Faith and the Founders

Put aside the contemporary discourse about “Christian nationalism,” if you can. At least that’s what Miles Smith, assistant professor of history at Hillsdale College and WORLD Opinions contributor, asks us to do in Religion & Republic: Christian America From the Founding to the Civil War (Davenant). Discussions of Christian nationalism tend to bring more heat than light, and Smith wants to turn down the temperature so he can illuminate America’s national heritage.

If Christians today wish to alter the trajectories of our respective countries, acquainting ourselves with our national heritages is essential. Smith makes the case that America’s foundations are neither secular nor theocratic and that contemporary Christians do a disservice to the past when they advocate for arrangements along either of those lines.

If the Early Republic was neither secular nor theocratic, what does Smith think it was? He argues that America was founded as a “Christian nation,” but one that was not defined by a federally established denomination. The Constitution produced national dis­establishment, but it did not secularize society or sideline Christianity from public institutions. Smith says the early United States was a republic of Christians committed to “Christian institutionalism.” He says, “They wanted to maintain Christian precepts in their nation’s various social and political institutions without sacralizing those principles or subordinating the American republic to a church.” The United States, though disestablished, remained committed to promoting Christianity through various public mechanisms.

To make his case, Smith looks at developments in legislation, court decisions, activities of international diplomats, cooperation between church and state in missions work, and the Christian character of institutions of higher education. Even the states that never had state-­sanctioned denominations generally assumed that they needed to support Christianity through various institutions. These phenomena reflected and perpetuated a broad consensus that America was a “Christian nation”—an identification that did not depend upon religious revival. Believers who cannot conceive of extra-ecclesial entities as “Christian” may find this line of reasoning strange, but the Americans of the Early Republic did not share this conceptual limitation.

Smith takes on the primary group that attempted to provide an alternative, secular framing for America: Thomas Jefferson and his acolytes. Jeffersonians radicalized the separation at the founding to include the separation of religion from the civil sphere entirely. Smith demonstrates that it was the “secular myth” of America that was invented, not the idea of a “Christian America,” because most Americans had always assumed the latter. The Protestant foundation of the United States is undeniable; however, most of the Founders understood this to entail broad religious liberty. Religion & Republic illustrates a Protestant institutionalism that corresponds with disestablishment and does not at all fit with Jefferson’s secularism.

These ideas are combined in one of Smith’s most provocative depictions of the American order. Where many interpret the history of the Early Republic as a religious novus ordo seclorum, Smith presents it as Protestant continuity—“a lingering ancien regime.” In this continuing Protestant ancien regime, disestablishment and public Christianity go hand in hand. Disestablishment is the fruit of Protestant Christianity, not its renunciation, but disestablishment did not necessitate the privatization of religion or negation of “Christian institutionalism.” No, as Smith explains, public Christianity was built into higher education, state laws, and diplomatic practice.

This vision of American public religion reminds me of sociologist José Casanova’s theories of secularization. In Public Religions in the Modern World, Casanova distinguishes between three meanings of “secularization” that are often bundled together: differentiation of church and state, marginalization of religion to a privatized sphere, and decline of religious belief and practice. He argues that only the first type—­secularization as the institutional differentiation between church and state—is necessary for modern political orders. Decline in belief and practice isn’t inevitable, and secularization as privatization of belief and practice is up for debate. Smith’s work suggests that in the Early Republic, the Founders embedded institutional differentiation—or disestablishment—into their new polity, but secularization as privatization was not the goal. In fact, there was a broad assumption that the republic needed Christianity.

Smith’s historical account includes a basic assumption held—implicitly or explicitly—by most civic leaders in the Early Republic: Christianity is an essential foundation to a disestablishmentarian order because “only a society of pious Christians could properly create a disestablishmentarian order and make it work.” Readers might be left with a lingering question: What do we do when our disestablished order no longer works, possibly due to an inadequate number of pious Christians?

The section that most vividly demonstrates these pervasive assumptions about the republic’s reliance on Christianity appears in the chapter on education. Smith makes the case that state education in the Early Republic aimed at producing good patriots and good religionists and that these two goals were intertwined. Today, few schools seem to believe that education’s goal is either of these things or that Christianity is essential in any way.

Religion & Republic is a piece of history, not political theory, but Smith offers ideas about applying his analysis. We cannot return to the exact conditions of the Early Republic, but we can learn from them. We should resist both atomistic individualism and idealized nationalism. Smith promotes a robust local civic engagement, and he advises Christians to work toward preserving any remaining Christian institutions.

Smith’s proposals cohere with the commitments of what has recently come to be known as social conservatism, but his historical analysis supplements these ideas with rich resources from our national heritage to fund a vision of Christian public institutionalism.

—James R. Wood is an assistant professor of ministry at Redeemer University in Ancaster, Ontario, and co-host of the Civitas podcast

Afterword

When John Calvin published the first version of his Institutes of the Christian Religion in 1536, he neglected to include instruction for pious living. Calvin quickly amended his oversight and added the material “on the Christian life” in the 1539 edition.

The publication of a new English version of On the Christian Life from Crossway is a delectable foretaste of the forthcoming translation from the publisher of Calvin’s entire Institutes.

Calvin avoids systematic harmonization in this book. But this is the style of his writings in general, because more than anything, he wants to “speak Scripture.” His teachings contain copious amounts of Scriptural citations and quotations, and his rhetoric is deeply shaped by the rhetoric of Scripture, which does not smooth everything out—however, it does spur Christians on to faith and obedience. And if one is intending to instruct in “the Christian life” rather than construct a system of doctrine, this is entirely fitting. —J.W.

Read WORLD’s full review of this book here.