The American Way

A Review of Religion & Republic by Miles Smith

The ravages of spurious evangelicalism on the Protestant tradition have left many Americans historically and politically unmoored, especially if they find themselves looking for religious continuity of any substance. Such listlessness leaves one vulnerable to specious influences. Conversations about the merits of Protestantism continue percolating. The challenge goes beyond river crossings, as those who remain steadfastly Protestant continue to elevate subversive and un-American voices. I myself have recently grumbled that American Protestants desperately need to free themselves from the influence of British theologians hawking their political wares in the land of the rich, gullible and as-of-yet free. The Absolute State of England is warning enough. In marked contrast, the New Catholics – that growing sphere of vital Catholic postliberals – purportedly present a compelling and occasionally muscular political vision (however disparate). But can a Catholic vision be an American one at heart? Can American Protestants provide a robust apology for their own tradition, history and politics without capitulating to Catholic ecclesiology or the liberalism of English academics? Surely I think so, and if the protestant retrieval movement of the past decade proffered nothing else – it undoubtedly has pulled out from the shadows and returned to public light the persistent union of religion and institution in the minds of our forefathers. Our greatest obstacle may not be how tempting the alternatives are, but a shallow understanding of who we as American Protestants actually were and what we might still strive to be. Miles Smith’s recent book, Religion & Republic, provides something of imitable importance on this front.

An Alternative to “Christian Nationalism”?

Smith’s base case is that pre-20th century American Protestantism relied upon secondary institutions to protect, mediate and undergird the interests of Christians in lieu of a national state church and that the American public did not interpret their open Christianity as unconstitutional but rather as necessary for the health of the republic. Smith repeatedly demonstrates that legislatures, courts, public schools, and even federal agencies codified and celebrated Protestant beliefs, defended the interests of Christians against the interests of non-Christians, and promoted religiosity.

Smith writes with a mind to refine certain reactionary movements in evangelical Christianity (namely Christian Nationalism), but the book hardly comes off as polemic. Outside of the introduction and conclusion, application is largely absent as he lays out a historical survey of early American institutions. His opening broadside on Jefferson excepted, each chapter thoroughly demonstrates the thick relationship between an early American institution and Protestant Christianity. The book sequences coherently with chapters on Thomas Jefferson, Legislation, Courts, Sabbath, World, Indians, and Education. The order is advantageous – examining the religious commitments of early 18th-century legislatures establishes the context for a more niche examination of Indian-Missionary relationships – but each chapter could also make for valuable reading in isolation.

Tar Heel Christian Nationalists

Smith’s chapter on education struck close to home. I, like Miles, am a North Carolinian. Moreso, I am a Tar Heel and I have lived most of my life on the deck of or in the shadow of her educational flagship. The student body there still maintains a noticeable evangelical bloc, and you can regularly spot weekday bible studies taking place in lounges. For a southern school, such Christian presence could be expected, but overall these students remain outliers, and “Christian” is a minority identity. The story at the faculty level would be even starker. For at least 50 years, conservative criticisms of Chapel Hill as the bastion of “commies and homosexuals” have more or less rang true. Anti-Christian ideologies set the bounds of discovery and discourse at UNC, just as they have at every other institution of higher education. This is what makes Smith’s 18th century retrieval here so striking.

How many UNC students are aware that Samuel McCorkle, the leading founder of the University of North Carolina, desired to form a Christian republic and believed that a state university was the ideal instrument for accomplishing this?¹ Do they know that the school’s first president, Joseph Caldwell, “preached the gospel every Sunday in the chapel…had the Bible taught in the school itself and opened the work of each day with prayer in the presence of all the students.”² Do they know that William Mercer Green, one of the school’s earliest chaplains (and professor of logic and rhetoric) openly taught that “religion of the Bible is the highest ornament and the surest safeguard of national prosperity.”³ One can dream.

This is very much the flavor of Smith’s book throughout, and its overall effect on one who loves both Christ and America is a deep sense of loss. My formulation of national apostasy has drawn heavily upon mass ideological shifts (Feminism!) or representative “bad guys” (FDR!) but Religion & Republic adds the nuanced layer of institutions to the tragedy and shows how critical these mediators were in the maintenance of public Christianity. American Protestantism never had a national church or a population of saints, but she most surely had institutions of men that deployed their significant influence for the furtherance and defense of Christianity.

Jefferson’s Strategic Subversion

It is thus unsurprising that Smith is at his harshest in his discussion of Thomas Jefferson because Jefferson was so consistently opposed to the Christianized institution. Through this lens, Jefferson (rightly) saw that the nature of the American republic was one dependent more on institutions than executive government for her enculturation and that having successfully warded off a constitutional union of church and state, political-spiritual conflicts would flow down to the institutions (they did). This is why Jefferson so invested his power in preventing union of religion and institution anywhere he could, not just at the highest levels of government. Exposing this aspect of Jefferson works is a brilliant setup for Religion and Republic because it delineates the location of power and conflict in the early years of our republic. Jefferson did not succeed here as he would have liked because of the sheer mass of Americans who did want their institutions to be Christian in name and influence. But he certainly tried, and therefore remains the founding hero for those beholden to myths of neutrality or an irreligious society.

More Of This

If any approach might persuade me that “Christian Nationalism” misses the mark widely enough to consider discarding, this will be it. Smith unmistakably loves America, and this gives him considerable advantages over those who do not. Smith is a historian, not a theologian, and maybe that is the key to his kerygmatic restraint. That is, he does not proclaim the need for a certain universalizing political theology, but instead demonstrates that from her earliest days American assumed Protestant Christianity and enculturated that religion through distinctly Protestant institutions. One might go so far as to say this is the American way, and that any distinctly American revival of Christianity should look for success here before the executive office. But this may be where Smith’s argument reaches its limits, as the world that birthed these Protestant institutions is gone, and it remains to be seen if any Christian institution (or maybe any institution at all) can survive the machine of post-Christian democracy.

If, despite all efforts, the institutions succumbed to secularism (precisely when is less important), were they bound to? Was the founding reliance on institutions instead of formal state religion a terminal weakness? More pointedly, by excluding the church from the constitution, did the founders put an expiration date on public Christianity in the United States? Regardless of how we approach these questions, Religion & Republic shows that we have positive examples to work from within our own national history and that we do not necessarily have to look outside the American tradition in order to conceptualize a Christian America. It is worth repeating and reemphasizing that as Americans, unless we intend to be revolutionaries, our approaches to reform should greatly emphasize the role of institutions in promoting true religion.

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