Was America Founded as a Christian Nation?

Michael Horton

Since the United States is celebrating its 250th anniversary, we thought we would dive a little more deeply into the history of the Christian faith in America, especially focusing on the early republic. To do this, we're going to have two conversations with two distinct professors of history at Hillsdale College.

Michael Horton

Dr. Miles Smith is the author of Religion and Republic: Christian America from the Founding to the Civil War and of the upcoming Valiant and Pious: The Idea of a Christian Soldier in America, 1800–1861. Dr. Darryl Hart, a longtime friend, has written many books. You might know him as a specialist on J. Gresham Machen, but he’s also written Benjamin Franklin: Cultural Protestant for Oxford University Press, The Lost Soul of American Protestantism, and most recently Protestants and Patriots: Presbyterians in the Age of Revolution.

Michael Horton

Miles, I was struck by a quote in the preface of your book, from Lord Macaulay, the English historian:

Michael Horton

There are two opposite errors into which those who study the annals of our country are in constant danger of falling: the error of judging the present by the past, and the error of judging the past by the present. The former is the error of minds prone to reverence whatever is old, the latter of minds readily attracted by whatever is new. The former error may perpetually be observed in the reasonings of conservative politicians on the questions of their own day; the latter error perpetually infects the speculations of writers of the liberal school when they discuss the transactions of an earlier age. The former error is the more pernicious in a statesman, and the latter in a historian.

Michael Horton

I want to ask you first, as a historian, to give us a little advice on how we should approach the question of Christianity in America — such a fraught topic, with a lot of misunderstanding on both sides of the ideological aisle. You really see the twin dangers Macaulay is referring to. Can you unpack that a little, and explain why it's important for us to think historically, recognizing that the past is the past and not necessarily an eternal idea?

Miles Smith

It's a good question. One of the things I realized as I got more into my profession was asking whether there's a difference between the study of Christianity and the study of the church properly — the church as an institution. I'm probably more willing to draw a black line between the two.

Miles Smith

I'm here in North Carolina on vacation, and I'm from western North Carolina, which is historically a very Presbyterian place. But there weren't a lot of churches. So you had a lot of people doing what they perceived to be religious lives without much ecclesiastical oversight, or even much institutional affiliation. The study of Christianity and the study of the church itself aren't always synonyms.

Miles Smith

Separating those two out means that our philosophy of history — especially if you study religion — has to change a little. The twentieth century was a clerical century. The church was big and active and influential. This is maybe where some conservative evangelicals miss just how influential the mainline was; there's this idea that everything was secular, that we've been under attack forever. Actually the church was riding high for much of the twentieth century.

Miles Smith

So historically — think about the nineteenth century, which is mainly where I study — separating out the church and Christianity, having some sort of taxonomical separation, is important. Because we live downstream from the twentieth century, which was the more clerical century, we tend to make assumptions about what church life was like during the early republic, during the time of the Revolution.

Miles Smith

For example, we have this idea that everybody was in churches, and their pastor got up and said, "We hate Britain," and they took up rifles and as a church went out and fought the British. That’s anachronistic. Especially in frontier populations, they weren’t in churches all that often. It might have been the case in New England. But those are a few observations toward thinking more seriously about the nuance of religious history in the US.

Michael Horton

In fact, you talk about the importance of distinguishing not only church and state, but church and religion in the early republic. What do you mean by that?

Miles Smith

Think about the frontier family we have as an idea. They have maybe the King James Bible; if they were Anglican, maybe a prayer book; if they're Reformed, maybe a Geneva Bible or something like that. So they have the Bible in their homes — and I was surprised that even that wasn't as common as I thought. Nonetheless, these people perceived themselves to be living religious lives.

Miles Smith

Is family worship church, for example? A lot of these people would have done something like family worship. Why? Because there was only an ordained minister around every six weeks or so. So what does it mean to live a religious life without regular exposure to regularly ordered ecclesiastical worship?

