God and Country: America in Red and Blue

Chapter 4. CONFLICT AND CHANGE

Chapter 4 CONFLICT AND CHANGE 57 If our contemporary civic battles were simply a result of inconsistent, Puritan versus Enlightenment worldviews, the outlines of our disputes would be clearer, but our prospects for a shared civic ethos would arguably be dimmer. Fortunately, cultures are not static; they change and are changed by historical experience. American history since the Revolutionary War has been an ongoing process of encounter—confrontation with national growth and world events, with new immigrants and their cultures, with science, technology, and modernism—all within the context of a constitutional framework meant to sharply limit central government power. America has added territories, fought wars, experienced economic and social upheavals, and become steadily more diverse. Along the way, religious, cultural, and political worldviews have synthesized, polarized, and changed. Even those Americans who have responded most negatively to these historical encounters are indisputably products of the modernity they reject. Alan Wolfe (2001) has noted that in its quest for popularity in a democratic society, Puritanism lost its harshness. Much the same phenomenon has modified and tempered other movements and “isms” over time. Any effort to sketch an inclusive or even minimally adequate picture of the encounters between American’s diverse religious worldviews and 58 / God and Country our collective history would occupy volumes. There are a number of excellent histories that do just that, and many of them address these issues perceptively and in depth.1 This chapter makes no pretense at duplicating those efforts. It will necessarily omit many significant elements of our democratic dialectic and gloss over many more; the intent is to provide a broad, albeit superficial, context for understanding the reciprocal influences that have changed both American religions and American culture since 1787. THE POST-REVOLUTIONARY PERIOD As we have seen, the United States emerged from the Revolutionary War with an unquenchable optimism about the future, fed by a conviction that it was the “New Israel.” The City on the Hill continued to be a national metaphor, carrying with it what Jeffrey Alexander has called a predilection for “binary thinking”—good versus evil, us versus them (Alexander, 2004). As James Morone has noted, the result has been a nation consumed by successive moral conflicts, intensified by radically opposing views about the nature of morality and moral responsibility. “Puritans bequeathed America two different answers to that bottom line: Who do we blame for trouble, the sinner or society?” (Morone 2003, 13). In 1827 Lyman Beecher would deliver a sermon capturing perfectly the tenor of the times saying, “I shall submit to your consideration . . . that our nation has been raised by Providence to exert an efficient instrumentality in this work of moral renovation. The origin and history of our nation are indicative of some great design to be accomplished by it” (Mathisen 2001, 151). Just as religion—or to be more precise, Protestantism—left an indelible imprint on American institutions , democratic processes have exerted an enormous effect upon American religious worldviews. After the revolution, millennialism flourished, not only in the standard Christian aspiration to make the world ready for Christ’s kingdom, but often in a quite secularized form: 1 Among the most prolific and perceptive of these has been Martin Marty, who has chronicled American religion in a virtual mountain of books over some half a century. Conflict and Change / 59 the United States leading the world to peace and plenty. The religious millennialism of this period already demonstrated the impact of the American experience; it was strikingly different from its more passive predecessors. Before the American Revolution, millennialists generally believed that they had to patiently await the destruction of an evil world, after which Christ’s kingdom would be established. In the early 1800s, however, Americans were much more optimistic about their ability to bring about the changes needed to usher in the Millennium. During the Second Great Awakening, shortly after the end of the revolutionary period, revivalists urged people to work against social evils. “The moral fervor, the expectancy, and the intense devotion to mission rooted in millennialist ideas inspired early-nineteenth-century efforts at reform and allowed different kinds of reformers to work together” (Mintz 1995, 16). That was fortunate, because different groups had decidedly different ideas about what to reform. Quakers were the first to prohibit slaveholding among their members . Quakers also organized efforts to ameliorate poverty and encourage temperance and worked to improve the treatment of Native Americans. The newly...