American Political Thought. Ken Kersch

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American Political Thought - Ken Kersch


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moral and philosophical ends. These Straussians will define the content of individual rights in the American liberal order by the lights of a substantive telos informed by a robust understanding of what is just, right, and good. If what is said to be a “right” does not square with that substantive requirement, the claim is held to be mistaken – it is, after due consideration, no right at all.

      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.

      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.

      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


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