Miles Smith

I’m hesitant to anathematize this kind of religious life and say, "Well, it’s not Christian." I understand the impulse to say, "If it’s not the church, it’s probably not Christian." But some of these people are Christian people. We have to ask ourselves what it looks like to live a religious life when you don’t have regular exposure to the institutional life of the church. At least in the early republic, we have to separate those out a little.

Michael Horton

Can an analogy be drawn to the Middle Ages, when the Fourth Lateran Council had to require people to go to mass and make confession once a year? Society was kind of assumed to be Christian — you weren’t anything else, with the festivals and all that — but as far as institutional belonging, it was something less pervasive perhaps.

Miles Smith

Rodney Stark actually makes that comparison, I think in the second volume of his books — The Triumph of Christianity. He points out that in the Middle Ages most people didn't go to church. Especially on the intellectual right, there's been a kind of pristinization of the medieval era. We have this idea that everybody was in church, going to these big cathedrals, and that's just not the case.

Miles Smith

Similarly, there's an idea that everybody in the nineteenth century had very Christian families and very churched families. No — church was something people actually had to be reminded to go do. Church wasn't necessarily a norm. Even people who assumed they were Christians weren't always churchy people. So yes, that analogy is very apt.

Michael Horton

In the introduction of your book, Religion and Republic, you write:

Michael Horton

Seventy years of jurisprudence from the Supreme Court and more recent battles over questions of theocracy or so-called Christian nationalism have convinced a significant number of American evangelicals that any state involvement with Christianity is both un-American and an invasion of supposedly pure religious practice. In conservative Calvinist circles this has been particularly pronounced, with breathless denunciations of theocracy or liberalism being thrown about by partisans of a secularist spirituality of the church and devotees of robust public Christianity, respectively. The United States' religious order was from the beginning neither theocratic nor secular.

Michael Horton

How was the United States' religious order neither theocratic nor secular?

Miles Smith

Think about this. The United States from the get-go has a social apparatus of Christianity that across the board was relatively observant of state-initiated fast days or state-initiated Thanksgiving. The holiday of Thanksgiving was designed to be celebrated in churches. There would be a day of thanksgiving, and so they would go to churches.

Miles Smith

Now, a good question is whether a thanksgiving service is a church service. Maybe that’s where someone might want to nitpick, and that would be fair. But inasmuch as it’s a clergyman leading it, and it’s largely his congregation gathering for thanksgiving — has that annihilated the churchiness of the church, that it was a magisterial proclamation that initiated it?

Miles Smith

The question of chaplaincy becomes important too. I have a friend who is a Wisconsin Senate Lutheran. The Wisconsin Senate does not have a chaplain, because they're absolutely committed to what would get called, in Reformed terms, the spirituality of the church, and they take that very seriously. On the other hand, most Reformed communions do have chaplains. If you think about the terms of chaplaincy, it doesn't necessarily mean the state is telling the church what to do, but it does mean the state is setting terms for a churchman's engagement — because he's ordained — with what is more or less a flock.

Miles Smith

These questions have just been a lot more fraught. It doesn't mean there's one great answer. But I don't think any of the lines are as clean as anybody might want to assume.

Miles Smith

One thing I might add: our understanding of the state probably hasn’t changed as much as our understanding of what the church is. I work at a place where we have a variety of different faith groups on campus. Think about the way we describe a big evangelical church — the way they describe themselves and market themselves to potential parishioners. It’s, "Come here, we have community, you can get to know people." All that stuff is good; I’m not knocking it. But in some ways people are describing a town. They’re actually describing a political association and not a spiritual one.

Miles Smith

So when you think about small groups, for example — why do you do small groups? "Well, we want people to get to know each other." Okay, that’s great. Is that actually the point of church? I thought the point of church was Word and sacrament. Darryl’s made this point a lot, and it’s a good one: we have a big institutional breakdown in American life. A lot of the civil institutions people used to use to get to know each other, to do civic life, have collapsed. And big evangelical churches are trying to step up and do what’s essentially a civic work, maybe without realizing it.

