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Two American Jeremiads: Traditionalist and Progressive Stories of American Nationhood

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2008

Andrew R. Murphy
Andrew R. Murphy*
Affiliation:
Valparaiso University
*
Address correspondence and reprint requests to: Andrew R. Murphy, Christ College, Valparaiso University, 121 Mueller Hall, Valparaiso, IN 46383. E-Mail: andrew.murphy@valpo.edu
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Politics and Religion , Volume 1 , Issue 1 , April 2008 , pp. 85 - 112
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Copyright © Religion and Politics Research Section of the American Political Science Association 2008

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References

NOTES

1. The 700 Club, 13 September 2001. See also Lincoln, Bruce, Holy Terrors: Thinking about Religion after September 11 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2003)Google Scholar.

2. For just a few such accounts, by several of its more prominent articulators, see Neuhaus, Richard John, The Naked Public Square: Religion and Democracy in America (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1984)Google Scholar; Falwell, Jerry, Listen, America! (Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Company, Inc., 1980)Google Scholar; Reed, Ralph, Politically Incorrect: The Emerging Faith Factor in American Politics (Dallas: Word Publishing, 1994)Google Scholar. The composite narrative offered in Section II will be taken primarily from these authors, who have played a critical role in the rise of the Christian right as a political movement.

3. Transcript of Nagin's remarks in The Times-Picayune (New Orleans), Tuesday, January 17, 2006.

4. The church's response to Katrina appears on its website, http://www.godhatesfags.com. Westboro's practice of protesting at the funerals of American servicepersons killed in Iraq, while holding signs declaring “Thank God for Dead Soldiers,” brought the rhetoric of divine punishment to a new level of public scrutiny during the first decade of the twenty-first century, leading to legislative action and even an inventive counter protest, in which members of a Vietnam Veterans' motorcycle group provided a human barrier to allow the funerals to proceed uninterrupted. See “Outrage at Funderal Protests Pushes Lawmakers to Act,” New York Times April 17, 2006.

5. See the summary of these interpretations, and references for each, at www.religioustolerance.org/tsunami04h.htm

6. The two classic treatments of the jeremiad's deep roots in the American tradition are Bercovitch, Sacvan, The American Jeremiad (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978)Google Scholar; and Miller, Perry, The New England Mind: From Colony to Province (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1953)Google Scholar. As will become clear in the next section, I am offering a related, though somewhat more generic, definition. I elaborate both the theoretical and historical elements of this argument in my forthcoming Prodigal Nation: Moral Decline and Divine Punishment from New England to 9-11 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).

7. These two particular jeremiads have been chosen purposively. In response to their critics, who often voice skepticism about the appropriateness of religious rhetoric in American politics, such leaders as Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell frequently point to the ways in which abolitionists, and later Lincoln, wove together their religious and political commitments in ways that strengthened rather than threatened American democracy. The jeremiad, I mentioned above, draws its rhetorical strength from an engagement with founders and founding virtues, and Lincoln is often considered an “honorary founder” for his role in rearticulating a sense of national purpose in the nation's most endangered hour. Lincoln is often considered the nation's most religiously profound — if unorthodox — president, and will serve not only as a useful counterpoint to this consideration of the Christian Right, but also as a worthwhile case study in his own right. It has been suggested to me that, in some sense, pitting Lincoln and Douglass against Falwell and Robertson is not a “fair fight” in terms of the historical significance and profundity of their thought. Fair enough. My point, though, as will become clear in the concluding section, is to have these two pairs of critics stand in for two larger ways of thinking about the American past, present, and future.

8. Bennett, William, The Index of Leading Cultural Indicators: American Society at the End of the 20th Century, revised and expanded edition (New York: Waterbrook Press, 2000)Google Scholar; Putnam, Robert D., Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Bellah, Robert et al. , Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985)Google Scholar.

