American Exceptionalism and Civil Religion

Reassessing the History of an Idea

John D. Wilsey

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780830899296
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Kirchengeschichte

Ever since John Winthrop told his fellow colonists in 1630 that they were about to establish a City upon a Hill, the idea of having a special place in history has captured the American imagination. Through centuries of crises and opportunities, many have taken up this theme to inspire the nation. But others have criticized the notion because it implies a sense of superiority which can fuel racism, warmongering and even idolatry. In this remarkable book, John Wilsey traces the historical development of exceptionalism, including its theological meaning and implications for civil religion. From seventeenth-century Puritans to twentieth-century industrialists, from politicians to educators, exceptionalism does not appear as a monolithic concept to be either totally rejected or devotedly embraced. While it can lead to abuses, it can also point to constructive civil engagement and human flourishing. This book considers historically and theologically what makes the difference. Neither the term nor the idea of American exceptionalism is going away. John Wilsey?s careful history and analysis will therefore prove an important touchstone for discussions of American identity in the decades to come.

1

The Origins of American Exceptionalism

Anglo-Americans . . . conceive a high opinion of their superiority and are not very remote from believing themselves to be a distinct species of mankind.

Alexis de Tocqueville, 1835

I n May 1856, the administration of President Franklin Pierce extended diplomatic recognition to the newly established government of the Republic of Nicaragua. This would seem a rather ordinary turn of events, except for the fact that the government of the new republic was headed by an American by the name of William Walker (1824–1860). Walker’s followers dubbed him “the grey-eyed man of destiny.”1 He was one of several “filibusters,” a term used to describe American soldiers of fortune in the 1850s who attempted to seize lands in Central America and the Caribbean through revolution and subsequently transform them into slaveholding states modeled after those of the South. Walker, with a private army of sixty men, intervened in a Nicaraguan civil war and successfully took over its government in 1855. As president of Nicaragua, Walker repudiated an 1824 edict emancipating slaves, intending to set up a new slave republic south of the Rio Grande. He also encouraged Americans to settle there as colonists in the same way Americans were invited by Mexico to settle in Texas in the 1820s.

Figure 1.1. William Walker, the “grey-eyed man of destiny”

But Walker was not of a mind to win friends in his new position. In addition to making powerful enemies all over Central America, Walker managed to alienate one of his chief American benefactors, Cornelius Vanderbilt. He seized control of Vanderbilt’s steamship assets and handed them over to his cronies. After being defeated in battle by a coalition of Central American forces, Walker was able to flee to the United States. And when he rolled the dice on another filibustering expedition in 1860, this time in Honduras, he was captured by the British navy, handed over to Honduran authorities, and executed by firing squad. If you are seized by curiosity, you can go to Trujillo on the northern coast of Honduras to see his grave.

Why on earth would anyone attempt such rash adventures? Walker’s motives were animated by the cause of “manifest destiny,” the idea that God by his providence had ordained that the United States would overspread the North American continent, and perhaps beyond. Walker sought to establish the institution of slavery in Nicaragua, as well as the English language, and fiscal policies that would attract and develop a white population in Central America. Walker hoped these policies would prepare the way for the United States to ultimately annex Nicaragua, in the same way it annexed Texas in 1845.

The story of the swashbuckling “man of destiny” William Walker, as bizarre as it seems to those of us on this side of sanity, is an example of what closed exceptionalism could lead to in the mid-nineteenth century. During the early national period, that is, the period from the ratification of the Constitution until the opening of the Civil War (1789–1861), closed American exceptionalism largely took shape. By the time the Southern states seceded from the Union in 1861, much of the American populace had accepted closed exceptionalism in the form of manifest destiny. By the end of the Civil War, slavery and secession were dead and another articulation of exceptionalism was championed—namely, the open exceptionalism of Abraham Lincoln. Thus, by 1865, the two forms of American exceptionalism, closed and open, were formed and continued to develop as the decades of the American experience progressed.

What are the origins of American exceptionalism? Where did the idea that America served as an exception to the norm of nations everywhere else in the world come from? How, why and when did closed and open exceptionalism develop, and who would be among their most persuasive spokesmen? These questions are the subject of this chapter.

