Common Places

A Davenant Hall Teaching Fellows lecture with Q&A by Dr. Miles Smith entitled "Finding a Christian America?" 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 explains there was not i