A Very British America
In the popular imagination, at least, the American Revolution has become synonymous with anti-monarchism. Left- and right-wingers seek to drape their ideological causes in patriotic slogans and images that could be taken wholesale from Thomas Paine’s radical democratic pamphlet Common Sense. According to this conventional wisdom, the American Republic was founded to become a kind of Anti-England, rejecting the Mother Country’s monarchic institutions and supposedly decadent culture.
Of late, though, a number of dissenting scholars have challenged this simplistic view of the Revolution. Eric Nelson, for example, argued in The Royalist Revolution that a certain kind of monarchism was an essential element of the American founding and laid the groundwork for the institution of the presidency. Richard Alan Ryerson’s magisterial John Adams’s Republic explores, in part, the ways the second president’s constitutional thought incorporated monarchic insights from ancient and modern politics to counterbalance aristocratic or oligarchic tendencies. It is by no means true that the Founders all rejected their British heritage; indeed, many considered the empire as a model of a good regime to imitate in certain ways as they built their own.
The latest contribution to this growing literature is Adam Carrington and Miles Smith IV’s brisk new book, That Blessed Liberty: Episcopal Bishops and the Development of the American Republic, 1789–1860. Through 10 short biographies of the prelates who sought to rebuild the Protestant Episcopal Church in the wake of the Revolution, the authors illustrate how these churchmen and their followers endowed our regime with a certain conservative wisdom that sustained it through turbulent early years. The distinctly Anglican contribution to the life of the American Republic is a vision of ordered liberty we desperately must recover today.
Despite its relatively narrow focus, Carrington and Smith’s volume ought to interest those outside the Anglican tradition. As debates about “Christian nationalism” and other forms of religious authoritarianism engross contemporary discourse about the place of faith in public life, looking back at the history of American religion, especially in the years immediately after the founding, can better inform our responses to various proposals. Beyond understanding our national principles, though, That Blessed Liberty can also help Christians understand how to navigate life in republican or liberal regimes more broadly.
Read more in Religion & Liberty.
