As in the Old Testament, harbingers of decline were greeted by claims that Puritans had strayed from the path of righteousness and would be destroyed by the wrath of God. After 1660 preachers wrote Jeremiads with the message that New England must repent for having strayed from God’s path and from the high achievements of the founding fathers. God will not long tolerate so profligate a people. “What shall I do with such a stiff-necked race?”
The Puritan Revolution in England
The first clash took place in England. … The effort to abolish absolute power in the temporal sphere and in the intellectual sphere, that is the meaning of the English revolution, that is its role in the development of our civilization.
François Guizot[552]
The Tudor period and the creation of the Church of England eclipsed the power of the Church, but the events unleashed by this upheaval resulted in a far more radical revolution in English political culture in the seventeenth century: the rise of the Puritans and the eventual eclipse of the aristocracy. Thomas Tombs labels the period from 1500–1700 encompassing the Reformation, the English Civil War, and the Glorious Revolution as “the Great Divide”—a watershed in English history.[553] Likewise, Andrew Fraser perceives the Puritan revolution as a fundamental break in English history. It resulted in “a radically new social character” that resulted in the “embourgeoisement of English elites.”[554]
The radicalism of the Puritan Revolution was that it eventually destroyed the old tri-partite Indo-European order based on domination of a military elite. This revolution was far more radical than that whereby Christianity destroyed the pagan gods of Old Europe because it “flattened the foundational myths of the trifunctional social order characteristic of all Indo-European peoples.[555] The Puritan Revolution and its aftermath eventually ended the Indo-European world and its Christian version: the king and aristocracy (“those who fought bellatores”), the Church (“those who prayed, oratores”), and the commoners (“those who worked, laboratores”).[556]
It was thus the quintessential modern revolution, and because of the rise of Britain into a dominant world power, it was a fundamental break in the history of the West. It marked the beginning of the end of aristocratic individualism with its strong emphasis on hierarchy between social categories and the beginning of the rise of egalitarian individualism with its ideology of social leveling and parliamentary democracy—blended with capitalism and wealth accumulation.
For the Puritans, the Civil War was framed in religious terms with a strong dose of millenarianism—the first of many Puritan-inspired holy wars aimed at achieving the millennium of peace and virtue. Flags for the parliamentary side had “aggressively religious themes,” with “anti-papist designs and Old Testament mottos such as ‘Aflame with love for Sion’ or ‘Thou shalt break them with a rod of iron.’”[557] After achieving power, Oliver Cromwell attacked Spain, “the perfect target for a holy war, the enemy of ‘whatsoever is of God’, involving ‘all the wicked people of the world, whether abroad or at home.’”[558]
The revolution, although begun in England, was slow to reach its completion there, whereas in the United States, “as a consequence of the Civil War, the absolute hegemony of the leveling, acquisitive and utilitarian society pioneered by the Puritan Revolution was firmly entrenched.”[559] The new order was far more egalitarian than the older order. Congregations elected their ministers, who served at their pleasure. Whereas war had been the province of the nobility, Cromwell’s New Model Army was based on citizen participation.
It was also profoundly spiritual and created enormous energy—energy that was eventually characterized far more by capitalist financial concerns than religious spirituality. “Possessive individualism” and “tasteful consumption” eventually came to define the highest expression of Anglo-Saxon character and culture. The government of England and other Anglo-Saxon areas became dominated by commercial and financial interests.
However, from the point of view of the new order, the revolution had succeeded in overthrowing an oppressive system. When the intellectuals of the new order looked at the English past, they did not see a social order of liberty and reciprocity. Rather, Whig historians saw the Middle Ages as oppressive, that people had no share in the government and the vast majority were the villeins, vassals, or bondsmen of their lords.[560]
The Puritan Revolution in the United States
In the United States, the Puritan revolution was carried to its extreme, and again we see strong millenarian tendencies. Freed of the hereditary aristocracy and religion of England, during the Jacksonian era “the few remaining conservative influences in religion, politics, and law” were swept aside.[561] The result was an exultant radical individualism in which every person was to have direct, unmediated access to God. This radical individualism distrusted all manifestations of corporate power, including chartered private corporations. However, the corporations established by the heirs of Puritanism, referred to as WASPs (White Anglo-Saxon Protestants) in the following, eventually metastasized into monsters “incapable of preserving either the class boundaries of the bourgeoisie or the ethnic character of the Anglo-American nation as a whole.”[562] In the hands of recent and contemporary Anglo-Saxons, the modern business corporation is analogous to the “proposition nation” concept: merely a concatenation of contracts, with no ethnic character, although Fraser is quick to note that corporations dominated by other groups do not lose their ethnic character. As noted in Chapter 2, oath-bound contracts were a central feature of Indo-European culture.
The Puritan-energized egalitarian tendencies eventually ended the aristocratic, Indo-European-derived social order of the Old South. The triumph of the North in the Civil War meant that the U.S. was even further removed from its Indo-European roots than before.