Imagine for a moment that the idea of American exceptionalism is a tree. The tree’s root system is intricate and deep. The trunk of the tree splits into two near the ground, becoming a multistem tree, like a maple. One trunk develops its own branch system independent of the other, but they both originate from the same root system. Closed and open exceptionalism are like this multistem maple tree. They are two trunks forming the same tree arising from the same root system.

There are four main root systems of the tree of American exceptionalism. These root systems are theological, political, exegetical and historiographical. Out of these root systems grows one tree, American exceptionalism, which separated into two trunks, closed and open, during the nineteenth century. Territorial expansion and the spread of slavery shaped and nourished the trunk of closed exceptionalism. That of open exceptionalism was bent and twisted by opposition to slavery and pruned by Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War, preparing it for growth and development into contemporary times.

Theological Roots

As an aspect of civil religion, exceptionalism entails distinct theological elements. Exceptionalism in general consists of an invocation to God; closed exceptionalism entails God’s special favor on the nation. Both closed and open exceptionalism acknowledge divine providence, although in differing ways. American exceptionalism’s theological roots are found in the Puritan worldview, and in particular, those Puritans who settled and flourished in the New England colonies during the seven­teenth and eighteenth centuries.

It is important to acknowledge here that the Puritans represent but one religious group among several in the colonial period. Religious diversity within the Christian tradition in the British North American colonies was a given, since a variety of religious groups were involved in most of the thirteen colonies’ founding. And as the Great Awakening got underway in the early to middle 1700s, that diversity became even more pronounced as evangelical groups such as the Baptists and Presbyterians became more populous. But the Puritans were perhaps the most influential intellectual group during the colonial period. In 1835, Tocqueville went as far as to say that “I see the destiny of America embodied in the first Puritan who landed on these shores, just as the whole human race was represented by the first man.”2 Through the enormous volume of Puritan writings in the form of sermons, books, pamphlets, newspapers, letters and so on, Puritan thought spread from New England to the Middle and Southern Colonies as well as to the western hinterlands. George McKenna wrote that the Puritans were, more than any other religious group, behind “an emerging sense of American nationhood, a realization that America was something more than a patchwork of villages, towns, and regions.”3

The history of the Puritans in England and America, while fascinating, is beyond the scope of this study. Suffice it to say here that many Puritans in England, after failing to reform the state church from within, migrated to America and established colonies in what became known as New England in the first part of the 1600s. Their theological positions were defined largely by Calvinism, and they sought to integrate theology into a worldview encompassing every aspect of life and thought.4 McKenna noted that Puritan thought provided what became a coherent framework or scaffolding around which American self-identification was constructed. It is my contention that three theological ideas in particular shaped that framework: the Puritan understanding of covenant, typology and millennialism.

Covenant. Central to the Puritan worldview was the concept of the covenant, an earnestly solemn communal arrangement between the people and God. The Old Testament provided the model for a covenant community, specifically that covenant that existed between the children of Israel and Yahweh, mediated by the law of Moses. In short, the people of the covenant community committed themselves wholly to God’s care, trusting in him for protection, provision and blessing. Their responsibility as God’s covenantal people was to obey his commandments and walk faithfully in his ways. In response to the people’s faithfulness, God would bless them and establish them in the land, and demonstrate his own faithfulness to them by exalting them before other peoples as they humbled themselves before him. John Winthrop, the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, articulated this covenant concept in his famous treatise, “A Model of Christian Charity.” According to Winthrop, if the people were faithful to obey God’s commandments, then God would “please to heare us, and bring us in peace to the place wee desire, [and] hath hee ratified this Covenant and sealed our Commission.”5 If, however, they became unfaithful to their identity as God’s covenant people, then God was certain to punish them, to “surely breake out in wrathe against us, be revenged of such a perjured people and make us knowe the price of the breache of such a Covenant.”6

The covenant as a structural theme in the Puritan conception of culture was articulated brilliantly in the literary genre known as the jeremiad. Preachers and writers employed this unique style of literature to shake the people awake and out of their spiritual and ethical lethargy and call them to repentance from their sin and to return to faithfulness to God.