Michael Horton

That leads to your discussion of the differences between Jefferson and Madison — in a certain sense, freedom from religion versus freedom for religion, which we've debated for a long time. I love Madison's argument against tax exemption for churches, because the state would be making a determination of what a true church is. You quote him here: for nearly fifteen centuries, what have Christendom's fruits been? More or less pride and indolence in the clergy, ignorance and servility in the laity, and in both superstition, bigotry, and persecution. In other words, his argument wasn't that it was bad for the state, but that it was bad for the church. Can you talk about the nuances there that we still have with us today?

Miles Smith

The question of churches and property is where that’s coming from. These guys live downstream from the Anglican establishment in Virginia. Anglican churches used to have attached to them what were called glebes. For people who’ve never heard the term: glebes are essentially church-owned property that isn’t the church building itself. It was something given historically by the king to a parish so that you could make rent money off it, or grow crops, and that money would be a little kickback to the church itself. But the church owned it. They were essentially grants from the state to the church.

Miles Smith

In North America there were glebes — in North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia. Even New York had a few; Trinity Church on Wall Street had a glebe attached to it at one point.

Miles Smith

The question Madison is getting at is an important one, because Virginia decided, alone among the states, not to allow churches to incorporate. If you don't know this: churches couldn't incorporate in Virginia until the first decade of the twenty-first century. There was a series of court cases initiated by — funny enough — Thomas Road Baptist Church, the big Baptist church that created Liberty University. It's Jerry Falwell's church. The argument was, everyone else allows churches to incorporate; why didn't Virginia? And the answer was that they didn't want churches owning land. If a church could own its own property, it could therefore be something other than a merely spiritual idea of a church.

Miles Smith

So if your church owns its own property, you've already transgressed to a considerable extent what Jefferson and Madison wanted. Think about this: if your church owns its own land, does that make it something other than a church? If your church obeys the local construction codes, if your church obeys the fire marshal, does that mean you're subordinating your church to the state?

Miles Smith

Some of it is the way we talk about the two kingdoms as well. Is the church merely spiritual? I'm not saying it's not spiritual. I'm asking whether it is only spiritual. And if your church is merely spiritual, should you own your building? Jefferson and Madison say probably not. The state of Virginia until 2007 said no.

Miles Smith

These are some of the questions they're assuming, largely because they're living in the eighteenth century, at a time when the church wasn't what we think of as the church. Churches were powerful semi-political institutions. The Church of England was not a merely spiritual church. I don't want to knock Madison and Jefferson for thinking about the legacy of the church the way they do. But I don't think they were the norm at all — especially on the East Coast. They were the exception.

Michael Horton

You give some examples for your view of Christian institutionalism — through legislation, the courts, the Sabbath, the treatment of Native Americans. What are some points and anecdotes worth mentioning, and what do they demonstrate to us?

Miles Smith

I use the term "Christian institutionalism" definitely to push back against the idea of a Christian nation. In a lot of ways Christianity did make its influence felt in civic institutions, and that wasn’t an inconsiderable influence. But in the early republic, across the board, there is a real sense that we do not want Christianity associated with the idea of an American nation. Christianity was something other than the government.

Miles Smith

Inasmuch as people on the right articulate what gets called Christian nationalism, it's an anachronism. You can only think about Christian nationalism downstream from what historically we might call liberal Protestant assumptions. I'm not saying all of those liberal Protestant assumptions are heretical per se, but you can't get to Christian nationalism from specific articulations of what you might call public, or even state-supported, Christianity in the early republic — because they do not want the state making determinations about what Christianity is.

Miles Smith

You might think of it this way: they’re happy with the church telling them what Christianity is, but they don’t want the state telling the church what Christianity is. In that sense, there’s actually a pretty capacious place for ecclesiastical influence in the early republic. People see that and say, "See, that’s Christian nationalism." No. What’s happening now is that we want the government to do the leading on that, when historically, at least in the United States, it was churchmen, educational institutions, and civic celebrations that weren’t even necessarily state-supported doing that. In the early republic it’s a lot of people talking to the state. Now what we tend to want is actual politicians and government officers doing this.

