The fervor with which assaults on liberalism are launched of late possess a zealotry difficult to understand in any reasonable sense. There is a religious element to it, a battle of ideologies that seem to leave the precincts of fact, data, and logic very quickly, often on both sides. The inability of Left to talk to Right is the equivalent of the sectarian babbling between any two apparently irreconcilable religious groups, both of whom insist on their point of view being not only correct but the only one.
After decades of more or less rational political discourse in this country, many people have been caught completely by surprise at the level of bitterness that, upon examination, seem unsupportable by the issues (with the possible exception of abortion—but even that is ramped up far more than it ought to be given the middle ground of contraceptive use).
Where did this come from?
Once more, we look back to the early republic.
When claims are made that this was established as a Christian Nation, such claims are both right and wrong. Wrong in that the structure of law and institutions created in the aftermath of the revolutionary war are the most secular such governmental constructs ever created. The establishment of the United States as a nation is not Christian or any other religion, and this was done very intentionally. More, perhaps, as break with all European traditions in which religion was politicized and churches were arms of the government, conjoining common faith with political hegemony, but nevertheless those who claim that the United States, in the form of the Constitution and the subsequent offices and conduct, was established as a Christian edifice are flat wrong.
However, the fact that this was a country of Christians is undeniable and the fervor of religious embrace was profound.
The old grade school lesson that the first colonists came here to escape religious persecution is mostly true. It doesn’t go quite far enough, though, and explain that these religious exiles were themselves probably more religious than the states from which they fled, states where religious observance was akin to a loyalty oath.
Which is, of course, how you get debacles like the Salem Witch Trials where you might expect a more rational approach. The Enlightenment veneer that overlay the revolutionary period and informed the political philosophy that manifested in the Constitution was pretty much just that—a veneer. City-bound for the most part, once you got out into the hinterland, on the frontiers, religious sentiment was a living, breathing reality that was as if not more important than any political principles in currency at the time. For many Americans of that generation, Liberty meant the freedom to worship God without a bishop or priest telling you where, when, or how.
Coming to North America must have been a surreal experience for these people. They had come from a crowded, dirty place—just about any city in Europe at that time—where they had constantly to worry about the next upheaval that would require a realignment of political (and sometimes religious) affiliations. Disease, high mortality, sometimes opulent wealth within walking distance of soul-crushing squalor. But for the most part a world that had become and was becoming more urbanized. Making landfall in the New World must have been like time travel, taking them back to a primeval land of myth. No buildings, no roads, nothing to indicate human beings had ever been there, huge, dense forests undisturbed by the axe.
Many brought with them a full suite of superstitions about old forests and just trying to live here must have required unbelievable courage—or unimaginable desperation. But they made a go of it, cut some trees down, built the first villages, and after a hundred years the east coast was beginning to look a bit like the world they had left.
But in pushing back that frightening forest they had clung to their faiths and relied on it hourly. Many early colonists believed Satan lived in those forests, and certainly many of the encounters with the near-naked natives who didn’t seem to know the first thing about God or Jesus did nothing to dissuade them of that idea. Pushing that forest back was not only consistent with their belief in Improvement but necessary to keep the devil a little further away.
By the mid 18th Century, The Great Awakening gripped the colonies, a series of revival movements spurred by open-air preaching based on emotional reactions to arminian accommodations embraced by the seaport cities that were becoming comfortable with material success. In a way it was a repeat of the movement that caused early pilgrims of Presbyterian and Calvinist theologies to cross the Atlantic in the first place. The daily struggle against the unknown happening in the rural frontiers was poorly served by churches that preached a moderate, calming theology with a God that seemed less and less concerned with sin in the face of worldly success. What happened in the hinterland evoked comparisons to the “heretical” movements of the Middle Ages which the Catholic Church worked to subdue and ended up with in the massive splits of the Reformation.
In his examination of the market phenomena that defined much of the early Republic, The Market Revolution, Charles Sellers writes:
“Our secular mythology renders almost incomprehensible the religious mythology that organized experience for early rural America. The gnostic cosmology and stoic resignation of peasant forebears, who likewise lived at the mercy of nature and invoked its fertility with daily labor, sacralized the behavioral norms demanded by the subsistence mode of production…for centuries peasant animism had magicalized the patriarchal Christian God who reconciled Europeans to hazards of weather, terrors of plague, and exactions of fathers and rulers. The Protestant Reformation revitalized this magical patriarchalism to cope with the Old World market’s initial surge. The awesome Jehovah proclaimed by Geneva’s Protestant theologian John Calvin was brought to the New World by uprooted emigrants and preached from Congregational meetinghouses of New England Puritans, the Presbyterian kirks of the Scotch-Irish, and the Reformed churches of Germans, Dutch, and French Huguenots. Calvinism’s thrilling promise of divine encounter sacralized deep springs of animistic magic and mystery to arm rural Euro/Americans with invidious power against capricious fate. The more vividly they felt Jehovah’s omnipotence, the safer they felt in a hazardous world.”
Preachers like George Whitefield and Jonathan Edwards took the Message to the wilderness, creating a surge of revivalist meetings that poured from New England southward, sweeping rural populations into the fold of highly emotional religious experiences, complete with swooning, ecstasies, visions, possibly glossolalia, all of which offended the stabilizing, order-hungry seaboard churches which reacted both from the pulpit and legislatively, fueling the growing political embrace of strict separations of church and state.
