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Nov 20, 2024 | 
wsj.com | D.G. Hart
On the subject of America, academic historians these days seem to live by the adage—the opposite of what their mothers taught them—that if they can’t write anything negative, they shouldn’t write anything at all. The persistent scolding in Paul Kahan’s “Philadelphia: A Narrative History” is typical. What might have been a story that observed both the triumphs and failings of America’s first capital is instead a soup-to-nuts treatment of the city’s failings.
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Aug 21, 2024 | 
wsj.com | D.G. Hart
For nearly 2½ centuries, Americans have built monuments, written plays, painted scenes of battle, marched in parades, published books and showcased documents for the simple purpose of keeping alive memories of the American Revolution. Michael D.
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Apr 3, 2024 | 
lawliberty.org | Tim Alberta |D.G. Hart |Rachel Lu |Jack Andrews
Since 2017 the study of American evangelicalism has featured a barrage of books that seemingly prove this religious group’s bad manners and uncivil politics. This perspective circulated even before the 2016 election of Donald Trump, to be sure. But with the election of Trump and the four-year, almost daily reminder of evangelical hypocrisy—headlines regularly repeated that “Eighty-One Percent of White Evangelicals Voted for Donald Trump”—the study of evangelicalism took an abrupt U-turn.
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Apr 2, 2024 | 
wng.org | D.G. Hart
Several years ago, during heated debates about Confederate soldiers’ statues, one common refrain was that these monuments were the products of local Southern communities that used war memorials to signal white supremacy to black residents. Thus, it is argued, only Jim Crow conditions could explain honoring officers who led an insurrection against the United States, the same soldiers who went to war to preserve slavery.
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Mar 20, 2024 | 
theaquilareport.com | D.G. Hart
Everyone understands that scientists, both natural and humanistic, interpret evidence, whether viruses, presidents, or evangelists. Historians evaluate data as much as public health experts. Still, the best historical judgments do not change with the headlines. A virus may require government to respond, but Protestants from the past do not. Calls for amnesty among those who defended and implemented the protocols of the COVID-19 pandemic are hardly news.
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Mar 7, 2024 | 
wng.org | D.G. Hart
Calls for amnesty among those who defended and implemented the protocols of the COVID-19 pandemic are hardly news. Emily Oster was the first to call for clemency of advocates for governments’ restrictive measures. She argued that many officials simply did not have sufficient knowledge for a better outcome. Since then Gavin Newsom, governor of California, and Gretchen Whitmer, governor of Michigan, have also pled for understanding.
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Jan 12, 2024 | 
lawliberty.org | D.G. Hart |Rachel Lu |Jonathan Leaf |Adam Tomkins
In 1923, a middle-aged professor of New Testament at Princeton Seminary, J. Gresham Machen, produced a book that asserted liberal Protestantism was not simply a defective version of Christianity but a different religion altogether. Talk about provocative. Was Machen trolling liberal Protestants? One hundred years later, white conservative Protestants in the US spent a good chunk of last year commemorating Machen’s Christianity and Liberalism. The reasons are not hard to imagine.
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Sep 29, 2023 | 
lawliberty.org | Benjamin Guyer |D.G. Hart |Dave Barfield |Eric Kaufmann
James Anthony Froude was an unlikely candidate to defend British Protestantism among his nineteenth-century contemporaries. As a student at Oriel College during the Oxford Movement, and with a brother, Richard Hurrell Froude who was a pronounced Anglo-Catholic polemicist, Froude appeared to be following John Henry Newman into the Roman Catholic Church.
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Sep 6, 2023 | 
wsj.com | D.G. Hart
Did a heightened emphasis on religious conversion in the 18th century promote reasonableness and open debate? George Whitefield preaches in London in 1742. Photo: Alamy Stock Photo‘Evangelicals,” or born-again Protestants—Christians who believe in converting non-Christians to their faith—haven’t had a lot of great press of late. The mainstream media all but blamed them for the 2016 election of Donald Trump. Going further back are evangelical ties to the Moral Majority and the religious right.
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Jun 29, 2023 | 
wsj.com | D.G. Hart
American Christians sometimes do unusual things in pursuit of patriotism. During World War I, many Lutheran congregations raised American flags in their sanctuaries and hung patriotic bunting from their balconies. It was a sensible show of national pride since many Lutherans still worshiped in their religion’s native language and the U.S. was at war with the German Kaiser. Brandishing patriotic symbols was a plausible way to answer charges of disloyalty.
