
An interview with Paul J. Gutacker
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Paul Vettaker
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Marshall Po
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Lane Davis
Welcome to New Books in History. My name is Lane Davis and today my guest is Paul Gutticker. He's a lecturer in history at Baylor University and the executive director of Brazos Fellows in Waco, Texas. And he's also the author of a new book, the Old Faith and a New American Protestants and the Christian Past, published by Oxford University Press in January of 2023. We're recording this episode a couple of weeks before the official publication date. So let me just say, Paul, welcome to New Books History and congratulations on the publication of the book.
Paul Vettaker
Thanks so much, Lane. I really appreciate it and it's an honor to be on the podcast Great.
Lane Davis
So before we dive into some of the specific narratives you go into in the book, just give us a big picture of what the book is all about and really how you came to be interested in this topic of historiography in the early and antebellum periods of American history.
Paul Vettaker
Yeah, absolutely. Well, I came into American religious history as an area of research when I began my doctorate studies. And I had. Prior to that, I'd been a little bit interested in how evangelical Protestants understood the Christian past, you know, where they located themselves within the larger history of Christianity. And as I was reading in the field of American religion and reading, you know, really great landmark books by, you know, by folks like Nathan Hatch and Mark Noll and all the sort of giants in the field, I noticed that there was an emphasis, you know, a very understandable emphasis on the focus on the Bible and evangelical Biblicism, but that sometimes this gave the impression that, you know, American Protestants broadly, and evangelicals in particular, were not very interested in history. And, you know, there were some exceptions to this talk about how they remembered ancient Greece and Rome. Of course, revolutionary history becomes a big sort of pop industry in the 19th century, but just really no sense of whether or not Americans thought about what had happened in the Christian faith, what had happened in the history of the church since the time of the apostles. And my hunch was that that wasn't quite accurate, that there was something there. And, you know, thanks to some of the digital tools we have now, I was able to find references to some of the most popular Protestant church histories, right? Some of the books written in the 18th century, one by a German Lutheran named Johann Mosheim, another by an Anglican minister named Joseph Milner, and several other of these works. And because Google Books and these databases that we now have are so, you know, powerful and can search such a wide range of sources, I was able to find thousands and thousands of references, citations of these books and others, and references to medieval history, to church fathers like Augustine or Cyprian, and I then sort of had the question like, well, what do we make of this? Is this just, you know, they read a lot and they read church history, or how does. How does this change what we understand about American Protestantism? So what I started to try to do is figure out how these uses of history, how this reading of Christian history shaped some of the bigger questions of the day and by of the day, I mean, really in between the Revolution and the Civil War, so the formative decades between those two. And so, as, you know, as I looked into Questions like women's rights and women's roles, gender and education, these things, or religious establishments. And the arguments against church and state alliance. Slavery was one of the first ones I started to look at. I got a sense for how these Protestants who are stereotyped as being ignorant about history or completely disinterested in tradition or precedent or the, you know, the old European norms that they're leaving behind, they were actually really steeped in history. And their sense of where they were in that history and their sense of what that history meant played a significant role in how they navigated these big questions. And so at that point, I realized the project was less a pure intellectual history. I wasn't writing a study of the scholarship around history. This sort of emergence of history as a scholarly discipline and church history particularly. Other people have done that work. I was trying to get more at a sense of how the literate, thoughtful layperson or clergyman or, you know, sort of activist, how they understood this past and how it shaped what they thought about, you know, who they were and what they were up to in the 19th century. So that's, that's kind of the big picture there. But in a lot of ways, I feel like I stumbled onto something in part because of powerful research tools and, and because this hadn't been noticed before.
Lane Davis
That's really interesting. It's especially interesting to hear how these new digital tools shaped this project. I think that's. That's a really fascinating story. Now, one of the themes that I think almost all of your chapters touch upon in some way is the idea that Protestants had of the corruption of the Christian church after the reign of Constantine. So in the early Republic, you show how this was used to specifically push for religious disestablishment. I wonder if you could explain that argument a bit for us.
