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Miles Smith

Dr. Miles Smith IV is a historian of the American South and native Carolinian. Follow him on Twitter @ivmiles.

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Miles Smith

Dr. Miles Smith IV is a historian of the American South and native Carolinian. Follow him on Twitter @ivmiles.

Miles SmithCulture

You can't clear cut political society.

If our political society is like a forest, then attempts to clear cut it will do to us what they do to forests: leave them poorer and sicker.

Miles SmithHistoryCurrent Politics

Futility

The Confederacy's attempt to preserve a race-based caste system was futile. So why are sun belt evangelicals trying to revive hateful old ideologies?

Miles SmithCurrent PoliticsFormation

Perdition

American evangelicals have lost all sense of the 'tragic' and the movement is being consumed as a result.

Miles SmithBook Reviews

Reading the Exvangelicals

It is almost certainly not coincidental that many exvangelicals have come from syncretic, evangelical charismatic backgrounds.

Miles SmithFeaturedHistoryCurrent Politics

John Quincy Adams: Christian Nationalist? - Mere Orthodoxy | Christianity, Politics, and Culture

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 […]

Miles SmithFeaturedHistoryCurrent Politics

A Puritan Founding? - Mere Orthodoxy | Christianity, Politics, and Culture

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 […]

Miles SmithFeaturedEvangelicalismCulture WarCurrent Politics

The Uselessness of "Christian Nationalism" - Mere Orthodoxy | Christianity, Politics, and Culture

Over the past several years the topic of Christian nationalism has occupied the minds of Evangelical intellectuals and pastors. No less than half a dozen books have been written on the subject in the past year. Three of them have […]

Miles SmithPoliticsFeaturedHistory

The Danger of Forgetting America's Anti-Racist History - Mere Orthodoxy | Christianity, Politics, and Culture

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 […]

Miles SmithFeaturedHistory

Who's Afraid of John Calvin? Answer: Thomas Jefferson

The Virginian founding father and arch-liberal feared that Calvinists, not Catholics, would be the undoing of his experiment in political liberalism.

Miles SmithFeaturedCurrent Politics

Liberalism's Tax on the Unborn - Mere Orthodoxy | Christianity, Politics, and Culture

By Miles Smith In 1781 Thomas Jefferson left the office of governor of Virginia and wrote the sole book-length work attributed to him. In Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson reflected on what he knew was the great moral […]

Miles SmithFeaturedCurrent Politics

Evangelical Indifference to Immigrant Families in Historical Perspective

Even slave-holding southern Protestants recognized that breaking up families was a great evil. What does it say about evangelicals today that we do not?

Miles SmithSocial TrendsBook Reviews

Reviewing Archbishop Charles Chaput's "Strangers in a Strange Land"

Reviewing Archbishop Charles Chaput's "Strangers in a Strange Land"