Category: History
Fight Progressivism. Be Liberal.
In 2017 and 2018, Notre Dame political philosopher Patrick Deneen argued that classical liberalism and progressivism are indistinguishable. Pick your metaphor: Progressivism is the fruit of liberalism’s poisoned tree. The liberal seed led inexorably to the progressive flowering. Or, liberalism...
John Quincy Adams: Christian Nationalist?
In the February of 1824, politically active Calvinists across the northern United States finally got their wish for a godly devout president who made the American republic a more explicitly Christian and righteous nation. The House of Representatives chose John...
The Search for a Christian Nation: Christian Nationalism and the American Founding
“Christian Nationalism” and the Appeal to History Is America a Christian nation—or was it ever? This vexed question, debated for decades, has been given a new lease on life by the heated and sometimes obsessive conversation around so-called “Christian nationalism”...
A Puritan Founding?
Earlier this year Philip Gorski and Samuel Perry published The Flag + the Cross, a sociological expose on what they identified as the threat to American democracy from what they called white Christian nationalism. It’s a work of sociology more...
Stuck in the Present
(Scroll to the bottom to learn about a free book giveaway.) Let me say a few words about the title, Stuck in the Present: How History Frees and Forms Christians. I find many Christians uninterested in the study of history....
The Danger of Forgetting America’s Anti-Racist History
Jake Meador has offered a thoughtful and challenging piece concerning the relationship between Christianity and the United States. Meador’s most salient point is that he has “become very suspicious of accounts of Christianity’s place in American life that leave out...
Who is This New Man?
The rubber band of our American common life is stretched to breaking.[1] Our connections are tenuous, our politics polarizing, and our sense of civic housekeeping — where we provide for others for the common good — seems like a foreign...
The Transcendentalists and Their World
Robert A. Gross is the James L. and Shirley A. Draper Professor of Early American History Emeritus at the University of Connecticut. His widely regarded book, The Minutemen and Their World won the Bancroft Prize. The following interview revolves around...
Christian Historiography and American History
Over the past year, parents and conservative activists have clashed with teachers and school officials over how the history of race in America is taught in the classroom. The rhetoric on both sides has been heated, with debate centering specifically...
The Prophet of Re-Alignment: Reading Michael Lind in the Ruins of the Old Republic
It has become a tired cliché to lament the polarization of American politics, yet after a year that witnessed a post-election assault on the US Capitol, and in which even epidemiology became a partisan issue, few would contest the truth...