men. The ensuing decade that followed Appomattox convinced many Americans that their society was progressing materially,...
Episcopalians in the Early National Midwest: Against Rome and Revivalism
Anglicanism represented the best chance of making the American West civilized and Protestant.
The Protestant Mind of Young Henry Adams
The Harvard education of the mid Nineteenth Century was still demonstrably Protestant and even conservative.
Protestants Against Biblicism and Racialized Science in the Early Republic
Protestant intellectuals, particularly those involved in colleges, universities, and seminaries, denounced phrenology and racialized science as incompatible with Christianity.
“The men, to make a State, must be religious men”
Evangelicals are not the only ones who have assumed the need for a religious body politic in America.
Political Philosophy in Hodge’s Romans Commentary
Theology, it appeared to Hodge, naturally included political theology
Lord Macaulay and the Limits of Liberalism
Liberals historically did not accede to Enlightenment or secularist ideology regarding the civil order.
Was America Ever Christian? A Reply to Desiring God
Was the early American republic really marked by deism, the Enlightenment, and secularity?
Samuel B. Wylie and the Invention of Secular America
1800 saw the invention of a secular America, not a Christian one. There was no need to invent an explicitly Christian founding, largely because the Christian socio-civil foundation of the republic was already largely assumed.