Thirty-five years since the publication of Sydney Ahlstrom's award-winning (and shelf-bending) A Religious History of the American People, which persuasively suggested that Puritanism is the leitmotif of America's religious history, George McKenna has upped the ante. In fewer pages, but with no less persuasive force, he builds the case for reading not only the country's religious history, but also its social and political history as, until relatively recently, variations on a Puritan theme.
If such a thesis appears implausible on its face, it may seem slightly less so when recalling Chesterton's oft-quoted description of America as a "nation with the soul of a church." It is this American soul-that which gives the nation its unique identity and which animates its thoughts, words, and deeds-that McKenna identifies with the patriotism of his title. He is thus quick to note that, while his thesis hangs on various social and political hooks, his interest is much less in social history than the history of an idea-what he calls a "myth" (though not in the pejorative sense), an idea that gives shape and meaning to communal experience.
He is also quick to note, as many before him have observed, that American patriotism is by no means synonymous with "blood and earth" nationalism or "my country right or wrong" jingoism. To the contrary, McKenna argues, America's brand of patriotism has from the start invoked and engendered an actual obligation to be right. Though possibly-indeed inevitably-the definition of "right" could in any given circumstance be hotly contested, the sense that the nation as a nation, and not simply Americans as individuals, is duty bound to do the right thing became a coin of common intellectual currency. Americans have consistently seen themselves as "an almost chosen people" (Abraham Lincoln), anticipating a "rendezvous with destiny" (Franklin Roosevelt), being "a nation with a mission" (George W. Bush).
The question is, What accounts for this unique patriotic spirit, with its twin notions of exceptionalism and obligation? Its origins, McKenna argues, can be located in the origins of the nation itself. The providential and covenantal overtones evident in the above presidential proclamations are none other than those of Puritan New England as expressed, for example, in representative seventeenth-century works such as Edward Johnson's Wonder-Working Providence of Sion's Savior in New England and Samuel Danforth's A Brief Recognition of New England's Errand into the Wilderness. The rhetoric is none other than that found in the "Ur-text of American literature," John Winthrop's 1630 "City Upon a Hill" sermon (A Model of Christian Charity).
Despite frequent and often superficial allusions to Winthrop's famous phrase, McKenna reminds his reader that this was no confident boast that New England would inevitably be a light unto the world; it was in fact a sober warning that all eyes would be upon the new nation. The whole of Winthrop's proclamation is knit through with "if…then" covenantal constructions: if we live justly, humbly, charitably…then the Lord will "command a blessing upon us"; if we forsake our obligations…then "we shall be made a story and a by-word through the world, we shall open the mouths of enemies to speak evil of the ways of God."
McKenna summarizes these currents of thought: "The distinctive legacy of New England Puritan rhetoric, then, is this strange two-sidedness: on the one hand, a confident sense of 'chosenness'; on the other hand, remorse, repentance, and the dread that God might at any time 'cast us off in displeasure, and scatter us in this Wilderness.'" That which makes for such compelling reading, however, is that this thesis does not flower into a polemic on America's status as a "Christian nation." Instead, McKenna demonstrates that this providential and covenantal paradigm has been consistently shared by Christians and (unmoored from its explicitly theological origins and implications) non-Christians alike.
Of course, it motivated such culture-shaping events as the Great Awakening, frontier revivalism, and ambiguously Christian movements from abolition and temperance to civil rights and the social gospel; but no less did it animate social and political episodes as disparate as New Deal progressivism, McCarthyite anti-Communism, and Weather Underground anarchism. Each illustrates the American compulsion to purify a nation variously beset by moral failings or flirting with perceived apostasies.
McKenna does not forfeit his credibility by attempting to read all national events as variations on a Puritan theme; but he does offer enough evidence and analysis to substantiate his thesis that American patriotism-while it lasted-was the child of decidedly Puritan parents. The qualifier in the preceding sentence brings us into the present, and to McKenna's coda: the myth of America's "errand in the Wilderness," he suggests, was brought home from Vietnam in a casket.
While previous generations of rebels, reformers, and malcontents had justified their protests with Puritan-inspired jeremiads, the new Jeremiahs no longer admonished their nation for failing to be faithful in its errand; they rebuked her for being so naïve as to believe she had an errand. (The popularity of Howard Zinn's indescribably awful A People's History of the United States arguably persists because that work is, if anything, a deconstructive narrative not of the nation's "election" but of its "reprobation.") Even in the aftermath of 9/11, McKenna is doubtful that we'll again see anything like America's earlier confidence in its status as a "city upon a hill." His doubt may be warranted. Any despair on the part of his Christian readers, however, would not be: "For here we do not have an enduring city, but we are looking for the city that is to come" (Heb. 13:14).
