Читать книгу American Political Thought - Ken Kersch - Страница 20

In the early seventeenth century, European colonists began to settle the original strip of land that became the United States on North America’s Atlantic coast, previously populated exclusively by native aboriginal tribes. Commerce provided much of the impetus for the European migration, including the early Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam (later, New York). Over time, fueled as well by the forces of imperial ambition and competition, the thirteen North American colonies matured into an estimable outpost of the globe-spanning British Empire.

Other European settlers, however, were drawn to the colonial settlements for religious reasons. While, as noted, the Southern colonies were initially settled by Anglicans, and Maryland by Catholics, the New England colonies were disproportionately settled by members of England’s “dissenting” Protestant religious sects. A religious minority in the mother country (7%), members of these sects were subject to discrimination, and even persecution. They were Calvinists of different sorts (Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Baptists), but also Quakers. Given their predicament as dissenters from the prevailing political order, undergirded by the officially established Church, ministers and theologians in the colonies spent time reflecting upon questions of the sources of legitimate worldly political authority, the relationship between that and otherworldly, divine authority, the respective claims of the individual and the community, and the appropriate relation between Church and State. As such, theological investigations by Christian ministers (and other Christians) in the American colonies addressed some of the most significant political questions. These investigations and discussions were transatlantic.

The English Enlightenment political philosopher John Locke had contemporaneously argued for “the reasonableness of Christianity” (1695) – that reason could be used to test the soundness of religious beliefs, and measure and confirm the authenticity of revelation. Locke’s views were widely disseminated by Puritan preachers in the American colonies. While the epithet “Puritanism” came to be associated with religious, and often sexual, oppressiveness, the most significant calling card of the Puritans was the role its theology afforded to reason, particularly as that reason was practiced outside of – and even against – the strictures of a government-sponsored, officially established Church. As such, Puritan thought in the Anglo-American tradition was allied, albeit imperfectly, with developments that led to modern conceptions of both religious and political liberty. It was the English Puritan writer and poet John Milton, for instance, who, in Areopagitica (1644), penned what is still one of the seminal arguments against censorship, and in defense of the freedom of speech. The Cambridge-educated Puritan minister Roger Williams (1603–1683), whose radical views concerning the liberty of conscience and the separation of Church and State led to his expulsion from the Massachusetts Bay colony, was a peerless champion of religious freedom. Puritan theologians authored pioneering challenges to the claim of the divine right (authority) of Kings.

As their name suggests, Puritans were additionally preoccupied with what they took to be the worldly corruption of the Church of England. They responded by founding new “purified” churches, where they could live and worship in the true light of God. It is this critical, moralizing impulse, and passion for purifying the corrupted and debased, that provides the basis for the epithet “puritanical” commonly directed not only toward Puritans (or their latter-day epigones), but also toward American culture more generally, which Puritan thought, in this regard, is held to have foundationally influenced and pervaded.

Protestantism, born in the call by Martin Luther, in his Ninety-Five Theses, for “Reformation,” had itself originated from similar concerns about the worldly corruption of the Roman Catholic Church, as manifested by a rampant materialism and a decadent, venal, and power-hungry clergy (including, at the apex, the Pope), at the expense, it was said, of genuine spiritual concerns. England underwent its own Protestant Reformation when, after King Henry VIII sought an annulment which the Pope refused to grant, reformationists helped underwrite Henry’s break from Rome and establish the Anglican Church, with the English monarch replacing the Pope as its head.

Some English Protestants expressed increasing disappointment and dissatisfaction with the course of the English Reformation. The Puritans thought that the Church of England had not gone far enough in cleansing itself of the vestiges of Catholicism. The growing body of dissenters complained that the monarchically decreed practices, rituals, and forms of worship prescribed by the Anglican Church, including the Church’s purportedly un-scriptural ornate clerical vestments, smacked of popery (a pejorative that frequently recurs in colonial American thought). By not excluding the self-evidently wicked from their communion, the Church of England was courting the corruption of the spiritually pure, imperiling their immortal souls. If even its ministers were worldly sinners, it was said, what hope could the Anglican Church offer the humble parishioner?

