American Political Thought. Ken Kersch
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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