Miles Smith is a historian of the American South and the Atlantic World. He has taught at Hillsdale College, Regent University, and Texas Christian University. His research interests and his writing focus on intellectual life and religion in the Nineteenth Century United States and Europe. He lives in Hillsdale, Michigan.
Political theology is the order of the day, and my, does it make people emotional. Different tribes of Protestants denounce each other for being un-American, or theocratic, or giving away the gospel in search of power. The war is not even between denominations; even within Calvinist churches and their Baptist adjutants in the United States,…
The controversy between a North American primate and the provincial tribunal regarding another bishop—let’s keep names out of this for now—has caused the most serious constitutional crisis in the life of the Anglican Church in North America to date. It has also caused confusion and consternation among educated and serious laypeople. Conservative rectors and those…
James Clark recently reviewed The Case for Christian Nationalism at The North American Anglican. He rightly noted that “contemporary effort to formulate an alternative political vision to liberal democracy has been underway for some time now” and that “much of the constructive literature thus far has been produced by Roman Catholics, with little comparable work…
Last week I served as a voting delegate to the annual synod and missions conference of the Anglican Diocese of the Living Word. The diocesan bishop, The Rt. Rev. Julian Dobbs, addressed the delegates as he does every year. This year Bishop Dobbs’s pastoral address made somewhat of a stir. Author Rod Dreher was present…
Concerns over Christian nationalism have filled the pages of Christian blogs, journals, and magazines especially in the wake of Donald Trump’s unambiguous co-opting of Revivalist groups’ Christo-Americanism[1] for his political coalition. It seems undeniable that their movement is at best foolish and tacky, and, more likely, heretical. But does this mean that Christian nationalism is…
Gerald Bray’s new Anglicanism begins with a chapter spelling out succinctly the history of the Church of England, its sisters, and successors until the middle of the Nineteenth Century. The Anglicanism of the early twenty-first century, Bray notes, “is essentially a nineteenth century invention.” Before the 1840s most members of the Protestant Episcopal Church in…
In January of 1800 Rev. Dr. James Madison, Bishop of Virginia, wrote his cousin, James Madison Jr. The former hailed the congressman and “Father of the Constitution” for his past work on the basic law of the still-new American republic. “You have really swept the Augean Stable; at least, you have cleansed the Constitution from…