The English Puritan John Field (1545–1588) had defined a church as “a company or congregation of the faithful called and gathered out of the world by the preaching of the Gospel, who following and embracing true religion, do in one unity of Spirit strengthen and comfort one another, daily growing and increasing in true faith, framing their lives, government, orders and ceremonies according to the word of God.” Puritans like Field endeavored to form churches of “visible saints”: voluntary associations of the holy, predestined for salvation. Such a spiritual community would admit only those of manifest probity; the faith community would be characterized by a rigorous discipline enforced by admonishment, censure, and excommunication.

A growing number of Puritans interpreted seventeenth-century England’s economic and political troubles as a sign of divine displeasure. This led to further reflection on the appropriate origins and organization of churches. Some sought greater reform of the Church of England. A cohort of more radical Puritans called for separation. Among them was Robert Browne, who in 1581 went so far as to declare the Church of England to be a false church, organized with utter disregard for biblical principles. Brown called for assemblies of the godly to establish new churches on Biblical principles. The Puritans who made landfall in Massachusetts, first at Provincetown (in whose harbor they drafted the Mayflower Compact of 1620), before settling at Plymouth, established the first separatist Church in what they called “New England.”

Many more – separatist and non-separatist alike – would follow, especially after the Anglican leadership moved to forbid Puritan liturgical practices and harass nonconforming ministers. Beginning in 1630, a “Great Migration” of seven hundred Puritans, including John Winthrop, aboard the Arbella, resettled in North America and founded the Massachusetts Bay colony. In doing so, they imagined their migration to the New World as a biblical Exodus of world-historical significance: on those distant shores they would found a “New Israel” rooted in Christian governing morals and ideals.

Notwithstanding that many settlers of the American colonies came simply to make a livelihood, or even as punishment for crimes, the providentialist and exceptionalist idea of the United States as “the redeemer nation” (Ernest Tuveson) – a recycled idea many of them had formerly applied to England – started early, and here. Ever since Winthrop described the Puritan settlement of Massachusetts Bay “as a city upon a hill” with the eyes of the whole world watching, many Americans have understood the United States as God’s chosen country, with a divinely ordained mission in the world. For good and for ill, Americans throughout their history have exhibited a marked tendency to imagine their nation’s historical and political trajectory as a religious drama. And, not infrequently, especially in times of crisis – or perceived crisis – they have shown a tendency to script that drama in apocalyptic terms: as an epic, God-haunted battle of Good versus Evil, with Satan’s snares perpetually tempting, and eternal damnation an impending threat.

The pietist strain of American political thought took strongest root in New England, where Church and State were most densely intertwined (church membership, for instance, was required to vote). The American Puritans set up distinctive governing structures anchored in their religious principles and codes. Although fleeing persecution based on their religious practices and beliefs, the American Puritans did not institute religious toleration. As they saw it, in migrating they had sought the freedom to establish their own self-governing communities where they could live according to their faith. As such, Puritans in America meted out severe discipline to those who spurned or transgressed against the community’s theological convictions. America’s early Puritans were aggressively moralistic. They expected community members to live up to the highest moral standards, and were quick to ferret out and punish immorality. Puritans like Winthrop spoke frequently of liberty. But they did so by the lights of the distinction they drew between a dangerous “natural liberty” (anarchic license) and a virtuous “civil liberty” harmonizing with just and legitimate authority. For a community and the individuals who comprised it to live according to just, legitimate, and true laws, both temporal and moral, as discerned and enforced by a legitimate governing authority, was to be truly free. Liberty, for Puritans, meant living by the commands of biblical (Christian) teaching under the authority of Our Lord Jesus Christ.

