Religion & Republic: Christian America from the Founding to the Civil War
By Miles Smith.
The Davenant Press, 2024.
Paperback, 350 pages, $42.95.
Reviewed by Glenn Moots.
Beginning in the 1970s, American Christians sensing a cultural shift engaged in a war of polemics with secularists like Madalyn Murray O’Hair over whether America was founded as a “Christian nation.” Over the last few years, this continuing controversy has diversified into something more niche: a debate over the threat, or promise, of “Christian nationalism.”
These culture war campaigns began in newsletters and are now waged on X; the rhetorical weapons deployed are often imprecise and partisan. But academic questions are also at stake in the contest over Christian America. In the 1980s, no doubt prompted by the culture wars, scholars Mark Noll, George Marsden, and Nathan Hatch went searching for Christian America but couldn’t find it. Professor Mark Hall claimed recently to have more-or-less found it, however. Hillsdale Professor Miles Smith has now joined the search. In Religion & Republic: Christian America from the Founding to the Civil War, Smith provides a thematic overview of the period between 1800 and 1860. His book is somewhat unique in that whereas many debates concern the religious character of the Founding or the Founders, Smith is concerned with the period afterwards.
During this first half-century of the republic, America’s religious and moral character was of interest not merely to culture warriors or to scholars as it is now, but to statesmen, jurists, and university presidents building the new nation. To discern Protestantism’s role in this period properly, Smith says we must reject the more familiar academic methodology focusing on a growing evangelical movement. In that familiar framing, used by Noll and others, Protestant influence in America is synonymous with biblicism, activism, and revivalism: it is concerned mostly with atonement or apocalypse. Above all, the evangelical is a reformer. While he may become an obnoxious moralist or slip into ugly apologetics for slavery, racism, or nativism, he’s never an irredeemable revanchist. He is likely to be a patriot during the Revolution, an advocate for religious freedom, abolition, women’s suffrage, and civil rights. Protestantism in this framing is individualistic if not always liberal.
While such a characterization may be true of many American Protestants, and the consequences of those characteristics salutary for elements of the new nation, it ignores the rigorous intellectual and institution-building character of Protestantism presented by John Witte, Harold Berman, or others. Smith argues that it is the Protestant institution-builders who matter for the early republic more than the activists or revivalists. More scholarship is appreciating this more traditional and conservative Protestant character. For example, while Noll casts patriot ministers as hopping radical political ideas owed to a radical Enlightenment, Gary Stewart demonstrates them to reflect traditional and orthodox magisterial Protestantism. It’s not surprising that Noll took the position that he did, however, given that leading lights of the mid-twentieth century era like Alan Heimert or Bernard Bailyn also paid almost no attention to the precedents of magisterial political theology. When the default among intellectuals was a presumption of discontinuity among American Protestantism, all could be cast as a true Novus Ordo Seclorum that looked more like Year Zero.
Smith’s Protestant is not this transformational type, a term that evangelicals like to use even today. Smith’s Protestant is institutional. Smith’s Protestant is an ancien regime Protestant, able and willing to bake his faith into existing legal, educational, or diplomatic regimes without sacralizing those regimes or subordinating them to the church. They were not theocrats. Perhaps most importantly, they built institutions in spite of, and alongside, disestablishment. In other words, there did not need to be a state church for them to do their work, or for them to see their society as any less Christian. Disestablishment, in Smith’s telling, did not diminish Christian cultural aspirations; it enlarged them insofar as the sectarianism typically agitated by a state church gave way to Protestant unity. As Smith describes it, “Disestablishment did not assign the church to a merely spiritual role in society but elevated it above political meddling. Disestablishment was the apotheosis of a Christian society, not its termination.” Indeed, not only do historians like John Fea or Martin Marty agree with Smith on the Christian character of America during this period, denominational leaders at the time such as Charles Hodge (Presbyterian), Isaac Backus (Baptist), George Washington Doane (Episcopal), CFW Walther (Lutheran) all agreed on that character as well.