9. See my “Augustine and the Rhetoric of Roman Decline,” History of Political Thought 26: 4 (2005), 586–606; and “Environmentalism and the Recurrent Rhetoric of Decline,” Environmental Ethics 25: 1 (Spring 2003), 79–98; also Spengler, Oswald, The Decline of the West, 2 vols. (New York: Knopf, 1929–1936)Google Scholar.

10. The classic account is Tuveson, Ernest, Redeemer Nation: The Idea of America's Millennial Role (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1968)Google Scholar; see also Hughes, Robert T., Myths America Lives By (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002)Google Scholar; and Hatch, Nathan O., The Sacred Cause of Liberty: Republican Thought and the Millennium in Revolutionary New England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977)Google Scholar.

11. Blight, David W. sees the rhetoric of chosenness as “a central unifying myth of nineteenth-century America” (Frederick Douglass' Civil War: Keeping Faith in Jubilee [Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1989], 104)Google Scholar.

12. See Coutu, Richard, “Narrative, Free Space, and Political Leadership in Social Movements,” Journal of Politics 55 (1993), 57–79CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13. The moral decline-divine punishment narrative represents a particularly salient version of cultural politics in the American tradition; for the best recent treatment of this phenomenon, see Leege, David C., Wald, Kenneth D., Krueger, Brian S., and Mueller, Paul D., The Politics of Cultural Difference: Social Change and Voter Mobilization Strategies in the Post-New Deal Period (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002)Google Scholar.

14. The attention to narrative among political scientists is a specific example of a more general explosion of interest in narrative across the humanities and social sciences: for overviews, see Kreiswirth, Martin, “Trusting the Tale: The Narrativist Turn in the Human Sciences,” New Literary History 23 (1992), 629–657CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15. Dienstag, Joshua, Dancing in Chains: Narrative and Memory in Political Theory (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 3Google Scholar.

16. Morone, , Hellfire Nation: The Politics of Sin in American History (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003)Google Scholar; Foner, Eric, The Story of American Freedom (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999)Google Scholar.

17. MacIntyre, After Virtue, 216, 213.

18. Polkinghorne, Narrative Knowing, 18–19.

19. Kerby, Anthony Paul, Narrative and the Self (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991), 53–56Google Scholar.

20. Stephen Crites, “The Narrative Quality of Experience,” in Why Narrative?, 69–71.; Gutterman, Prophetic Politics.

21. Fulford, Robert, The Triumph of Narrative (New York: Broadway Books, 1999), 14Google Scholar; also Polkinghorne, Narrative Knowing, 11. see also Kermode, Frank, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967)Google Scholar, ch. 1; and Cronon, William, “A Place for Stories: Nature, History, and Narrative,” Journal of American History 78 (1992), 1349CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22. Toolan, Michael J., Narrative: A Critical Linguistic Introduction (London and New York: Routledge, 1988), 3Google Scholar.

23. White, Hayden, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), ch. 1Google Scholar.

24. Cronon, “A Place for Stories,” 1350.

25. Kort, Wesley A., Narrative Elements and Religious Meaning (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1975), 62Google Scholar.

26. Each of these jeremiads has occasioned its own rich secondary literature. There is simply not the space to engage that literature fully, and in this paper I will limit myself largely to the basic primary source material necessary to illustrate the shape of the narratives under consideration. A forthcoming study Prodigal Nation situates these and other jeremiads into their historical context and engages with larger issues.

27. For just a sampling of a voluminous literature, see Hunter, James Davison, Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America (New York: Basic, 1991)Google Scholar; and Green, John, Rozell, Mark, and Wilcox, Clyde, The Religious Right in American Politics: Marching Toward the Millenium (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2003)Google Scholar. An intriguing ethnographic lens on Jerry Falwell's emergence as a bridge between American evangelicalism and fundamentalism is found in Harding, Susan Friend, The Book of Jerry Falwell: Fundamentalist Language and Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000)Google Scholar.