Paul Vettaker
Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, in these formative decades right after the revolution and as the new constitution institution is being constructed and ratified, one of the big questions was, what's the place of the state in religion? And advocates for disestablishment. And this includes folks like Jefferson and Madison, but also some of the more famous religious ministers. Isaac Bacchus, John Leland, others. They all were able to tap into this pretty broadly held sense that things had gone really wrong in Christian history. And most Protestants tended to date this to around the time of Constantine. And if Constantine and Theodosius and the Christian empires of the 4th century, if they weren't entirely to blame, they were at least partly to blame for how the, you know, quote unquote, pure Apostolic faith was corrupted by Greek philosophy, corrupted by wealth and power, basically. Once the empire got involved, things went south. And one of the reasons this resonated so widely was that you could blame that for everything that went wrong in Roman Catholicism. So you could associate church, state alliances with the worst corruptions of medieval Catholicism and tap into the broad, you know, and deeply felt anti Catholicism of the day. So it was, in some ways, you know, so. So, for example, Jefferson Leland, they'll mention this in their speeches, and they almost don't have to prove it. It's simply by bringing this narrative up. There was a compelling, I think almost. It seemed like almost an empirical case could be made for this is what happens when state and church are allied together. So it gave them a powerful historical narrative that I think, again, resonated with widely held prejudices and deeply held beliefs about where things went wrong in Christian history. And then what it also allowed then. And this kind of points forward to where the rest of the book goes, is if we undo that mistake, if we reverse Constantine and Theodosius and get back to a, you know, a. In a lot of ways, disestablishing state churches, passing the First Amendment, these things would. Would allow American Christianity to undo the sort of fundamental problem that had emerged in medieval history. And so it also encouraged this sense of American exceptionalism. It. It helped them see themselves as recovering true apostolic Christianity.
Lane Davis
I think that's such an interesting way to see that. Now, there were a few historians or historical works, and you've noted a few of them already, but you show that Protestants return to several of them over and over again. And figures like David Hume, Edward Gibbon, Joseph Priestley, and then you've mentioned Johann Maassheim. I wonder if you could say a little bit more about this collection of historians, because for me, some of them were a little surprising to know that Protestants were reading widely, figures like Hume and Gibbon. What do you think drew Protestants to these. These historical figures or these historical works?
Paul Vettaker
Yeah, good. Yeah, I think a variety of things. Right. So. And it depends on the source, somebody like Joseph Milner, who's an evangelical Anglican, and he's not a great scholar, but he wrote one. You know, he wrote a history of the church that tried to be deeply edifying. And so a lot of folks who didn't even agree with Milner about certain theological tenets still found it a very encouraging history to read because it highlighted the presence of faithful Christians in every century. So pious reasons for reading him. Right. And reproducing his history with some of the, you know, more rationalists, you might say, Enlightenment historians, Hume and Robertson and Gibbon. It's interesting because often, you know, there's. There's some readers who I found who really don't like the skepticism and the sort of cynical approach to Christian history that you'll find in some of these philosophical historians. But they don't mind it too much because what it primarily shows is, is how bad Catholicism is. So it's still very illustrative, I think, to the average American Protestant to read these histories and know, here's how corrupt and superstitious and tyrannical the Catholic Church became. In other words, it's sort of a friend of my enemy, of my enemy as my friend sort of situation. You'll even find I found one reviewer saying, you know, when you read Hume, it's really. I think he was talking about Hume and given actually, it's really. You kind of have to almost plug your nose. The infidelity and unbelief is simmering under the surface, but it's still worth it because you get this really good sense of how things got so corrupted. So I think that was the draw and sometimes you had. I mean, Maassheim is trying to do something in the middle. You know, he's plugged into the German Enlightenment. He doesn't like how Protestant historians before have been maybe too concerned with piety and not concerned enough with explaining the causes of historical events. So he's trying to do something modern in between. But the other thing I'll say is that this is in a lot of ways the only things that the only options they had until new German historiography in the 1830s and 40s, because there just isn't a lot out there. So you'll, you'll get folks like Samuel Miller at Princeton Seminary complaining. There's really not a good Protestant church history yet. They're either too cynical or they're too pious or they're, you know, too swayed by, you know, Milner's establishmentarianism or something. So everybody's griping about there's not a great history, but they all keep reading it and they sort of do the best they can with the sources they have.