The Puritans practiced – indeed, helped pioneer – government by consent in the way they organized their churches. As explicated by Winthrop and John Wise, among others, Puritan churches – in contradistinction to both the Church of Rome and the Church of England – were voluntary associations of “visible saints,” organized by mutual consent through covenants. As such, Puritan church governance reflected proto-democratic instincts about self-government that foreshadow important elements of later democratic thought. In a plea for forbearance for his human foibles and errors, as well as a reminder of his high authority, Winthrop reminded those who had entrusted him with governing power that “It is yourselves who have called us to this office, and being called by you, we have our authority from God.” Given the organization of their churches, by the standards of their time – again, as compared with the organization of the Church of Rome and the Church of England – this allowed for considerable diversity. By the standards held by most in our own time, however, that diversity looks tightly circumscribed: it had sharp, and sometimes harshly (and even cruelly) enforced, limits.

These limits were perhaps most dramatically tested by the case of Roger Williams, a Puritan separatist critical of the decision of the Massachusetts Bay colony founders to retain their ties to the Church of England. Stubbornly hewing to his own inner light, Williams persistently antagonized his religious community, to the point where he was banished from the colony. Williams moved south, first founding the city of Providence (1636), and then securing a formal charter for the new colony of Rhode Island (Providence Plantations) (1644). Chafing at Massachusetts Bay’s Congregationalist structures and strictures, Williams became a Baptist.

In the Bloudy Tenent of Persecution (1644), Williams penned one of the first arguments in English (following some Dutch predecessors) for both religious toleration and the total separation of Church and State. Williams’s arguments for both were foundationally, if not exclusively, theological. Coerced or compelled faith, he argued, was not genuine faith. As such, it was contrary to Scripture. Persecution for alleged error made a travesty of the teachings of Jesus Christ (Williams called it “soul rape”). It was, moreover, a menace to civic peace. Williams additionally argued that the Bible itself had firmly distinguished the realms of Church and State. In uniting them, Massachusetts Bay had flouted the commands of Holy Scripture. The Bible, he elaborated, had commanded that worldly government should be secular. Being a good Christian and a good magistrate or citizen were separate matters. Any attempt to establish a purported “Christian Commonwealth” in this world would end by afflicting the faith, and the faithful: to the extent it got involved in worldly politics, the Church would find itself complicit in, and corrupted by, worldly politics. Williams championed the view, later enshrined in the US Constitution (Article VI, Cl. 3), that “no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.”¹

Williams’s arguments for toleration and the complete separation of government and religion evinced a profound concern for the claims of individual conscience. Williams considered an individual’s conscience man’s most valuable, God-given possession – and, indeed, responsibility. Williams’s arguments left a strong imprint on American political thought. Claims on behalf of the individual’s self-discerned inner moral light of conscience found a sustained life in what some have called the nation’s alternative “dissenting tradition,” which held obedience to conscience to be both a requirement of the soul and a pillar of political liberty. It was palpably in evidence, for instance, in Henry David Thoreau’s refusal to pay his taxes that supported an immoral war (the Mexican-American War, 1846–1848), and in Thoreau’s, and others’, refusal to lend any sustaining support for chattel slavery.

Many contemporary scholars have argued that Williams’s theological arguments on behalf of Church–State separation, which became rooted, if uneasily for some, in the United States, at least at the national level, underwrote the US’s exceptional religiosity. As compared with a secularizing Western Europe, where established churches ended up shouldering the blame for the decisions and behaviors of the worldly politicians with whom they had publicly and closely associated themselves, Church–State separation in the United States, such as it was, reinforced, it has been said, the purity of the Church. A separation, moreover, in which the state showed no favoritism toward any of the country’s competing religious sects – gradually adopted by all of the American states by the early nineteenth century – proved especially conducive to the liberty of conscience. Some have latterly argued, moreover, that non-establishment and the wide scope given for a multitude of competing religious sects spurred competition among churches to effectively meet the needs of their current and potential congregants, strengthening the churches, and promoting Christian evangelization.