Unlike most of us in contemporary times, when some calamity befalls a group of people, the Puritans’ first thought was not to assign some natural explanation to it. When a hurricane devastates a community in our times, for example, most of our thoughts go to things like climate change, lack of wind shear, or elevated surface temperature of the ocean when we attempt to explain its course, its strength and why it happened in the first place. But the Puritans’ first thought after experiencing a crisis was simply God’s meticulous providence. This view of providence has in mind that every single thing that happens (or does not happen), down to the minutest of details, is directly attributable to God’s intentional activity in his world. A famine, a disease, a drought or an Indian raid—the Puritans habitually thought God used natural events like these to directly respond to their backsliding, their sinful neglect of their covenant with him.

During the second half of the 1600s, the jeremiad arose as an inimitable Puritan—and by extension, American—literary genre. It took on new efficacy in the wake of the disaster of King Philip’s War (1675–1678), in which the Puritan colonists and their Indian allies fought against the Wampanoag tribe under Metacom (King Philip to the English). Both sides were devastated. The native population was reduced from a quarter of all inhabitants in New England to a tenth, and one in sixteen English settlers were killed.7 Larry Witham wrote, “After King Philip was killed in August 1676, and his severed head stuck on a pike in Plymouth, ministers poured out their Jeremiah-like interpretations through the printing presses.”8 The first drop in a flood of jeremiads was likely Michael Wigglesworth’s 1662 poem, “God’s Controversy with New England,” written in response to a drought. Jonathan Mitchel wrote “Nehemiah on the Wall in Troublesome Times,” a 1667 election-day sermon. In 1670, Samuel Danforth preached his “Brief Recognition of New England’s Errand into the Wilderness,” which provided one of the first lists of Puritan sins. And in 1702, Cotton Mather published his monumental Magnalia Christi Americana, which was a providential history of the New England colonies. Witham called Magnalia “a sustained jeremiad.”9

This Puritan conception of covenant entailed a special calling on them as God’s chosen people with a divinely ordained mission. Even though they believed they existed as the people of God, they were always cognizant of the enormous responsibility that came with that privileged position. As they read the Old Testament, they saw not only the ancient Israelites existing in covenant relationship to God; they saw themselves.

Typology. In the Christian tradition of biblical interpretation, typology has served as a consistent method in demonstrating the symbiotic relationship of the Old Testament and the New. Christian biblical interpreters have recognized for millennia that the key to the harmony between the Old and New Testaments is the person and work of Jesus Christ. Christ made the Old Testament meaningful. Thus, for example, the Israelite exodus from Egypt served as a type, a foreshadowing, of the antitype, namely, the Christian’s passage from death to life made possible by the atoning sacrifice of Christ on the cross. David as the king of Israel served as a type of Christ, who is at once the eternal King of the Jews and the King of kings who will personally come to reign at his second advent. The return of the captives from Babylon in the late sixth century served as a type of salvation, which is the work of Christ alone. And there are many, many others.

Sacvan Bercovitch identified the significance of the Puritan practice of seeing themselves and their experience as colonists in New England in typological terms. The Puritans extended the hermeneutical method of typology from mere biblical interpretation to a providential interpretation of secular history as well. They were not the first to do this—this practice dates back to the earliest centuries of the church—but they consistently saw themselves as key players in salvation history. Scripture served as a benchmark for the interpretation of God’s work in both sacred and secular history, since God’s activities had not ceased with the death of the apostolic generation. Bercovitch wrote, “In effect, they incorporated Bible history into the American experience—they substituted a regional for a biblical past, consecrated the American present as a movement from promise to fulfillment, and translated fulfillment from its meaning within the closed system of sacred history into a metaphor for limitless secular improvement.”10 He also said, “It became the task of typology to define the course of the church (‘spiritual Israel’) and of the exemplary Christian life.”11 By employing this literal-historical interpretation to Scripture, the Puritans saw themselves as active agents in God’s overall program for human history. We will later see how typology’s relation to millennialism factors into the Puritan interpretation of history and their view of themselves.

For now, what were some of the figures in Puritan typology? In other words, how was typology applied in the Puritan theological system? Several examples can be readily identified. The nation of Israel was a powerful figure in Puritan typology. Samuel Danforth, in his “Brief Recognition of New England’s Errand into the Wilderness,” saw that the Puritans who were carving out a civilization in the wilderness of North America wer...