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12 Prologue decline.’’ Perhaps even more so than Machiavelli, Nietzsche sees agape making people too weak for the demands of individual liberation and cultural greatness found only through an aesthetic life of power ever seeking more power. We must move beyond the morality of love of God and others, Nietzsche argues, because the God who authored such commandments ‘‘is dead.’’ A more sweeping claim even than God simply does not exist or has met some kind of divine demise, Nietzsche is announcing—as Martin Heidegger later observed—‘‘the impotence not only of the Christian God but of every transcendent element under which men might want to shelter themselves.’’26 Machiavelli’s political realism, Bacon’s scientific materialism, Locke’s philosophical liberalism, Freud’s therapeutic justice, and Nietzsche’s radical skepticism of any traditionally understood moral norms all remain exceptionally strong influences in our post-Christian present. Together they form—whatever their differences—a most imposing barrier for charity to play any meaningful part in the formation of an important civic ideal. But it is this very fact that makes the study at hand all the more necessary and interesting. Despite such powerful forces, various notions of agape remain both religiously central and politically salient throughout American life. In more recent times, the most obvious example of this is found in the hymnal rhetoric of Martin Luther King Jr.’s civil rights push. An even more recent if less sustained and less successful manifestation is found in George W. Bush’s idiom of ‘‘compassionate conservatism’’ on particular display during his gubernatorial years and first presidential campaign. Civic Charity To begin to understand how Christian charity got so firmly implanted in the soil of the American political tradition, flowering into a civic charity of broad influence, and to adequately reflect on how well such a phenomenon comports with reasonable accounts of political necessity and justice, we must turn first to John Winthrop. The reasons for this have already been indicated. He is not only the first to introduce charity as an ideal of more than solely religious significance, but he does so in a way that is both memorable and alarming. It is in Winthrop and his Model of Christian Charity speech—examined in detail in part 1 of this book— that one most clearly sees both the sunlit uplands and the dark narrows ‘‘Bonds of Affection’’—Three Founding Moments 13 that stand as possible outcomes for the polity anxious to be formally ruled by the imperatives of Christian love. For the reader still sure at this point that in Winthrop only negative lessons can be learned, part 1 begins by showing that Nathaniel Hawthorne, this most famous of all critics of the Puritans, seemed to recognize distinctly redeeming qualities in Winthrop and his charity-oriented leadership, namely a sense of genuine human compassion and noble purpose that made him the most attractive of his Puritan peers. Part 2 of this book details a monumental shift in thinking about charity and politics by highlighting Jefferson’s radical break with the ancient religious norms of agape so central to Winthrop. We do see here, however , that even Jefferson’s devout commitment to a largely secular model of liberal democracy is suffused with an attention to securing a fraternal affection between citizens, an attention increasingly colored for him by New Testament teachings. We also see that the impact of Jefferson’s position is modulated in its break from certain Winthropian positions by the influence of more traditionally religious figures of influence in the revolutionary-constitutional generation. It is not until Lincoln, considered in part 3, that we see a full-bodied model of civic charity that harnesses many of the respective benefits of both Winthrop’s and Jefferson’s positions without eviscerating the essential claims of either. While it will take the rest of this book to explain adequately what is meant by civic charity, how it came into existence , and how it reaches its apotheosis in the thought and rhetoric of Lincoln, one might at this point anticipate its vague contours. Civic charity, like its theological parent Christian charity, has both a vertical (pious) and horizontal (compassionate) dimension which play off each other in dynamic interaction. Furthermore, both dimensions are simultaneously and acutely attuned to the traditions of liberal democracy and Judeo-Christianity. To be more specific, civic charity’s vertical dimension calls for a public recognition of and gratitude for a God of judgment and providence even as it respects and helps...

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