28. For just one of these premature reports of demise, see D'Antonio, Michael, Fall from Grace: The Failed Crusade of the Christian Right (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992)Google Scholar. A more nuanced understanding of the appeal of the Christian Right is presented by Hopson, Ronald E. and Smith, Donald R., “Changing Fortunes: An Analysis of Christian Right Ascendance within American Political Discourse,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 38: 1 (March 1999), 1–13CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

29. Dobson, Edward, “The Bible, Politics, and Democracy,” in The Bible, Politics, and Democracy, ed. Neuhaus, Richard John (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1987), 3Google Scholar.

30. Neuhaus, The Naked Public Square, 140. See also Glazer, Nathan, “Fundamentalism: A Defensive Offensive,” `in Piety and Politics: Evangelicals and Fundamentalists Confront the World, ed. Neuhaus, Richard John and Cromartie, Michael (Washington, DC: Ethics and Public Policy Center/University Press of America, 1987)Google Scholar.

31. Listen, America!, 183; Falwell, , “Future-Word: An Agenda for the Eighties,” in The Fundamentalist Phenomenon: The Resurgence of Conservative Christianity, ed. Falwell, Jerry, with Dobson, Ed and Hinson, Ed (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1981), 203Google Scholar.

32. America Can Be Saved!, 118.

33. Listen, America!, 123. Later in the same volume, Falwell offered his view that contemporary feminism is driven by a small number of women who never accepted their God-given roles (150).

34. Robertson, Pat, America's Dates with Destiny (Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1986), ch. 19Google Scholar.

35. Robertson, The Turning Tide, 113.

36. Listen, America!, 179; 253–254. See also The Fundamentalist Phenomenon, 188.

37. Naked Public Square, 102. See also Neuhaus, “What the Fundamentalists Want,” in Piety and Politics, 16–18; and Edward Dobson, “The Bible, Politics, and Democracy,” 3–4.

38. Reed, , “What do Religious Conservatives Really Want?” in Disciples and Democracy: Religious Conservatives and the Future of American Politics, ed. Cromartie, Michael (Washington, DC/Grand Rapids, MI: Ethics and Public Policy Center/Eerdmans, 1994), 6Google Scholar; also Reed, Politically Incorrect, ch. 3.

39. Reed, “What do Religious Conservatives Really Want?”, 3.

40. Prominent Americans who did not live during the founding era, such as Abraham Lincoln or Daniel Webster (or prominent foreigners like Tocqueville, who contributed to American self-understandings), often receive a kind of “honorary” founder status for their role in articulating national purpose at key moments in the national life.

41. America Can Be Saved!, 21–2; Listen, America!, 30–34. See also Pat Robertson, America's Dates with Destiny, chs. 1–3; and Robertson, The Ten Offenses (Nashville: Integrity Publishers), 2–7.

42. Listen, America!, 29.

43. See Hamburger, Philip, Separation of Church and State (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2002)Google Scholar.

44. Reed, Politically Incorrect, 77, 78.

45. Listen, America!, 58–60; The Fundamentalist Phenomenon, 187.

46. Robertson, , The Turning Tide: The Fall of Liberalism and the Rise of Common Sense (Dallas: Word Publishing, 1993), 112–113Google Scholar.

47. See Lienesch, Michael, Redeeming America: Piety and Politics in the New Christian Right (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1993)Google Scholar; but cf. also Smith, Christian, Christian America? What Evangelicals Really Want (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000)Google Scholar.

48. Carpenter, Joel A., Revive Us Again: The Reawakening of American Fundamentalism (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997)Google Scholar; The Fundamentalist Phenomenon, chs. 4, 5.

49. Reed, Politically Incorrect, 33–34.

50. Listen, America!, 16.

51. Turning Tide, 294.

52. Johnson, Paul, “The Almost-Chosen People: Why America is Different,” in Unsecular America, ed. Neuhaus, Richard John (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1986), 6, also 9–12Google Scholar. See also Johnson, , “God and the Americans,” Commentary January 1995, 31Google Scholar: Johnson argues that the young American republic was “religious not necessarily in its forms but in its bones” (31).

