How Firm a Foundation, Puritanism as the Wellspring of American Freedom

Covenant Reformed Baptist Church

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Strong arguments for the role of faith in preserving freedom can be made from both philosophy and logic.

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But as Western society loses its cultural bearings, the ground rules for philosophy are breaking down. What is self -evident to one intellectual is absurd to another.

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Many appear weary of logic. Tell a modern atheist that he must either believe in an eternal universe, contrary to the evidence of science he claims to cherish, or in a self -creating universe, a paradox at best, and he will just shrug his shoulders and say, no.

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For such folks, the whole arsenal of rational discourse is diffused. It's not just an inability to argue such people into faith, always a tall order, but frequently an inability to cultivate in them even an ambiguous respect for the contributions of religion to our heritage.

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Karl Marx, for example, sat in the British library and wrote, Religion is the opiate of the masses.

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If he had only bothered to pick up a volume of 17th century English history, he would have learned what an absurd proposition that is.

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And yet the philosophy he created has had an enormous impact on the world view of much of Western intelligentsia to this day.

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Though Marx's economic prescriptions are largely discredited, the general attitude of the

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Western academy is still deeply, if ambiguously, influenced by his dismissal of religion. One such

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Western academic was Robert W. Fogel. Robert Fogel was nurtured in some of the best of America's elite academies, a disciple of Nobel laureate

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Simon Kuznets. Fogel went on to teach at Rochester University, Harvard, and finally the

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University of Chicago Graduate School of Business. Fogel was a groundbreaking economic historian. He focused particularly on the economics of American slavery.

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When he began his work, he probably expected to confirm what had been the assumption ever since Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations that slavery was economically inefficient, doomed to self -destruction, and the pursuit of indolent pseudo -aristocrats who loved lording over their fellow man.

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To his surprise, he uncovered the opposite. Professor Fogel found that the morally reprehensible institution was fantastically profitable and efficient.

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It even frequently provided slaves with a higher standard of living than the average free white farmer while demanding less labor.

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It gave slaves a longer lifespan than most European or American city dwellers of the same period.

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Fogel concluded that it was not economic forces that brought about the end of slavery, but a revolution in moral sentiment with its roots in Puritanism.

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In his Nobel Prize -winning work on slavery, he chronicled how devoutly religious people campaigned to end an oppressive practice that mere economics would not have.

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He confessed to me in his great surprise at his discovery. He recalled that he, like much of his generation, had absorbed

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Marx's attitude toward religion with little thought. He said that he was in his 50s, a leading scholar at some of America's leading academic institutions, and yet he had never known the truth about what forces put an end to the greatest assault on liberty ever divides, slavery.

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Only those who look beyond what works and the status quo for millennia could have moved society to aspire to ideals of universal freedom that a transcendent source of authority beckoned them to.

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That vision, that transcendent authority is found in religion, in Christianity. It was not a careful apologist like C .S.

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Lewis with his winsome Mere Christianity who reasoned Professor Fogel into a greater appreciation of the contributions of Christianity to America.

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It was the facts of history. That history, I believe, is our greatest asset in a philosophically confused, logic -weary generation.

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As Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. is reported to have said in another context, upon this point, a page of history is worth a volume of logic.

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Religion is central in American history, particularly colonial American history, but through the whole of the 19th century as well.

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It is important that we get this history right. The Pilgrims and their Puritan brothers, for example, did not come to New England just to get away from religious tyranny in their homeland.

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Rather, they crossed the rude waves to be free to live out their own religion to its fullest.

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Too often, their motives are thought of only as a one -dimensional quest to be free from religion when actually they long to be free for religion, for a purified

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Christian church. Increase Mather, the leading Puritan of the second generation of New England, wrote reverently,

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It was a great and high undertaking of our fathers when they ventured themselves and their little ones upon the rude waves of the vast ocean that so they might follow the

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Lord into his land, a parallel instance not to be given except that our father

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Abraham from Ur of the Chaldees or that of his seed from the land of Egypt.

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It was in respect to some worldly accommodation that other plantations were erected, but religion and not the world was that which our fathers came hither for.

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Pure worship and ordinances without mixture of human inventions was that which the first fathers of this colony designed in their coming hither.

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We are the children of the good old nonconformist. John Winthrop, the first governor of Massachusetts, told the settlers while crossing the

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Atlantic that they were going to plant a city upon a hill. The entire world was to be awed by the model of Christian charity they were going to build and let our public schools leave no doubt that this new society was to be built brick by brick on the principles of Puritan faith.

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The historian Perry Miller called Puritan Massachusetts a

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Bible commonwealth. Admittedly, even many devout believers today may be cool to the intimate relationship church and state enjoyed in the 17th century

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New England. The Southern Baptists, for example, have their roots in Puritanism, but in a wing of Puritanism that criticized the way mainstream

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Puritans used the state to enforce doctrinal orthodoxy. These Baptists are ardent defenders of the, quote, separation of church and state to this day, but enlightened

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Baptists do not mean by that phrase what it came to mean in the second half of the 20th century an active policy by all levels of government, federal to local, to force all expressions of religion, even the most ambiguous, out of public life.

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This was not what the First Amendment, supported by most Baptists, was intended for. Rather, the whole Puritan heritage later coalesced roughly into what we today call evangelicalism, sought to preserve government neutrality towards specific denominations.

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At the same time, they assumed the government, especially on the state and local level, would have a role to play in preserving public morals and encouraging religion generally.

