American Reformer
Protestant Social and Political Thought
Managing Editor
In addition to my work for American Reformer, I am also the headmaster for a small classical Christian school, which has just started up this year. Part of our student culture for the older students is the presence of a hall system (very similar to the houses from Harry Potter, if you are familiar). As a school in rural Tennessee, all our hall namesakes are Tennesseans of historical note. They are Andrew Jackson, Alvin York, Davy Crockett, and John Sevier. I am the head of Sevier Hall, and so I have dedicated myself to reading some of his biographies to be able to know the man better. I picked up two volumes by James R. Gilmore on Sevier’s life. The first was “The Rear Guard of the Revolution,” which is mostly about Sevier and his contribution to the American Revolution as the leader of the over-mountain men who won a major victory against Redcoats and Tories at King’s Mountain (arguably being the most important turning point in the Southern theatre with Saratoga being its Northern theatre counterpart), which froze Cornwallis in place in the Southern theatre of the war, meaning he couldn’t reinforce the Northern theatre to trap Washington. This bought time for the French to marshal their navy, ultimately ending the Revolutionary War at Yorktown. The second volume is sort of a sequel to the first and is mostly about the formation of the state of Tennessee and Sevier’s role. Sevier was the first governor of the state of Tennessee and played a major role in the formation of the proto-state after the revolution as a leading statesman and experienced leader. One of Sevier’s closest friends is considered the founder of Nashville, and another was the first governor of Kentucky.
As I read these, I am struck by two unexpected elements. The books were written in the 1880s, and Gilmore is an unapologetic fan of Sevier’s. The book reads like a panegyric of the man, and there appears to be very little effort to maintain a facade of objectivity in spite of the fact that Sevier’s mistakes are recorded honestly. It reads like a story, and when Sevier does wrong, the reader experiences a tension like that of watching characters in a film make poor decisions leading to disaster. Dramatic irony, in other words. The second thing that I have found surprising is the complete eradication of the noble savage mythos that is attached to the Cherokee and Chickamauga Indian tribes. Though they are recorded in the book as a mixture of hostile and villainous and as reasonable and accommodating. Gilmore clearly distinguishes between sub-tribal groups that, though they claim the same general heritage and region, have a very different ethos among them. The Indians in the book are depicted in very human ways. The ultimate verdict is that the Indians and the white settlers are not likely to be able to co-exist, and since the book was written in the 1880s, it is possible that Gilmore had the contemporary tribal issues in mind when emphasizing this. Gilmore’s account shows that as a warrior, Sevier had much more experience fighting the Cherokee than the Redcoats, and his thesis in his first book is that without the early settlers to Tennessee, the Cherokee loyal to the British crown would have swept into the Southern colonies and helped the British subdue them. This was clearly a widely held understanding of the situation with the Indians, as it is reflected in the Declaration of Independence as a complaint against King George III.
If you enjoy biographies as a way to get into historical reading, these two are good ones to choose. The first reads almost like an adventure story, and the second is only marginally less entertaining, as there is only slightly less drama. This is an unremembered corner of the war, and if you are a fan of the film The Patriot, you may be surprised by a few similarities in the true story of Sevier and the Over-Mountain Men. I think this should be required reading for anyone interested in Tennessee history, but also anyone who takes the history of the formation of the American nation, and any students of the American Revolution. A caution to the good people of Carolina, though, Gilmore is not complimentary of your Western Carolina brothers. He is a big fan of Virginians, though, and believes (with evidence) that most of the early Tennessee settlers were more Virginian than Carolinian. I can speak for my own family when I say that they arrived and stayed in Virginia for a few generations, stopped over in Carolina for one generation, and made their way to Tennessee shortly after. Perhaps there is some merit in his claim. On my mother’s side, I actually trace my lineage back to Sevier, but as the man had 18 children in his lifetime, that is not as impressive a link as I used to think. Some of you reading this are probably related to him, too! Gilmore wrote after doing years of research, including interviewing some older men who had known Sevier personally when they were young. Many of his historical sources were handwritten letters and personally owned items of Sevier’s. No one has written a more chronologically close account of Sevier and so we are left wondering if Gilmore’s praises are accurate or if he was caught under the spell of Sevier’s larger-than-life legend. I tend to believe Gilmore is accurate in the events, if a bit effusive with his praise of his character. Overall, the book made me proud to be his relative and glad to be heading up Sevier Hall at my school.
