Protestants and American Conservatism

American conservatives still confounded by the election and enduring popularity of Donald Trump among groups describing themselves as conservative will acquire a better historical understanding of the rise of Trumpism by reading Gillis J. Harp’s Protestants and American Conservatism. It is not so much that Harp offers a definitive explanation for this phenomenon; rather, he demonstrates conclusively that conservatism in the United States has been a highly convoluted tradition from the beginning, and in many cases American Protestants have contributed much to the confusion. Harp notes, for example, how biblically grounded debates over the social versus individual nature of the human person go back to John Winthrop’s leadership of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. He mentions Anne Hutchinson and the Antinomian Controversy but could have done more to show it as a seminal moment in the individualist-communalist division that has riven Protestant conservativism since that time. Harvard’s establishment in 1636...

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