Miles J Smith

In the past decade-or perhaps more precisely since the advent of Donald Trump into Republican politics-evangelical Protestants have debated so-called "Christian nationalism," a term that is so nebulous and so ill-defined that it can loop in secularist Trumpist politics, Christian Reconstruction, and nearly anything else that is exotic enough to pique the interest-or derision, or desires-of ministers, scholars, and politicians interested in the intersection of politics and religion. Trump "encourages Christians to identify the nation [we assume Looper is not using a precise definition of "nation" downstream from its Greek root and instead means the American republic] rather than the church as their primary community and to practice America's politics rather than the politics of Jesus" (56). The two kingdoms doctrine, identified by Christ in his "render unto Caesar" discourse in Matthew 22, charged ministers of religion with recognizing the political "supremacy" granted to the emperor "from heaven in matters affecting the public order." Protestant reformer Martin Luther echoed Christ and Gelasius when he stated that "God has therefore ordained two governments: the spiritual which by the Holy Spirit produces Christians and pious folk under Christ, and the secular which restrains un-Christian and evil folk, so that they are obliged to keep outward peace, albeit by no merit of their own."

The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism by Edward E. Baptist is reviewed. Baptist asserts that enslaved persons constituted the most attractive kind of collateral in the Western world. Slavery's attractiveness seemed to be confirmed by the Anglo-American financial situation in which banks continued to loan significant sums to enslavers. Bankers, Baptist argues, seemed convinced that slavery would remain viable for the foreseeable future. Baptist's work argues viscerally but somewhat incompletely that American slavery easily coexisted with American capitalism, but his larger polemical point that capitalism by nature is only exploitive seems less convincing.