American Political Thought. Ken Kersch

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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.

      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 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.


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