Retooling Americanism

(This is my entry in an online symposium hosted by Joe Carter at The Evangelical Outpost.)

Writing for Commentary magazine, computer science professor and mail bomb attack survivor David Gelernter advances the idea that Americanism, “the set of beliefs that are thought to constitute America’s essence and to set it apart,” makes people worldwide uncomfortable because it is a kind of religion.

While commenting on the Judeo-Christian roots of this religion, Gelernter also proposes that Americanism can be understood as the ultimate flowering of Puritanism in a political context.

What makes Gelernter’s thinking more original than most is his willingness to describe Americanism in religious rather than civil terms, and his keen appreciation for under-publicized Jewish influence on the American founders.

Mr. Peter deNeeve’s seventh-grade history class at Saint Joseph’s School clued me in to colonial fondness for classical Rome (hence the applause for George Washington as “our Cincinnatus” from his contemporaries). Gelernter points out that classical influence was not alone: colonial preachers also drew parallels between the Exodus of the Israelites and their own sojourn across the Atlantic to the New World.

Gelernter’s take on Americanism has much to recommend it, but he’s on firmer ground describing Jewish influence on the Puritans than he is while discussing Puritan influence on the rest of us.

In my judgment, Gelernter overstates Puritan influence, ignores pivotal Catholic contributions to American thinking, and misreads one of Americanism’s “holiest” texts, the Declaration of Independence.

Here’s how Gelernter frames the discussion:

Suppose you were to put together a bookful of pronouncements and predictions about America’s destiny, ranging over four centuries. What title would you give it?

Such an anthology did appear in 1971; it was edited by an associate professor of religious studies and subtitled “Religious Interpretations of American Destiny.” The book’s main title was God’s New Israel. From the 17th century through John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Americans kept talking about their country as if it were the biblical Israel and they were the chosen people.

Where did that view of America come from? It came from Puritanism—Puritanism being not a separate type of Christianity but a certain approach to Protestantism. And here is a strange fact about Puritanism. It originated in 16th-century England; it became one of the most powerful forces in religious if not all human history. It consistently elicited bitter hatred—and was directly responsible for (at least) two world-changing developments. It provoked the British Civil War (in which the Puritans and Parliament asserted their rights against the crown and the established church), and the first settlements by British religious dissenters in the new world.

Note that although Gelernter is making the case for Puritan influence, his examples are negative rather than positive. Settlement might seem positive, but even in Gelernter’s own reckoning, dissent rather than wanderlust motivated the Puritan crossing to Plymouth Rock.

We know that Puritans opposed the alleged laxity of other Protestants. A BBC history of the English Civil War sheds more light on the religious roots of that strife than Gelernter had space for:

At the heart of the conflict lay the policies and personality of the King
himself. Charles I was a reserved, slightly diffident figure whose abilities as
a monarch left a good deal to be desired. During the 1630s, his apparent
determination to rule England without the assistance of Parliament, his
introduction of all sorts of controversial financial measures and his support
for 'high-church' religious practices aroused considerable alarm among his
subjects. Many people, particularly the more zealous protestants, or 'puritans', came to fear that Charles was pursuing a hidden agenda: that he planned to remove his people's rights, or 'liberties', and to restore England to the Catholic fold.

Moreover, as James Webb points out in his book Born Fighting, rebel ranks in the American Revolution were dominated by Presbyterians.

While it was possible to be both Puritan and Presbyterian (per Gelernter, “Puritanism was shared by people of many faiths, at any rate within Protestant Christianity”), colonial loyalties were localized enough to dilute Puritanism’s influence outside of its New England incubator.

Webb also observes what Gelernter does not: that many of the frontiersmen who opened the American West had Scots-Irish rather than English ancestors.

Harry Crocker’s one-volume history of Catholicism provides more reason to suspect that Puritan interpretations of that eminently Catholic book, the bible, needed outside help before they could flower into an appreciation for freedom, equality, and democracy:

The Quebec Act of 1774 electrified Puritan New England against the crown, because the act granted French Canadian Catholics—who were now English subjects—freedom to practice their religion. The Continental Congress demanded that the act be repealed, as it was a religious threat to the colonies…Daniel Barber recorded in his History of My Own Time, published in 1827, that colonial anti-Catholicism was “so strong through the early part of the Revolution that the president of Princeton University believed that common hatred of Popery, caused by the Quebec Act, [was] the only thing that cemented the divergent religious groups in the colonies together sufficiently to allow them to make war.”

While Gelernter rightly notes that Puritanism is a subset of Protestantism, he seems not to notice that Puritan influence must accordingly be derivative at best. This is the second major problem with Gelernter’s approach to the roots of Americanism: he doesn’t look far enough back.

Although it may seem odd to chide an essayist who finds democracy prefigured in a verse from the Book of Deuteronomy for not looking far enough back, Gelernter examines the Hebrew Scriptures through Puritan eyes. This approach ignores the fact that Puritan theology would have been impossible without Catholic intellectual capital.

