released 1/17/2025
In this Friday Feature, we present two interviews from Volume 91 of the Journal that examine religious understandings of God’s purpose for America in the 19th century and the colonial era, respectively. First, Daniel Walker Howe examines about the dynamic forces at work in nineteenth-century America that undergirded American faith in progress. He highlights the role of transportation and communications technologies and biblical religion and calling. Many Americans, whether Whig or Democrat, understood the nation as one with a divine mission to the world, differing only in what constituted this mission. The impetus to social and religious progress and the spread of cultural and material wealth was driven partially by such a mission, which institutions of higher education encouraged in the elite populations of students they served. Howe is the author of What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848 (Oxford University Press, 2007).
Then, George McKenna gives an overview of religious paradigms during the American colonial era. McKenna describes how the Puritans saw their own faithfulness and national flourishing as bound up in God’s providence and plans for the people of America. This sense of God’s providence was as an immanent presence that would respond to faithfulness and lack of faithfulness with favor and punishment, and this concern for the divine response undergirded their sense of mission. This mission was, in fact, not a mission to build a new nation per se, but instead to renew and reform the church community. During the American Revolution, this mission was reconstructed to tell a myth of pilgrims escaping from England to create a new nation founded on democratic freedoms. But this myth would have been strange to the Puritans, who instead understood themselves to be enacting a vision of the faithful church, and many of whom were simply waiting for England to be reformed, at which point they would return to their homeland. McKenna is the author of The Puritan Origins of American Patriotism (Yale University Press, 2007).
34 minutes
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Related reading and listening
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