The result of Lincoln’s victory was that limits on federal power “were swept aside by executive decree and military might. By crushing the southern states, Lincoln fatally weakened the federal principle; his arbitrary exercise of emergency powers laid the foundations for executive dictatorship whenever exceptional circumstances justify the suspension of constitutional liberties.[563]
Nineteenth-Century Puritan-Inspired
Intellectual Trends: Secular Versions of Moral Utopianism
An interesting feature of Puritanism is the tendency to pursue utopian causes framed as moral issues—their susceptibility to utopian appeals to a “higher law” and the belief that the principal purpose of government is moral (see Chapter 7 for a psychological analysis of moral idealism). New England was the most fertile ground for “the perfectability of man creed,” and the “father of a dozen ‘isms.’”[564] There was a tendency to paint political alternatives as starkly contrasting moral imperatives, with one side portrayed as evil incarnate—inspired by the devil. Puritan moral intensity can also be seen in their “profound personal piety”[565]—their intensity of commitment to live not only a holy life, but also a sober and industrious life.
Whereas in the Puritan settlements of Massachusetts the moral fervor was directed at keeping fellow Puritans in line, in the nineteenth century it was secularized and directed at the entire country. The moral fervor that had inspired Puritan preachers and magistrates to rigidly enforce laws on fornication, adultery, sleeping in church, or criticizing preachers was universalized and aimed at correcting the perceived ills of capitalism and slavery.
Puritans waged holy war on behalf of moral righteousness even against their own cousins—quite possibly a form of altruistic punishment given the sacrifices of closely related peoples on both sides of the Civil War. Whatever the political and economic complexities that led to the Civil War, it was the Yankee moral condemnation of slavery that inspired and justified the massive carnage of closely related Anglo-Americans on behalf of slaves from Africa. Militarily, the war with the Confederacy was the greatest sacrifice in lives and property ever made by Americans.[566] Puritan moral fervor and punitiveness are also evident in the call of the Congregational
ist minister at Henry Ward Beecher’s Old Plymouth Church in New York during World War II for “exterminating the German people ... the sterilization of 10,000,000 German soldiers and the segregation of the woman.”[567]
Ernest Tuveson notes that the moralistic, idealistic strand of American thought tends to come to the fore in times of crisis—“the expansionist period, the Civil War, the First World War.”[568] After the evil has been vanquished, the rhetoric dies down, and disillusionment may occur as people realize that evil has not, after all, been extirpated.[569] However, it lurks in the background and may revive in times of crisis. “Yet, despite post-Civil War disillusionment, the myth of the Redeemer Nation kept a hold on the deepest feelings of the country, and in critical moments asserted itself,”[570] citing several speeches of Woodrow Wilson: “America had the infinite privilege of fulfilling her destiny and saving the world.”[571]
Transcendentalism as a Movement of
Puritan-Descended Intellectuals
Philip Gura’s American Transcendentalism provides a valuable account of the Transcendentalists as a nineteenth-century intellectual elite in the United States whose characteristics can be traced to their Puritan origins; they created what we would recognize today as a culture of the left—utopian, idealistic, and moralistic.[572] This is of considerable interest because Transcendentalism was a movement entirely untouched by the predominantly Jewish milieu of the twentieth-century left in America.[573] Rather, it was homegrown, and its story tells us much about the sensibility of an important group of White intellectuals and perhaps gives us hints about why in the twentieth-century the WASP establishment so easily became replaced by a new Jewish elite.
Based in New England, Transcendentalism was closely associated with Harvard and Boston—the very heart of Puritan New England. It was also closely associated with Unitarianism which was an offshoot of the original Puritan Congregationalists and which had become the most common religious affiliation for Boston’s elite. Many Transcendentalists were Unitarian clergymen, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, the person whose name is most closely associated with the movement in the public mind.
These were very intelligent people living in an age when religious beliefs required an intellectual defense rather than blind obedience. Their backgrounds were typical of New England Christians of the day. But as their intellectual world expanded (often at the Harvard Divinity School), they became aware of the “higher criticism” of the Bible that originated with German scholars. This scholarship showed that there were several different authors of Genesis and that Moses did not write the first five books of the Old Testament. They also became aware of other religions, such as Buddhism and Hinduism which made it unlikely that Christianity had a monopoly on religious truth. If the higher criticism implied that the foundations of religious belief were shaky, and if God was unlikely to have endowed Christianity with unique religious truths, the Transcendentalists would build new foundations emphasizing the subjectivity of religious experience.
