Miles Smith’s book is an excellent reminder that conservatives should never prioritize an idealized individual or nation. Rather, we must work to preserve those institutions that point us to better lives.

Liberalism has not been wanting for obituaries in recent years. Academics such as Patrick Deneen have argued at length that the American experiment has failed and it is time for a new regime. Among Roman Catholics, the most extreme angst about political modernity finds expression as “integralism,” an ideology holding that the state ought to be subordinate to the church. Among evangelicals, these same anxieties sometimes manifest as the less sophisticated “Christian nationalism,” the quasi-theocratic position that Protestants need to “take back” America and return it to some earlier, more pristine set of social arrangements.

But in his new book, Religion & Republic, Hillsdale College history professor Miles Smith IV takes a different tack from sounding liberalism’s death knell. Instead, he persuasively argues that the roots of American order go far deeper than liberalism’s critics allow, and he shows how the Founders saw Christian institutions playing a vital role in the life of the early republic. The generation that built this country largely existed in a distinctively Protestant stream of the Western tradition, which is sadly neglected today. By retelling this almost forgotten story, Smith unearths tools and principles that Christian Americans can deploy as we pursue cultural renewal today.

The book begins by distinguishing Protestant tradition from “evangelicalism.” In Smith’s analysis, religion in the early republic had much more to do with historic Anglican, Lutheran, and Calvinist expressions of the faith than the more charismatic or biblicist approaches common in nondenominational churches and evangelical seminaries today. As Publius put it in Federalist No. 2, Americans were

one united people; a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs.

It would be an exaggeration to say that every American was a Christian, but Christian religion nonetheless formed the moral core of the republic.

Beginning from this premise, Smith outlines an interpretation of the First Amendment altogether at odds with the strict separationism many believe it enshrines. After decades of liberal jurisprudence, it may be difficult to see the Constitution as anything but an instrument of secularism. Smith, however, comes to a different conclusion after a closer look at the way Protestants actually governed at the time of the American founding. They largely believed that government was, in fact, responsible for legislating morality—and that religion was supposed to guide it in this “essential duty.” “Put simply,” he concludes, “Early Republic legislators conceived of the First Amendment very differently than modern Americans do and did not perceive the Constitution as imposing federal will on preexisting establishments.”

It is for this reason, Smith argues, that the American Revolution’s commitment to personal liberty did not result in the retreat of Christianity from the public square. Other secularizing movements born from Enlightenment ideology, such as the French Revolution or English liberalism, may have aimed at such an outcome—but in this, as in so much else, America was exceptional. “Disestablishment commitments regarding church and state did not revolutionize family or other institutions that upheld life in the Early American Republic,” Smith contends, “nor did the United States enter the family of nations perceived by commentators as a sanctuary for secularism, social democracy, or social egalitarianism.” It would be more accurate to say that Christianity undergirded the early republic’s public square. Religion played a fundamentally conservative role in the American founding, to put it another way, by providing both a shared sense of a transcendent moral order and links back to an enduring Western tradition.

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