How Firm a Foundation: Puritanism as the Wellspring of American Freedom

Strong arguments for the role of faith in preserving freedom can be made from both philosophy and logic. But as Western society loses its cultural bearings, the ground rules for philosophy are breaking down. What is self-evident to one intellectual is absurd to another. Many people appear weary of logic. Tell a modern atheist that he must believe either in an eternal universe (contrary to the evidence of science he claims to cherish) or in a self-creating universe (a paradox at best), and he will just shrug his shoulders and say, “No.” For such folks the whole arsenal of rational discourse is defused. It is not just an inability to argue such people into faith—which is always a tall order—but frequently an inability to cultivate in them even an ambiguous respect for the contributions of religion to our heritage. Karl Marx, for example, sat in the British library and wrote, “Religion is the opiate of the masses.” If only he had bothered to pick up a volume on seventeenth-century English history, he would have learned what an absurd proposition that is. And yet the philosophy he created has had—and continues to have—an enormous impact on the worldview of much of Western intelligentsia.¹ Though Marx’s economic prescriptions are largely discredited, the general attitude of the Western academy is still deeply, if ambiguously, influenced by his dismissal of religion. One such Western academic is Robert W. Fogel.

Robert Fogel was nurtured in some of the best of America’s elite academies. A disciple of Nobel laureate Simon Kuznets, Fogel went on to teach at Rochester University, Harvard, and, finally, the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business. Fogel was a ground-breaking economic historian who focused particularly on the economics of American slavery. When he began his work, he probably expected to confirm what had been the assumption ever since Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations: not only was slavery economically inefficient and doomed to self-destruction but it was the pursuit of indolent pseudo-aristocrats who loved lording over their fellow man. To Fogel’s surprise, however, he uncovered the opposite. Professor Fogel found that the morally reprehensible institution was fantastically profitable and efficient. It even frequently provided slaves with a higher standard of living than the average free, white farmer, while demanding less labor; it gave slaves a longer life span than most European or American city dwellers of the same period. Fogel concluded that it was not economic forces that brought about the end of slavery but a revolution in moral sentiment that had its roots in Puritanism. In his Nobel Prize–winning work on slavery, he chronicled how devoutly religious people campaigned to end an oppressive practice that mere economics would not have ended. He confessed to me his great surprise at this discovery. He recalled that he, like many of his generation, had absorbed Marx’s attitude toward religion with little thought. Prior to writing the book, Fogel, a leading scholar at some of America’s premier academic institutions, had never known the truth about what forces put an end to the greatest assault on liberty ever devised: slavery. Only those who looked beyond “what works” and the status quo could move society to aspire to ideals of universal freedom to which a transcendent source of authority beckoned them. That vision and that transcendent authority are found in religion.²

It was not a careful apologist, like C. S. Lewis with his winsome Mere Christianity, who reasoned Professor Fogel into a greater appreciation of the contributions of Christianity to America. It was historical fact. That history, I believe, is our greatest asset in a philosophically confused, logic-weary generation. As Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., is reported to have said, in another context, “Upon this point a page of history is worth a volume of logic.”³

Religion is central in American history—particularly in colonial American history—but through the whole of the nineteenth century as well. It is important that we get this history right. The Pilgrims and their Puritan brothers, for example, did not come to New England just to get away from religious tyranny in their homeland. Rather, they crossed “the rude waves” to be free to live out their religion to its fullest. Too often, their motivations are thought of as a one-dimensional quest to be free from religion when actually they longed to be free for religion. Increase Mather, the leading Puritan of the second generation of New England, wrote reverently:

John Winthrop, the first governor of Massachusetts, told the settlers while crossing the Atlantic that they were going to plant a “City upon a Hill.” The entire world was to be awed by the model of Christian charity they were going to build. And let our public schools leave no doubt that this new society was to be built, brick by brick, on the principles of Puritan faith. The historian Perry Miller called Puritan Massachusetts a “Bible Commonwealth.” Admittedly, even many of today’s devout believers may be cool to the intimate relationship enjoyed by church and state in seventeenth-century New England. The Southern Baptists, for example, have their roots in Puritanism but in a strand of Puritanism that criticized the way mainstream Puritans used the state to enforce doctrinal orthodoxy. To this day, these Baptists are ardent defenders of the separation of church and state. But enlightened Baptists do not mean by that phrase what it came to mean in the second half of the twentieth century: an active policy by all levels of government—federal to local—to force all expressions of religion, even the most ambiguous ones, out of public life. This was not what the first amendment—supported by most Baptists—was intended to do. Rather, the whole Puritan heritage, later to coalesce roughly into what we today call evangelicalism, sought to preserve governmental neutrality toward specific denominations. At the same time, they assumed that the government, especially on the state and local levels, would have a role to play in preserving public morals and generally encouraging religion. The famous New England revivalist of the early nineteenth century, Lyman Beecher, at first lamented the disestablishment of Connecticut’s Congregational church, in 1818; but as he mastered the voluntary society, he saw the great possibilities for “influence.” Beecher was determined that these societies would bring to bear as closely as possible the influence once exerted by the old establishment. Eventually, he came to believe that disestablishment was “the best thing that ever happened to the state of Connecticut” and that the ministers had actually gained influence.⁶ This meant that the biblical heritage that drove the Puritans across the Atlantic continued its role in shaping the common mind of America after the American Revolution and through the first third of the nineteenth century, at least. When a society is shaped by these values, even those individuals who are not particularly devout or orthodox, such as Benjamin Franklin or Abraham Lincoln, may be said to have been broadly shaped by them. Sociologist Talcott Parsons notes what happens when an ideology (or theology, in this case) influences a society over a length of time:

