Recognizing the Puritan flavor of “America”

“In the introduction to his magnum opus, Magnalia Christi America (‘the great works of Christ in America’), first published in 1702, Cotton Mather wrote, ‘But whether New-England may live any where else or no, it must live in our History!’ He meant his history, the history he was writing, but his words have taken on a larger meaning, for it was New Englanders who led the way in telling the story of America, and they told it as the story of a people destined by God to lead the nation. It may be an exaggeration to characterize the Puritans as America’s original founders, but it would not be out of place to call them the founders of America’s political culture and rhetoric. As Andrew Delbanco, the author of The Puritan Ordeal, has written, ‘No matter how estranged we may feel from their experience, to speak of them (whether with recrimination or reverence) is still in some sense to speak of our nativity.’ The political philosopher Sheldon Wolin has suggested that the Puritan experience in seventeenth-century New England performed the function of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s ‘Legislator,’ the semimythical figure at the dawn of the commonwealth who engraves in the hearts of a people the ‘mores, customs, and especially opinions’ that allow the polity to take root. Yet Rousseau’s ‘civil religion’ — his handful of stripped-down dogmas designed to make the masses become patriotic citizens — never took root in America. It never had to, because America already had a religion with distinctly civic overtones and incomparably greater depth than Rousseau’s concocted religion. The brand of Reformed Protestantism the Puritans brought with them from England’s Puritan commonwealth had within it a strain of intense political activism, one rooted in the image of the Puritan community as the collective agent of providence. It did not take long for this to become a basic component of the American ‘constitution,’ using the word in its broadest sense of politeia, or ‘way of life.’ In some measure we can attribute to it the long succession of New England-influenced reform movements — from temperance and abolitionism in the nineteenth century to civil rights in the twentieth — and a correspondingly long line of vigorous political leaders. More to the present point, it became the dynamic core of American patriotism. . . .

“What, then, is American patriotism? . . . [I]t is not, strictly speaking, a rational activity, like reasoning from first principles. It would seem to belong among what Jonathan Edwards called ‘the affections.’ This is also why it is so closely allied with religion, which also summons the affections to serve, as theologians would put it, as channels for the Holy Spirit to enter the soul. But what is the substance here? What American belief is it that elicits these feelings of affection?

“Its origin dates back to seventeenth-century Puritanism, yet it has adapted itself to all the modifications in Puritan-derived Protestantism over the past three centuries — and there have been many. The one constant running through all forms of this Protestantism is the belief that Americans are a people set apart, a people with a providential mission. John Winthrop’s famous prediction aboard the Arbella, as it set out for the New World in 1630, that ‘we shall be as a City upon a Hill’ may have been little more than a rhetorical embellishment of his main point, that the colonists must live together in charity, but by the end of the century it had taken on enormous weight and significance. In 1670, when Samuel Danforth delivered a sermon entitled A Brief Recognition of New England’s Errand Into the Wilderness, the people of New England were well prepared for the typology: the people of New England stood for the children of Israel; their parents’ three-month journey across the sea stood for the ‘long and wearisome passage through the uncultured Desert’; and so, like the ancient Hebrews, they ‘were then consecrated to God, and set apart for his worship and Service.’ The settlement of America was turned into a holy quest and was put into the context of a millennial crusade. From a strictly theological standpoint there was not much left of Puritanism by the end of the eighteenth century, but this sense of biblical errand survived and worked its way deeply into even the most (seemingly) secular undertakings. Here, to take one example of many from that time, is Rev. Samuel Sherwood calling his country to arms against the British in 1776: ‘Let your faith be strong in the divine promises. Although the daughter of Zion may be in a wilderness state, yet the Lord himself is her Light. The time is coming when Jehova will dry up the rivers of her persecuting enemies, and the Ransomed of the Lord shall Come With Singing unto Zion, and Everlasting Joy.’ The very definition of America is thus bound up with the biblical paradigm of a people, like the ancient Hebrews, given a holy mission in a new land. It runs through the rhetoric of America’s presidents, and we can find it almost at random in their speeches, whether it was Lincoln depicting Americans as ‘an almost chosen people,’ Franklin Roosevelt talking about an American generation’s ‘rendezvous with destiny,’ Reagan calling America ‘a shining city on a hill,’ or George W. Bush declaring that ‘America is a nation with a mission, and that mission comes from our most basic beliefs.’ We can trace this providentialism directly back to the Puritans of the seventeenth century. They managed to envisage an America long before there was a United States of America. America is a work of the imagination as much as it is a juridical entity, and it was their imagination that played the seminal role in creating it. ‘The myth of America,’ writes Savan Bercovitch, ‘is the creation of the New England Way.’

“American patriotism has its roots in Puritanism, and at some level — often in a rather muddled way — most Americans recognize that fact. Those for whom patriotism has a positive valence generally credit the Puritans with laying the foundations of America (though they would more likely call them ‘Pilgrims,’ which has a nicer sound; the two terms are regularly conflated). Other Americans are inclined to regard patriotism, or at least the more demonstrative displays of it, as a problem rather than a virtue, but they, too, readily acknowledge, even sometimes exaggerate, the foundational role of Puritanism. Thus, for both sides Puritan serves as a kind of synecdoche for American patriotism: people who worry about the dangers of patriotism look back on Puritanism as a dark influence on American culture, while those who would promote patriotism generally regard the Puritans in a more positive light.”

— from George McKenna, The Puritan Origins of American Patriotism (Yale University Press, 2007)
You can hear McKenna discuss this book on this Friday Feature.