Old Testament Republicanism

One of the most engaging essays I read in graduate school was Robert Bellah’s 1967 article “Civil Religion in America.”¹ In this seminal piece, Bellah explained how the Founding generation created a civil belief system that had all of the trappings of a religion, was vaguely unitarian, and espoused a deity that had a fondness for the United States of America. In his presentation, Bellah emphasized Enlightenment ideals, although he also noted the importance of ancient Israel. Nevertheless, I was troubled by not quite understanding how this American political religion developed historically. In the succeeding decades, eminent historians such as Ernest Tuveson, Mark Noll, Nathan Hatch, Harry Stout, and Sacvan Bercovitch filled in many of the details missing from the Bellah piece. We should add Eran Shalev’s name to this list of distinguished scholars, as his American Zion is a wonderful addition to the study of political religion in America’s revolutionary and early national years.

American Zion is intellectual history at its finest. In this volume, Eran Shalev deftly traces the Old Testament’s impact on republican thought, from its European origins through its flourishing in the American Revolutionary and early national periods, to its eventual decline in the decades before the Civil War. While other distinguished historians have alluded to the many themes, ideas, and images in American Zion, this study is unique in its singular book-length focus on and chronological description of the Old Testament’s impact on American government and identity. Shalev uses a wealth of books, essays, sermons, pamphlets, and newspaper articles in making his case. Naturally, most of the written material comes from the well-educated upper class; however, Shalev also includes newspaper articles likely to have been read by a broad range of people. Perhaps his most fascinating examples are those involving people on the margins of society. Ever sensitive to regional variation, Shalev discusses documents produced up and down the Atlantic seaboard. While his efforts at producing a national rather than a Northern narrative aren’t totally successful, the overall argument holds together nicely.

One of American Zion’s strengths resides in what it is not. Because of his emphasis on the cultural and political impact of the Old Testament, Shalev bypasses previous historians’ debates over the nature of republicanism. He also moves beyond current culture-war arguments over the Founders’ orthodoxy, a subject expertly dissected in John Fea’s Was America Founded as a Christian Nation? (2011). Instead Shalev shifts attention away from Christian doctrines and instead examines the impact of the Hebrew scriptures in shaping American political discourse and national identity.

Shalev’s central argument is that biblical republicanism not only created a rationale for revolution, but made it possible for Americans to link the nation’s fortunes to those of ancient Israel, thus assuring themselves that they, like the ancient Hebrews, had a special relationship with the Almighty. While elite Revolutionary leaders understood their cause in terms of classical republican ideals involving virtue and citizenship, such a discussion was unlikely to engage those with lesser education. However, the literate populace was well-versed in the Bible, thus making it possible for the leadership class to make classical republican arguments illustrated with biblical examples. Naturally, the foundation for this strategy was the Old Testament, as the Hebrew Bible was much more concerned with issues of statecraft than was the New Testament. The end result was the creation of a “biblical civic humanist language” that appealed to elite and common folk alike (p. 21).

The story begins with the American Revolutionaries and their use of multiple Old Testament tropes to justify their drive for political independence. The Hebrew scriptures had significant memorable, and malleable, material that could be used to support a host of arguments. Prior to 1776, when colonists were more inclined to blame their troubles on Parliament and the king’s advisors than on George III, polemicists focused...