Can You Have A Christian America Without Christian Nationalism?

Paleo Protestant Pudcast

Summer has made convening the co-hosts more challenging than when the academic calendar locks these confessional Protestants down. For this episode, the pudcast needed to aspire to Internet greatness without the presence of our Lutheran colleague, Korey Maas. This left D. G. Hart (Presbyterian) and Miles Smith (Anglican) to talk about Mile's new book, Religion and Republic: Christian America from the Founding to the Civil War. The conversation explores the Protestant character of American society before 1865 without having an established church. What the United States did have was the host of voluntary societies and organizations about which Alexis de Toqueville marvelled, institutions that shaped public and private sentiments in ways that were not doctrinaire but were generically Protestant. These realities lead inevitably to questions about what relevance or wisdom this era of American history has for current elbow-throwing and breast-beating about Christian nationalism.

This recording has no sponsor but if it did, it would have to be the publisher of Miles' book, the Davenant Press.

Follow Miles Smith on Twitter @ivmiles and D. G. Hart @oldlife. Korey Maas remains inaccessible.