Puritans One and All?

Orthodox Calvinism, with its tragic insistence on human falleness, has always appeared as a jarringly strange doctrine in the history of a country whose cultural temperament, in later years, so often seemed to be dominated by a spirit of optimism and an ebullient faith in progress. Writing in 1911, the philosopher George Santayana wittily remarked, "How strange to the American now that saying of Jonathan Edwards, that men are naturally God's enemies! Yet that is an axiom to any intelligent Calvinist. . . . If you told the modern American that he is totally depraved, he would think you were joking, as he himself usually is."¹

Yet, if the Calvinist doctrine of original sin rapidly lost its hold on the American religious imagination, it nevertheless remains an interesting question how Puritanism might have continued to influence American culture. Professor James Morone, in his new study, Hellfire Nation: The Politics of Sin in American History, addresses himself to this issue, arguing that "after three and a half centuries—for better or worse—we remain Puritans all." The centrality of morality in American political life is the main subject of Hellfire Nation, particularly what Morone terms the "politics of sin," a form of moral discourse initiated by the Puritans and purveyed by their so-called neo-Puritan successors, such as the abolitionists, prohibitionists, and anticommunists of subsequent eras. The neo-Puritans are later challenged by a rival group of moral crusaders arriving in the early twentieth century who preach the Social Gospel. The persistence and power of moral crusades in American politics form one of the unifying themes of American history in Morone's view, and his goal in Hellfire Nation is therefore to recast "the American story as a moral tale."²

Morone's contention that American politics has always involved conflicts among competing systems of morality would at first glance seem to be a fairly obvious one, particularly in light of the disputatious history of American Christianity. Such an insight, however, is nevertheless one that he believes political scientists are apt to lose sight of, given what he sees as their tendency to focus on the more secular dimension of political activity. His argument that the evaluative "ought" is at least important as the factual "is" comes as a welcome reminder that morality, especially but not exclusively religious morality, has been a potent shaping force in the American past.

Morone begins his study, appropriately enough, with the Puritans, a group that he believes has long been slighted by political scientists. The Puritans, like most American moral crusaders, he contends, are motivated first and foremost by the questions "Who are we? Who belongs?"—questions that Morone often treats as distinctively American. The Puritans were thus engaged in a "restless quest for their own elusive identity," something that they "concocted" not so much from a set of theological premises, but by identifying a long list of Satanic "others," such as Indians, Quakers, and witches. They thereby established the paradigm according to which all subsequent moral disputes would be framed. The dominant group, motivated by a need to clarify, shape, and preserve its identity as well as its power, proceeds to stigmatize another group, which invariably results in its repression or outright proscription. Thus, Morone comfortably draws a series of parallels among widely separated historical moments, for example, the witch-hunts of the Puritan era and the anticommunist witch-hunts of the 1950s. By the time we arrive at his chapter on the sixties, he declares that "it's the same thing every time," which means, more or less, that race, class, and gender, and the concept of the "other"—the principal theoretical categories employed by Morone—can fully explain the bulk of moral conflict in American history.³

This is a large claim, and Morone has difficulty sustaining it not only in his treatment of the Puritans, but in numerous instances over the course of his five-hundred-page tome. It is by no means clear, for example, that the Puritans were motivated primarily by the question "Who are we?" Such an interpretation veers precipitously close to being psychologically reductive, as it...