53. William J. Bennett, “Religious Belief and the Constitutional Order,” in Piety and Politics, 366.

54. Lincoln, Holy Terrors, 38.

55. Carpenter, Revive Us Again, 3–6; and passim.

56. Contrast, for example, the account of the American experience one finds in Eck, A New Religious America. For a comparable account, which would take issue with monolithic claims about Christian hegemony in the American past, see Schmidt, Restless Souls.

57. Contrast, for example, Mohr, Richard D., The Long Arc of Justice: Lesbian and Gay Marriage, Equality, and Rights (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Richards, David A. J., The Case for Gay Rights: From Bowers to Lawrence and Beyond (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2005)Google Scholar.

58. Reed, Politically Incorrect, 36. See also: “This is a Christian nation” (Falwell, America Can Be Saved!, 23); “[T]he changes of the last half-century have had disastrous consequences for the nation” (Robertson, The Turning Tide, 168).

59. Contrast Douglass's reaction to Lincoln's first inaugural (“How sadly have the times changed, not only since the days of Madison — the days of the Constitution — but since the days even of Daniel Webster. Cold and dead as that great bad man was to the claims of humanity, he was not sufficiently removed from the better days of the Republic to claim, as Mr. Lincoln does, that the surrender of fugitive slaves is a plain requirement of the Constitution”) with his enthusiasm for the Second, which he called “a sacred effort.” See Douglass, , “The Inaugural Address” [April 1861], in The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, ed Foner, Philip S. (New York: International Publishers, 1950), III: 77–78Google Scholar; and his remarks on the Second Inaugural as reported in Reminisces of Abraham Lincoln by Distinguished Men of his Time, ed. Allen Thorndike Rice (New York: North American Review, 1888), 192–193.

60. “The Blood of the Slave on the Skirts of the Northern People,” Life and Writings, I: 347; see also idem, “Lecture on Slavery, No. 2” [Rochester, 8 December 1850], Life and Writings, I: 141.

61. “‘A House Divided’: Speech at Springfield, Illinois” [16 June 1858], Collected Works, II: 461–469.

62. “Change of Opinion Announced” [reprinted in The Liberator, 23 May 1851], Life and Writings, II: 155.

63. “The Fourth of July and the Negro” [Rochester, 4 July 1852], Life and Writings, II: 185.

64. “The Slaveholders' Rebellion” [Himrods Corners, NY, 4 July 1862], Life and Writings, III: 248.

65. “The Proclamation and a Negro Army” [Cooper Institute, NYC, Feb 1863; Douglass's Monthly, March 1863], Life and Writings, 322–323. See also Blight, David W., “Frederick Douglass and the American Apocalypse,” Civil War History 31 (1985): 309–328CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

66. “Speech at Springfield, Illinois [26 June 1857]”, Collected Works, II: 405–406.

67. “First Debate with Stephen A. Douglas at Ottawa, Illinois” [21 August 1858], Collected Works, III: 18. Douglass also argued that the founders expected the “speedy downfall of slavery”: see “The Present and Future of the Colored Race in America” [Church of the Puritans, NYC, May 1863], Life and Writings, III: 354.

68. “Address at Cooper Institute, New York City” [27 February 1860], Collected Works, III: 535. See also Holzer, Harold, Lincoln at Cooper Union: The Speech that Made Lincoln President (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004)Google Scholar.

69. “To Henry L. Pierce and others” [6 April 1859], Collected Works, III: 376.

70. “Speech at Bloomington, Illinois” [4 September 1858], in Collected Works, III: 89.

71. “Gettysburg Address” [19 November 1863], Collected Works, VII: 23.

