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There have long been scholars who, while still harboring conceptual ambitions, nevertheless rejected claims that Lockean-liberal political thought has been hegemonic in the United States or, alternatively, that it is subsumable under the aegis of the liberal–republican tension. As they saw it, there had always been multiple frameworks and perspectives that had vied for prominence and pre-eminence in the country’s aggressively contested public sphere.

Whoever is an avowed enemy to God, I scruple not to call him an enemy of his country.

John Witherspoon (1776)

Mingling religion with politics [must] be disavowed and reprobated by every inhabitant of America.

Thomas Paine (1776)

Many have long believed – and still do – that the United States is inherently a Christian nation: that it was founded upon Christian principles by Christian founders who both assumed and stipulated that the country’s political institutions “presuppose” a Christian epistemology, theology, and faith. As such, one does not venture far into American political thought without encountering Christian – and, more specifically, Protestant – assumptions, imagery, eschatology, and theology.

While Protestant theology has been a constant force in American life, political and otherwise, from the first settlements to the present, the degree to which the country’s core political institutions were founded on Christian principles is far from clear. Excepting its closing flourish announcing that the document had been done “in the Year of our Lord” 1787, the US Constitution neither claimed the authority or blessing of, nor referenced, God: it was designed as an entirely secular plan for government.⁵ Just a few years earlier, Thomas Jefferson, the principal author of the Declaration of Independence (1776) which declared that “all men … are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights” – had stated firmly that “The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others.” An unorthodox Christian who denied the divinity of Christ, Jefferson explained his position by noting that “it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” While a number of state governments at the time of the founding had established churches, the trendline concerning establishments in the early republic was resolutely downward: Massachusetts rang down the curtain on the country’s last religious establishment in 1833.

In the founding era and subsequently, secular Enlightenment rationalism committed to the progress of human reason, as exemplified most prominently by the likes of Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, developed parallel to, and, in some cases, in alternation in influence with, commitments to, and waves of, Protestant Christian religious fervor and enthusiasm. These have significantly shaped American public life from the first Puritan settlement to the First and Second Great Awakenings (c. 1730–1755 and 1790–1840, respectively) to the present.

While there was some initial religious diversity (Maryland was settled largely by Roman Catholics, and Virginia by adherents of the established – albeit Protestant – Church of England), the most pervasive influence was of England’s dissenting Protestant religious sects. The core elements of their reformation theology, set in motion by Germany’s Martin Luther (1517), who helped start a process that sheared much of Christendom off from the Roman Catholic Church, held, first, that Scripture – the text of the Holy Bible – was the only source of Christian doctrine, and, second, that belief and faith in Jesus was the only path to salvation. The former provided the law for human conduct, and the later the gospel that promised forgiveness from sin, and eternal life, by dint of God’s grace. To be a Christian was to know God, and live by His commandments and His plan.

The Reformation splintered Christendom from a mostly unified body under the auspices of the Church of Rome into a multiplicity of sects holding diverse convictions regarding humanity’s sinfulness, God’s plan for its salvation, and the meaning of Jesus’s resurrection for human redemption. John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion (1536), a major Protestant text (directing, for example, the practice of Lutherans, Presbyterians, and Congregationalists), in turn, placed a heavy (Augustinian) emphasis on original sin and man’s total depravity, as well as the sovereignty of God in all things – including His (inscrutable/unknowable) predetermination (predestination) of who would ultimately be saved (the elect), and who would be eternally damned. Salvation, for “Calvinists,” would not be by good works or earthly deeds, but by God’s grace alone. Other sects, by contrast, promised salvation through diverse means, typically involving not simply the adherence to God’s law in pre-mortal life (righteousness), but also inner faith.

As we shall see in the chapters that follow, Christian theology played a direct role in shaping how Americans thought about core political issues, whether it be the relation of the individual to the community, the origins and limits on government, the role of morals and conscience in public life, the nature of liberty, equality, and justice, the imperative of social reform, or the duty to obey or defy the law. From the Puritans, to antebellum reform (including temperance, prison reform, abolitionism, and women’s rights), to the progressive social gospel, the emergence of fundamentalism, the civil rights movement, the anti-Vietnam War movement, the Cold War, and the rise of the Religious Right, an increasingly pluralistic cohort of Protestants, joined more and more over time by politically active Roman Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, and others, did politics in ways that were deeply informed by their religious outlooks and convictions.