Smith’s revisionist approach to the period then requires not only that we reject religious establishment as a bellwether of Protestant influence, but also that we appreciate how much Americans rejected religious intolerance while still advancing the idea of a Christian polity. One Methodist Episcopal characterized religious intolerance as “odious and hateful,” for example. Rejecting hard intolerant establishments was American Protestantism’s cleanest break with its European legacy. At the same time, however, Americans maintained the older European Protestant desire that institutions and culture reflect their Christian faith. The U.S. Constitution prevented a federal religious establishment to be sure, because it would have imposed the broadest intolerance. But the Constitution did not prohibit state establishments; nor, more importantly, did it discourage Christianity’s place in civil, social, or intellectual life. Smith approvingly quotes Geoffrey Stone who argued that evangelical Protestants “converged on American politics en masse” as a “Benevolent Empire.”
American Protestant churches therefore lacked the “nursing father” that they enjoyed in prior centuries, whether in Europe or in the colonies, but Protestants nevertheless wove their convictions into the existing institutions to become a de facto (though not de jure) state religion. Institutional Protestantism wasn’t confined to the original colonies either but continued west. The Northwest Ordinance of 1787, for example, demonstrates how American statesmen considered religion, learning, and morality dependent on one another. The ordinance’s passage, “Religion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged” has been rightly called the “birth certificate” of the University of Michigan and was inscribed on notable buildings.
Such pervasive Christian influence was not the intent of James Madison and Thomas Jefferson, the latter characterized by Smith as one who “loathed churchly institutions and Protestant clerics.” Even Jefferson’s attempt to root British liberties in the Anglo-Saxons was motivated, in part, by this refusal to acknowledge the role of Christianity in Anglo-American jurisprudence. Like other skeptics of the era, he considered only a “primitive” (pre-Athanasian) Christianity authentic and hoped that faith could be reduced to personal moralism. Anything more was abhorrent priestcraft, he thought, and his University of Virginia reflected that. The state of Virginia even denied churches the freedom to incorporate.
But Jefferson’s view was a minority opinion. While some of the Federalist fears of his presidency were no doubt hysterical or opportunistic, those fears demonstrated why Jefferson should not be considered representative of American thinking. Most Americans desired some link between church and institutions, including the state, so long as it did not promote what they judged to be intolerant. Religious tests for office continued in many states. Strict sabbath laws, as well as profanity and blasphemy laws, continued undeterred for decades and expanded into new states. The church as a social institution was therefore not confined to spiritual well-being as a voluntary society as it is today. Churches and whatever biblical ideas were considered institutionally relevant got treated as civic assets. Jurists agreed. The right of the Protestant Episcopal Church in Virginia to own property was upheld by SCOTUS in Terrett v. Taylor (1815), with the majority opinion written by Justice Story, a jurist perceiving no conflict between establishment and religious freedom. Story was regularly charged by Chief Justice Marshall to write opinions, demonstrating Marshall’s own support of public Christianity.
Jurists became stewards of religious exercise in other cases as well. The New York Supreme Court in Dutch Church of Albany v. Bradford (1826) considered itself empowered to demand behavior “calculated and tending to maintain the honor of religion and promote the success of the gospel.” In the Ruggles case (1811), New York Supreme Court Chief Justice Kent likewise upheld a blasphemy charge in part because he considered Christianity part of the common law. In 1824, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court upheld a blasphemy charge on similar grounds. In the 1830s, when iconoclast Abner Kneeland cried out against what he considered theocracy and despotism in Massachusetts by testing its blasphemy laws, the judge chastised him as an inflexible heretic. A state church no longer existed, but public Christianity certainly continued, the judge ruled. Delaware and Missouri likewise treated Christianity as privileged because of the rights of its Christian citizens. Legislators protected Christian prescriptions and judges preserved Christian proscriptions because of freedom of conscience, not despite it.
