Marion, Ind. (Apr. 23, 2026) — Samuel L. Young, Ph.D., assistant professor of history in Indiana Wesleyan University's (IWU) Division of Social Sciences, recently presented his research on a national stage, appearing on an American 250 conference panel in Washington D.C. exploring religion and religious liberty in the American Revolution. The panel was organized by the Jack Miller Center and the American Revolution Institute and broadcast by C-SPAN.
Young's presentation, titled "Luther's Redemption in the Early American Republic," traced the surprising transformation of Martin Luther's reputation in post-Revolutionary America, from a figure widely dismissed by Enlightenment historians to a celebrated proto-American hero whose legacy became woven into the nation's founding mythology.
Drawing on his forthcoming book, "Saint of the Republic: The American Myth of Martin Luther" (Oxford University Press), Young opened with a striking image: the stained-glass windows of the Washington National Cathedral's War Memorial Chapel, where Luther is depicted just above George Washington.
“Throughout their history,” Young said, “Americans have found many positive connections between the sixteenth-century monk and American civic virtues.”
Young argued that the decades immediately following the Revolution were ones of remarkable cultural creativity, as Americans reread human history through a nationalist lens. Luther, once derided by influential Enlightenment historians such as Hume and Gibbon as vain and tyrannical, was recast through new biographies and popular orations as a champion of liberty of conscience and the unalienable rights of man.
"The dramatic differences between 18th century evaluations and those in the early 19th century testify to the power of rereading history through a nationalist lens," Young said.
Young identified two key forces driving Luther's rehabilitation. The first was an explosion in American printing capacity after the war, which produced new biographies portraying Luther as an exemplar of the civic virtues Americans held most dear. The second was the culture of civic celebration — Fourth of July orations, Thanksgiving sermons, Election Day speeches — in which Luther increasingly appeared alongside the founding fathers as part of the same providential arc of history.
The trend reached a peak in 1817 with the 300th anniversary of the Reformation, an interdenominational national observance in which Lutherans, Episcopalians, Baptists, Presbyterians, and others united to celebrate Luther as a founding figure of American religious liberty.
Young also noted that Luther's adoption as a proto-American hero carried long-lasting cultural consequences, helping to fuel Protestant-Catholic tensions throughout the 19th century and well into the 20th. He pointed to President Woodrow Wilson's 1917 address to Congress urging a declaration of war against Germany, which closed with a paraphrase of Luther's famous words: “God helping her, [America] can do no other.”
"Saint of the Republic" is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.
