A Response to Brad Littlejohn on Religious Liberty
A follow-up to our recent debate.
A follow-up to our recent debate.
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…
The logic of religious liberty in Walker's book encourages moral anarchy rather than liberty.
The Baptist idea of "soul competency" has been distorted, and with it our whole notion of religious liberty.
In his book The Next American Nation (1995), Michael Lind offers a damning prediction of the Evangelical Right's embrace of the politics of victimhood.
So far, I have worked to argue that the English Reformed tradition had already become considerably less magisterial by the mid-seventeenth century. Next, I want to suggest that Cromwell’s move towards supporting a kind of multiple establishment had echoes in the early republic, first in the abortive attempts to create shared establishments that would support churches of various denominations, as was attempted by Jefferson’s enemies in Virginia, then by the creation of an informal evangelical establishment in which Presbyterians and Congregationalists played the central role.
What insight did R.L. Dabney have on the origins of American religious liberty?