At the time of the nation’s founding, moreover, American political thought was clearly inflected by strains of statist nationalism – “statist” not in the sense that there were understood to be no constitutional or natural limits on the powers of government, but in the sense that, born as the country was into the Westphalian world order premised on geographically demarcated, interacting, and competitive national states pursuing their own interests, many Americans were concerned with the would-be power, fame, wealth, and glory of the United States as a nation-state, akin to – and in competition with – Great Britain, France, and Spain. Isaac Kramnick, an important proponent of the argument that the American founders drew upon and debated a range of antagonistic thought traditions, argued that a number of the founders, most prominently Alexander Hamilton, understood themselves to be statebuilders, aimed at creating a new commercial nation-state that could hold its own – protect and advance its “national interest” – in a global arena. To do so, the country would need a powerful and energetic centralized government with wide-ranging powers to tax, spend, promote economic development, aggressively protect its interests in the international arena through trade regulations, and, indeed, once possessed of a mighty military, fight. In this, localism was a potentially sapping centrifugal force. A relatively passive government chiefly concerned with administering justice and protecting private rights, moreover, would be wholly inadequate to the task.⁶

The political scientist Benedict Anderson has argued that, in the modern world, nationalism, which he famously defined as the sense of the nation as “an imagined community,” was born of the colonial encounter between the “Old” and “New” worlds, and, arising out of empire and expansion, came into its own in the modern world as a distinctive species of political thought. Across history, American nationalism has come in different forms, from patriotic-militaristic statism, to cultural-chauvinistic, to religious. All, of course, have in some sense blended together in a mixture that has come to characterize the United States as a distinctive (and perhaps “exceptional”) imagined community.

Religious – or, more precisely, white Protestant – nationalism has been a remarkably consistent strain of American political thought. Many Americans have long conceived of their country as a faith community, founded on Protestant (or, much later, in response to the rise of twentieth-century totalitarianism, “Judeo-Christian”) principles, which, they believe, have both constituted its populace as moral beings, actors, and citizens, and provided the theoretical foundations for its political institutions. As such, there is a long tradition of white Protestant nationalist political thought that spans all of American history, and has informed and underwritten the country’s politics.

One common form of this religious nationalism has been Christian providentialism: the idea that the nation’s founding was divinely ordained. Christian nationalists believe that the nation’s very purpose was to provide a sanctuary for persecuted Christians, a place where they would be free not only to live in accord with the precepts of their faith, but also to live together collectively as a Christian polity – as a Christian commonwealth. While the country that eventually became the United States of America was initially settled for many reasons, not least commercial, it is nevertheless true that certain of the early settlements, particularly in Puritan New England, clearly imagined themselves as founding a “New Israel” – a place where, persecuted in their home countries, the godly and righteous could freely worship God, and realize their common faith. Indeed, many colonists often spoke of the new land in messianic terms – as providentially given to them by God for the advancement of His Truth and Word (also, in a different way, an “exceptionalist” vision). These settlers were concerned less with the “civic virtue” prescribed by republicans than with Christian virtue.

The American Negro has the great advantage of having never believed that collection of myths to which white Americans cling: that their ancestors were all freedom-loving heroes, that they were born in the greatest country the world has ever seen, or that Americans are invincible in battle and wise in peace…. Negroes know far more about white Americans than that.

James Baldwin (1963)

Other scholars have observed that ostensibly ascriptive, pre-political ethnic and racial identities have long been constitutive of the self-understandings of Americans as an imagined community. Forms of ethno-nationalism or racial nationalism have long held that membership in the US political community is premised upon ascriptive racial or ethnic characteristics, such as whiteness (racial), or Anglo-Saxon (ethnic), or white Anglo-Saxon (racial-ethnic) identity. These ascriptive nationalisms have been founded on different understandings, ranging from genetic to cultural. In practice, they have commonly intersected across American history with religious nationalism (e.g. the United States as an inherently white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant nation). All of these forms of nationalism have underwritten understandings of civic membership, belonging, and exclusion. To the extent that they are founded on ascriptive categories positing a fixed “identity,” they are presumptively unbridgeable and permanent.

