Events

Featured Event

April 18th, 2024 at 8pm | Free and on Zoom

Since roughly 1980, the history of religion and particularly Protestantism in the United States has been litigated along a series of binaries: evangelical v. mainline, theocratic v. secular, liberal v. conservative. While these binaries are not artificial in themselves, they are particularly problematic if they are applied retroactively to the Early Republic or any point in history that precedes the so-called evangelical historiography created in the latter part of the twentieth century. Consequently, Americans have little understanding of religion in the nineteenth century and more importantly they have no idea how the fundamental laws of the United States reconciled Protestantism to a disestablished republican order. 

In this lecture, exploring ideas introduced in his forthcoming book Religion & Republic: Christian America from the Founding to the Civil War, Dr. Miles Smith will explain there was not in fact any reconciliation needed between Protestantism and disestablishment. Rather, Christianity 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.

The lecture will be followed by a Q&A time.