religious fervor and enthusiasm. These have significantly shaped American public life from the first Puritan settlement to the First and Second Great Awakenings (c. 1730–1755 and 1790–1840, respectively) to the present.
While there was some initial religious diversity (Maryland was settled largely by Roman Catholics, and Virginia by adherents of the established – albeit Protestant – Church of England), the most pervasive influence was of England’s dissenting Protestant religious sects. The core elements of their reformation theology, set in motion by Germany’s Martin Luther (1517), who helped start a process that sheared much of Christendom off from the Roman Catholic Church, held, first, that Scripture – the text of the Holy Bible – was the only source of Christian doctrine, and, second, that belief and faith in Jesus was the only path to salvation. The former provided the law for human conduct, and the later the gospel that promised forgiveness from sin, and eternal life, by dint of God’s grace. To be a Christian was to know God, and live by His commandments and His plan.
The Reformation splintered Christendom from a mostly unified body under the auspices of the Church of Rome into a multiplicity of sects holding diverse convictions regarding humanity’s sinfulness, God’s plan for its salvation, and the meaning of Jesus’s resurrection for human redemption. John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion (1536), a major Protestant text (directing, for example, the practice of Lutherans, Presbyterians, and Congregationalists), in turn, placed a heavy (Augustinian) emphasis on original sin and man’s total depravity, as well as the sovereignty of God in all things – including His (inscrutable/unknowable) predetermination (predestination) of who would ultimately be saved (the elect), and who would be eternally damned. Salvation, for “Calvinists,” would not be by good works or earthly deeds, but by God’s grace alone. Other sects, by contrast, promised salvation through diverse means, typically involving not simply the adherence to God’s law in pre-mortal life (righteousness), but also inner faith.
As we shall see in the chapters that follow, Christian theology played a direct role in shaping how Americans thought about core political issues, whether it be the relation of the individual to the community, the origins and limits on government, the role of morals and conscience in public life, the nature of liberty, equality, and justice, the imperative of social reform, or the duty to obey or defy the law. From the Puritans, to antebellum reform (including temperance, prison reform, abolitionism, and women’s rights), to the progressive social gospel, the emergence of fundamentalism, the civil rights movement, the anti-Vietnam War movement, the Cold War, and the rise of the Religious Right, an increasingly pluralistic cohort of Protestants, joined more and more over time by politically active Roman Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, and others, did politics in ways that were deeply informed by their religious outlooks and convictions.
At the time of the nation’s founding, moreover, American political thought was clearly inflected by strains of statist nationalism – “statist” not in the sense that there were understood to be no constitutional or natural limits on the powers of government, but in the sense that, born as the country was into the Westphalian world order premised on geographically demarcated, interacting, and competitive national states pursuing their own interests, many Americans were concerned with the would-be power, fame, wealth, and glory of the United States as a nation-state, akin to – and in competition with – Great Britain, France, and Spain. Isaac Kramnick, an important proponent of the argument that the American founders drew upon and debated a range of antagonistic thought traditions, argued that a number of the founders, most prominently Alexander Hamilton, understood themselves to be statebuilders, aimed at creating a new commercial nation-state that could hold its own – protect and advance its “national interest” – in a global arena. To do so, the country would need a powerful and energetic centralized government with wide-ranging powers to tax, spend, promote economic development, aggressively protect its interests in the international arena through trade regulations, and, indeed, once possessed of a mighty military, fight. In this, localism was a potentially sapping centrifugal force. A relatively passive government chiefly concerned with administering justice and protecting private rights, moreover, would be wholly inadequate to the task.6
The political scientist Benedict Anderson has argued that, in the modern world, nationalism, which he famously defined as the sense of the nation as “an imagined community,” was born of the colonial encounter between the “Old” and “New” worlds, and, arising out of empire and expansion, came into its own in the modern world as a distinctive species of political thought. Across history, American nationalism has come in different forms, from patriotic-militaristic statism, to cultural-chauvinistic, to religious. All, of course, have in some sense blended together in a mixture that has come to characterize the United States as a distinctive (and perhaps “exceptional”) imagined community.
Religious – or, more precisely, white Protestant – nationalism has been a remarkably consistent strain of American political thought. Many Americans have long conceived of their country as a faith community, founded on Protestant (or, much later, in response to the rise of twentieth-century totalitarianism, “Judeo-Christian”) principles, which, they believe, have both constituted its populace as moral beings, actors, and citizens, and provided the theoretical foundations for its political institutions. As such, there is a long tradition of white Protestant nationalist political thought that spans all of American history, and has informed and underwritten the country’s politics.
One common form of this religious nationalism has been Christian providentialism: the idea that the nation’s founding was divinely ordained. Christian nationalists believe that the nation’s very purpose was to provide a sanctuary for persecuted Christians, a place where they would be free not only to live in accord with the precepts of their faith, but also to live together collectively as a Christian polity – as a Christian commonwealth. While the country that eventually became the United States of America was initially settled for many reasons, not least commercial, it is nevertheless true that certain of the early settlements, particularly in Puritan New England, clearly imagined themselves as founding a “New Israel” – a place where, persecuted in their home countries, the godly and righteous could freely worship God, and realize their common faith. Indeed, many colonists often spoke of the new land in messianic terms – as providentially given to them by God for the advancement of His Truth and Word (also, in a different way, an “exceptionalist” vision). These settlers were concerned less with the “civic virtue” prescribed by republicans than with Christian virtue.
The American Negro has the great advantage of having never believed that collection of myths to which white Americans cling: that their ancestors were all freedom-loving heroes, that they were born in the greatest country the world has ever seen, or that Americans are invincible in battle and wise in peace…. Negroes know far more about white Americans than that.
James Baldwin (1963)
Other scholars have observed that ostensibly ascriptive, pre-political ethnic and racial identities have long been constitutive of the self-understandings of Americans as an imagined community. Forms of ethno-nationalism or racial nationalism have long held that membership in the US political community is premised upon ascriptive racial or ethnic characteristics, such as whiteness (racial), or Anglo-Saxon (ethnic), or white Anglo-Saxon (racial-ethnic) identity. These ascriptive nationalisms have been founded on different understandings, ranging from genetic to cultural. In practice, they have commonly intersected across American history with religious nationalism (e.g. the United States as an inherently white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant nation). All of these forms of nationalism have underwritten understandings of civic membership, belonging, and exclusion. To the extent that they are founded on ascriptive categories positing a fixed “identity,” they are presumptively unbridgeable and permanent.
The University of Pennsylvania political scientist Rogers M. Smith has argued that the standard inventory of American political thought paradigms – first, the Hartz thesis positing a hegemonic Lockean liberalism, and then the republican thesis – not only failed to recognize what he called “ascriptive Americanism” as a major current