Miles Smith

A good example is the idea of a politician doing public prayer. You would never see that in the early republic. The most theocratic New Englander — if they were a representative, a member of the state house, a governor, whatever — would never have prayed in public. And now we have some cabinet officers who do it.

Miles Smith

Would some of those guys in the early republic code as Christian nationalists because of what they think the government should do vis-à-vis Christianity? Sure. But they themselves would not have done what you might think of as churchy things — gospel presentations, praying. At least in the last twenty years, especially on the right, there’s more a sense of: we want the president to say something particularly Christian-y, or we want whoever to say something kind of Christian-y.

Michael Horton

It’s interesting that even in more theocratic periods and places there was that distinction — especially in churches of the Reformation, that strong distinction between the king doing priestly duties versus the priests doing it.

Miles Smith

In the history of Anglicanism, the monarchs don't pray in church; the priests or the bishops are still praying in church. What we've done — and a lot of it's the twentieth century — is create a very particular idea of a Christianized America, instead of what I think was happening in the early nineteenth century, which was an Americanized Christianity, for better or worse. America becoming its own sort of religion is a creation of the twentieth century, not the nineteenth.

Michael Horton

Let's rewind with Darryl Hart, swim across the Atlantic, and talk about Protestants and Patriots. You note that King George III described the American Revolution as a Presbyterian rebellion. How did calls from Presbyterians around ecclesiastical issues branch out into political revolution? Feel free to start earlier here — you go all the way back to Calvin's Geneva. Maybe a good place to start would be to define Erastianism.

Darryl Hart

I don't know if I want to get into Erastianism yet. It's a curious thing, really, when you think about King George's remarks about Presbyterians. I think it indicates in some ways the way Presbyterianism from the seventeenth century was in the monarch's head. But it really is the New Englanders who are much more aggressive about asserting their rights against Parliament.

Darryl Hart

I just did a tour with students of Revolutionary War sites — Concord, Lexington, Boston. These are the chief sites of the initial outbreak of the war. And these are all people — sometimes liberal Congregationalists — who are leading the charge. Even some clergy preaching about tyranny and the rights of British citizens in the 1750s. Presbyterians are really kind of muted in those characteristics. Presbyterians in the 1750s, '60s, '70s never had an established church in North America (well, minus Canada, whatever was happening up there). The Congregationalists did, and they lost their charter in 1692 or whatever. There's very much a New England exceptionalism that New Englanders had, and that continues to shape American national history.

Darryl Hart

But the real Presbyterian revolution — and I argue this in the book — is in the 1630s and 1640s, when there was such a thing as the Bishops' Wars. It's a very small war, but it is a war between the Scots and Charles I, 1639–1640. It's sort of a forerunner to the civil wars and the Scots aligning with Parliament against the king in the civil wars of the 1640s.

Darryl Hart

What happened in Scotland in 1638 is the National Covenant — the affirmation of that covenant by Parliament, by the church, by the people. It is very much committed to Presbyterianism and Reformed religion, opposed to Roman Catholicism, and it’s hearkening back to a covenant that James I — but he was James VI of Scotland — had made in 1581 as part of the Negative Confession, or King’s Confession, which was another kind of covenant the Scottish monarchy had started. So the National Covenant for the Scots is reinstituted in 1638, and when Charles then requires the Church of Scotland to use the prayer book, that leads to the so-called Bishops’ Wars. There were minor skirmishes. There were real armies formed. There were maybe a dozen lives lost, other people injured. But that is the trigger, or at least a catalyst, and it’s very much a religious one, where people are objecting to the king imposing upon the Church of Scotland — and those religious matters spill over into the politics of England. At this point England and Scotland are two separate realms, although ruled by one king. That’s also where this gets a little dicey, and how Presbyterianism enters its way into English politics.