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The famous New England revivalist of the early 19th century, Lyman Beecher, at first lamented the disestablishment of Connecticut's Congregational Church in 1818, but as he mastered the voluntary society, he saw the great possibilities for, quote, influence.

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Beecher was determined these societies would bring to bear, as closely as possible, the influence once exerted by the old establishment.

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Eventually, he came to believe that disestablishment was, quote, the best thing that ever happened to the state of Connecticut, unquote, and that the ministers had actually gained influence.

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This meant that the biblical heritage that drove the Puritans across the Atlantic continued its role in shaping the common mind of America after the

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American Revolution and through the first third of the 19th century, at least. When a society is shaped by these values, even those who are not particularly devout or orthodox, like Benjamin Franklin or Abraham Lincoln, may be said to have been broadly shaped by them.

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Sociologist Talcott Parsons notes that what happens when an ideology, or a theology in this case, influences a society over a length of time, quote, insofar as a given system of ideas has existed for a long time in a society at strategic points, it is a reasonable hypothesis that it exerts a steady influence in the direction of canalizing attitudes in such a way that they will become, in terms of such a system, meaningful.

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This is the more true, the more the society in question is one characterized by the persistence of aggregates, by strength of belief.

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First in New England, then after the Great Awakening in the rest of America, the ethics, habits, and worldview of evangelicalism was arguably the dominant cultural force.

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The evidence of history shows that it was anything but a mind -numbing opiate. It is not a coincidence that the freest nation in the world was also the most

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Christian. While the Puritan quasi -theocracy had long since dissolved, Puritan values were spread further and deeper into American culture by what

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George Marsden calls culturally aggressive New England Yankees. Both Marsden and Fogel sketch a complicated, reflexive process in the first half of the 19th century in which northern

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Protestants, at first battling each other for political dominance, eventually coalesced, joining northern

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Baptists and Methodists in the new Republican Party. The result, says Marsden, was that the Republican Party had a strong Puritan evangelical component bent on regulating the society according to Christian principles.

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The abolition of slavery was their first great goal and their greatest achievement. The war that became inevitable for this achievement is largely responsible for forging the

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American identity of a nation of the people, by the people, for the people that it projects to the world today.

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We must remember that the motivations for these strides forward in freedom were not from some secular

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European Enlightenment philosophy, but from devout Puritanism. Nearly a century and a half after the

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Puritans' Great Migration, it was no accident that it was New England that agitated first to throw off Britain's heavy yoke.

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The city of Point Hill was not an infantile stage of religious oppression, but the foundation of American ideals, the wellspring of its best principles.

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The Great Awakening, breaking out over a century after Winthrop's Great Migration and only a generation before the

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American Revolution, was a reassertion of Puritan ideals. Many historians, such as Harvard's Alan Hemert, have in the last generation seen that the

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Puritan revival, commonly called the Great Awakening, was pivotal in preparing the ground for the revolution.

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Subsequent history was a progressive application of Puritan ethics as revived and dispersed through the

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Great Awakening. Take slavery, for example. While it's true that early Puritans did not necessarily object to the odd household slave, they based this regrettable institution on economic necessity, not racism.

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An African slave may be one of the elect. They should not be treated as if they do not have souls that cannot be chosen by God.

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On the other hand, King Charles I, King of England, may be so lost as to deserve decapitation.

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A theology which teaches that slaves may be elect and kings may be reprobate is not a theology which becomes the opiate of the masses.

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In the later 18th century, Samuel Hopkins' Puritan conscience, shaken by the brutal reality of the mass slave trade, helped light the fuse that led to emancipation.

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The age -old peculiar institution was ended, not by the European Enlightenment or the seminal ideas of Greek philosophy, but by evangelical

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Christianity. Puritanism created principles of justice and individual rights, what

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Fogel terms egalitarianism, so convincing that generations of enlightened scoffers would assume they were self -evident.

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They were so sure of the self -evident nature of the dictates of nature and nature's God that they proceeded to cut off the very limb on which they were sitting.

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Certainly they believed that they were improving the radically theocentric worldview of Puritanism by synthesizing it with humanistic sensitivities, but they could not see that their incessant scoffing at the transcendent authority of faith would eventually make all declarations of right and wrong seem absurd.

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The result of the advance of secularism and the laughing question, says who? to even the most reasonable ethical prescriptions like the

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Golden Rule was not more freedom. It has not led to the end of history in which egalitarianism has triumphed, but to the blood of Columbine and the presidential question as to the meaning of is.

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The crisis now, as Osginus rightly saw, is the crisis of cultural authority.

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Today, Americans are feeling the shock of the realization that the sensate system they built is vacuous, insupportable, and in the end, self -destructive.

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Ethics of any kind, including egalitarianism, makes no sense, holds little compelling power, creates no allegiance, elicits little devotion, without some kind of transcendent authority.

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Thomas Jefferson notwithstanding, no truths are self -evident. The illusion of a self -evident egalitarianism was created by an ideational system so powerful that it was able to permeate a culture and create social momentum that continued for generations, even centuries after it itself had died, but the momentum is not perpetual.

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Even Max Weber, who could feel the air leaking from the enlightenment bubble, quote, the rosy blush of religious asceticism's laughing air, the enlightenment, seems also to be irretrievably fading.

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As it continues to fade, various ideologies are fighting to fill the void. The great myth of religion as an opiate continues to keep sincere, intelligent

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Americans from looking to it as a source of hope, but rather than boldly go to brave new worlds that promise, that fail to provide, new heights of egalitarianism and autonomy,

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America would do better to draw from the well of its own city upon a hill.