Mid-19^th Century Britain and to a lesser extent the United States of the same era became the arenas of the great debates over the relationship between Christianity, free trade, nationalism, and nationalism as each of those propositions both intellectual and social related the commonwealth. In the United States the Whig Party and their successor Republicans embraced nationalism and Christianity but rejected free trade in favor of Henry Clay’s protectionist American System. The Democrats, led by Andrew Jackson and later Martin Van Buren, embraced free trade more readily, but still saw some space for what they called a revenue tariff. Christianity’s relationship to free trade never made its way on to the floor of Congress in a meaningful way. The only aggressively free trade religious body proved to be the Southern Presbyterians, who in 1864 issued a free trade affirmation at their 1864 General Assembly. Southern Protestants saw a capacious space for Christianity in political society—in the form of an autonomous but influential church—and free trade but they were increasingly suspicious of the nation—in the form of the federal state—by the middle of the 19^th Century in a way northern Whigs (and Republicans) were not.

Much of the American debate over free trade hewed closely to debates on slavery in the same era. In Britain, the debates took place in a society that prohibited slavery, and therefore the question could be litigated without the obscuring politics of slavery. Free trade champion Richard Cobden argued that Christianity played a necessary role in the free trade debate, and he rejected out of hand the nationalism that typified Britain’s Conservatives at the time. He did not, it might be noted, associate free trade with religious disestablishment; Cobden practiced the Anglican faith throughout his life and supported its establishment. He differed in this respect from Scottish Presbyterian Thomas Chalmers, who rejected protectionism and establishmentarianism even as the latter broke with the state church and joined the Free Church in the Great Disruption of 1843.

Chalmers and Cobden broke not on the question of establishmentarianism, but on the question of whether the state was an essential agent in the moral ordering of society. Chalmers saw the state and nations as enduring parts of human political life. Cobden—while not as convinced as someone like Hegel that the states and nations would eventually disappear in a future utopian order of perpetual human peace—nonetheless believed national differences would be mitigated by Christianity to such a degree that a brotherhood of countries would treat each other with Christian good will and trade with each other on the same terms. Lord Hobart, a devotee of Cobden, argued in the aftermath of the American Civil War that nationalism was essentially folly. The Briton screeching “God Save the Queen” and the Frenchmen belting out “La Gloire” both confirmed for Hobart the essential truth of Cobden’s Christian internationalism and free trade devotion. If British and French nationalists “were heathens, there would be more to be said for them.” But Cobden hoped that “improved means of education and advancing intelligence would have taught even to paganism that the self-isolation of nations-the self-imposed and obstinately maintained severance of man from man, because they happen to be of a different race, or to have a different political history-was not an evil to be danced and sung about, but a calamity to be deplored.”

What Cobden and Hobart could not understand was Christians holding on to jingoistic nationalism in what they both believed was the enlightened 19^th Century. “Christianity cut the knot which intellectual advancement would sooner or later have untied, and if taught anything, taught this, that simply because they belong to a different race, or are geographically divided from them, men have no right to treat other men as socially and politically distinct from themselves.” Social and political estrangement “of members of the great human family is an evil of the same nature as the mutual estrangement of children born of the same parent; and that the exclusive regard of men for those with whom they are classed by the accidents of origin or of soil is a moral delinquency of the gravest kind.”

Both Cobden and Chalmers, it might be noted, could be classed as postmillennialists, in that both believed that Christianity might bring about a future era of human fraternity. Where they differed was the continuing place of modern political association and division in the coming Christian era. Modern postliberal Christian nationalists and postliberal ecclesiocentrists divide on similar lines, in that Christian nationalists presume the endurance of the modern state in ways that theonomists and their ecclesiocentric successors do not. Cobden and Hobart in this regard, remained committed liberals, assuming that liberal free trade and the Christian church would bring about the coming Christian era in tandem, a broadly proposition shared by American Protestants in the 19^th and 20^th Centuries but rejected in the late 20^th Century by dispensationalists, and in the 21^st by postliberal Christian nationalists, many who interestingly enough came of age in dispensational churches.