Why Should Puritans Take All the Credit?

Paleo Protestant Pudcast

Upstream from Christian nationalism, the topic of our last discussion, is the use to which historians of the United States have put denominational or church history in describing American identity (and with it American nationalism). In this recording, co-hosts, Korey Maas (Lutheran), Miles Smith (Anglican), and D. G. Hart (Presbyterian) talk about Anglican, Lutheran, and Presbyterian reactions to the way two or three generations of American historians, literary scholars, and faculty in related fields after World War II used Puritanism to understand the mission, purpose, and meaning of the United States. (Abram C. Van Engen's City on a Hill is one recent example of the way Puritanism became the distillation of American identity during the Cold War.)

Debates among historians of the Episcopal Church in the United States (Allen Guelzo and Thomas C. Reeves contested the high vs. low-church character of the denomination back in 1993 and 1994 in the pages of Anglican and Episcopal History) are exemplary of the way denominations can react to questions about a communion's own history independent its relationship to narratives about Christianity's influence on a nation's development. Another is to weave, as Presbyterians did, your own denomination into the success of the United States.

Though the lessons from this discussion are hardly reducible to a bumper sticker, the place of Protestantism in the American narrative is a topic that continues to be part of the study of American history. That in turn has implications for the way confessional Protestants tell their own histories and conceive of Lutheran, Anglican, or Presbyterian identity over against or alongside American national identity.

Follow Dr. Smith and Dr. Hart on Twitter. Pray for Dr. Maas to join Twitter.