It’s difficult to point to a more divided, polarized, or toxic time in U.S. history. It’s a presidential election year, and the two major political parties are at each other’s throats. Citizens accuse their neighbors of wanting to destroy the country from within, or even colluding with foreign-born enemies from without.
Pastors preach partisanship from their pulpits. Some hope to gain the favor of the next politician in power. Others hope that maybe, just maybe, this president will make things right. There’s an immigration crisis, diplomatic crises across the globe, and a deep uncertainty about what’s on the other side of a sure-to-be-contested election. Will the nation even survive?
The year was 1800. The presidential candidates were John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. Americans’ deepest concerns about foreign policy revolved around Great Britain and France.
In 2024 we find ourselves experiencing a surprisingly similar situation to the people living in the United States in 1800. No doubt the details have changed, but for many Americans—and many Christians in particular—the struggles, temptations, and fears remain unsettlingly similar.
In such times, history can be very instructive. The lives of those who have gone before us offer us an opportunity to slow down, assess our situation, and ask ourselves important questions. What should I do during this election season? Has anyone else been in this situation before? Did they make mistakes that I can learn from today?
Allow me then to introduce you to the Rev. Samuel Miller, whose life offers us a helpful guide and a sharp caution for engaging in the political sphere today. A Presbyterian pastor in 1800, Miller found himself in the midst of unprecedented political vitriol and national uncertainty. Not wanting to sit idly by, Miller got involved.
He corresponded with major political leaders to gain influence. He threw his weight behind the one political party he believed represented American virtue, and he put his trust in the leader of that movement. He was utterly convinced that as a Christian and as a Presbyterian pastor, he was doing the right thing for Christianity and for his country. And three decades later, he regretted just about everything he did.
Who was Samuel Miller?
Samuel Miller was born in Delaware on October 31, 1769. His father John was a Presbyterian minister, and from childhood, Samuel set out on the same path. In 1788, Miller left home to attend the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned his degree the following year. In 1791, Miller moved to western Pennsylvania to continue his studies with Charles Nisbet, a Presbyterian stalwart and president of Dickinson College.
In 1792 Miller began full-time vocational ministry when he received a call from Collegiate Presbyterian Church in Long Island, New York. Alongside two other ministers, Miller would spend the next 20 years ministering in New York, becoming one of the most widely-known and highly-respected ministers in the Presbyterian Church.
He played a central role in the development and expansion of American home missionary societies, which sent missionaries to white settlers and Indigenous peoples on the frontiers of the new nation. He served as moderator of the General Assembly in 1806.
Miller’s faithfulness and service among Presbyterians led directly to his next and final career change. In 1813 he was called to serve at the brand new Princeton Theological Seminary as professor of ecclesiastical history and church government. From his post at Princeton, Miller built a reputation as a learned and steady spokesman for Presbyterianism. He published dozens of works, including biographies of American pastors, sermons delivered at public gatherings, theological treatises on the major issues of the day, and even a public letter on the benefits of cultivating sea kale!
During Miller’s Princeton years, he also developed a reputation for his public and evolving stance on the problem of slavery. Miller’s views and practices were complex, and for the present-day reader, frankly, confounding. He regularly spoke against slavery, calling it in an 1823 sermon “unjust, unreasonable, inhuman…altogether unworthy of a Christian and a Republican community.”1
He said this, even while he himself enslaved people at Princeton Seminary. He called publicly for the gradual manumission of enslaved people, but also advocated for their removal to Africa via colonization. He personally opposed American racialized slavery in his heart, but refused to call it inherently sinful. He would muddle through this moral quagmire throughout his entire life.
A New York Pastor During the Election of 1800
For our own political times, it is Miller’s years in New York that offer the most relevant instruction and caution. In both contemporary letters and in his reflections written decades later, Miller consistently spoke of his desire to avoid preaching partisanship on Sunday morning. He considered it his right to express his thoughts as a citizen, but considered his call as a minister “paramount to all other considerations.”2
And yet, much of Miller’s behavior during this period points to another side of the story. During the 1790s and the 1800 election season, Miller consistently attempted to ingratiate himself to the leading state and national politicians of the day.
In 1793, he preached a sermon on the connection between Christian and political liberty and mailed it to President George Washington in Philadelphia. Washington responded politely, and with his thanks. Miller corresponded with John Jay of Federalist Papers fame who was then governor of New York. They discussed the political scene, the legacy of George Washington, and the American Revolution. In and around 1800, he would write to and about many other political leaders of the day including James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, Eliphalet Nott, and Aaron Burr.
But above all these political leaders, Samuel Miller pledged his political faith to Thomas Jefferson, the standard-bearer of the Democratic-Republican party. This party often called itself the Republican party for short (not to be confused with today’s Republican party, whose beginning would not come until the 1850s and the rise of Abraham Lincoln).
