"Religion and Republic"

In Religion and Republic: Christian America from the Founding to the Civil War (Davenant Press 2024), Miles Smith, associate professor of history at Hillsdale College, presents a masterful but readable recalibration of the interminable debates surrounding Christian Nationalism. Rather than arguing from the perspective of myopic secularism, ahistorical biblicism, or even Magisterial Protestantism, Smith draws on American history to explain how leading persons, institutions, and doctrines of disestablished Protestant Christianity were woven into the fabric of American political and social life during its first 80 years.

Kevin DeYoung summarizes Smith's thesis in the Foreword:

Throughout our history as a country America was neither a repristination of Calvinist Geneva or Constantine's Rome nor a secular novus ordo seclorum. ... From 1789 onward, there existed a sometimes contentious but often complementary set of convictions that (1) America would never have a federally established Christian Church and that (2) America was and always had been an obviously Christian country. (v)

In short, for at least its first 80 years, the United States enjoyed a disestablished "established" religion. And that religion was a wide but theologically deep Protestantism. "Especially in the nineteenth century, America could be fairly described as a nation held together--in law, in culture, and in shared assumptions--by a broadly Christian order that privileged Protestant Christianity while also tolerating religious minorities." (v)

Smith substantiates his thesis through fulsome chapters on legislation (primarily but not exclusively at the state level), common law courts, protection of the Sabbath, "the world" (i.e., federal foreign policy), Indians, and education. I was aware of some aspects of what Smith covered but much of it was entirely new to me. Smith also devotes a chapter to Thomas Jefferson, the ideological and political bête noire of the disestablished Protestant establishment. In brief, Jefferson's anti-Christian program of anti-clericalism proved a failure: 

Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, intellectual, religious, and judicial elites remained committed to older Protestant understandings of church and state whereby two separate institutions worked hand in hand to maintain the civil and social orders. ... From the election of Jefferson onward, historical Protestant legal frameworks in state laws, judges, colleges and universities, and the burgeoning American literati all upheld Protestantism's fundamental place in American culture, politics, and society, whether Jefferson liked it or not. (55)

But all was not straightforward during Protestantism's hegemony. Smith's discussion of controversies about the Sabbath demonstrates that there could be sharp disagreement within disestablished Protestantism. Conservative Presbyterians took the first step in 1808 by barring a local postsmaster from communion for opening mail on Sunday. Virtually all Protestants believed that commercial activity should be suspended on the Lord's Day but for most, the work of government--including mail delivery--could take place as a "work of necessity." Some Presbyterians, however, following the letter of their Westminster Standards, agitated in favor of taking political action to prohibit mail delivery on Sundays. They failed. For many other conservative Protestants,

The definition of the Lord's Day used by the prohibitionists ... was in many ways a sectarian [Presbyterian] one, and [thus] the Sunday mail campaign was in many ways a misguided attempt to force the United States not into a rejection of secularism but into an explicit adoption of a Calvinist doctrinal expression ... (140-141)

I'll leave it to followers of this blog to read Smith book for themselves. They should. (And they can order it here.)

Nonetheless, two quibbles. First, there's no index. I had assumed in this digital age that including an index to a book of this sort was easy and thus standard. And second, Smith overlooked a significant effect of Protestant political efforts in the Bankruptcy Act of 1841. The power to seek a voluntary discharge of one's debts, and that only every seven years, owes its legislative success to Northern Whig Protestants. See my article The Missing Piece of the Puzzle: Perspectives on The Wage Priority in Bankruptcy (here or here) for more on this.