Darryl Hart

The 1640s lead to the Civil War. Charles is defeated. Charles is tried for treason by the Rump Parliament and executed in 1649. And the Scots, even though they were opposed to Charles, also opposed regicide — because you don't kill the Lord's anointed. That's what you learn from the lesson of the Hebrew monarchy: David versus Saul. David had a chance to kill Saul, or his men did, and didn't do it, because you don't kill the Lord's anointed. Plus, they had a covenant with the king, at least with the Stuart monarchy, and Charles was kind of sheepish about whether he was going to affirm that.

Darryl Hart

So Presbyterianism in the 1630s and 1640s is a very powerful ingredient in the civil wars and eventually the toppling of the monarchy — which again is a huge deal in the history of the West. The French Revolution echoes that in 1793, when the French execute King Louis. There's a period of the Commonwealth era where Cromwell is Lord Protector, and beyond, and then there's the restoration of the crown in 1660. Most Presbyterians are relieved by that, because most Presbyterians in Scotland would prefer a monarchy. They're not republican — which again makes the American Presbyterians of the 1760s and '70s very different from that, even though you can maybe have echoes of it.

Darryl Hart

So, to go back to your question in a long-winded way: I think George III has in his head — and he’s not a descendant of the Stuarts — that Presbyterians were a pain in the neck in the seventeenth century, and they’re up to it again. Presbyterianism is the word he uses for that. But I think the American Revolution really does begin very much in New England.

Michael Horton

Talk a little about the American revision to the Westminster Confession of Faith regarding the magistrate.

Darryl Hart

The original Westminster Confession, 1646 or '47 — and it is useful to point out that this is an English document. Presbyterians love Scotland. They love the Scottish Reformation. They think of John Knox, they think of Presbyterianism in Scotland. But the Westminster Confession is not a Scottish document. There were Scottish commissioners at the Westminster Assembly, maybe four of them, giving advice. But this is very much an English document, as Chad Van Dixhoorn would affirm — called by Parliament.

Darryl Hart

The language of chapter 23 — I believe it is 23, on the civil magistrate; maybe 25, I can't keep it straight — really does talk about the magistrate the way Constantine ran the Council of Nicaea. It talks about the magistrate calling synods, presiding over those synods, giving counsel to those synods. You read Eusebius's accounts of Nicaea — that's what Constantine was doing. Now, is Eusebius always telling the truth, or writing in a certain way for the good of the church? Okay, you can take it with a grain of salt. But it is curious to me, whenever I go back and read the original, that this sounds like Nicaea. They're envisioning a magistrate — and granted, they're writing this for Parliament. They're not necessarily thinking about a king, but they're also not thinking about getting rid of monarchy altogether. So they're thinking about that relationship between magistrate and church the way Constantine was relating to the council of bishops at Nicaea.

Darryl Hart

They do clarify that he cannot administer the sacraments, lead worship, and so on. But still there’s very much a religious dimension to his civic responsibilities. I think it evokes a kind of sacral monarchy that had been part of the Christian West going back to Constantine — but that echoes back to the Old Testament, to the Hebrew monarchs as well.

Michael Horton

Even Luther and Calvin calling on the emperor to act as Constantine and Charlemagne of old, as nursing fathers of the church, to call a council.

Darryl Hart

Yes. The magisterial Reformation very much depended on and unleashed magistrates intervening, or in some ways mingling, in the affairs of the church. If not for that, the Reformed and Lutherans would have been the equivalent of the Anabaptists. They needed state support. I'm not saying they did that artificially somehow — but they still needed state support.

Michael Horton

That's a really important point, Darryl. What does that teach us about historical context? Sometimes we can go back and read the Reformers, we can read Rutherford, and treat it as a kind of theology for every time and place, not realizing that they were fighting for their lives and the prince was their best hope — but that doesn't mean it was always consistent with their principles, right?

Darryl Hart

I don't think it was merely pragmatic. I do think Calvin — is it book two or three, I can't remember, on the magistrate — is genuine in talking about the magistrate's responsibility to promote religion, to protect the church, to enforce both tables of the law. And he does invoke the pagan authors who also thought that the state needed to promote religion — obviously pagan religions — but he's saying this is a principle widely shared by both pagans and Christians. Today's Christian nationalists very much pick up on that.