Lane Davis
One of the things I really appreciated about your book is how you were able to take a fresh look and add some real nuance to the work of a few of the more well known historians of evangelicalism. And specifically you already mentioned Nathan Hatch and Mark Noll. I want to get to Nolan in just a minute, but I wanted first talk about how your Work supplements Hatch's democratization thesis. Maybe first explain what that thesis is and then talk about your contribution to that.
Paul Vettaker
Yeah, for sure. Yeah. So Nathan Hatch, you know, one of these great books, every time I return to it, I realized just, you know, what a great work he did with it. But in this book, he argued against some of the social history of the mid 20th century, that the religious awakenings of the, what we sometimes call the second Great Awakening, that the post revolutionary era growth of Protestant Christianity and Bible religion was not a conservative reaction to the revolution, but rather really tapped into the spirit of the revolution. So, you know, these groups, and he covers Baptists and Methodists and the black church and the Christian movement, he says they were able to succeed in part because they resonated with this sort of anti establishment, democratizing spirit of the day. Right. They were willing to innovate, they were willing to depart from the received norms. They trusted the experience of ordinary people in some ways more than the, you know, the experts, so called experts. Right. And this made them mobile and made them, you know, attractive to a sort of popular base. And Hatch shows basically that American Christianity took on, at least in these particular forms, took on the democratizing spirit of the revolution. So great book. And people have. It's one of those where people will poke at it from here or there, and yet everybody kind of takes it, I think, for granted. And you have to cite it. It's just obligatory.
Lane Davis
Right, right.
Paul Vettaker
And I don't really have a big quibble with that thesis, but again, you can get the impression reading this, this book, that breaking from custom, breaking from tradition, innovating, democratizing in these ways meant that these groups, Methodist, Baptist, churches of Christ, didn't care about what happened before. Right. A sort of throw it off, don't look at it, move on, turn away from the past, turn toward the frontier, move forward. And in fact, you know, when you look at the writings of some of the leaders of this democratizing movement, what you find when you look at Baptists, Methodists, Churches of Christ, is that they're really very aware of the same historical narrative we were just talking about. And they think it's essential to know that history, to study it so that you can get behind it to the pure faith of the apostolic era, but also so you don't repeat the same mistake. So somebody, for example, like Alexander Campbell, thinks that studying church history is secondary in importance only to studying scripture. And he's always urging the ministers who are in his circles to learn this past. One of his very first editorials in his monthly journal, which was first called the Christian Bapt. In fact, the first volume includes a piece by Campbell on the importance of church history and the problems with Protestant historiography that are out there. So what I try to say in this part of the book is just to point out that this process of rejecting the past doesn't imply an ignorance of the past. In fact, it's often funded by a close attention to the historical texts that they had at the time. And it's not a rejection of reading history, even if it's a rejection of sort of historical precedent.
Lane Davis
So we've already kind of danced around the idea of anti Catholicism that's sort of present in all of this. But you really point that out in your chapter on the 1820s, 1830s, this era of good feelings that you talk about. I wonder if you could sort of talk specifically about this period and how calls to Christian history really played a role in sort of the rise of anti Catholic sentiments in that era.
