American Political Thought. Ken Kersch
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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.
Race and Indigeneity during the Settlement and the Road to Revolution
When Spanish, Dutch, French, and English explorers and settlers first arrived in North America, they encountered a land inhabited by millions of indigenous peoples who had been living there for over 10,000 years. As such, the political thought of and concerning America’s native peoples, like that involving its coercively imported Africans, has been a constant throughout US history. This indigenous political thought falls into two categories. First, there is the political thought of the native tribes themselves concerning their own collective lives, considered independently of their relationship to the European settler-colonizers. And, second, there is the political thought of the tribes (and, for that matter, of the Europeans and their American descendants) underwriting, informed, and generated by the European conquest, settlement, and rule. The former, given the structure of modern scholarly disciplines, has historically – and, some would say, problematically – been considered the proper subject less of political science than of anthropology. It involves deep considerations of native concepts, cosmologies, epistemologies, philosophies, religions, and cultural practices of a far-flung landscape of different indigenous tribes. This thought advanced diverse understandings concerning the origins and nature of the community, clan, and kin, the relation of native peoples to the land and other living beings, and the sources and locus of authority. The latter species of indigenous thought, developed of necessity, frequently sparked political debates and contention among natives and white settler-colonialists alike. This second type of thought formulated views concerning native sovereignty and the desirability and terms of acculturation, assimilation, conversion, or accommodation in the face of a relentless demographic onslaught. Tribal thinkers raised questions concerning the normative or strategic desirability of