Associate Editor
I’m still in the midst of reading classic Anglican texts from the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries (and on rare occasions, the 19th century). Since I just started looking through William Beveridge’s commentary on the Thirty-Nine Articles (he was the Bishop of St Asaph from 1704 until his death just four years later), I’ll focus on another work I recently finished: William Goode’s The Doctrine of the Church of England as to the Effects of Baptism in the Case of Infants.
First, some background on Goode is in order. He was a 19th-century Evangelical Anglican who was rector at St. Antholin’s in London, Allhallows the Great, Thames Street, and, finally, St. Margaret Lothbury. In 1860, Prime Minister Lord Palmerston appointed Goode to the deanery of Ripon, a position he held for eight years until his sudden passing in 1868.
Goode became famous for his advocacy against the Tractarians, a group that had its genesis at Oriel College at Oxford that sought to bring certain pre-Reformation practices and aesthetics back to the English Church. As Goode argued in his massive work, The Divine Rule of Faith and Practice, the Tractarians put the Thirty-Nine Articles “upon the rack to make them consistent with their views”—which they did in order to close the gap between the Church of England and the “Roman See.”
Church historian Lee Gatiss notes that Goode was one of the major figures in the C of E who helped establish “the primacy of the Articles as the hermeneutical grid through which the Prayer Book was to be understood.” Goode did this to counter what he saw as the Romanizing tendencies of the Tractarians and restore the original meaning of the Anglican formularies (i.e., the Thirty-Nine Articles, the Book of Common Prayer, and the Ordinal).
This historical background helps properly situate Goode’s Doctrine, which was a lengthy response to John Henry Newman (who had since entered the Roman Catholic Church) and other Tractarians on the important subject of baptism. In an exhaustive survey of the theology of the Anglican divines, bishops, and professors in the universities after the Reformation, as well as a smattering of patristic sources, Goode forcefully argues that the C of E “is wholly opposed to the notion of spiritual regeneration being always conferred” in baptism. He notes that continental Reformed divines such as Peter Martyr Vermigli and Martin Bucer, who had influence on the creation of the 1552 Prayer Book, “were notoriously opposed to such a doctrine.” Instead, they “fully approved” of the language Archbishop Thomas Cranmer used in the baptismal service. Goode writes that the Anglican “Reformers, as a body, held that the elect only are made partakers of those spiritual gifts that are essential to regeneration, and that final perseverance was always connected with those gifts.”
Calvinists and Arminians, Laudians and Puritans—Goode maintains that all agreed that baptism was the “laver of regeneration” that served as the formal entrance into the church, a grafting into Christ, and a washing and a remission of sins—but it was not spiritual regeneration. That could only happen through the instrument of faith. Article 27 of the Thirty-Nine Articles notes that baptism had to be received “rightly” for its full benefits to take effect. Goode argues that charity was presumed in the language of the Articles, as well as the continental confessions and catechisms, regarding baptism, which features descriptions that can sound to the untrained like an ex opere operato formulation. Baptism was always expressed in its fullest sense as a way to teach parishioners the entire meaning of the sacrament.
Reading Goode helps supply us with an important part of a larger debate on the true meaning of baptismal regeneration, which can be a slippery and confusing term. It also shows why it’s very odd for Protestants, especially those in the Anglican tradition, to celebrate John Henry Newman being made a doctor of the Roman Catholic Church.
Contributing Editor
This semester I’m teaching a course on the separation of church and state in America, from the colonial period through the twentieth century. In preparation, I read a number of books. First up was Matthew L. Harris and Thomas S. Kidd’s 2012 work, The Founding Fathers and the Debate Over Religion in Revolutionary America: A History in Documents. This is an excellent book of the most seminal primary resources at the founding relating to the religion question. Its strength is that there is little biased editorializing, and that it includes over fifty primary documents but is still less than two hundred pages overall.
The sources are organized into six different periods. First, “Religion and the Continental Congress,” which includes prayer and fasting proclamations, the Robert Aiken’s Bible, and the design of the National Seal. Second, “Religion and State Governments,” including most state constitutions written between 1776 and 1778, the Virginia Declaration of Rights, and the debate in Virginia between Patrick Henry and Jefferson and Madison. Third, “Constitution and Ratification,” relating to the debates during the ratification. Fourth, “Religion and the Federal Government,” including Washington’s Farewell Address, the Treaty of Tripoli, and Jefferson’s First Inaugural. Fifth, “Disestablishment and the Separation of Church and State,” including John Leland’s base for Baptist religious liberty, and writings by John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. Sixth and finally, “The Founding Fathers’ Own View on Religion,” which selects nine founders and explains their private religious views in their own words. The introduction gives a helpful, non-nonsense overview of the myriad issues related to religion at the founding of America. This book will help scholars and lay readers come to their own conclusion about the religion question vis-à-vis America’s founding, without putting a thumb on the scales in favor of a liberal “consensus” of religious liberty and pluralism.
