From Puritanism to Progressivism
How religious ideas became common sense for secularists
This post is part of a series about the lingering impact of religion in everyday American life.
For all its rigors and sorrows, America has always been a land of hope. For no people was that more true than the Puritans The fervor of their distinctive compound—a relatively high degree of religious intensity, coupled with relative prosperity and opportunity that could beguile the most devoted believers—fueled periodic religious revivals. The First Great Awakening, as it was known, occurred in the 1730s and 1740s. Some historians see the growing skepticism toward established religious authority that characterized the movement—is not what’s in a believer’s heart more important than the doctrines in a preacher’s head?—as an underlying factor in the growing skepticism toward established political authority in the years before the American Revolution. The Second Great Awakening, which began at the turn of the nineteenth century, was notable for the explosion of two newer sects, the Baptists and Methodists, who achieved a dominance they’ve retained in American Protestantism ever since. They were also notable for their ability to attract a large number of African American adherents, though slavery was a contentious issue that ultimately led to North-South splits in both—and by some reckonings, a moral conflict that led to the Civil War.
What made these newer varieties of Protestantism notable was the way in which they emphasized choice over the old Calvinist doctrine of powerlessness. There were variations on this theme; in the South, for example, the emphasis was on personal agency—Jesus loves me, and I have a responsibility to get my act together and stop drinking, for example. In New England and the band of settlement that stretched across upstate New York and the Midwest, human agency had a more collective cast—we are a beloved community, and we can do better, a sensibility that sparked the great social reform movements of the era, the most important of which was abolition. Religious historians have a term to describe this temperament: “Perfectionism,” by which they mean not a fussy commitment to unrealistic standards, but rather to describe a confidence that grand goals could be achieved in this world as a means of obtaining salvation in the next one.
Ever so imperceptibly, this world began to take precedence over the next. That’s inevitable: the tides of religious fervor rise and fall the world over, and the collective intensity that accompanied the colonization of English North America was simply unsustainable. Longings for personal transformation never disappeared. But they were increasingly refracted through other filters.
Like science. As with the Protestant Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, usually dated to the seventeenth century, was a long time in coming. Actually, it would be fair to say that the two movements proceeded in tandem, especially when one considers the emphasis on intensive, systematic inquiry so important to both. Indeed, it’s important to note that the conflict between science and religion that so many of us take for granted is of largely modern origin. An educated minister such as the New England Puritan Jonathan Edwards could make a close empirical study of a spider’s design and behavior, serenely confident that he was simply observing the wonders of God’s creation in the world.
Which is not to say that science had no effect on religious fervor or observance. Founding Fathers such as Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson considered themselves men of science in an age of Enlightenment that placed special emphasis on overthrowing religious superstition. While neither they nor any other Founder overtly challenged the prevailing pieties of their day, they tended to take a more skeptical view of direct divine intervention in a world they believed God made to run like clockwork—a typical metaphor—under impersonal rules of his own devising. Such Deism, as it was known, served to foster individual initiative: God won’t answer your prayers, but he won’t stand in your way, either. In the words of Franklin’s famous alter ego, Poor Richard, “Diligence is the mother of good luck.” (A quote long attributed to Thomas Jefferson—“I am a great believer in luck, and find the harder I work the more I have of it”—is consistent with his philosophy, even if he never said anything of the sort.)
Such attitudes increasingly suffused sacred and secular thinking, the line between them porous. Transcendentalists such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau combined close personal observation of natural phenomena, which they regarded as portals to metaphysical truths that could be revealed to each and all. This is why, in a less exalted vein, Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville used the term “individualism” to describe the credo of the United States he observed in the 1830s. As Tocqueville noted, this new national trait was less a matter of the familiar vice of selfishness than it was a philosophical manifestation of egalitarian principle (though one that Tocqueville, every inch the aristocrat, deplored). “Selfishness originates in blind instinct; individualism proceeds from erroneous judgment more than from depraved feelings,” he wrote. A preference had become an article of faith.
The wedge between science and religion didn’t really open up until after the publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859, a book whose conclusions Darwin avoided revealing for many years (until a rival was about to go ahead and publish similar findings), because he understood their deeply subversive implications. The problem was not simply a matter of the earth being much older than the Bible said, or human beings being descended from apes, hard as that would be for some Christians to accept. It was also that the process of evolution was far more volatile and random than most people believed. False starts, wrong turns, and sudden mass abortions were both common and unpredictable. Crass popularizers of Darwin spoke of “survival of the fittest” to justify indifference to issues of social justice. But the really troubling idea was fitness itself as a matter of genetic cards randomly dealt from a reproductive deck in a game whose rules, and winning hands, were ever-changing.
The most creative response to this crisis of faith came from the American philosopher William James. A pioneer in the emerging field of psychology at the turn of the last century, James retained a lifelong fascination with, in the title of his most famous book, Varieties of Religious Experience, which he refused to reduce to a series of biological impulses. In “The Will to Believe” and other essays, James established himself as a founding father of what many observers consider the one school of thought Americans have contributed to Western philosophy: pragmatism. Precisely because scientific truths are always changing, and precisely because there are propositions about the nature of reality that cannot be empirically tested, James argued that we are free to choose among those propositions—propositions that in many cases go to the heart of human experience—about what we may validly believe unless or until they are proven otherwise. (Like the existence of God, for example.) More than that: our commitment to what he called a living option has the power to realize possibilities. James put the matter succinctly in a 1907 essay: “Truth is what happens to an idea.” This notion of truth as a verb rather than a noun, something that becomes a reality as a result of our willingness to act on it, goes to the very heart of what the American Dream in all its varieties has always been about: wishing will make it so. As James recognized, this is not always the case. We can and will fail. But it’s not foolish to try. In fact, trying may well be the most rational thing you can do.
James, of course, is an obscure figure at best for most Americans. His brother, novelist Henry James, is perhaps better known, though a less appealing character. Henry was a dyspeptic elitist, while there’s an irresistible sunniness about William that outshines the melancholy that shadowed much of his life. Ideas were his medicine. But his finely wrought philosophical reasoning reflected deep-seated currents running through American life, and a common-sense logic that continues to animate the American Dream.
Certainly, James was not the last word on the subject. Skeptics of pragmatism have long noted its tendency to lack philosophical rigor, and its optimism can appear glib. It can also be put to nightmarish ends by those who insist their form of hate is no worse than your idealism (and is really simply a different version of the same thing). Plastic truths can be bent in any direction.
Most people, then and now, deny or sidestep the inevitable tensions that accompany any form of faith rather than wrestle with them directly. Religious fundamentalism, which emphasized taking the Bible literally, emerged as a response to the challenge of Darwin, and a hallmark of the Third Great Awakening, which swept the nation at the end of the nineteenth century. Alternatively, liberal Protestant sects professed hope that new scientific discoveries might yet illuminate God’s design in ways that would harmonize with religious belief. In terms of numbers, at least, the die-hards held out better than the liberals: there are now more Muslims in the United States than (Church of England) Episcopalians, as mainline Protestant churches have dwindled in numbers and influence. Evangelicals are more diffuse, but far more numerous, though their numbers too are now in decline. Americans continue to be among the most religious people on the face of the earth, even if the increasingly secular character of everyday life leads most people to focus on what they regard as the matter at hand: making the most of this life. And it’s here that the sacred residue of Protestantism has lingered most durably: in the idea that individual choice should be the basis of the good life—good as in happy, and good as in right. It’s a potent worldly theology. But like all theologies, like all faiths, there are always shadows of doubt.
Next: The (now forgotten) Protestant-Catholic Divide