Darryl Hart

On the other hand, if you didn't have the pope behind you — and the Protestants have rejected the pope — there are two great authorities: there's the pope, and there's the crown, depending on where you are, which crown or which prince it is. And if you don't have the support of the state, you're an Anabaptist. You're toast.

Darryl Hart

Luther pleading with the German nobles to reform the church, even raise up the sword against the church, is really kind of cool and striking. It's also kind of scary — do you really want the state going after priests and bishops that way? And yes, Luther was prone to excess at times. But that's the nature of the magisterial Reformation. It's only going to happen with the state backing it.

Michael Horton

How did the American Presbyterians revise the confession on that? What led to their change of viewpoint?

Darryl Hart

Well, it's still really a mystery — and I'm thinking that even in retirement, when I'm going to be living a couple blocks from the Presbyterian Historical Society, God willing, I'll see what they have in their archives.

Darryl Hart

I was also listening to a podcast earlier this morning about John Witherspoon, who was president of the College of New Jersey, a signer of the Declaration — the only clergyman to sign the Declaration. He was a representative of New Jersey at the Continental Congress. He was instrumental, and maybe had a big hand in the revisions, but he burned all of his private papers. The church would still seemingly have records.

Darryl Hart

The revisions were basically backing away — the magistrate is going to protect all the churches. I think people stop there and say this is intended only for the Protestant denominations. But there are three or four lines toward the end of that first paragraph in chapter 23 where it talks about protecting everyone from certain kinds of molestation for their beliefs and practices. I think they could have stopped earlier if they only wanted to protect Protestants.

Darryl Hart

When they ratified it, they were meeting in Philadelphia. There were Jewish congregations there, or at least one Jewish cemetery that dates before this. There was a Roman Catholic parish there. George Washington, during the Continental Congress when he was still a part of it — or maybe it was the Philadelphia convention for the Constitution — worshiped at one of those Roman Catholic churches during his time there. It doesn't prove anything. I think it just means that Roman Catholics and Jews were part of the fabric of Philadelphia society. Philadelphia being part of the Quaker colony, and unusual for having the kind of religious freedom that they had there. And the first presbytery in North America is in Philadelphia; those ministers who met in 1706 would have been highly aware of that religious diversity. I think they're revising it to make room for that religious diversity — and so the magistrate. They understand that a state church, an established church, and a magistrate who's going to actively promote one religion or a state religion, just isn't going to work in what's happening in the United States of America, which does exist at that point. The Constitution hasn't yet been ratified. So you could say they're conceivably adapting this to the new reality of the United States.

Darryl Hart

But I would also add that the Adopting Act of 1729 — when the Synod of Philadelphia began to use the Westminster Standards as the confessional standard and began to try to require subscription — they had two meetings. One was to affirm the Westminster Standards. The second meeting, the same day, was to allow for exceptions. And all of the exceptions in 1729 were about chapter 23 and the civil magistrate. The Presbyterians in North America didn't want that understanding of the civil magistrate that the English and the Scots had in 1646. Consequently, you could see 1729 as a kind of preliminary to the revisions that actually took shape in 1788. But the actual debates — who called for the revisions, who initiated them — is still a mystery to me. Maybe there are historians out there who have nailed all this down, but I haven't seen people cite them yet.

Michael Horton

Some recent work I’ve seen, alongside yours, has really explored the role that Presbyterians had at a time when they could probably have actually had a state church in New Jersey at least — but didn’t, and there was a principled move away from that. So what are we going to say is truly Reformed? Calvin’s Geneva, or American Presbyterianism? Again the question of historical circumstances comes up. And on the Christian nationalist side at least, they seem to want to go back behind American Presbyterianism to a more Erastian kind of Westminster Assembly in the 1640s. Is that right?

Darryl Hart

Yeah, I think that's fair. I think you could actually identify at least four strains of Presbyterians on church-state matters, and in America three of those groups are much less subdued.

