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  • Hellfire Nation: The Politics of Sin in American History
  • David Tell
Hellfire Nation: The Politics of Sin in American History. By James A. Morone. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003; pp xii + 575. $40.00.

America is quite literally a hellfire nation. This, at least, is James A. Morone's contention. Convinced that classical liberalism cannot account for the "roaring moral fervor at the soul of American politics" (7), Morone writes a history of sin and seeks thereby to demonstrate the ubiquitous ingrediency of sin and salvation in American politics. In Morone's telling, morality pervades the American story and motivates political actors from every point on the ideological spectrum. From John Winthrop's sermon aboard the Arbella to the Clinton administration's drug treatment legislation, Morone identifies the moral behind and within the political. Following an election in which morality was, at times, cast as the provenance of the political Right, Morone provides the timely reminder that the impulse to save America from its sins crosses political boundaries and transcends ideological commitments. Indeed, Hellfire Nation: The Politics of Sin in American History grounds the countless permutations in American government and the ever-changing conceptions of American identity in powerful but competing logics of sin and redemption.

Although politics are here rooted in discourses of sin, Morone argues that the ambivalent practices of the Puritans ensured that sin could never be understood univocally. He suggests that the Puritans bequeathed to America two competing moral traditions. On the one hand, the Puritans blamed sinners for the devolution of society. On the other hand, these same Puritans held society responsible for the morality of its citizens. These seemingly mutually exclusive practices—blaming both sinner and society—each flourished, Morone tells us, into two enduring moral traditions. Hellfire Nation is [End Page 347] Morone's attempt to account for and track these "two great moral paradigms [as they] develop and duel across American history" (497). He is, however, not simply tracking; lurking behind his compelling articulation of these dueling moral paradigms is a fervent call for the Left to reclaim its own moral tradition—a tradition, he claims, that the Left abandoned in exchange for liberalism. By way of review, I will foreground the political logic that attends each moral tradition, recast Morone's reclamation project, and, finally, identify a theoretical limitation that compromises the fervor of his attempt to reclaim a particular moral tradition for the political Left.

The Puritan impulse to blame the sinner for societal declension evolved into an ethic that Morone labels "neo-Puritanism" or "Victorianism." In this tradition, the politics of sin are rooted in a Puritan understanding of covenantal theology. Morone explains that as the Puritans settled New England, they imagined themselves entering into covenant relationships with their communities and with their God. The covenants, written anew for each Puritan settlement, were "plain, sweet, promise[s] of obedience" by citizens in exchange for divine favor on the community. Morality thus became politically charged, for the entire polity "would bear the consequences of bad behavior" (41). Within such a framework, it is hardly surprising that Puritan politicians were inordinately concerned with the morality of the Puritan citizenry, for the politics of Victorianism, Morone is careful to point out, demolished the boundaries that liberalism would posit between public and private. Indeed, Morone suggests that covenantal logic—with its focus on the communal dangers of the sinner—authorized a politics concerned primarily with distinguishing and protecting the virtuous community and disciplining, controlling, or expelling the depraved other.

Although the Puritan jeremiads identified all manner of deviations from the covenants, Morone identifies four general categories of trangression that became the perpetual concern of the politicized Puritan pulpit: laziness, drink, violence, and, above all, sex. Transforming dissent into sexual deviance proved a powerful and enduring political formula. To Morone's mind, this is nowhere better illustrated than in the witch panic that struck Salem Village. Morone records that, in the seventeenth century, witches were real; sorcery was part of everyday life: "When beer went bad, butter soured, a boat sank, the cow took sick, a man became impotent, a woman miscarried, or a baby died, people looked over their...

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