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."

All historical writing, he said, even the most honest, is unconsciously subjective, since every age is bound, in spite of itself, to make the dead perform whatever tricks it finds necessary for its own peace of mind.1 The search for peace of mind has taken on more than one form in this new twenty-first century. Conscious that we remain bound to the sources that are available to us and in many ways to the received interpretive frameworks that have defined each historians own training, historians have taken it upon themselves to find peace of mind by revising predecessors in the search of improved and understandably more inclusive narratives for an increasingly diverse society. Samuel Price argued that in the modern West "the centrality of 'religious belief' ... has sometimes led to the feeling that belief is a distinct and natural capacity which is shared by all human beings. Just as the words and actions[and Facebook post, Instagram photos, and Tweets] of religious leaders are susceptible to scrutiny by online sources, so the Internet can create spaces for people to re-examine the doctrines, symbols, and practices of religious traditions." Because of the increased breadth and diversity of Internet users, they note, "more people have been given access to a global audience for their ideas, creating new sources of authority."

Historians have argued that disestablishment liberated American religion and allowed for the proliferation of religious practice and religious freedom, especially individualistic Evangelicalism in the South. This proposition reduced nearly all of southern Protestantism to Revivalist Evangelicalism, and failed to account for the powerful presence of coercive Protestant religiosity in older southern states such as South Carolina. While they shared certain Evangelical particulars with frontier populations, Protestants in South Carolina, especially Presbyterians, rejected individualized religion in favor of religiosity that favored and nurtured activist state protection of both antidemocratic political norms and chattel slavery. This essay argues that ostensibly disestablished Presbyterianism in South Carolina helped intellectually erect and socially perpetuate coercive religious and state power.