New England’s Puritan churches were notable, and precedent-setting, exercises in self-government, offering clear models for secular political rule. Each church was independent of every other church. As its own independent, self-governing faith community, each church selected its own minister, who served at the congregation’s pleasure. (The congregational structure instituting self-government in ecclesiastical matters was codified in the Cambridge Platform of 1648.) While there were strong elements of what Alexis de Tocqueville later called “individualism” in these new departures, the colonial Puritan congregations were nevertheless intensely communal: the emphasis was on the collective spiritual, moral, and temporal needs of the group over and above those of the individuals who comprised it – an emphasis explicated in John Winthrop’s speech “Modell of Christian Charity” (1630), delivered shipboard during the Arbella’s Atlantic crossing. New England’s Puritans understood their communities as organic wholes: their individual members were the organs and limbs of a single human body, inextricably joined and sharing a common fate. Winthrop enjoined his flock on the Arbella that to “love one another with a pure heart fervently we must bear one another’s burdens, we must not look only on our own things, but also on the things of our brethren.” He called for common devotion to mercy and charity. Notably, Winthrop’s injunction to communal duty and care was directed toward the “private” institutions of “civil society” (here, churches), rather than toward the “public sphere” institutions of (secular) government. Concern for the needy was considered a matter of divine Christian obligation.

The Christian communions that formed churches made no claims to universal inclusion. The “people” with the authority to enter into the covenant organizing a church was a highly circumscribed class, in accord with the stringent purposes that had motivated the association in the first place. Full membership was limited to saints. And claims to sainthood required proof – visible evidence of having had a conversion experience, of being “Born Again.” A 1646 Massachusetts law mandated that all within a township attend its church. But only full members of the church were afforded governing privileges. In time, however, this orthodoxy began to clash with the more casual inclinations of others, who may not have been able to provide personal evidence of religious conversion.

As the Protestant theologians were often deeply learned men – educated, for instance, at England’s Cambridge University – their understandings of the proper government of churches were not fashioned from Christian sources alone. Puritan theologians in the colonies were also informed by ancient and modern texts of political philosophy, from Aristotle to (in time) John Locke. John Wise’s reflections on church governance, for example, drew upon Aristotle’s consideration of the virtues and debilities of rule by the one, the few, or the many (monarchy, aristocracy, democracy), and the possibility and potential of mixed political regimes. Wise was also persuaded by his near contemporary John Locke’s theories of government by consent, arising out of the state of nature. These understandings were disseminated in the American colonies not only in books and pamphlets, but also from the pulpit. As such, in their concern with questions of natural equality, the relationship of the individual to the community, the claims of conscience, of self-government, and significance of the individual’s voice in directing the affairs of the community – and, indeed, of political liberty – Puritan thought anticipated and informed colonial thinking concerning fundamental questions of (secular) American political thought.

Americans still debate the extent and nature of the Puritan legacy in US political thought. Religious traditionalists recur to the Puritans’ strict moral standards, their enlistment of public authorities to aggressively police personal and public morals, and their privileging of claims of the community over those of the individual. Many also claim that the Puritanism of early New England set the template for the country’s core political philosophy. Less remembered, perhaps, is the profoundly subversive strain of Puritanism’s more radical and persecuted dissenters – like Anne Hutchinson, Roger Williams, and the Quakers, who, like Hutchinson and Williams, had been banished from Massachusetts Bay. The same was true for many who remained, like the liberal Congregationalist minister Jonathan Mayhew of Boston’s Old West Church. In the role it afforded individual conscience, some of this thought was intensely individualistic. Mayhew’s and Wise’s voluntarist understandings of the nature of governing authority and non-submission and active resistance to illegitimate authority may have been initially developed as part of their reflections on the organization of churches. But their thought on these matters powerfully appealed to the American revolutionaries. Puritan theology figured into the theorizing about the rights of representation and, in time, of resistance and revolution. And, indeed, Mayhew took an early stand against illegitimate government power, adducing the divine right of Kings and British colonial rule as cases in point. Mayhew held biblical teaching to be consistent with Whig and Lockean premises holding the public good to be worldly government’s only legitimate end. He argued that subjects had not only a right but a duty to resist and overthrow any government that failed to promote the public welfare and preserve fundamental rights, and to fight for liberty against tyranny.

