Andrew Preston

Overview

Andrew Preston is a historian of American religion and foreign policy whose paired conversations in 152. American Crusades and 153. God and the American Empire interpret religion as a constitutive and internally divided part of American expansion, reform, diplomacy, and war rather than as decorative presidential rhetoric.

Current Profile

Preston’s framework connects institutional structure, historical inheritance, and international conduct. 152. American Crusades traces a repertoire from Puritan exemplary mission through Manifest Destiny, abolition, Civil War emancipation, and Protestant empire in the Philippines. 153. God and the American Empire explains its modern durability through church-state separation and a changing “marketplace of faith.”

Across both episodes, the militant “sword of the spirit” and reformist “shield of faith” allow religious commitments to support conquest, intervention, pacifism, pluralism, abolition, anti-imperialism, and human-rights pressure. His examples run from colonial New England to McKinley, the late-1930s construction of a public Judeo-Christian tradition, Truman, Reagan, Bush, and Trump. These broad historical claims remain attributable to Preston and require wider evidence before becoming exhaustive explanations of American religion or diplomacy.

Key Characteristics

• Interprets American religious persistence through disestablishment, competition, innovation, and political culture.
• Treats religion as part of foreign-policy belief and coalition formation, not merely rhetorical packaging.
• Distinguishes militant and reformist religious impulses rather than equating faith with interventionism alone.
• Takes professed belief seriously while retaining land, slavery, markets, strategy, and power as interacting causes.
• Uses presidential episodes to connect domestic religious pluralism with changing international moral frames.

Evidence

Institutional persistence

• 153. God and the American Empire attributes American religious durability to church-state separation and a competitive “marketplace of faith.”

Foreign-policy interpretation

• 152. American Crusades connects colonial violence, expansion, abolition, the Civil War, McKinley, and the Philippines to competing religious routes into foreign policy.
• 153. God and the American Empire uses the “sword” and “shield” distinction and examples from Truman through Trump to extend the framework into modern diplomacy.

Qualifications

The current profile rests on two short, consecutive podcast conversations. It records Preston’s interpretive framework, not a complete bibliography, systematic comparison with Europe, or independent verification of colonial causation, presidential motives, denominational generalizations, and diplomatic anecdotes.

What Changed

• Extended the profile backward from modern diplomacy to colonial war, expansion, abolition, Civil War emancipation, and the Philippines.
• Clarified Preston’s method as taking belief seriously without reducing policy to religion alone.

Relationships

• American Religious Persistence - institutional explanation developed in the episode.
• Judeo-Christian National Identity - historical coalition whose emergence Preston dates to the late 1930s.
• Religious Moral Framing of U.S. Foreign Policy - foreign-policy framework illustrated through presidential cases.
• American Exceptionalism - national-difference belief partly expressed through religious mission.
• Manifest Destiny - nineteenth-century fusion of expansion, civilizational hierarchy, and moral responsibility.
• American Imperial Self-Denial - tension between Philippine rule and later anti-imperial self-understanding.