With a wealthy enslaving plantation owner as its most visible leader, the Republican party styled itself the party of the average farmer. And Miller professed that even if Thomas Jefferson was a faithless deist, he would rather have a Republican deist as president than an “aristocratic” John Adams from the Federalist party.3
Miller attempted to court the favor of Thomas Jefferson more than any other politician. He sent Jefferson sermons and pamphlets, asked him to proclaim days of fasting, and sought his opinion on a book he was writing about 18th-century history. Miller dismissed the concerns of many of his contemporaries about Jefferson’s policies and “alleged infidelity” to the Christian faith. While he didn’t approve of all of Jefferson’s religious beliefs or personal practices, Miller remained confident that Jefferson was the right man for the presidency.4
Jefferson voters like Miller felt they had good reason to put so much faith in their candidate and political party. The 1800 election promised to be a critical turning point in American history. It was the first time that an incumbent political party might be elected out of office. The stakes were high, and the media certainly told everyone so. The Jefferson-supporting media depicted Adams as a royalist, an aristocrat who would surely destroy their young democratic republic.
In the newspapers, Adams supporters called Jefferson “the Arch Priest of Atheism” and “a manifest enemy to the religion of Christ.” One pastor claimed that if Jefferson was elected, the government would send people to Christian homes to burn their Bibles and turn their wives and daughters to prostitution. (Spoiler alert: Jefferson won the election, and this did not happen.)
Through the entire election season of 1800, Miller tried to convince himself that he was above the fray. “Few things have given me greater mortification and shame,” Miller confessed to a fellow pastor, “than the use which has been and continues to be made of religion in the present electioneering struggle for President of the United States.”5
No doubt Miller genuinely felt this way about himself. But it was nevertheless true that he also participated in the political melee. And because of his position of authority, it’s fair to say he played a leading role in it.
Political Regrets
Miller bought into the partisan rhetoric during the 1800 election season and rooted his hopes too deeply in his preferred political party and presidential candidate. We know this because three decades later, Miller wrote about regretting all of it.
In and around 1830, Miller expressed regret for his attempts at political influence.
“I look back on that whole part of my early history with entire disapprobation and deep regret,” he lamented. “I fear I did an amount of injury to my ministry, which could by no means have been counterbalanced by my usefulness as a politician.”
His election-season political maneuvering had gained him virtually nothing. At best, it had weakened his ministry; at worst, compromised it.
But this regret was tame compared to what Miller considered his gravest mistake: “pleading with so much zeal the cause of Mr. Jefferson.”6 From his post in Princeton, Miller looked back 30 years and realized how the partisan power game had ensnared him and clouded his judgment. He claimed he had believed all along that Jefferson was “an infidel,” and a man unworthy of the office of the presidency. And yet, he had convinced himself to support Jefferson as the “truly republican, patriotic” candidate, against the “aristocratic” Federalist John Adams.
While he remained a committed Democratic-Republican in 1830, he now deemed Jefferson a “selfish, insidious, and hollow-hearted” man, and “a hypocritical demagogue.” He concluded with the ultimate expression of regret for a preacher, professor, and author: “I renounce and wish unsaid and unwritten, everything that I ever said or wrote in his favor.”7
Conclusion
After these years of retrospection, Miller continued teaching at Princeton Theological Seminary for another two decades. He retired in 1849 and passed away in January 1850. His life offers us much to admire and imitate: a passion for preaching, a commitment to his family and communities, a sincere investment in the missionary spread of the gospel, and a lifelong dedication to teaching and learning.
But Miller’s story also offers us a timely and pointed caution for our own politically fraught times. The perils of politics are many, and Christians are not exempt from their dangers. Seek political influence, and you’ll likely fail to find it, while also damaging your calling in the process.
Invest yourself in political movements and parties, and you might get influence and association with the powerful. That will be your reward. Put your trust in politicians to lead you and your people to the promised land, and you will almost certainly regret it. They will let you down, or you will realize later that you made a moral calculation that gave them power, but cost you your integrity.
What will it profit you if you gain the Congress or the presidency, but forfeit your ministry or conscience? We often only discover this with the clarity of hindsight. Take a cue from Miller, and consider it today.
Brian Franklin serves as Associate Director of the SMU Center for Presidential History and is a ruling elder at New St. Peter’s Presbyterian Church in Dallas.
1 Samuel Miller, The Life of Samuel Miller, vol. 2 (Philadelphia: Claxton, Remsen and Haffelfinger, 1869), 87-88.
2 Samuel Miller to Elisha Babcock, 5 February 1803. Princeton University, Firestone Library, Samuel Miller Papers, Box 2, Folder 6, AM 3402.
3 Samuel Miller to Mr. Gemmil, 7 December 1800; in The Life of Samuel Miller, vol. 1 (Philadelphia: Claxton, Remsen and Haffelfinger, 1869), 131.
4 Miller to Babcock, 1803.
5 Miller to Gemmil, Life of Samuel Miller, 131.
6 Life of Samuel Miller, 132.
7 Life of Samuel Miller, 132.