Secondly, my class is structured around Philip Hamburger’s excellent and ground-breaking book, Separation of Church and State (Harvard University Press, 2002). Hamburger’s book is a history-of-ideas text, tracing the origin and development of the concept of ‘separation of church and state’ from the pre-colonial and colonial periods all the way through twentieth century Supreme Court jurisprudence. Hamburger’s overall thesis is that separation is a relatively modern doctrine that developed after the founding period. The majority of the founding fathers were not pushing for the complete bifurcation between a secular public order and privatized religion; instead, they held an antithetic view, that religion—especially Christianity—was paramount to the success of American constitutionalism and republican self-government.
While Jefferson and Madison’s ideas of religious non-cognizance (parallel to Roger Williams’ beliefs but not derived from them) predominated in Virginia and encapsulated a proto-form of separationism, these two founding stalwarts were a minority report during the founding period. Far more representative were Congregationalists in New England and dissenting Baptists. Even Baptists, who wanted to disestablish state churches and end taxpayer subsidies for the clergy, were not in favor of separating church and state in America. They wanted the Christian religion to flourish, as establishmentarians in Massachusetts and Virginia also desired, but their tactics were radically different. Believing that church establishments were a union of church and state akin to continental Catholicism, Baptists allied with Madison and Jefferson to beat back Patrick Henry and the threat of an Anglican Virginia.
The rest of Hamburger’s book is a fascinating and insightful journey through nineteenth and twentieth century America: the election of 1800 and Jefferson’s battle with the Federalist clergy, Protestant and Catholic conflicts over religious education and general influence in politics, the rise of liberal Protestantism and the National Liberal League under Francis Ellingwood Abbott, and Supreme Court jurisprudence of last century that cemented many of the cultural and religious changes that had proceeded it. Hamburger by far is the best one-stop-shopping for a refutation that the founders enshrined the principle of separation of church and state in the Constitution.
Editor-in-Chief
I’m neck deep in research for my next book on Evangelicals in the Trump era. Francis Fitzgerald’s The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America, is massive but an easy read. It’s essential for understanding the rise of the moral majority and neo-Evangelicals. I also just started Daniel G. Hummel’s The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism. It’s much drier than Fitzgerald but, coupled with Crawford Gribben’s work on Darby, provides a good historical overview of the development of the new eschatology. The most penetrating work in this area, however, is still James Davison Hunter’s Evangelicalism: The Coming Generation. I’ll be writing more on this soon, so I don’t want to give too much away, but Hunter’s analysis in the latter third of the book has really held up, and so has his Culture Wars. Capitulation to the “civility ethic” has really defined Evangelicalism for the past 30-50 years.
Stepping back from modern Evangelicalism, I approached Pauline Maier’s The Old Revolutionaries: Political Lives in the Age of Samuel Adams with a degree of skepticism, but it’s superb. The book is basically six 50-page biographies, from Samuel Adams to Charles Carroll, of early Americans that more or less got the revolution going but were later forgotten. As Maier says of Adams, he was better at the revolution part than the governing part. She gets Adams just right. There are relatively few biographies of the elder cousin Adams and many of them are garbage. Maier centers the once more famous Adams’ Calvinism, filial piety, and classical republicanism. In one chapter she does more than most have in full volumes. Then you’ll learn about figures you’ve probably never heard of like Isaac Sears and Thomas Young, and come away struck by how depressingly partial our knowledge of the founding era really is.
Lastly, I’m halfway through Michael Walzer’s The Revolution of the Saints: A Study in the Origins of Radical Politics. He gets some things wrong about Calvin and Calvinism, reading both in some cases as a 1960s liberal would. It’s amazing, however, what he gets right and what he read (pre-internet). Walzer’s description of the revolutionary Puritan as a new social type of seventeenth century England is insightful, as is his theory of how politics shifted in that period to lay-centric expression. The Puritan as radical–industrious, pious, willing to break things, and fixed on his vision of a godly commonwealth–is something, in my opinion, that doesn’t need to be fled or softened today but embraced.
Image: Royal Institution, Albemarle Street (1918), Thomas Rowlandson. Wikimedia Commons.
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