Darryl Hart

You can have the original Covenanters of the 1630s, who then after the Restoration take a beating because they're still insisting on the covenant and the monarchs don't like it, and there's persecution of the Covenanters. A very small group, but that's one form. Eventually those Covenanters will hold on; some will go to Ireland, some will come to North America.

Darryl Hart

Then you have the Church of Scotland. Finally we have Presbyterianism — it was always a competition between Anglican Episcopalians and Presbyterians in Scotland, but finally settled roughly in 1690 with the Glorious Revolution. And that’s a very moderate church. They’re moderate because they’re not going to be like the Covenanters — "we’ve got to back it down here, folks." But it’s so moderate you could argue it feels in some ways to American Presbyterians like the mainline church of the twentieth century: kind of liberal, tolerant, squishy in its sentiments.

Darryl Hart

But there are still conservatives in the Church of Scotland, and some of those begin to leave. In the 1730s the so-called Seceders, or the Associate Reformed, form their own presbytery. They will also eventually go to Ireland and North America.

Darryl Hart

And then in the nineteenth century, skipping way ahead, you have the Free Church, which also says, "This state church business isn’t working. We’re going to get out. We’re still committed to an ecclesiastical establishment, and we’re going to try to function as if we’re the state church." But in effect they really have to function as a denomination, as a free church, as a voluntary church.

Darryl Hart

All three of those groups show up in the United States — Free Church much less so. But the Free Church, the Associate Reformed, the Covenanters, and the Church of Scotland are all part of the original Presbyterianism in Canada, and they're trying to sort that out with Anglicans and Methodists. It's a really fascinating history. I think Americans don't take Canada as seriously as we should. This isn't necessarily pro-Canada, but it's still a fascinating part of the way that British Protestantism moved to the New World — and it's a different kind of New World than the United States.

Darryl Hart

The way they eventually had to sort out what Miles was talking about earlier, these glebe lands — they had similar arrangements, so that Anglicans and Presbyterians in Scotland would receive support, some kind of encouragement from the state. Because, oh, by the way, both the Church of Scotland and the Church of England are the established churches in the United Kingdom. So we've got to recognize those in Canada. But wait a minute — then there are all these other Presbyterian groups.

Darryl Hart

Eventually the political arrangements bring the Canadian Presbyterians together, so that by 1867 and then 1875 you have the Presbyterian Church of Canada form these different streams together. But it takes almost seventy years for that to happen, which is roughly the same time as the formation of the Confederation of Canada — basically the origins of Canada, not as a separate nation. It's still in the Commonwealth. It's a dominion, but it's Canada beginning to operate on its own in ways within the British Empire that Ireland had tried earlier, and America might have tried. Anyway, it's a very fascinating way of looking at Reformed churches in another part of the world, up in Canada, which is not very far.

Michael Horton

In what ways are early American — that is, US — Presbyterians similar to or different from today's post-liberal movements or proponents of Christian nationalism?

Darryl Hart

One way to answer that builds off what I was listening to earlier: a very interesting, lively interview about John Witherspoon by Jeff Morrison, who wrote a book on Witherspoon almost twenty years ago but was being interviewed about it again in connection with the 250th and Witherspoon's role in the Continental Congress.

Darryl Hart

One thing you could argue is that today's proponents of a Christian America — which I think we also need to keep in mind has been going on for at least forty years; think back to the Moral Majority and Francis Schaeffer and Jerry Falwell, who were also arguing for a kind of recovery of America's Christian roots — you have a similar expression of that today, although I think it's very different.

Darryl Hart

Where Witherspoon, and Madison following him (Madison was a student of Witherspoon), and most of the founders believed that for a republic to truly function you needed a virtuous people — and the way you would get virtue was from the church, or from the churches. In that way, for the state to encourage the churches was therefore to encourage good citizenship among the people.

