The First Amendment and the push for disestablishment from the 1780s to the Jacksonian Era redefined the history of the religion and more particularly Christianity in Protestant North America. Disestablishment seemingly separated American Christianity from its...
Miles Smith
Musings on history, politics, religion, and all the other things we take too seriously in the 21st Century.
Latter Day Saints, Religious Liberty, and the Problem of Christian America in the Early Republic
Since the promulgation of the United States’ Constitution in 1788, Protestants across denominational lines largely supported disestablishment and the Constitution’s provision for religious liberty in Article I. Last week I noted that there was in the Early Republic...
Corporate v Individual: Religious Liberty in the Early Republic
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 the term meant or entailed. Religious liberty...
Protestantism and the Problem of Populism
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 and its relationship to religious life in the United States. One...
Is Napoleon’s most famous marshal secretly buried in a North Carolina Presbyterian churchyard?
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 (and to a lesser extent Iredell, Cabarrus and Mecklenburg counties) in...
Evangelicals, Guns, and Church and State in the Early Republic
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.
Early Republic Southern Baptists, Education, and Populism
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 seminarians. Despite a...
Christianity, Education, and Secularism in 1900 America
At the beginning of the Twentieth Century, secularization in Western intellectual and political life led to policy changes in education, particularly in France and in the United States. The American republic’s commitment to a disestablished federal religious regime...
Passion and Constraint in the Early Republic Religious Order
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 was not in any meaningful way theocratic, but it was...
Anglicans and Education in the Early Republic
Changes in education remain among the most significant alterations in intellectual life in the United States. The growth of colleges and universities from primarily liberal arts and religion institutions into credentialization bodies chiefly aimed at procuring...