Paul Vettaker
Yeah, for sure. So there are sometimes there's a sense that anti Catholicism was strong in the period leading up to the Revolution. And then in the sort of early Republic, you know, there's a little bit of a decline in that anti Catholicism, and you can put the French Revolution in there in the mix, but then it comes back with a vengeance in the 1830s and 40s as Catholic immigration picks up. And that's definitely the case in terms of the big picture. But in between and throughout, these American Protestants, who will many of them be leading the fight against Catholic immigration, will join a nativist movement propagating this historical narrative. And the link, in other words, between the older anti Catholicism of the 18th century and the resurgent nativism that we see in the 1830s and 40s is the sort of Protestant embrace of. It's not a new embrace, but the continuation of this anti Catholic history. So, again, what you'll get is, in this chapter, I try to look a little bit more broadly than just at the classic nativist sources, but what you get is in the education of women and in the education of children in the Sunday School movement, you get quite a bit of this narrative coming through, right. That the big narrative that's being taught to Americans on every level of education is there was a pure apostolic faith, things got corrupted, and Catholicism is to blame for that, and Catholicism continues that. Right. And we're now leaving that behind in this country. And so I'm trying to get at how this seeped all the way down to the level of the sort of ordinary Citizen, including children, including in female academies, and including in African American schools as well. So that the anti Catholic thread really goes throughout the book, and it only modifies slightly at the end, I think, in the chapters on slavery. But one of the more implicit arguments that I'm trying to make is their reading of history really assures them that Catholicism is a threat because they again, they take this for granted. So these narratives about the Dark Ages, about medieval superstition, about the Inquisition, these are deeply baked into the way that American Protestants imagine the past.
Lane Davis
So as someone who's personally interested in the history of American higher education, I was really interested in your chapter on American seminaries and theological schools. You write that history became a really hotly contested topic in those settings in the early 19th century. And I was especially interested in the controversy that was surrounding Philip Schaff at Mercersburg. Could you explain maybe first who Schaff was and why he was such an important figure in the study of church history and then why his approach to the subject caused such a stir?
Paul Vettaker
Yeah, yeah, Shafsher, he's so interesting, right. So he studies with the sort of leading scholars of German historiography. He's born in Switzerland and he comes to teach first at Andover Seminary. I'm sorry, first at Mercersburg Seminary, then Andover, and then eventually Union. And when he comes to the States, he, you know, he's already got this great training and he's learned a way of approaching the Christian past that is more interested. It's, you know, capital R, romantic. It's more interested in sort of organic development than sort of a really hard decline narrative. So he's still a Protestant, but he, in his initial inaugural address at Mercers Brick Seminary, Shaft says that, you know, Protestantism has to pay attention to church history more than it does and recognize that it grows out of the history of the whole church. So, you know, he'll even say that the Reformation, I think the quote is that it's the legitimate offspring, the greatest act of the Catholic Church. Right. So recovering the sense in which Luther, Calvin were Catholic, that that reform is birthed from within the church, even if there are breaks. And he gives Catholicism a legitimate place, in other words, in the historical development of Christianity. So he doesn't agree with everything that medieval Catholicism taught. He's, you know, he's not advocating for a conversion to Catholicism, but he says it had a kind of role. And you can, you can kind of hear Hegel almost in the backdrop, right. As sort of thesis, antithesis, synthesis. And Protestantism in this telling is the next chapter, but it's not the final one. He. He envisions an ecumenical future where the church will be sort of united and bringing together the best insights of Protestantism with the other branches of the faith, including Catholicism. And this, you know, gets him in hot water. So he's asked to explain this. Eventually he'll be, you know, brought under a trial for heresy in the German reform denomination. And he'll find ways, I think, to communicate this vision and teach this vision that are a little bit more palatable, but it is alarming to Protestants who, you know, are fundamentally anti Catholic in their orientation to their theology and their churchmanship. So he'll persuade some and there will be more Reformed and more Protestant types who will appreciate what he's doing. Charles Hodge, for example, is more appreciative than other Protestant critics, but some Protestants see what Shafa is doing as sort of pulling the rug out from under the Reformation and the whole Protestant approach to the faith. So he'll inspire not just writing against this historical vision, but further investment in historical study from especially Baptists, but also other Reformed ministers, Presbyterians. And, you know, some of the sources I deal with in this chapter show that in particularly in speeches, but also in lecture notes, some of these professors are targeting Jaffa, saying, this is why we need better Protestant history, because we're going to be led astray by this Catholicizing approach to the past. Or, you know, it's not as big of a part of this book. But the Oxford movement is also quite alarming to these Protestants. So they're really concerned that they have to find a way to teach church history in a way that's scholarly, that's sound, that's not dog, you know, just sort of a function of dogmatics. But that is thoroughly Protestant. That that produces ministers who will be, you know, convinced Protestants who won't be taken in, who won't be, you know, soft toward Catholicism. And again, it's not incidental that this is happening at the same time that nativism is politically active and. And many of the critics of Schaeff are going to be in the same circles or at least interested in or concerned by growing Catholic immigration.