By the time of the revolution, although the revivalist movements had fractured and splintered into numerous disputatious denominations, a basic sympathy existed informing all of them with the idea that God was not the property of the government, that in fact God disapproved of governments that interposed law between individuals and what they perceived as the natural right to encounter creation without intermediary or interpretation. (This latter sentiment came to inform the idea that the government should, in fact, say nothing whatever, pro or con, regarding religion, and ought to remove even the appearance of favoritism toward either specific faiths or religious experience in general.) A tremendous pool of resentment toward the government on this issue rippled beneath the surface of all other resentments that combined to cause the break with England. The colonial governments were often seen as collusive with the King’s government in this regard and there was no doubt an expectation that this would be redressed once independence was achieved. (It took a while—direct state sponsorship of certain churches did not end for some time, although the federal government had removed itself from such connections.)
It was the Second Great Awakening, which began after the establishment of the United States and ratification of the Constitution that created the odd coupling of capitalist zeal and religious fervor. Competing traditions, old and new, sought to achieve dominance in a rapidly expanding nation that quite obviously embraced worldly success as a natural right, one of the chief goals of the revolution. In Europe, the established churches, as arms of the state, muffled themes of denouncing the world and its attributes, a trend that could be trace all the way back to the first establishment of Christianity as the dominant religion of Rome. Governments did not wish to discourage wealth-building because this was a source of political power. The older churches had long since found accommodation with attention to money and rarely preached against self-improvement, at least among the merchant classes. This same trend was taking place in America where seaboard financial dynasties were emerging and the class-free society that had been in place in practice if not legally for a long time promoted wealth-building across all social lines. Interest in salvation appeared to wane with the rise of temporal comfort.
The successors of Edwards, Samuel Hopkins and Timothy Dwight in particular, wrestled with the fact that mercantile growth was inevitable and followed the frontier like a wave, and with it a, to them, diluted religious apprehension known as Deism. Deism was an Enlightenment accommodation which greatly diffused religious experience, rendering it almost a wholly philosophical matter rather than one of spiritual rebirth. It was Deism that permitted the Founders to avoid the question of a national religion in drafting the Constitution—a movement hard to argue with given the antipathy of the rural settlers to any state sponsored church—but which the inheritors of Calvin found spiritually troubling. They feared an abandonment of Christianity as worldly success and comfort grew. The Second Great Awakening restarted the revivals, took them further west, and south, as a firebreak to a perceived ambivalence to spiritual matters in the east.
The central difficulty of keeping religious ethics in the face of successful nation-building affected both traditions and the older churches, in New York and Boston, adopted some of the rhetoric of what was called the New Light, and took advantage of the new printing technologies to create the first wide-spread Bible and Tract Societies. For a time, Bibles were the largest selling book throughout America because they were the cheapest, along with the tracts accompanying them. Mass printing drove the price per copy down drastically and endangered all other forms of popular publishing except newspapers.
The battle was between Enlightenment rationalism—which was concerned with man’s rights in this world, now—and the emotionalism of Millennarian religious experience, which proclaimed that the concern must be on the state of the soul for the next world. In Europe a similar confrontation was occurring which would result in the rise of Romanticism—a more or less secular embrace of emotionalism over rationality—while here is resulted in an entrenched Evangelicalism, centered not on the primacy of sentiment and emotionalism concerning the self and the world but on the emotionalism found in a rebirth in God.
The accommodation that emerged was one that coupled all the driving ambition of worldly success with a strict self-abnegation—temperance, chastity, and a severe scrupulousness in business—that made the only sanctified outlet of worldly ambition the very success in business that had a generation before been seen as the biggest threat to spiritual matters.
This engendered a reversal of certain themes—for instance, the Millennium, the return of Christ to Earth, now became something that had to happen before Jesus came back, not when—but the success of this led to half a century of expanding church attendance and the growing influence of religion in political movements, i.e. abolition and temperance.
What this meant for our present examination is that a pool of religious sentiment tied to Millennarian anticipation, rejection of rationalism, and an embrace of antinomianism (the belief that one can be so possessed of grace/salvation that manmade laws no longer apply) became a popularly maintained constant. The antipathy against government is fed by this select exceptionalism to give this group a belief in the rightness of their cause from a source irredressable in secular institutions.
The 19th Century is littered with small groups of religious isolates who chose westward migration rather than life under a growing secular government. Most failed, but some became notable successes—the Mormons for one—but by and large all these groups have been partially absorbed into mainstream American life. They bring these traditions with them, of course, just as any other self-identified group does.
What effect this has in practice is a manifestation in the belief in a higher law that overrides the legislative, judicial, and common law and seeks to challenge institutions on the basis of what could be seen as a “natural law” position. At almost every turn, with a few prominent exceptions, this has been a defense of status quo not politically so much as culturally. (On both sides of the slavery issue we find strong, entrenched religious sentiment dictating moral positions. While abolition can be seen as revolutionary, at base it was very much a defense of the doctrine of voluntary salvation and the denigration of “worldliness” by people from a Congregationalist-Puritan-Quaker tradition. However, the net effect was revolutionary.)
I’ll go over what this means to us today in the next part.