Americanism as puritanism, once again

I know that this sequel to my earlier reflections comes too late to qualify for Joe Carter's contest, but I will not let that prevent me writing further on the subject of Puritanism and Americanism. Indeed, on second thought I think there may be something to David Gelernter's assertion that, far from disappearing from the scene, Puritanism became Americanism over time. Here is where the phenomenon of secularization plays a role.

My mentor at the Institute for Christian Studies, the late Dr. Bernard Zylstra, used to argue that there is an historical connection between the variety of Christianity dominating a country and the ideology it was likely to embrace after it became secularized. A secularized Christianity does not exactly cease to be Christian, even if it no longer retains an orthodox soteriology. Many of the old features remain and mutate into something different. However, the focus on God's sovereignty and redemption in Jesus Christ come to be supplanted by the assumption that we will in some fashion save ourselves.

According to Zylstra, those countries affected by the Reformation, with its emphasis on the priesthood of all believers and individual responsibility, in their post-secularization forms come to embrace individualistic liberalism, with its focus on individual liberty and social contract. Examples of this can be seen in Great Britain, the Netherlands and the United States, where individualism and the "rights talk" that accompanies it have been taken to the furthest degree. By contrast, those countries whose christian traditions are Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox are likely after secularization to embrace a more collectivistic ideology, such as socialism or nationalism. As the hold of a strongly institutionalized and hierarchical church on the people becomes weakened, its place is taken by highly centralized, dirigiste state. Those countries exemplifying this development would include Russia, France and post-1960s Québec.

To be sure, it's not an airtight thesis and one can easily think up counter-examples. Yet it is true that a country's dominant religious tradition can hardly refrain from having an impact of some sort on its political culture. With respect to America, one might say that that country's prevailing political culture is one of secularized puritanism, which amounts to an odd amalgam of individualistic liberalism and collectivistic nationalism. The old Puritan commonwealths in New England were definitely protestant, with all this implies for ecclesiology and the direct relationship of the individual believer to God. Believers were encouraged in this faith, with its highly personal focus, while at the same time they were deemed members of a "Citty upon a hill," to quote John Winthrop. This implied a singular focus on the community and its prerogatives. Failure to conform to this community placed one outside its boundaries, as Roger Williams and others discovered. Of course, all communities exist within boundaries, but there the political community acted very much as an ecclesial community, going so far as to excommunicate perceived dissidents from its confession.

Needless to say, Puritanism in its specific christian manifestation is indeed dead. But in its secularized form it lives on in the form of Gelernter's Americanism. Americanism calls for a confessional commitment to individual liberty and liberal democracy, but it does so in a way that makes this commitment a mark of membership in the national community. A mere birth certificate or passport is not sufficient, if belief in these ideals is not also present. Americanism is thus a form of nationalism. To be sure, it is not an ethnic nationalism like that held by many Greeks, Serbs and (at one time) Italians and Germans. But it goes well beyond the legitimate requirement of loyalty to one's political community and the land it occupies by requiring adherence to ideals with a genuine spiritual provenance. In this respect, Americanism functions as a civil religion. Although it is not as obviously oppressive and intolerant as Rousseau's vaunted civil religion, it does require a certain attenuation of the particularities intrinsic to any religious orthodoxy, including its spiritual core.

Of course, Americans are still great church-goers, unlike most Europeans and (perhaps) Canadians. Secularization in the US has not led to a decline in church attendance over the past half century, as it has in other western countries. However, that does not mean that secularization has not occurred there. Secularization is not limited to the pro-abortion Democratic Party or to the urbanized "blue" states that voted for Gore and Kerry in the last two presidential elections. Where devout church-goers in the "red" states persist in believing that their country enjoys a special covenantal relationship with God and that America is a "Citty upon a hill," a biblical worldview that recognizes the larger corpus Christi as "a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God's own people" (I Peter 2:9) has already been considerably weakened.