Institutional Protestantism was prominent in universities and colleges, too, whether public or private. They very much resembled seminaries until the growing influence of German methods transformed them into something more familiar to us today. At the University of Wisconsin, the president called on professors to be “regulated by Christian ethics . . . unshaken in the Christian faith.” He believed that it should be said of professors there that “[a]n American heart should beat high in his bosom.” Newark College (now the University of Delaware) eschewed any professorial candidates who bore prejudice against Christianity or political principles subversive of the Union. Only the University of Virginia made any pretense to being non-sectarian though it eventually fell into line with every other state university that held chapel services. Most Americans did not recognize the freedom of religion to include the freedom to principled skepticism—let alone promote speech or education to advance such skepticism.
Protestantism also dictated a certain approach to affairs of state. Early administrations generally prioritized relations with Protestant nations and took a dim view of Roman Catholic countries; many refused to send more than a consul to Rome. Providentialism was overt, identifying the nation’s fortunes as determined by divine favor. Missionaries became an extension of foreign policy. Though Article 11 of the 1797 Treaty of Tripoli stated that “the government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion,” Smith demonstrates that it was not so clear cut in the minds of Americans. He quotes Fea to say that if the treaty was an accurate description of things, “someone forgot to tell the American people.”
As for relations with foreign nations at home, the American Indians, Smith contrasts benevolent organizations such as the American Bible Society (ABS) with Jeffersonian and Jacksonian policy that led to more relocation and suffering. The ABS and similar Protestant organizations aligned better with Federalist ideals, though all American policies were generally paternalistic. Some missionaries and denominations, however, not only tried to blunt the hostility of uncivilized rough-and-tumble settlers but promoted economic integration of the Indians and hoped to preserve their indigenous culture and language. One litmus test of Protestant attitudes on this last point was who supported translation of the Bible into indigenous languages and who wanted to force use of the scriptures in English.
Even when Protestant unity did not prevail, as when it failed in a debate over Sunday mail delivery, it still proved just how much a soft religious establishment still existed. The mail had been run by the postal service on Sunday since 1810, with a precedent extending back even further in some states. Trains to carry the mail operated even in New England where they most objected to Sunday delivery. Objectors argued that consciences were violated by working on the sabbath, an argument attempted even today in employment lawsuits. But it was also asserted that preserving the sabbath preserved republican institutions because religion promoted requisite virtues—a more politically-minded argument. Some Protestants objected, seeing this particularly sectarian interpretation of the sabbath as a pseudo-establishmentarian Presbyterian national religion. This battle over interpretation of a particular theological point demonstrated how much the country remained staunchly Protestant, not one slouching toward secularism.
Political contests among Christians now would not be over such relatively minor points of application within their own traditions. Today’s churches and believers are more likely to simply parrot popular political ideologies, Right or Left, about immigration or welfare policy, for example. If faith and law do intersect in 2025, it is probably to assert protection of an inner realm of conscience violated by LGBT or birth control mandates, for example. On the other side, some claim a conscientious right to be free from religion, though that claim relies on a conception of the conscience that would not exist had it not been advanced by faithful persons with an eye to the God that skeptics deny.
Conceptions of faith, or identity, as something entirely internal and private are the opposite of the period Smith describes. Americans for most of our history understood faith to be something publicly practiced, shared, and benefitting the republic, or res publica. That is, our beliefs about human virtue, origins, and ends are a public matter. Perhaps as we consider the new culture wars, including cancel culture that has become a kind of secular excommunication, we are moving back in line with the period Smith describes. We will not confine our fundamental beliefs to something substantially internal and private but agree with our predecessors that they are a public thing. Seeking concord on such matters is an imperfect but essential part of life together. We will then have to decide which faith best aligns with our consensus on public matters. It probably will not be Protestantism, evangelical or otherwise. What it will be, however, will define the culture wars of our future.
Glenn A. Moots is Professor of Political Science and Philosophy at Northwood University and also serves as a Research Fellow at the university’s Center for the Advancement of Free Enterprise and Entrepreneurship. He is the author of Politics Reformed: The Anglo-American Legacy of Covenant Theology and co-edited, with Phillip Hamilton, Justifying Revolution: Law, Virtue, and Violence in the American Revolution.
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