The University of Pennsylvania political scientist Rogers M. Smith has argued that the standard inventory of American political thought paradigms – first, the Hartz thesis positing a hegemonic Lockean liberalism, and then the republican thesis – not only failed to recognize what he called “ascriptive Americanism” as a major current of American political thought, but also in critical ways contradicted those prevailing paradigms’ ostensibly orienting commitments to civic solidarity and free and equal liberty under law – the country’s purported “Idea” or “Creed.”⁷ More broadly, Smith argued that Americans have long ascribed certain traits and characteristics to members of certain groups and groupings, whether identified by race, ethnicity, sex, or gender – that is, they have long made ascriptions based on identity. Those holding political, economic, social, and cultural power, in part via the privileging of their own (favored) ascriptive characteristics, have denied full (or even any) recognition to the members of those groups as civic equals on the basis of those ascribed characteristics. Until the mid-nineteenth century, most African-Americans were enslaved – treated as species of property. Native Americans were considered savages, to be, variously, Christianized and assimilated, removed, or exterminated. Women were, in many ways (via, for example, coverture laws) considered to have legally merged with their husbands, and could not vote. These exclusions were not only practiced and legally enforced but spoken of and justified openly and extensively in the public and private spheres. As such, Smith argued, it makes little sense to describe the American political thought tradition as exclusively liberal and republican, as if the principles which those frameworks purported to cherish were applied and invokable by all.

Both before and after Smith, however, some have pushed back against this understanding, insisting that “the American idea” or “creed” is real, and that these aberrational blots on the nation – even when they involved an overwhelming majority of the populace – are better conceived of not as evidence of the falseness of American claims to being a “creedal nation” but as a failure, slowly remedied across time, to live up to the noble and catechistic ideals on which the country had (genuinely) been founded.

Creedal nationalism defines Americanism not ascriptively but as a willingness to subscribe to a set of normatively desirable and foundational principles – in most iterations, liberty, equality, and democracy. “True” or “Real” Americanism – full civic membership – is defined by a willingness to fully commit oneself to – and perhaps even give one’s life to defend – such principles. In contradistinction to ascriptive Americanism, creedal nationalism promises an open and inviting form of civic membership – on display, for instance, each year when thousands of immigrants of diverse races, ethnicities, nationalities, and religions take a solemn oath of American citizenship. Upon swearing the oath – professing fidelity not only to the country’s laws, but also to its catechistic creed – they are presumed as American as anyone else, even those whose ancestors have been living in the United States for generations: they join the American national community as full civic equals.

It may seem that, when compared with ethno-racial ascriptive or religious nationalism, creedal nationalism is inviting, inclusive, and egalitarian. But creedal nationalism has its own cast of outsiders: those who do not subscribe – or who are held by others to not subscribe – to the creed’s constitutive beliefs. Their beliefs – and, by extension, their persons – are classed as “anti-American,” or “un-American.” While these epithets would clearly be applied to those who expressly repudiate the polity’s creedal political principles, they have also been wielded against those – for example, socialists – whose political views, despite their protestations, are held by their opponents to have repudiated those principles. If their views are in the minority, their insistence that their views are consistent with the American creed, or even provide the best opportunity for its fullest realization, are likely to fall on deaf ears. As such, its apparent universalism notwithstanding, creedal nationalism can unleash its own forms of civic exclusion, and conduce to intellectual orthodoxy, conformism, and a reluctance to express political disagreement or dissent for fear of being labeled a traitor.

Two of the most emblematic statements of American creedalism were made by outside observers of US political culture, the French aristocrat and sociologist Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859) and the Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal (1898–1987). Both are at once celebrations and critiques.

De Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (1835) has been widely adopted by Americans as a seminal text of American creedalism. Tocqueville was part of a flotilla of European visitors who came to the Jacksonian United States to observe and reflect upon the extraordinary spectacle of a country in which the constituent people, the demos, were their own rulers. Democracy in America is an engaging mixture of dispassionate observation, sociological description and reportage, analytical-philosophical reflection, and normative evaluation and assessment – much of which was speculative, provisional, and prognosticative. An early social scientist in the modern sense, Tocqueville observed that Americans professed certain principles of political thought and, moreover, that, in some ways, they lived, or sought to live, by the lights of those principles. Tocqueville then went out and observed what Americans actually did and said, and identified patterns. He additionally observed the ways that key institutions of American life functioned. Tocqueville then stepped back to consider both the present and future implications of their dynamics. Where he saw problems, he considered the possibility that other dynamics and institutions might offer potential remedies, or at least mitigations.

