American Jeremiad

5. Ritual of Consensus

5 Ritual of Consensus By all accounts, the jeremiad played a central role in the war of independence, and the war in turn confirmed the jeremiad as' a national ritual. The Whig sermons and tracts express a rite of passage into nationhood, an official coming-of-age ceremony, which had long been in rehearsal. It was a ritual replete with a special set of symbols, a communal myth, and a sophisticated form of socialization - all of these now focused upon a single, comprehensive, distinctly American event. For as the Whig Jeremiahs explained it, independence was not the spoils of violence, but the harvest of Puritanism. It was not some sudden turbulent challenge to the system , but the consummation of a process of uprising that began aboard the Mayflower and Arbella and matured in the struggles of 1776. In short, the Revolution was the movement linking the two quintessential moments in the story of America - the twin legends of the country's founding fathers - the Great Migration and the War of Independence. In that development lay the sacred drama of American nationhood. I have already discussed the Puritan origins of this outlook, but it may be well here to specify its meaning for the concept of revolution . Historically considered, revolution has two entirely different meanings, secular and religious. In secular tradition, revolution means a forcible change of government. It highlights discord, contradiction , and discontinuity, and has lent itself, in these terms, both to progressive and to cyclical views of history. For radicals, it proved 132 RITUAL OF CONSENSUS 133 that men could improve their conditions - that indeed, they might found a new paradise of reason by overthrowing the institutions of the past. For conservatives, revolution meant the treacherous, repetitive wheel of fortune. "Eadem, sed aliter," in Schopenhauer's famous phrase: despite its rhetoric of progress, it brought the same old thing in new dress. In either case, revolution was an issue in and of this world; and in either case, it had little or no bearing upon the course of sacred history. Whether or not man would improve his earthly lot, believers could feel secure in speaking of their spiritual destiny. In this context, the meaning of revolution was emphatically and unequivocally progressive. Individually, every true Christian had the promise of heaven, through what Augustine termed the revolutio of the soul toward God. Collectively, the church was advancing toward New Jerusalem through a series of revolutionary upheavals. Each upheaval constituted a revolution in itself, but all were linked in an ascending spiral. Thus Abraham was said to have revolted against the idolatry of Ur; thus Richard Hooker spoke of "the revolution begun by our Saviour" against the Hebraic Law; 1 thus Reformers spoke of Luther's revolution against Papal Antichrist , and anticipated the revolutions of the apocalypse. The New England Puritans applied this vision directly to their own enterprise. As we have seen, they used it to obviate traditional distinctions - in this instance, the distinction between secular and sacred revolution. * They bequeathed their peculiar figural mode to Enlightenment America, and ultimately to the patriot Whigs, who mystified secular change as divine progress, and redefined the errand as a rite of passage into the sacred meaning of the American Revolu- *The ritual of baptism, for example, accents the contradictions between worldly and spiritual commitments, between social revolution and the soul's revolutio to God. The Puritans invoked the example of John the Baptist to enforce a social conversion rite. They, too, used anxiety to inculcate a special symbolic habit of mind; but whereas baptism seeks to invert the meanings of secular discourse ("wilderness," "promised land," "revolution" itself), the Puritan Jeremiahs inverted the standard meanings of Christian discourse in order to enlist support for their tribal errand - to direct the rising generation toward the building of New Canaan and the revolutions that would usher in the Theopolis Americana. Their ritual techniques appear everywhere in the eighteenth century; in revival sermons, in military speeches, in exhortations to moral purification and commercial development, and finally, as Emory Elliott has shown, in the sermons of the Revolutionary pulpit. 134 THE AMERICAN JEREMIAD tion. In doing so, they contributed in two important ways to the rhetoric of the jeremiad. First, they amplified the Puritan distinction between the Old World and the New. European uprisings, they explained, were revolutions in the secular sense. Internal divisions and conflicts led to violence, and violence to discord and decay...