Lane Davis
That's such an interesting story. You highlight two groups of marginalized peoples in the book, specifically African Americans and then women, and how the study and the writing of history took on very different purposes for them. I want to deal with both of them, but could you start with African Americans? What was the study and then the writing of history? What purpose did it take on for that Group?
Paul Vettaker
Yeah, absolutely. So this is an interesting part of the story. And here I feel like I've owed so much to some of the other historians I've read on this question. But what we see is in the 18th century and then increasingly in the 19th century, really creative approaches to history, generally from African American historians, but in particular narrating the Christian past as this story of liberation. So this sometimes is called a liberation historiography, and it picks up on some of the narratives we already talked about, that there was an early church that was equal, that was, you know, interracial, and that Christendom corrupted that initial liberating impulse of Christianity with intolerance, with inequality. And this, this plays out in the rise of modern slavery. And so you get often black ministers who have read the same historiography that we talked about, pointing out that slavery is birthed in the era of the corruption of Christianity. And that if you're going to take this narrative, you know, as sort of normative for Christian history, that racial equality belongs to the era of pure Christianity. So they'll use this in arguments for abolition, in arguments for black education. They'll especially point to the African roots of orthodox theology. So pointing out North African theologians, which they very much embrace as African and as black. So Tertullian, Cyprian origin, Augustine. Later on, when, when they get to the, we get to the more heated debates over Christianity and slavery, some of these African American historians will take a good amount of delight in pointing out that defenders of slavery are using, sometimes citing Augustine or Cyprian, who in fact were African. They'll say, you know, and, and the, the irony here being what are you going to say when you get to heaven and you sit down with Augustine and he says, why did you use my argument for fending slavery? So they, they point, they sort of notice the multi ethnic multicultural character of the early church and use this raw, again, broadly accepted historical narrative to advocate for their own education and advancement and to push against the, you know, white supremacy that's keeping them out of education, that's keeping many of them enslaved. And it's, it's a, it's a powerful component because it, there, it allows them to use Scripture, but then also place themselves in the narrative of sacred history from the time of Scripture to the present. And this is a sort of powerful historical, I'd say, imagination that can fuel their activism and push back against the injustice they face.
Lane Davis
I found it really interesting that for women, you noted there was a pretty dramatic shift both in, both in the way women Wrote history. And in just the history that was being written about women between 1830 and then 1850, it looks differently. I wonder if you could talk about that shift just a little bit and sort of what caused it and what are some of the effects?