Darryl Hart

But what Morrison was also saying is that Madison and Witherspoon both — and this fits with the revision of the Westminster Confession — didn't want the state to do anything religious. The way Miles was saying earlier, that you wouldn't have a magistrate praying. They wanted to let the churches do it, encourage the churches to do this work, and the state is going to remain apart from it.

Darryl Hart

What we hear today is proposals for making the government Christian, making the prince or the magistrate a Christian who will then promote Christianity as part of the public good. I think at the time of the founding, and for Presbyterians at the time of the American Revolution, they had had enough of the state promoting Christianity in that way. Let's try a different arrangement: we're going to have a small government with limited operations. The Constitution enumerates what those powers are of the federal government. And now let's let the churches do all that they want to do and create all sorts of Christians, and let virtue come from the bottom up rather than the top down.

Michael Horton

When we look at the situation today, it seems like there’s a kind of secularist nationalism on one side and Christian nationalism reacting against it — and that there’s a hollowing out of the church in the name of a kind of nationalism, where the nation becomes sacred. And who are the ministers of the nation? The senators, the princes, the magistrates. And we have to have them affirming our Christian nation. Does that seem like what’s happening right now?

Darryl Hart

It does. And I can't figure out the degree to which it's part of a 2.0 or 3.0 of theonomy — which was trying to recover the Old Testament laws in some ways for the modern state, which would represent Doug Wilson today — or whether it's a kind of civil religion, which has a very long history in the United States, and which does turn the United States into a kind of sacred enterprise.

Darryl Hart

I was reading a book review this week of a new collection of John Quincy Adams's speeches. One of his long speeches was roughly from 1819, defending the Declaration and the Constitution, but talking about the eternal and sacred dimensions of the Declaration. I think that evokes an older strain of New England and Presbyterian theology — covenant theology and a covenanted nation. Covenanters were doing that in Scotland as well, but the idea that the United States was in a kind of covenanted relationship with God. Then you turn that into a kind of American exceptionalism, and you can get the idea that America alone has this covenanted relationship with God.

Darryl Hart

I do think that is part of the source of turning America into a redeemer nation, which is a long theme in American politics throughout American history. For my money, as someone who's a spirituality-of-the-church person and an amillennial person, it doesn't work well with me — but it's clearly there. And I'm still trying to figure out how those sources are being used today by so-called proponents of Christian nationalism.

Michael Horton

As your colleague Richard Gamble has argued and documented so well, it was actually mainline progressive Protestants who pioneered the idea of America as a redeemer nation, a Christian nation — of course with earlier precedents, but really this idea, all the way up to Woodrow Wilson, of America having this sacred mantle laid upon it for the redemption of the world. But now it's sort of coming from the right rather than the left. It's very odd.

Darryl Hart

Yes. And I would add, too — language and vocabulary. Mike, you’ve written a lot about the importance of language in theology, and it does matter. You have certain terms and categories available for thinking about society or politics, and in America we have a long tradition of using Christian terms to think about this. But if you read other sources from the West, especially pagan sources, whether Roman or Greek, you do have other sources for thinking about a republic or a democracy, different kinds of government, different kinds of constitutions.

Darryl Hart

If you believe in the Bible and the importance of the Bible as your sole authority — if the Bible gave you some directions about democracy or republics or something, not to be too literal — okay, then that may be a point. But there are so many different authors from the ancient and modern worlds you could use to talk about good government. Some Christian nationalists do that. I don't want to necessarily name names, but to give an illustration, Stephen Wolfe does that in his book. He's trained as a political theorist — or maybe he prefers political philosopher; those people get upset with the terms philosophy or theory — but he does do a lot of retrieval of older sources about political theory in his work. He's much more conversant with those non-Christian sources as well, but still the outcome is to put it in Christian categories.

Michael Horton

Well, Darryl, my good friend, it's great to talk to you again, even if it's behind a screen. I wish you well. Thank you so much for all of your contributions, and especially this latest work of yours, Protestants and Patriots: Presbyterians in the Age of Revolution, published by Notre Dame Press. It's been great to talk about this, especially as we celebrate the 250th anniversary of this great nation of ours.