THOMAS KIDD  |  JUNE 10, 2024 

In this post I am interviewing Dr. Miles Smith, assistant professor of history at Hillsdale College, about his new book Religion and Republic: Christian America from the Founding to the Civil War.

[TK] Your book suggests that America was Christian between the Revolution and Civil War, but maybe not in the ways that evangelical partisans suggest. How so?

[MS] The United States can safely be called Christian between the founding and the Civil War because its citizenry understood that the American republic’s civil, cultural, educational, and social institutions had Christian foundations. There was a Protestant ancien regime built into American institutions like colleges, state laws, courts, and diplomatic practice.

My thesis is that while this Protestant order was disestablished and not theocratic, that did not make it any less Protestant, any less an order, or any less institutional. This distinction is important because American Protestants did not recreate the Calvinist oligarchy of Geneva or Lutheran monarchies of Germany, nor did they think the Reformers’ understanding of the relationship of church and state was appropriate for their new republic. But neither did they recreate Protestantism or become something other than Protestant.

John Jay, a Founding Father and the first chief justice, saw an essential Protestant continuity and commonality in the new American republic when he told the people of New York in 1787 that “Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people—a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion.” Jay and other Early Republic statesmen and divines saw a continuity between the British Protestant order social and religious they were born to, and the new American nation they constituted in 1789.

Religion and Republic claims that the Early Republic United States, a period that broadly extends from 1790 to 1860, in fact remained committed to disestablishment while simultaneously protecting and even perpetuating institutional—usually but not always Protestant—Christianity through federal and state courts, state colleges and institutions, state legislatures, executive proclamations from governors and presidents, and through state cooperation with religious institutions and Protestant divines. These were not attempts to create a pseudo-state church, precisely because most politicians, intellectuals, and ministers did not believe that Protestant Christianity needed a state church or churches to maintain its institutional position in the American civil and social order.

Every major Protestant denomination and intellectual rejected the perceived Erastianism of historic Protestant and Roman Catholic Christianity and affirmed federal disestablishment. Christians in the United States historically believed that their faith had a necessary and salutary effect on law, politics, and society that deserved to be preserved and perpetuated by the civil magistrate in the form of broad protections for Christian liberty. That the Founders and the generation of politicos who succeeded them thought Christianity was a net benefit to society is not controversial. That they did not think the government should privilege a specific sect of Christianity is not controversial either. What might surprise Americans in 2024 is that Early Republic Americans believed they could protect Christianity, preserve religious liberty, and champion disestablishment simultaneously without the involving the federal government.

You say that you tend to see “Protestant continuity in the Early Republic, where evangelicals see transformation.” (xv) What does this mean?

I see evangelicals—in the historic sense of that term—as Protestants, but the term evangelical connotes a movement within Protestant churches that prioritized a specific understanding of piety and personal devotion. Evangelicals tended to prioritize personal devotion and experiential religion in ways other Protestants did not. Evangelicals also prioritized the social over the institutional. Likewise, some—but not all—modern evangelicals view hierarchies in general as deeply problematic. Few if any church structures at the beginning of the nineteenth century had a history of egalitarianism as we moderns understand the term.

Some evangelicals in our own day read history backwards and assume that because disestablishment was the law of the land, all Protestants and more particularly all evangelicals were committed to a less churchly and less institutionally oriented expression of Protestant Christianity. I’m not convinced. Even Baptists in the Early Republic, like Isaac Backus, Jonathan Maxcy, and Francis Wayland, supported disestablishment and Baptist commitments on ecclesiology while simultaneously wanting Christian influence in culture, society, and yes even state structures. Evangelicals in the Early Republic were often classically trained and had a high view of how history informed the relationship between government and religion, so they simultaneously rejected establishmentarianism and state churches, and had a robust commitment to making and/or sustaining a Christian culture and society.

You use the term “Christian institutionalism” to describe the religious and legal milieu of the Early Republic. What does this term mean? How does it change our view of Christianity’s role in the Founding era and following decades?

Early Republic Protestants wanted to maintain Christian principles in their nation’s various social and political institutions without sacralizing those principles or subordinating the American republic to a church. Christianity and the Christian church are not synonyms. There are Christian nurses, Christian artists, and Christian politicians. The reflex among some evangelicals is to argue that America is—or should be—a Christian nation, and to search for partisan political ways to keep—or make—America a Christian nation.

Early Republic Protestants would not have seen the partisan political realm as the primary way of making or keeping America Christian. Most would have seen the primary way of keeping America Christian as leading lives of faithful devotion to Christ and making their institutions reflect a Christian moral and social ethic. What distinguishes Early Republic evangelicals from modern evangelicals is a willingness to cooperate with the state explicitly. Missionaries, for example, willingly took government money and saw their mission as political, at least on some level. Missionary work saved souls, but it also brought blessings of Christian civilization and liberal government to people with whom missionaries worked.

We tend to think of the disestablishment of state churches as the “main event” of church-state relations in the Early Republic. But you argue that there were many other ways in which Christianity maintained an institutional presence, even after all the states abandoned an official denomination. Give us examples of how the institutional commitment to Christianity worked in the absence of state churches.

An easy example is chaplains. Most federal institutions—the ones most explicitly bound by the First Amendment’s religious liberty provisions—retained paid chaplains who were compensated by the state to fulfill a religious office. Early Republic Protestants did not view this as Erastian, or theocratic. The ministers were not doing politics; they were fulfilling a spiritual office in the halls of congress, the military, etc. Likewise state universities regularly hired Christian ministers as professors and as university presidents. These men were not serving as pastors; they were not fulfilling a churchly role. They were nonetheless Christians, and their faith underpinned their intellectual lives.

Likewise, state governments in the Early Republic—North and South—believed that Christian intellectual life and historical Christian conceptions of morality and virtue were necessary for liberal and republican governance to work. This was the reason state colleges—examples include Indiana University and South Carolina College—sometimes created the position of professor of the evidences of Christianity. States actually paid an academic to defend Christianity intellectually. And yet these same state governments were ferociously committed to disestablishment. Early Republic Protestants did not believe that public affirmation of the truth of Christianity was inconsistent with federal disestablishment.

The idea of “Christian institutionalism” outside of the church makes Baptists like me a little nervous. Do you think that Baptists were outliers with regard to Christian institutionalism in America, or were they more comfortable with Christian influence on the state (or vice versa) than we have realized?

Baptists were comfortable with what I am calling Christian institutionalism, precisely because they understood that the church **was not** the only Christian institution. Baptists understandably rejected state-supported churches, but they still believed the government could affirm Christian precepts or commitments in other institutions. For example, five Baptists served as US Senate chaplain before 1865 without controversy. One of those Baptist ministers—Obadiah Bruen Brown—was pastor of Washington DC’s First Baptist Church. The church could not pay his salary, so Brown worked for the government as a clerk. In fact, it was Brown’s commitment to disestablishment that made him a popular choice as chaplain.

Baptists were careful to define the limits of what was churchly and what was not, because of their experience of persecution by state churches. Admittedly I don’t spend a ton of time on Baptists—I try to touch on the ones who interacted with institutions—but a pastor-scholar who has done more is Obbie Tyler Todd. His book Let Men Be Free: Baptist Politics in the Early United States (1776–1835) is the best look at Baptist political views in the Early Republic.