David J. Brewer

David J. Brewer (1837–1910) was an American jurist and Supreme Court Justice whose theological and legal writings significantly shaped late nineteenth-century American Protestant thought regarding the relationship between Christianity and national identity. His most notable work, *The United States, a Christian Nation* (1905), articulated an influential argument that American constitutional and legal traditions were fundamentally rooted in Christian principles, a position that reflected and reinforced the broader cultural anxieties of the Gilded Age regarding secularization and social change. Brewer's jurisprudence and public writings exemplified the intellectual currents of American Christian nationalism during a period of rapid industrialization, immigration, and religious pluralism.