In 1831 William Mercer Green, an Episcopal clergymen and later bishop of Mississippi, used a lecture at the University of North Carolina to extol what he argued was the near total affects of public Christianity on the development of Western social progress. For Green,...
political theology
Patriotic Jesus: Bishop Theodore Dehon on the Duty of Patriotism in the Early Republic
Christopher Edwards Gadsden, rector of St Philip’s Church in Charleston, South Carolina and later bishop of South Carolina, published a comprehensive biography of Theodore Dehon in 1833. Dehon served as the second Episcopal bishop of South Carolina. When he died in...
Napoleon’s Defeat and Thomas Chalmers’ Post-millennial Nationalism
“Were such a government as this to be swept from its base, either by the violence of foreign hostility, or by the hands of her own misled and infatuated children-I should never cease to deplore it as the deadliest interruption which ever had been given to the interests of human virtue, and arm, to the march of human improvement.”
“Impious and Fearful”: Early Republic Episcopalians Against the Social Contract
In an 1848 election sermon to the Massachusetts legislature, Alexander H. Vinton, rector of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Boston, told the state legislators the state had a divinely ordained function in moral government. Interestingly, Vinton rejected Locke and the...
Frederick Jackson Turner, Frontier, and Protestantism
The subjugation of the frontier seems to have been done through institutions that were at best ambivalent about democracy, liberalism, and individualism.
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.
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.
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.
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...