Hellfire Nation: The Politics of Sin in American History (review)

By virtually any measure, this is an ambitious book. To document America's experience with "the politics of sin," Morone treats four centuries of history, stretching from John Winthrop to Jerry Falwell. Although the vastness of Morone's task leaves him with considerable discretion in selecting episodes to examine, he does not shy away from events and issues that remain enmeshed in historiographical controversy, such as the nature of the Great Awakening and its influence on the American Revolution. Nor does he avoid the most divisive questions of contemporary politics, including abortion and drug policy.

Perhaps even more ambitious than the scope and subject matter of the book is Morone's effort to extract enduring explanations of American political behavior from these contested and complicated histories. A great deal of the book's explanatory work is performed by the ubiquitous trio of race, class, and gender. In Morone's story, anxious Americans invoke the concept of sin to stigmatize and control dangerous others. One of the lasting legacies of this tendency is the creation of an underclass that is not only "other" but "wicked"—a fact that has tremendous implications for policy formation. "We've followed the same pattern across American time," he notes in a typical observation before describing again a recurring political progression that runs from zealotry, to bigotry, to panic, and finally to state-enforced prohibitions (476). Provocatively, Morone highlights moral fervor as a lever that has repeatedly pried the United States away from its anti-statist orthodoxies.

The strong normative element in Morone's book rests on a dichotomy that he develops from its opening pages. There are, he insists, two kinds of morality politics. The first views sin as an individual responsibility and therefore attempts to punish the sinner; the second considers sin the result of systemic failures and therefore seeks to restructure the system. The first is preoccupied with affronts to God; the second is more concerned with earthly justice. Morone's stated purpose is to promote the latter, which he sees languishing in a culture dominated by the former. Yet even as it offers this bifurcated understanding of American morality, Hellfire Nation demonstrates that for many Americans—and for much of American history—this is a false dichotomy. The abolitionists, for example, combined a progressive vision of racial justice with an intense focus on such issues as personal industry and sexual purity. Frances Willard was able to secure women's rights in a way her more radical contemporaries could not precisely because she merged a modern sense of social morality with a traditional notion of personal righteousness. Even today, Morone admits, the African-American community joins the pursuit of penal equity with an unabashedly religious commitment to social conservatism.

Morone often exhibits an awareness of this historical complexity, locating vibrant strains of communitarian morality among the otherwise sin-obsessed Puritans and hearing loud echoes of Puritan hellfire in the otherwise progressive Social Gospel. "We remain," he repeatedly observes, "puritans all" (497). It is therefore all the more troubling that in his concluding chapters he pits "neo-Puritans" and "a new social gospel" irreconcilably against one another. This conflict, he suggests, merely reflects a historical reality in which the division between the two moral traditions has grown increasingly stark over the past century. But his imposition of these rich and historically rooted identities on the flatly drawn ideologues of America's contemporary culture wars is the most striking example of how the book's pursuit of political clarity ultimately overwhelms its commitment to historical nuance. The result is a work that is readable and rousing, but one that reifies a Manichean view of morality politics and thereby limits the range of political possibilities that American history actually offers.