This line of Puritan thought, to be sure, was in tension with more conservative strains holding that non-submission and disobedience would tend “to the total dissolution of civil government; and to introduce such scenes of wild anarchy and confusion, as are more fatal to society than the worst of tyranny.” Romans 13 – whose conventional implications Mayhew had brilliantly inverted by emphasizing the failure of worldly leaders to faithfully adhere to their high responsibilities and duties, which lent legitimacy to their presumptive authority – had declared, after all, that “The powers that be are ordained of God.” Hierarchy and deference to legitimate authority – of wives to husbands, children to parents, and servants to masters – it was also said, conduced to healthy, well-ordered families, households … and polities. Both strains of Puritanism were present from the country’s earliest settlement.

Soon, however, major developments were afoot. Between the time of the first Puritan settlement in New England and the American Revolution, the transformation, and diversification, of American Christianity was well under way. The trans-denominational evangelical Christianity that has shaped American politics – including reformist campaigns like temperance/prohibition, abolitionism, the social gospel movement, and the contemporary Religious Right – was forged during the transatlantic First Great Awakening (c. 1730–1755). The English evangelist George Whitefield, who toured the colonies preaching at open-air revivals, set himself against the arid formalism and indifference amongst his Protestant brethren. Whitefield urged Christians to turn their gazes inward, examining their propensity to sin, to repent, and to commit themselves anew to a holy, Christian life. Whitefield, his countryman John Wesley, and other home-grown colonial evangelists like T.J. Frelinghuysen, Gilbert Tennent, James Davenport, and Jonathan Edwards, encouraged their flocks to feel deeply both their depravity and the pure joy they would experience when they made the momentous decision to re-commit themselves to Christ – to be “Born Again.” In joining the community of “New Light” Christians in a flood of fervor and enthusiasm, the evangelists promised, they would be welcomed with a surpassing love of a kind they had never before experienced.

While this was happening, most of the “Old Light” churches in the colonies went about their business, and often set themselves against what they took to be the unhinged emotionalism and questionable theology of the camp meeting revivals. There were schisms between Old Light and New Light versions of the Methodism of Whitefield and Wesley, the Dutch Reformism of T.J. Frelinghuysen, the Presbyterianism of Tennent, and the Congregationalism of Davenport and Edwards. The New Light evangelists met Old Light attacks with their own accusations that the stolid Old Lighters were more concerned with their respectability and worldly status than with the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

The New Light evangelicals also diverged from each other, both in their theology and in their temperaments. The more cerebral evangelicals like Jonathan Edwards, influenced by the Enlightenment, closely examined the natural world, and explained how it intricately demonstrated the Creator’s superintending plan and design. (This theological project would be taken up in the nineteenth century by academic natural philosophers like Williams College’s Mark Hopkins, who, prior to the rise of the secular German-style research university toward the end of that century, played a central role in higher education at the nation’s then mostly Christian colleges and universities.)² On the other hand, evangelicals like the fanatical James Davenport – who denounced other clergy as heretics, bragged about assessing at a glance whether an individual was destined for heaven or hell, and burned worldly luxuries, books, and, in one case, his own pants (which, in a fit of righteousness, he stripped off before an appalled crowd) – made it hard to know where the godliness ended and prurience, exhibitionism, and mental disturbance began.

The effects of the First Great Awakening on the later life of the nation are hard to exaggerate. Besides transforming its theology, the revival significantly augmented and diversified American Christianity. (The ranks of the Methodists and Baptists in particular swelled.) The First Great Awakening inspired a transformative introspection amongst colonial women. It, moreover, played an important role in the adoption of the Christian faith by the country’s enslaved African peoples, fundamentally reshaping black American life and thought.

At the most general level, the understanding of many Americans of the world as superintended by God’s plan, of life as beset by sin, but with a promise of redemption and salvation, and of this condition as constituting not only a great truth but also an emotion-drenched drama of world-historical significance with everything at stake, has plainly been informed by the United States’ Protestant heritage. So, too, has one major strain of what has come to be called “American exceptionalism,” which understands the United States as “New Canaan,” or “New Israel”: a promised land and people, chosen by God, with His great plan in mind, serving as a beacon – and perhaps even savior – to the world.