Any inherently oppositional phenomenon like Puritanism depends for survival on what it opposes. Without something to protest, there is no Protestantism. To put this metaphorically, by identifying Puritanism as the V-8 under the hood of the American experiment, Gelernter slights both pioneering Catholic work on the internal combustion engine, and Presbyterian motor oil, which was Protestant but not necessarily Puritan.

Gelernter’s only concession to Catholic influence is a passing reference to “anglo-Catholicism” by way of illustrating the similarity between Americanism and American Zionism.

In fact, the first edict of religious toleration in Western history dates back to Constantine rather than to William Penn, John Winthrop, or Thomas Jefferson. Similarly, the right of the people to “alter or abolish” any form of government that fails to secure their God-given rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is an echo of what Augustine of Hippo wrote in his City of God:

Without justice, what are kingdoms but great robber bands? What are robber bands but small kingdoms? The band is itself made up of men, is ruled by the command of a leader, and is held together by a social pact. Plunder is divided in accordance with an agreed upon law. If this evil increases by the inclusion of dissolute men to the extent that it takes over territory, establishes
headquarters, occupies cities, and subdues peoples, it publicly assumes the title of kingdom! This title is manifestly conferred on it, not because greed has been removed, but because impunity has been added.

Augustine in turn based much of his writing on Catholic exegesis of what Jesus meant about faithful citizenship when he instructed his disciples to “give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s.”

The first two shortcomings in Gelernter’s thesis become glaringly evident in light of the third shortcoming: seduced by a “conceptual triangle” of his own making, Gelernter misreads the Declaration of Independence:

The idea of an “American creed” has been around for a long time. [Samuel] Huntington lists its elements as “liberty, equality, democracy, individualism, human rights, the rule of law, and private property.” I prefer a different formulation: a conceptual triangle in which one fundamental fact creates two premises that create three conclusions.

The fundamental fact: the Bible is God’s word. Two premises: first, every member of the American community has his own individual dignity, insofar as he deals individually with God; second, the community has a divine mission to all mankind. Three conclusions: every human being everywhere is entitled to freedom, equality, and democracy. In the American creed, both premises and all three conclusions refer back to the Bible, especially the Hebrew Bible.

Freedom, equality, democracy: the Declaration held these truths to be self-evident, but “self-evident” they were certainly not. Otherwise, America would hardly have been the first nation in history to be built on this foundation. Deriving all three from the Bible, theologians of Americanism understood these doctrines not as philosophical ideas but as the word of God. Americans, virtually alone in the world, insist that freedom, equality, and democracy are right not only for France and Spain but for Afghanistan and Iraq.

Look again at the first of Gelernter’s two premises. Its “me and God” formulation is the residue of a typically Protestant mistrust for church. But human dignity is not the result of some individual negotiating position relative to God any more than American rights come from the Constitution; human dignity is an ontological fact described in the Book of Genesis and affirmed for all time by Jesus as God-become-Man. The difference in emphasis has political implications.

Gelernter’s second premise, that the community has a divine mission to all mankind, runs counter to the strain of isolationism that has been part of the American persona since day one.

Even more surprising, Gelernter mistakes the “life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness” in the Declaration for “freedom, equality, and democracy.” Early drafts of the Declaration said “property” rather than “happiness,” but no matter. Gelernter makes hay noting that “self-evident” truths were not all that obvious, forgetting that Jefferson had been thinking of himself and his fellow delegates. The line reads “We hold these truths to be self-evident.” Whether you do, too, is irrelevant to the argument the colonists were making. Gelernter misses this point.

Worse, his obtuse paraphrase of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as “freedom, equality, and democracy” suggests that his thesis depends on conflating Jefferson with Robespierre, and that is something up with which I will not put.

The founding fathers mistrusted pure democracy with good reason, and were never as smitten by the egalitarian impulse as we moderns tend to be. Ponder what Harry Crocker wrote about the period immediately following the American Revolution:

“A homegrown aristocracy of businessmen in the North (men like John Adams) and landed proprietors in the South (men like Jefferson, Washington, Madison, and Monroe), along with the Constitution’s hierarchical, republican political institutions, tempered the people’s democratic spirit.”

To this point, I’ve only been able to retool Gelernter’s take on Americanism by treating the retooling as a kind of duel. You the reader must decide whether I give as good as I get. But Gelernter concludes his essay on a note that I have no quarrel with:

Puritans took to heart these famous words from the Hebrew Bible: “I have set before you this day life and death, blessing and curse: therefore choose life and live, you and your children” (Deuteronomy 30:19). On board the Arabella, John Winthrop closed his famous meditation of 1630 by citing that verse from Deuteronomy, centering his words on the page for emphasis:

Therefore let us choose life
that wee, and our Seede,
may live; by obeying his
voice, and cleaveing to him,
for hee is our life, and
our prosperity.

No Saudi fanatic, no Kashmiri fanatic could have written those words. John Winthrop was a founder of this nation; we are his heirs; and we ought to thank God that we have inherited his humanitarian decency along with his radical, God-fearing Americanism.

To that conclusion, I would add only that if we Americans are John Winthrop’s heirs, and if we are predisposed to choosing life, then Roe v. Wade remains the most obvious blight on any national claim to humanitarian decency. To the extent that Gelernter is right about what America stands for, abortion is un-American.