First in New England, then, after the Great Awakening, in the rest of America, the ethics, habits, and worldview of evangelicalism were arguably the dominant cultural forces. The evidence of history shows that it was anything but a mind-numbing opiate. It is not a coincidence that the freest nation in the world was also the most Christian.

While the Puritan quasi-theocracy had long since dissolved, Puritan values were spread further and deeper into American culture by what George Marsden calls “culturally aggressive New England Yankees.” Both Marsden and Fogel sketch a complicated, reflexive process in the first half of the nineteenth century in which Northern Protestants, at first battling each other for political dominance, eventually coalesced, joining Northern Baptists and Methodists in the new Republican Party.⁸ “The result,” says Marsden, “was that the Republican party had a strong Puritan-evangelical component, bent on regulating the society according to Christian principles.”⁹ The abolition of slavery was their first great goal and their greatest achievement. The war that became inevitable for this achievement is largely responsible for forging the American identity of a nation “of the people, by the people, for the people” that it projects to the world today.¹⁰

We must remember that the motivations for these strides in freedom did not come from some secular European Enlightenment philosophy but from devout Puritanism. Nearly a century and a half after the Puritans’ Great Migration, it was no accident that it was New England that first agitated to throw off Britain’s heavy yoke. The “City upon a Hill” was not an infantile stage of religious oppression but the foundation of American ideals—the wellspring of its best principles.¹¹ The Great Awakening, breaking out over a century after Winthrop’s Great Migration and only a generation before the American Revolution, was a reassertion of Puritan ideals. Many historians, such as Harvard’s Alan Heimert, have, in the last generation, seen that the Puritan revival commonly called the “Great Awakening” was pivotal in preparing the ground for the Revolution. Subsequent history was a progressive application of Puritan ethics, as revived and dispersed through the Great Awakening. Take slavery, for example. Although it is true that early Puritans did not necessarily object to having household slaves, they based this regrettable institution on economic necessity, not racism. According to the Puritans, an African slave may be one of the elect, so he should not be treated as if he does not have a soul that can be chosen by God.¹² On the other hand, Charles I, King of England, may be so lost as to deserve decapitation. A theology that teaches that slaves may be elect and kings may be reprobate is not a theology that becomes the opiate of the masses. In the later eighteenth century, Samuel Hopkins’s Puritan conscience, shaken by the brutal reality of the mass slave trade, helped light the fuse that led to emancipation. The age-old “peculiar institution” was ended, not by the European Enlightenment or by the seminal ideas of Greek philosophy but by evangelical Christianity.

Puritanism created principles of justice and individual rights—what Fogel terms egalitarianism—so convincing that generations of “enlightened” scoffers would assume they were self-evident. In fact, they were so sure of the self-evident nature of the dictates of “nature and nature’s God” that they proceeded to cut off the very limb on which they were sitting.¹³ Certainly, they believed they were improving the radically theocentric worldview of Puritanism by synthesizing it with humanistic sensitivities. But they could not see that their incessant scoffing at the transcendent authority of faith would eventually make all declarations of right and wrong seem absurd. The result of the advance of secularism and the laughing question, “Sez who?” to even the most reasonable ethical prescriptions was not more freedom. It has led us not to an “end of history” in which egalitarianism has triumphed but to the blood of Columbine and the presidential question as to the meaning of the word is.

The crisis now, as Os Guinness rightly observes, is a “crisis of cultural authority.”¹⁴ Today, Americans are feeling the shock of the realization that the “sensate system” they built is vacuous, insupportable, and, in the end, self-destructive. Ethics of any kind, including egalitarianism, makes no sense, holds little compelling power, creates no allegiance, and elicits little devotion without some kind of transcendent authority. Thomas Jefferson notwithstanding, no truths are “self-evident.” The illusion of a self-evident egalitarianism was created by an ideational system so powerful that it was able to permeate a culture and create social momentum that continued for generations—even centuries—after it, itself, had died. But the momentum is not perpetual. Even Max Weber could feel the air leaking from the Enlightenment bubble: “The rosy blush of [religious asceticism’s] laughing heir, the Enlightenment, seems also to be irretrievably fading.”¹⁵ As it continues to fade, various ideologies are fighting to fill the void. The great myth of religion as an opiate continues to keep sincere, intelligent Americans from looking to it as source of hope. But rather than boldly go to brave new worlds that promise—but fail to provide—new heights of egalitarianism and autonomy, America would do better to draw from the well of its own City upon a Hill.