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.
Straussians pursue their scholarly agendas in American political thought in a family of ways. Many undertake studies of key figures – often of those they hail as “great men,” like the nation’s founders, Abraham Lincoln, and Frederick Douglass – who, as ostensible exemplars of virtue and statesmanship, nobly arrived, in diverse ways in different times, at understandings of the rightful admixture of the ancient and the modern in striving to steer the American polity. In contrast, they will also – at times ominously – set their sights on the ways in which other figures in American politics – often the early twentieth-century Progressives, and their (ostensibly) secular liberal successors – have abandoned the unique blend of the ancient and modern that, from the Straussian perspective, constitutes the glory and nobility of the American polity. Following Strauss, these scholars will spy in these purportedly faithless Americans the moral and philosophical heresies of positivism, historicism, secularism, and relativism. Besides focusing on individual great men (and sometimes women), Straussians have studied a broad array of the country’s political institutions and creedal documents with an eye to the ways in which those, rightly read, square with their broader understandings of the distinctive nature of the American polity. Although they sometimes critique these documents or institutions, and detail the ways that they fall short, Straussians’ general predisposition – in part arising out of their sense of duty as teachers of the (it is hoped, virtuous) citizenry – is toward (informed) patriotism and celebration, to the inculcation, through an appropriate liberal arts education, of a philosophical grounding, historical knowledge, and national pride.
Theories Positing the Inadequacy of the Traditional Frameworks and Proposing Alternatives
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