Is America a Christian nation? This question has evoked countless books and even more debate. On one side of the argument, people point to the establishment clause of the First Amendment and the Jeffersonian “wall of separation” to prove that America was founded as a fundamentally secular nation, free from governmental religious influence. Opponents of this secular perspective point to the Christian convictions of many of the founders, to the Christianity of the broader colonial culture at the time of the American Founding, and to the establishment of state churches. The question of the Christian nature of the American Founding and the early republic has been taken up by scholars, Christian leaders, and laity alike.

This is the question that guides Miles Smith in Religion and Republic: Christian America from the Founding to the Civil War. In his book, Smith seeks to give a comprehensive and historically rooted answer to the question of the Christian character of the early American republic. In seeking to answer the question, Smith argues that America, while officially areligious by virtue of federal disestablishment, was functionally Protestant due to the pervasiveness of what Smith calls “Christian institutionalism” (p. xxv), which he defines as the proliferation of Protestants and Protestant ideals in traditionally “nonreligious” American institutions. Protestant Christianity, according to Smith, was a foundational identity of the American people for the first century of the nation’s existence.

Smith, a professor of history at Hillsdale College, posits that rather than a secularizing force, federal disestablishment was a tool used to uphold the English Whig tradition and perpetuate Christian—specifically Protestant—civilization through non-church institutions. These institutions—public schools, legislative bodies, courts, and private businesses—upheld the Protestant character of the early republic by their incorporating Protestant Christianity into the fabric of the American lived experience. Smith points to seven examples to support his argument: The unsuccessful secular vision of Thomas Jefferson, governmental legislation, courts and judicial decisions, private and public debates over sabbath laws, American international diplomacy, the American Indian policy, and public education. In each of these examples, Smith seeks to demonstrate that “while church and state might be separable, religion and politics were not” (p. 64). This Christian worldview and broad Christian institutionalism, according to Smith, was so deeply ingrained in the American psyche that it allowed for disestablishment in the first place (p. 3).

This de facto Christian America was maintained until the Civil War. Smith writes that in the postbellum period, Darwinism and secularism removed the broad cultural preference for Christianity. This was especially true in public education and in the judiciary. This trend, according to Smith, culminated in the 1960s’ full-scale rejection of Christian institutions, leading to a broad rejection of traditional American Protestant dominance.

Religion and Republic is a well-sourced argument in favor of viewing the early American republic as a fundamentally Protestant nation. Smith wisely avoids framing his argument in terms of Christian morality. Rather, he maintains that it was primarily “nonreligious” institutions that created and maintained the Protestant Christian character of the early American republic. The book finds itself in a long and contentious stream of historiography regarding the religious temperament of the American founding. The twentieth century saw an extended academic discourse around how much influence Christianity—particularly the Great Awakening—had upon the founding. Smith has produced a welcome and fresh addition to this conversation, arguing not that the framers explicitly wrote their beliefs into the constitution but rather that the American ethos was so deeply Protestant that the framers included disestablishment to allow Christian institutionalism to flourish. The book’s chapters are wide-ranging and helpful vignettes that show various aspects of the Christian nature of the early republic. Whether it be Thomas Jefferson’s virulent secularization hopes or the aim of early public education to be the “chief vehicle for the implantation of Christian theology and Christian practice” (p. 239), Smith ably demonstrates the Protestant influence in nearly every corner of American culture.

This is not to say that the book is without flaws, the most glaring of which is the abundance of typographical/grammatical errors. The book is badly in need of an editor, and the errors are frequent enough to distract from the subject material. Additionally, in the preface, Smith comes out in strong opposition to Evangelicalism. This does not appear in the rest of the book, so the vigor with which he opposes Evangelicalism in the preface is inexplicable. He makes a stark distinction between Protestant tradition and Evangelical tradition (p. xix), claims that Evangelicals view religious history in America as “socio-moral transformation typically centering around the Great Awakening” (p. xx), and states, bafflingly and without substantiation, that “‘evangelicalism’ doesn’t have much of a history” (p. xxiv). Works on Evangelicalism such as Doug Sweeney’s The American Evangelical Story (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2005) and Thomas Kidd’s Who is an Evangelical? (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019) would strongly beg to differ. The preface seems to serve as Smith’s personal soapbox against Evangelicalism, a position which he does not extrapolate through the rest of the book.

These issues notwithstanding, Religion and Republic presents a compelling and well-structured argument for the view of America as an unofficial-but-inarguably-Protestant nation. Through his examination of non-church American institutions, Smith cogently demonstrates that, despite official disestablishment, the early American republic was fundamentally defined by Protestant involvement in all aspects of culture. Thus, Smith answers the question, “was early America a Christian nation?” with a resounding and unequivocal “yes.”