In their search for an intellectual grounding of religion, they rejected the empiricism of John Locke which conceptualized the human mind as passively reacting to environmental events, turning instead to the idealism of Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Schelling, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, based on the idea of an active, creative mind able to envision ideal worlds and pursue them into reality. As the writer and political activist Orestes Brownson summed it up in 1840, Transcendentalism defended man’s “capacity of knowing truth intuitively [and] attaining scientific knowledge of an order of existence transcending the reach of the senses [the program of the empiricists], and of which we can have no sensible experience.”[574] Everyone, from birth, possesses a divine element, and the mind has “innate principles, including the religious sentiment.”[575]
The intuitions of the Transcendentalists were decidedly egalitarian and universalist. “Universal divine inspiration—grace as the birthright of all—was the bedrock of the Transcendentalist movement.”[576] Ideas of God, morality, and immortality are part of human nature and do not have to be learned. This is the spiritual equivalent of the democratic ideal that all men (and women) are created equal.
Intuitions are by their very nature slippery things. One could just as plausibly (or, in my view, more plausibly) propose that humans have intuitions of greed, lust, power, and ethnocentrism—precisely the view of the Darwinians who came along later in the century and rose to predominance in the early twentieth century. In the context of the philosophical milieu of Transcendentalism, their intuitions were not intended to be open to empirical investigation. Their truth was obvious and compelling—a fact that tells us much about the religious milieu of the movement.
Besides rejecting empiricism as the basis of knowledge, the Transcendentalists rejected materialism with its emphasis on “facts, history, the force of circumstance and the animal wants of man.”[577] Fundamentally, they did not want to explain human history or society, and they certainly would have been unimpressed by a Darwinian view of human nature that emphasizes such nasty realities as competition for power and resources and how these play out given the exigencies of history. Rather, they adopted a utopian vision of humans as able to transcend all that by means of the God-given spiritual powers of the human mind.
Not surprisingly, this philosophy led many Transcendentalists to become deeply involved in social activism on behalf of the lower echelons of society—the poor, prisoners, the insane, the developmentally disabled, and—most critically—slaves in the South.
Prominent Transcendentalists
The following examples give a flavor of some of the central attitudes and typical social activism of important Transcendentalists.
Orestes Brownson (1803–1876). Brownson admired the Universalists’ belief in the inherent dignity of all people and the promise of eventual universal salvation for all believers. He argued “for the unity of races and the inherent dignity of each person, and he lambasted Southerners for trying to enlarge their political base.”[578] Like many New Englanders, he was outraged by the Supreme Court decision in the Dred Scott case that required authorities in the North to return fugitive slaves to their owners in the South. For Brownson the Civil War was a moral crusade waged not only to preserve the union, but to emancipate the slaves. Writing in 1840, Brownson claimed that we should “realize in our social arrangements and in the actual conditions of all men that equality of man and man” that God had established but which had been destroyed by capitalism.[579] According to Brownson, Christians had
to bring down the high, and bring up the low; to break the fetters of the bound and set the captive free; to destroy all oppression, establish the reign of justice, which is the reign of equality, between man and man; to introduce new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness, wherein all shall be as brothers, loving one another, and no one possessing what another lacketh.[580]
George Ripley (1802–1880). Ripley founded the utopian community of Brook Farm and was an important literary critic, “preach[ing] in earnest Unitarianism’s central message, a belief in universal, internal religious principle that validated faith and united all men and women.”[581] He wrote that Transcendentalists “believe in an order of truths which transcends the sphere of the external senses. Their leading idea is the supremacy of mind over matter.” Religious truth does not depend on facts or tradition but inheres in every human—clearly a universalist vision.
[Religious truth] has an unerring witness in the soul. There is a light, they believe, which enlighteneth every man that cometh into the world; there is a faculty in all, the most degraded, the most ignorant, the most obscure, to perceive spiritual truth, when distinctly represented; and the ultimate appeal, on all moral questions, is not to a jury of scholars, a hierarchy of divines, or the prescriptions of a creed, but to the common sense of the race.[582]
Ripley founded the ill-fated Brook Farm on the principle of substituting “brotherly cooperation” for “selfish competition.”[583] His creation was a
paradigmatic transcendentalist project—developing a utopian society on the basis of reason and moral intuitions. He questioned the economic and moral basis of capitalism, and held that if people did the work they desired, and for which they had a talent, the result would be a non-competitive, classless society where each person would achieve personal fulfillment.
Amos Bronson Alcott (1799–1888). Alcott was an educator who “believed in the innate goodness of each child whom he taught.”[584] He “realized how Unitarianism’s positive and inclusive vision of humanity accorded with his own.”[585] He advocated strong social controls in order to socialize children: infractions were reported to the entire group of students, and the entire group was punished for the bad behavior of a single student—a remnant, perhaps, of Puritan collectivism. His students were the children of the intellectual elite of Boston, but his methods eventually proved unpopular. The school closed after most of the parents withdrew their children when Alcott insisted upon admitting a Black child, indicating that although the transcendentalists formed an antislavery intellectual elite, their ideas were not necessarily popular with the public. Alcott supported William Garrison’s radical abolitionism, and he was a financial supporter of John Brown and his violent attempts to overthrow slavery.
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