Saint of the Republic

Abstract

Saint of the Republic explores the reception of Martin Luther in American history and culture from the colonial period to the present. As the first Protestant, Luther had long held religious significance in the Anglophone world, honored for restoring the scriptures to their proper authority, asserting the principle of justification by faith, and championing resistance toward the tyrannical Roman Catholic church. After the American Revolution, Luther took on new meaning for early Americans who began to see the Protestant Reformation as a foreshadowing of their nation. Luther came to embody the ideals of the United States, especially individual rights, religious liberty, and freedom of conscience. Identifying the reformer with these civic virtues meant that many who would find the particulars of Luther’s theology distasteful could nonetheless praise him as a proto-American. This vision of Luther as a forerunner to the United States dominated the reformer’s cultural reception in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. With Luther firmly entrenched as a proto-American champion of liberty, political and social movements of all kinds could appeal to the reformer, positioning their cause as a continuation of the work begun by Luther. Advocates for temperance, abolitionism, women’s rights, White supremacy, nativism, racial justice, and gay rights could all look to the proto-American Luther as an inspiration. Though critics of Luther challenged this interpretation of the reformer (drawing attention to his anti-Semitism, misogyny, political quietism, and violence toward opponents), the American Luther myth has endured through the present, strengthened by the recent 2017 Reformation anniversary celebrations.