Tocqueville’s observations – about the role of women and religion, about lawyers, about New England township government, and innumerable other aspects of American life as he observed it – and his often prescient analysis of their implications, are too extensive to canvass here. But one preoccupation of his is worth setting out: his extended consideration of the implications of what he took to be the pervasive American belief in (democratic) equality – for which, it is worth underlining, his point of comparison, his yardstick, was not an abstract ideal (or, for that matter, twenty-first-century standards) but contemporaneous Western Europe. Tocqueville was attracted by the trend toward equality he saw in America. He thought it boded well for the future of liberal freedom in the world. At the same time, however, he tempered his celebration with reservations and concerns. The faith of Americans in democracy and equality threatened traditional understandings of hierarchy and authority, many of which had long undergirded much of the peace, good order, manners, and mores of western societies, and their core institutions like families and churches. Throughout history, most people had taken their basic opinions and understandings from hierarchical authority and traditions. What might happen, Tocqueville wondered, as the commitment to democracy and equality, with the critiques they entail of hierarchy, tradition, and authority, unspooled to reach new and previously unimagined destinations?

Tocqueville pondered, and speculated. He expressed concern about the emergence of a “tyranny of the majority.” In the absence of the traditional sources of authority and hierarchies in a democracy, the people, he predicted, would increasingly take their opinions from what those around them were thinking. As such, he posited that democratic America’s ironic fate might be that its thorough-going individualism might end, paradoxically, in a stultifying conformism: while everyone would ostensibly be free to think and do as they pleased, most would end up thinking and doing what everyone else was. The country’s loudly professed commitment to freedom of speech and freedom of thought would end up, Tocqueville ventured, with very little freedom of opinion.

Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and American Democracy (1944) was a landmark study commissioned by the New York-based Carnegie Corporation that influenced the American civil rights movement and public thinking about civil rights more generally. In that two-volume report, Myrdal posited an “American Creed” that largely reflected liberal values of liberty, equality, and justice for all – which he took to be widespread among Americans, and sincerely held. That said, Myrdal argued that, in key respects, chiefly with regard to race, the country had as yet failed to live up to its creedal ideals, (Similar views had long been expressed, in diverse ways, by the abolitionist Frederick Douglass, the feminist framers of the Seneca Falls Declaration on Women’s Rights, and other “aspirationalists” – and, for that matter, by “declinists,” who focused on corruptions and fallings away.)

Critical race theorists and Rogers Smith have taken exception to Myrdal’s framing. The commitment to ascribed identities, they have argued, had always been constitutive of the nation’s laws, practices, and self-understandings. Put otherwise, it was not the exception but the rule. As such, according to Smith’s “multiple traditions thesis,” American political thought needed to afford “ascriptive Americanism” full and equal status as a constitutive paradigm of American political thought.

Many others of note both before and after Myrdal, ranging from Hector St. John de Croevecoer, to Hartz’s The Liberal Tradition in America, to Ernest Tuveson (Redeemer Nation: The Idea of America’s Millennial Role, 1968), to Samuel Huntington (American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony, 1981), have articulated creedal understandings and visions of American political thought. A closely associated genre are works that have posited an “American character” or an “American mind,” such as Frederick Jackson Turner (“The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” 1893), David Potter (People of Plenty: Economic Abundance and the American Character, 1954), or David Hackett Fischer (Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America, 1989). Both the creedalist and “American character” genres posit a set of quintessentially American beliefs and inclinations. They advance a diverse set of arguments about their ostensible roots, ranging from the country’s distinctive geographic and material conditions to the national/ethnic/racial characteristics – the demographics – of the people who populated it. Notably, it was only a short step from this approach, in the minds of some of these scholars, to the positing of the underlying values and principles to which “we,” as Americans, are ostensibly committed, and the mind and character “we” ostensibly share. Such homogenizing and essentializing theses, while they remain attractive to many, are also, these days, quite controversial. This is because they not only tend to posit a broad consensus among a diverse and disparate collection of people, but additionally suggest that that consensus has been largely fixed across time, across which the United States experienced many changes, not least in the composition, and political agency, of its populace.

While these understandings, and American creedalism, are typically taught as philosophies or coherent wholes, a variety of observers have seen their importance in American life not as rooted in a deliberate philosophical choice among Americans but in the conditions of their settlement and demographics, and their economic status and class. They have also been embodied in and informed by narratives and stories.