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Religion & Republic, Miles Smith

SKU: 1-14-SMIRAR-P

ISBN/UPC: 9781949716313

$65.00

PRODUCT INFORMATION
PRODUCT INFORMATION

A Protestant republic

In recent years, America’s status as a “Christian nation” has become an incredibly vexed question. This is not simply a debate about America’s present, or even its future–it has become a debate about its past. Some want to rewrite America’s history as having always been highly secular in order to ensure a similar future; others seek to reframe the American founding as a continuation of medieval Christendom in the hopes of reviving America’s religious identity today.

In this book, Miles Smith offers a fresh historical reading of America’s status as a Christian nation in the Early Republic era. Defined neither by secularism nor Christendom, America was instead marked by “Christian institutionalism.” Christianity–and Protestantism specifically–was always baked into the American republic’s diplomatic, educational, judicial, and legislative regimes and institutional Christianity in state apparatuses coexisted comfortably with disestablishment from the American Revolution until the beginning of the twenty-first century. 

Any productive discussion about America’s religious present or future must first reckon accurately with its past. With close attention to a wide range of sermons, letters, laws, court cases and more, Religion & Republic offers just such a reckoning.

Biography:

I’m a trained historian. I attended university at the College of Charleston in Charleston, South Carolina, and I got my Ph.D. from Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, Texas. My research is on the U.S. South and the Atlantic world. I generally write on intellectual history—ideas, religion, slavery and freedom, etc.—but I occasionally dabble in political history, too. I’m also interested in Europe and in Latin America. I edit nineteenth century works of historical theology and am revising a religious biography of Andrew Jackson. I also sometimes write for popular outlets like Mere Orthodoxy, The Gospel Coalition, Public Discourse, The Federalist, and The University Bookman.
 
My professional life has taken me from TCU, where I taught as a graduate assistant, to Hillsdale College, where I taught for two years, to Regent University in Virginia Beach, and now back to Hillsdale.
 
I grew up in Salisbury, North Carolina, which is about 45 minutes north of Charlotte. My parents and brother live in Charlotte now so that’s generally what I consider my adult hometown. When I’m not working, I like spending time with my family and friends, reading, and writing, and trying to find someone to play tennis with me. I’ve always been devoted to essays, novels, and poetry, but like anyone raised in the small-town South, I also like certain less-refined things like sports and [don’t tell my mother] pro wrestling.

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Religion & Republic, Miles Smith

Religion & Republic, Miles Smith

$65.00
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