This article argues against the cliché (posited most famously by Alexis de Tocqueville and Carl Schmitt), that there were inherent correspondences between religious and political concepts. Such connections were historically contingent, and had to be forged by polemicists and apologists who eclectically drew upon a variety of sources. This is evident from an examination of differing Presbyterian reactions to the French Revolution. John Brown in Scotland combined an aristocratic Presbyterian ecclesiology with a Burkean view of authority to argue for an anti-democratic conception of “representative government.” By contrast, the Scottish-American Alexander McLeod synthesized radical Presbyterian political theology with Painite ideas of “representative democracy.” Thus representation emerged as the key concept in both authors, yet its compatibility with democracy was an open question. The examples of Brown and McLeod also show that religion, as much as “secular” politics, had to grapple with and re-imagine “democracy.”

American Baptist Theological Seminary (ABTS), founded as a black Baptist school in 1924, sprung from an unusual partnership between black and white Baptists in the Jim Crow South. The black National Baptist Convention (NBC) and white Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) jointly funded and governed the Nashville seminary, emphasizing from the outset the strength of their common Baptist identity, though persistent frictions reared up with regularity. The relationship between two leaders involved with ABTS in the mid-twentieth century – National Baptist David V. Jemison and Southern Baptist Eugene P. Alldredge – offers an intriguing lens for viewing the hopes and pitfalls that attended Baptist interracialism in the segregated South. Their correspondence in the 1940s reveals a growing friendship and fellowship as they collaborated in seminary work and bonded over their likeminded Baptist convictions, followed by an abrupt rift after Alldredge’s paternalistic meddling in NBC politics led Jemison to defend black Baptist autonomy. Thus, the Jemison–Alldredge relationship poignantly illustrates two conflicting realities facing such attempts at Baptist interracialism: Baptist identity did offer a legitimate nexus for interracial fellowship, yet the racial hierarchy and prejudices of a segregated society also circumscribed those efforts, as black Baptists walked a tightrope between assuaging white concerns and maintaining their own independence.

In the decades that followed the American Civil War, Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Baptists, Methodists, and Episcopalians across the Northern United States embarked on a massive centrally coordinated church-building program. Just as capitalists and politicians poured resources into the American West and South to consolidate and cohere the newly reunited nation under a single economic and political order, these Northern Protestants also hoped to bind the republic’s sections with a homogenous faith by bankrolling a continental network of church edifices across the country.

This article explores the role of the postbellum Protestant church-building endeavor in the broader process of national consolidation. It argues that the movement was nationally consolidative in three ways. Firstly, by pooling and re-distributing capital from wealthier congregations to their needier counterparts, the church-building organizations themselves brought greater uniformity and unity to the process of Protestant expansion in the United States. Secondly, the movement was compelled by a powerful religio-political philosophy of church-building the author terms “republican ecclesiology,” which endowed the Protestant edifice with a key infrastructural role in national reunification as a stabilizing bastion of piety and patriotism, especially in the American West. Finally, church-building advocates believed that the cross-continental financial networks forged between benefactors and beneficiaries consolidated the nation spiritually by creating a more united body of Protestant believers all invested – emotionally as well as financially – in their compatriots’ salvations.

Scholars, beginning with Hippolyte Delehaye, have long claimed a distinction between eastern and western customs of relic veneration in late antiquity: westerners left martyrial corpses intact and did not translate them, using contact relics instead, while easterners readily moved and divided these relics. They base this distinction on two papal letters from Pope Hormisdas’s legates and from Gregory the Great that distinguish between Roman and Greek customs of relics veneration. Yet scholars have almost totally neglected one piece of late antique evidence highly instructive for this topic: a letter from Eusebios of Thessaloniki, a contemporary of Gregory the Great, responding to a request from the emperor Maurice to send a corporeal relic of the Thessalonian martyr Demetrios. I argue that Eusebios’s letter demonstrates that the distinction between Roman and Greek customs of relic veneration proposed by the papal letters does not hold in late sixth-/early seventh-century Thessaloniki; furthermore, rather than giving evidence for sweeping, regional patterns, these letters all offer reflections on local, municipal customs of relic veneration in Rome and Thessaloniki in response to local imperial customs in Constantinople.

The article presents a revised dating of a major late medieval inquisition of heresy, challenging the dating of the records established since the 1880s. The inquisitor Petrus Zwicker’s proceedings against Brandenburgian and Pomeranian Waldensians in Stettin did not take place between November 1392 and March 1394, with an 11-month pause between March 1393 and February 1394, as has been the scholarly consensus up till now. Instead, the prosecution was a continuous process that started in November 1393 and lasted till late March 1394. The article discusses the problems of the established dating that is based on now-outdated information about the inquisitor’s itinerary and an ambiguous 15th-century commentary on the register volume. The internal evidence of the register, such as the way different deponents refer to the same events, strongly points towards an uninterrupted process. The revised timeline for the inquisitions solves several contradictions in interpreting the records and proposes new lines of inquiry. A novel reconstruction of the last Waldensian minister’s visit to Stettin and surroundings is provided in the last section of the article. In general, the article addresses the constant need to re-evaluate established interpretations of premodern sources, including those uncontested in the scholarship.

During the Cold War, various political forces sought to shape the mindset of the Chinese diaspora. One understudied cultural influence that played an important role in reaching overseas Chinese was Chinese Christian literature. Focusing on Dengta (Lighthouse, 1956–1967), the first Chinese Christian magazine aimed at non-Christian communities in the diaspora, this study examines how the magazine developed an evangelical discourse that engaged with the cultural and spiritual identities of the Chinese diaspora amid political and ideological conflicts. Published in Hong Kong, which emerged as a hub for Chinese Christian literature in the post-war period, the magazine reflects a pivotal shift in Chinese Christian publishing: the start of a global movement aimed at evangelizing overseas Chinese. To appeal to the diaspora, Dengta adopted an ethnic and cultural rhetoric of Chineseness and presented Christian ideals in a context that resonated with the experiences of the Chinese diaspora. I argue that the Chineseness promoted by Dengta helped construct a transregional and transnational sense of belonging for overseas Chinese by framing a blend of traditional Chinese culture and modern knowledge within a Christian cosmic worldview. This study foregrounds the evangelical efforts of Christian literary workers to shape the diasporic experience amid the political tensions of the Cold War.