The nation-state emerged in Western Europe out of the Wars of Religion as a tool of the Protestant movements.

To get any insight at all into what Jesus’ childhood and upbringing were like, you have to do something that sometimes makes Protestants uncomfortable: study Mary.

For American Protestants used to the First Amendment’s protection of religious freedom, integralism—the doctrine that the state should publicly support the Catholic Church and protect that faith—sounds strange.

Ideas are not enough. Teaching in a history department these past couple years has convinced me that ideas are often not the driving force behind great changes in society and world events. Philosophers, theologians, and intellectuals of all sorts often act like the only thing that matters are ideas. You get the ideas right and then you change the world. Evangelicals are notorious for this kind of thinking.

Four hundred years ago, the Second Defenestration of Prague occurred when a Protestant mob threw the Austrian emperor’s representatives out of a castle window. The Bohemians then started the Thirty Years’ War, which changed the course of world history and led to today’s nation-state world order.

From the ashes of both Bryan’s ignoble isolationism and Wilson’s utopian universalism rose the school of Christian realism advocated by Reinhold Niebuhr.

While there is enormous merit to Michael Doran’s binary and overall thesis in his First Things essay, there are some complicating factors that obscure the “wondrous chasm” between Jacksonianism and Progressivism.

Rather than simply securing our borders or pursuing our interests, Americans continue to believe that what happens here is the fate of the earth. The real challenge to this consensus would be a view of America as just another country, neither exceptionally good nor exceptionally evil.

Christian theo-political witness has always contended that political responsibility cannot be had by seeking either greatness or goodness absent the other.