72. The notable quotation in which Lincoln charged “Stephen, Franklin, Roger and James” with conspiring to nationalize slavery appears in Lincoln's 1854 Peoria speech; it reentered the political fray during the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858; see Lincoln, Collected Works, III: 20.

73. “The Kansas-Nebraska Bill” [speech, Chicago, Nov 1854], Life and Writings, II: 317.

74. “The Present and Future of the Colored Race in America” [speech at Church of the Puritans, NYC, May 1863], Life and Writings, III: 205; “The Future of the Negro People of the Slave States” [Emancipation League, Tremont Temple, Boston, 12 Feb 1862], Life and Writings, III: 213.

75. “The Union and How to Save It” [Feb 1861], Life and Writings, III: 64.

76. “The End of all Compromises with Slavery — Now and Forever” [Frederick Douglass' Paper, 26 May 1854], Life and Writings, II: 283. For the evolution of Douglass's political agendas at various points in his life, see Blight, Frederick Douglass' Civil War, passim.

77. “To James S. Wadsworth” [January 1864?], Collected Works, VII: 102; “Reply to Committee Notifying Lincoln of his Renomination” [9 June 1864], Collected Works, VII: 380; “Last Public Address” [11 April 1865], Collected Works, VIII: 399–405.

78. Douglass, “The Slaveholders' Rebellion” [Himrods Corners, NY, 4 July 1862]; Life and Writings, III: 248; Lincoln, “Address to the New Jersey Senate” [21 February 1861], Collected Works, IV: 235–236; Noll, , The Civil War as a Theological Crisis (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 89Google Scholar.

79. “Valedictory” [16 Aug 1863; Douglass' Monthly, Aug 1863], Life and Writings, III: 376.

80. “Address Before the Young Men's Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois” [27 January 1838], Collected Writings, II: 115; emphasis added.

81. Lincoln, Gettysburg Address.

82. Bellah, Robert N., Madsen, Richard, Sullivan, William M., and Swidler, Ann, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (New York: Harper and Row, 1985)Google Scholar; Putnam, Bowling Alone; Etzioni, The Spirit of Community.

83. For a similar argument directed particularly at Bellah and communitarians, see Yack, Bernard, “Liberalism and Its Communitarian Critics: Does Liberal Practice ‘Live Down’ to Liberal Theory?”, in Community in America: The Challenge of Habits of the Heart, ed. Reynolds, C.H. and Norman, R.V. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 147–169Google Scholar.

84. Wolin, “Contract and Birthright,” 183.

85. See Richards, David A. J., Identity and the Case for Gay Rights: Race, Gender, Religion as Analogies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999)Google Scholar; and Nash, Roderick Frazier, The Rights of Nature: A History of Environmental Ethics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989)Google Scholar.

86. One thinks, here, of Rawls's invocation of the “fact of oppression” in Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 37. A denial of the fact of oppression, I think, betrays either a fundamental misreading of the contemporary social landscape or a more dangerous willingness to impose uniformity on a diverse populace.

87. Hunter, Culture Wars. For critical perspectives on the culture wars thesis, see Wolfe, Alan, One Nation After All: What Middle-Class Americans Really Think About God, Country, Family, Racism, Welfare, Immigration, Homosexuality, Work, the Right, the Left, and Each Other (New York: Viking, 1998)Google Scholar; Fiorina, Morris P., Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America (New York: Longman, 2004)Google Scholar.

88. See, e.g., Scalia, Antonin, A Matter of Interpretation: Federal Courts and the Law (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998)Google Scholar; Breyer, Stephen, Active Liberty: Interpreting Our Democratic Constitution (New York: Vintage, 2006)Google Scholar.

89. Higham, , Hanging Together: Unity and Diversity in American Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. chs. 5–7; Hollinger, , Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism (New York: Basic, 1995)Google Scholar. For a fuller argument about the need for capacious, progressive jeremiads in contemporary American public life, see my A Prodigal People, ch. 8.