Seminar Overview
The seminar on church and state for young faculty will examine the question of Protestant traditions and the American Revolution. In particular, it will explore why the great majority of dissenting American Protestants supported the War for Independence even though the Calvinist tradition (illustrated by Calvin himself) originally advocated obedience to rulers and was hostile to the antinomianism of more radical reformers. We will compare this with the thinking of Protestant Loyalists who for religious or other reasons chose against the American Revolution, as well as Enlightenment themes in American Revolutionary thought. The seminar will also study the effects of colonial experience on Protestant arguments during the Revolution, the effects of the War on these opinions, and subsequent Protestant contributions to the Constitutional Convention and the adjudication of religious questions in the new states.

Seminar Faculty:
Mark Noll, University of Notre Dame
Michael McConnell, Stanford Law School
Harry S. Stout, Yale Divinity School
Donald Drakeman, Princeton University

Select Readings:
 - Ellis Sandoz, ed., Political Sermons of the American Founding Era, 1730-1805 (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund)
 - Daniel Dreisbach and Mark David Hall, eds., The Sacred Rights of Conscience: Selected Readings on Religious Liberty and Church-State Relations in the American Founding (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund)

Seminar Participants
This seminar is open to post-doctoral, tenure-track, and non-tenure-track scholars in the fields of political science, history, law, and political philosophy