Paul Vettaker
Yeah, absolutely. It's very telling because it's not just the case, as far as I can tell, it's not just the case in American historiography, but we see something similar in British historiography, and I think it's a similar thing as well in some of the German sources I've looked at. So something happens. Yeah, something happens where in the 18th century and in the early Republic, when men or women are writing about the Christian past, there's very little attention given to the place of women in that history. So, you know, there's sometimes mention of a couple famous ones, you know, Helena Constantine's mother, Monica Augustine's mother, but these are pretty sporadic and undeveloped. And, you know, historians who did, you know, female historians who did great work, Susanna Rosen, Hannah Adams, they don't notice this either, or they don't. There's nothing to draw on for them. And then sometime around 1830, this begins to shift. And I, you know, I conjecture why 1830. But what we see is all of a sudden, there's increasing attention given to women in Christian history, what Christian history means for women. So that's its own question, right? Has Christianity been a liberating force for women? Most everybody is going to say 1830 is going to say yes to that, even if they mean different things by it. And also, what role did women play in the spread of Christianity and the building up of the church? And you'll get not just women, but also some men writing history who give women a significant place in this and who notice, for example, that the Christianization of Europe, often played out through the embrace of Christianity by a queen or a, you know, a female member of some sort of ruling power. So that starts to happen, and then what you see is in the next generation. So in the 1840s and 50s, the meaning of that is sort of used in different directions. So some take up this recovery of women and the women of the church to argue, look, it's that women have been the leaders of the faith through their influence as mothers, as wives, as sisters, as daughters. And so we need to embrace that. So using it for a sort of domestic role for women, although often with an emphasis alongside that, that women need to be educated, they need to have a deep understanding of history, of scripture, these sorts of things. And then you also have the women, early women's rights move picking this narrative up. So you have authors like Elizabeth Cady Stanton, you have Margaret Fuller, you have Lucretia Mott picking up on the same narrative about the importance of women in Christian history, but also taking it in a different direction that something was corrupted. Again, that corruption narrative and what it was entailed the oppression and subjugation of women. And so it's interesting because I'm not sure I have the best explanation for why this happens in different places all around the same time. But all of a sudden you find people paying attention to the women of Christian history, many of them are women, and then picking that up and using that, interpreting that to have different significance for their own time.
Lane Davis
Well, future book there. So I want to, yeah, I want to jump to the last chapters of your book where you, you look at the use of Christian history in the debates over slavery in the 1840s and then during the Civil War. I know it's unfair to ask you to kind of deal with two chapters of your work at the same time, but I'm doing it anyway. So what did your work really uncover about Protestants use of history in this era? And I'm specifically interested in how your work modifies Mark Noll's thesis on the Civil War as a theological crisis.
Paul Vettaker
Yeah, for sure. Yeah, it, it's, you know, I, I feel like when I first started writing this, I, I, I, I struggle to name exactly what it revises because Noel, I've gone back and looked and he's very careful because he is who he is. And I, you know, he's not basically, he's not wrong about anything he says. But the impression that you can get from theological crisis, and again, it's a similar impression to what you can get from Nathan Hatch, is that because the debate over slavery was so defined by the Bible and the Bible alone, that tradition, church history, precedent, that these things were not really part of what pro and anti slavery theologians were arguing over. And you can get that impression and then you can kind of go from there to say, you know, the problem. This is at least what I did in my head. And I don't think Noel ever says this, but I, my assumption was, man, if only they had had some history and tradition, maybe the debate would have gone differently. Right. Maybe if it hadn't just been common sense and the Bible right there, there would have been some other resources there as these American Protestants wrestled with this huge issue. I think, in other words, I was sort of hopeful that history could have saved the day, you know, and unfortunately it's sort of the opposite. They, these people, you know, arguing over the compatibility of Christianity and slavery did focus the most on the Bible and what it meant. But as soon as you have two people who believe the same things about the Bible, arguing, you know, disagreeing about what the Bible says, they are very quick to turn to other sources to bolster their case to, you know, shore up their interpretation. And in fact, that's what you see. So both sides were convinced that the, you know, best theological wisdom from ages past, especially the church fathers patristic era theology, supported their position sometimes. This was extremely selective, right? So you'll have, you know, folks like Richard Fuller citing Chrysostom on his interpretation of First Corinthians and using this to argue, you know, you should be happy, you should be content as a slave, you should not try to seek your freedom. And he just ignores that the rest of Chrysostom's writings command, you know, he's got sermons commanding Christians to emancipate their slaves. And it's, it's so it's a very selective use of history. But both end up really sure that the weight of Christian history is on their side and the, you know, already sure that the Bible's on their side. You know, whether pro or anti slavery, if you think that the whole weight of Christian history is on your side, it's going to make it even harder for the debate to move forward. And so the sort of tragic irony is that this theological debate did not fail because they ignored history or didn't pay attention to tradition, but precisely because both sides were convinced that history was on their side precisely because they were reading it. And again selectively and I would say misusing in a lot of ways that past it kept the debates from moving forward.
