"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.

Creation and Creatureliness: The Blessing and Beauty of Work

Usually I try to write something that even if not original at least reflects my original response to what another has written. But I've finished reading two other prolific bloggers who, while I suspect disagree on much in terms of their approaches to theology, have nearly simultaneously made thematically similar observations. The first here by D.J. Hart on the natural blessing of good, hard work as exemplified by one of his second-order heroes, H.L. Mencken, and the recently deceased Christopher Hitchens. Why, Hart in effect muses, are many Christians so heavenly minded they are of little earthly good? God's creation is good and the results of those who work it well should be admired.

The second is an extended quotation from Wendell Berry that bemoans the disconnect between current American evangelical "Christendom" and the historical rootedness of the Church in the beauty of creation and humanity's artistic response. The result of evangelicalism's historical amnesia is not merely ugly churches and vapid music but a cultural blindness that destroys the Church's witness more effectively than any persecution.

Are You a MTD?

Friday night the Renew 2010 conference at Westminster Presbyterian Church featured Notre Dame professor of sociology Christian Smith.  Smith is best known as author of Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers.  Based on 3,000 lengthy telephone interviews with teenagers (and their parents) as well as 267 in-depth follow-up personal interviews in 2003 and 2005, Smith concluded that the actual religion of American teenagers is moralistic, therapeutic, deism: (i) a God exists who created and orders the world and watches over human life on earth, (ii) God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other as taught in the Bible and most world religions, (iii) the central goal in life is to be happy and feel good about oneself, (iv) God does not need to be particularly involved in one's life except when he is needed to resolve a problem, and (v) good people go to heaven when they die.

For what it's worth, I doubt that the religion of American teenagers differs significantly from their parents' religion.  In fact, it differs only slightly from what was called American Civil Religion back in the 70s.  Significant by their absence (at least in the Christian account) is any awareness of sin, judgment, and salvation in Christ.

Saturday morning Smith went on to summarize the results of the results of interviews with the same cohort five years later.  I'll save my summary of his findings but for now it's safe to say that the Church in America has utterly failed to communicate effectively the truths that virtually all Christian traditions have acknowledged for 2,000 years.  The Church has always existed in some tension with American culture, or at least it should have.  Some might be relieved that any such tension has disappeared.  American culture has won.  Amazingly sad.