How to Love All of America
There’s something about the Puritans. I don’t descend from them—my father’s people are mostly Borderers—but I love them nonetheless. I love the early Puritan call to “loue one another with a pure hearte feruently.” I love the later neo-Puritan (Unitarian) call to “hush the noise, ye men of strife, / And hear the angels sing!” I love Sullivan Ballou’s letter to his wife. I love the large Puritan families of the early colonial period and their hardy and hard-earned faith. I love an old New England town common, burying ground, or obscure biblical name. I even love Not-so-fair Harvard.
I love the Puritans. The greatest among them number among the greatest Americans and Christians. But—hear me out—they weren’t perfect. The Puritans—more broadly, the English Dissenters (on both sides of the pond)—had their distinctive imperfections. And unless we understand those imperfections, we can’t understand America’s past, present, or possible futures.
Stop Puritan Hate?
Recently, the Puritans re-entered the Xitter discourse, and Timon Cline re-shared his American Mind salvo chastising the Puritan chastisers. Among other things, Cline criticizes Noah Rothman’s argument for a “notable connection between the progressive, social justice Left, the new Puritans, and the old Puritans.” Cline concludes, “Puritanism as a punchline, epithet, and pejorative should find no comfort on the Right, unless we hate our fathers and, by extension, ourselves.”
Filial piety, which encompasses national piety, certainly calls for reverence of our national forefathers. But our duties to our descendants—and to the truth—require honest examination of our forefathers’ shortcomings. There’s something about the Puritans, and that something is an undeniably mixed bag. We shouldn’t hate them (or the Quakers, or the Borderers, or the Cavaliers, or anyone else). But neither should we venerate them uncritically.
The Puritan Hypothesis
Properly understood, the Puritan hypothesis has nothing to do with the contemporary anti-Americanism which Cline rightly criticizes. Instead, it is a historical hypothesis about the theologico-political trajectory of the Puritans, Quakers, Levellers, Diggers, Fifth Monarchists, and other early English Dissenters—many of whom settled New England in particular—which posits a special connection between Puritanism and later Progressivism. Like it or not, the early Dissenters and their descendants—both biological and ideological—have always had a discernible radicalizing and equalizing streak (often reflected in their ecclesiology). Understanding that streak goes a long way towards understanding America itself.
Don’t take my word for it. Look up Gerrard Winstanley, John Lilburne, Tom Paine, the Public Universal Friend, William Godwin, George Ripley, John Humphrey Noyes, Theodore Parker, William Lloyd Garrison, John Brown, Lydia Maria Child, Mary White Ovington, or John Dewey—to name a few. Study the history of abolitionism, Unitarianism, utopian socialism, the Social Gospel movement, the temperance movement, women’s suffrage, and other social and theological movements in the Anglo-American world through the mid-twentieth century. Chart out the course of such institutions as Harvard College, the First Church in Boston, Jeremiah Wright’s Trinity United Church of Christ, and the Conway Hall Ethical Society. Read Hume, Mill, Carlyle, and others (including many Southerners) who observed the Dissenters’ eschaton-immanentizing streak long before I or Noah Rothman was born. Once you notice it, you can’t un-notice it.
What explains this streak? I myself am inclined towards a broadly biocultural—not merely theological—explanation. After all, the Dissenters have always been among the WEIRDest of the WEIRD. Regardless, what cannot be denied—and what all lovers of America must reckon with—is that the Puritans and other Dissenters, for all their brilliance and holiness, have always had a disproportionate radicalizing bent. To borrow Davidson’s words, American Progressivism’s American ancestry must be “traced out on the northern side of the Potomac.”
A Model of American Charity
What then? Herein are four things to be propounded:
1. The Puritans and their descendants cannot be excised from the American story. Neither can the Cavaliers and their descendants. To love America is to love America from sea to shining sea and from latitude to shining latitude—North, South, and West.
2. To love America is to love America’s oldest folkways—not merely certain abstract political ideals. Accordingly, to love America is to cherish various sectional or regional American loyalties. America cannot flourish unless these loyalties are nurtured and reciprocally honored.
3. Chesterton: “Love is not blind; that is the last thing that it is. Love is bound; and the more it is bound the less it is blind.” To love America is to seek to understand America’s blemishes and sins—not to condemn her but to make her more beautiful. We cannot overlook the errors of our Puritan and other forefathers. They in their wisdom would never advise us to.
4. We love America in vain if we do not synthesize the best of her conflicting political traditions—Northern and Southern, Anti-Federalist and Federalist, Jeffersonian and Hamiltonian, even (I daresay) Patriot and Loyalist. None of these traditions were perfect, just as none of our forefathers were perfect. We must learn from all of them. As Lanier understood, the present moment calls not only for “antique sinew” but also for “modern art.” True filial piety does not merely recapitulate what has come before. It faithfully and lovingly builds something better upon it.