Lane Davis
Well, Paul, your book is a really interesting and thorough dive into this period in American history. And I know for me it really challenge some of the assumptions of Protestant education and uses of history that I had. And I'm sure it's going to be a very beneficial read for a lot of our listeners as well if they do want to find you either online or in real life. What's the best way for listeners to reach out?
Paul Vettaker
Yeah, that's great. Well, thanks so much, Lane. And I'm on Twitter. You can find me at pvettaker on Twitter. And I also occasionally blog a little bit across the web, but mostly at the Brazos Fellows blog. So if anybody wants to read about this fellowship that we run here in Waco you go to brazosfellows.com and then find a link to the blog there. But most things that I write will be linked to on Twitter and including this podcast. Excellent.
Lane Davis
Excellent. Well, Paul Gutticker is the author of the book the Old Faith and a New American Protestants and the Christian Christian Pass. It's published by Oxford University Press and will be available from booksellers everywhere by the time you're listening to this podcast. So, Paul, thanks so much for taking the time to talk today. Good luck with the book and good luck in all your future work.
Paul Vettaker
Thanks so much, Lane. I really appreciate it.
Lane Davis
And listeners, if you haven't, please subscribe to our channel on Spotify, Apple Music, anywhere else that you get your podcasts, we have new episodes that come out every day. Thanks so much for listening and happy reading.
Podcast: New Books Network – New Books in History
Episode: Paul J. Gutacker, The Old Faith in a New Nation: American Protestants and the Christian Past
Date: January 5, 2026
Host: Lane Davis
Guest: Paul J. Gutacker, Lecturer in History at Baylor University
This episode centers on Paul J. Gutacker’s book, The Old Faith in a New Nation: American Protestants and the Christian Past (Oxford UP, 2023). Gutacker and host Lane Davis discuss how American Protestants between the Revolution and the Civil War engaged with Christian history, particularly how their historical consciousness influenced debates about religious disestablishment, anti-Catholicism, democratization, marginalized groups, and slavery. The conversation interrogates classic assumptions about early American Protestants' relationship with tradition and the past, offering a nuanced reinterpretation.
[02:13 – 07:04]
[07:04 – 10:40]
[10:40 – 14:21]
[14:21 – 18:57]
[18:57 – 22:23]
[22:23 – 27:58]
[27:58 – 36:25]
[36:25 – 40:47]
“Breaking from custom, breaking from tradition, innovating, democratizing in these ways meant that these groups, Methodist, Baptist, churches of Christ, didn’t care about what happened before. ...and in fact…they think it’s essential to know that history.”
— Paul Gutacker, 16:42
“The anti-Catholic thread really goes throughout the book, and it only modifies slightly at the end, I think, in the chapters on slavery. But one of the more implicit arguments that I’m trying to make is their reading of history really assures them that Catholicism is a threat because they again, they take this for granted.”
— Paul Gutacker, 21:39
“If you think that the whole weight of Christian history is on your side, it's going to make it even harder for the debate to move forward.”
— Paul Gutacker, 40:15
Gutacker’s book, The Old Faith in a New Nation, is praised for its nuanced intervention in the study of American religious history, upending assumptions about early American Protestant attitudes toward tradition and the past. The episode provides depth on how historical imagination was actively contested and politicized within American Protestantism—and why that legacy still matters.
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