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

Acton Essay Contest Winner

The following essay won first place in the tenth Acton Essay Contest. Official press release: “Mr. Carpenter’s essay, "‘How Firm a Foundation: Puritanism as the Wellspring of American Freedom,’ focuses on the centrality of religion in the development of freedom in the United States.” Second place went to Kevin DeYoung, and third to R. J. Snell.

Strong arguments for the role of faith in preserving freedom can be made from both philosophy and logic. 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. 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.” For such folks the whole arsenal of rational discourse is defused. 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.

“Religion is the opiate of the masses.” — Karl Marx

Karl Marx, for example, sat in the British library and wrote, “Religion is the opiate of the masses.” If he had only bothered to pick up a volume on seventeenth century English history, he would have learned what an absurd proposition that is. And yet the philosophy he created has had an enormous impact on the world-view of much of Western intelligentsia to this day.[1] Though Marx’s economic prescriptions are largely discredited, the general attitude of the Western academy is still deeply, if ambiguously influenced by his dismissal of religion. One such 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 Simon Kuznets, Fogel went on to teach at Rochester University, Harvard, and finally the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business. Fogel was a ground-breaking economic historian. He focused particularly on the economics of American slavery. 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. To his surprise, he uncovered the opposite. Professor Fogel found that the morally reprehensible institution was fantastically profitable and efficient. It even frequently provided slaves with a higher standard of living than the average free, white farmer while demanding less labor; it gave slaves a longer life-span than most European or American city-dwellers of the same period. 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.

For more on Fogel’s research into how Christians ended slavery see: “A Secular Jew Makes a Surprising Discovery About Christians and Slavery”

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. He confessed to me his great surprise at this discovery. He recalled that he, like much of his generation, had absorbed Marx’s attitude toward religion with little thought. He said that he was in his fifties, 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 devised: slavery. Only those who looked beyond “what works” and the status quo for millennia could move society to aspire to ideals of universal freedom that a transcendent source of authority beckoned them to. That vision, that transcendent authority is found in religion.[2]

It was not a careful apologist, like C. S. Lewis with his winsome Mere Christianity, who reasoned Professor Fogel into a greater appreciation of the contributions of Christianity to America. It was the facts of history. That history, I believe, is our greatest asset in a philosophically confused, logic-weary generation. 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.”[3]

“Upon this point a page of history is worth a volume of logic.” — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

The City upon a Hill

Religion is central in American history, particularly colonial American history but through the whole of the nineteenth century as well. 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. Rather, they crossed “the rude waves” to be free to live out their own religion to its fullest. Too often, their motivations are thought of as only a one-dimensional quest to be free from religion when actually they longed to be free for religion. Increase Mather, the leading Puritan of the second generation of New England, wrote reverently:

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 Lord into his land. A parallel instance not to be given except that our father Abraham from Ur of the Chaldees or that of his seed from the land of Egypt.[4]

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 . . . . Pure Worship and Ordinances without the mixture of human inventions was that which the first fathers of this colony designed in their coming hither. We are the children of the good old non-conformists. [5]

John Winthrop, the first governor of Massachusetts, told the settlers while crossing the 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. The historian Perry Miller called Puritan Massachusetts a “Bible Commonwealth.” Admittedly, even many devout believers today may be cool to the intimate relationship church and state enjoyed in seventeenth century New England. The Southern Baptists, for example, have their roots in Puritanism but in a wing of Puritanism that criticized the way mainstream Puritans used the state to enforce doctrinal orthodoxy. These Baptists are ardent defenders of the “separation of church and state” to this day. But enlightened Baptists do not mean by that phrase what it came to mean in the second half of the twentieth 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. This was not what the first amendment – supported by most Baptists -- was intended for. Rather the whole Puritan heritage, later to coalesce roughly into what we today call evangelicalism, sought to preserve government neutrality toward specific denominations. 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.

Influence

The famous New England revivalist of the early nineteenth 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 “influence.” Beecher was determined these societies would bring to bear as closely as possible the influence once exerted by the old establishment. Eventually he came to believe that disestablishment was “the best thing that ever happened to the state of Connecticut” and that the ministers had actually gained influence.[6] 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 American Revolution and through the first third of the nineteenth 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. Sociologist Talcott Parsons notes what happens when an ideology (or theology in this case) influences a society over a length of time:

In so far 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. This is the more true, the more the society in question is one characterized by the persistence of aggregates, by strength of “belief.”[7]

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

Puritan Values

While the Puritan quasi-theocracy had long since dissolved, Puritan values were spread further and deeper into American culture by what George Marsden calls “culturally aggressive New England Yankees.” Both Marsden and Fogel sketch a complicated, reflexive process in the first half of the nineteenth century in which Northern Protestants, at first battling each other for political dominance eventually coalesced joining Northern Baptists and Methodists in the new Republican Party.[8] “The result,” says Marsden, “was that the Republican party had a strong Puritan-evangelical component, bent on regulating the society according to Christian principles.”[9] 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 American identity of a nation “of the people, by the people, for the people” that it projects to the world today.[10]

The Great Awakening

We must remember that the motivations for these strides forward in freedom were not from some secular European Enlightenment philosophy but from devout Puritanism. Nearly a century and a half after the Puritans’ Great Migration, it was no accident that it was New England that agitated first to throw off Britain’s heavy yoke. The “City upon a Hill” was not an infantile stage of religious oppression but the foundation of American ideals -- the wellspring of its best principles.[11] The Great Awakening, breaking out over a century after Winthrop’s Great Migration and only a generation before the American Revolution, was a reassertion of Puritan ideals. Many historians, such as Harvard’s Alan Heimert, have, in the last generation, seen that the Puritan revival commonly called the “Great Awakening” was pivotal in preparing the ground for the Revolution. Subsequent history was a progressive application of Puritan ethics, as revived and dispersed through the Great Awakening.

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

Take slavery, for example. While it is true that early Puritans did not necessarily object to the odd house-hold slave, they based this regrettable institution on economic necessity – not racism. An African slave may be one of the elect; they should not be treated as if they do not have souls that can be chosen by God.[12] On the other hand, Charles I, King of England, may be so lost as to deserve decapitation. 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. In the later eighteenth century, Samuel Hopkins’ Puritan conscience, shaken by the brutal reality of the mass slave trade, helped light the fuse that led to emancipation. The age-old “peculiar institution” was ended, not by the European Enlightenment or by the seminal ideas of Greek philosophy, but by evangelical Christianity.

The Crisis of Cultural Authority

Puritanism created principles of justice and individual rights -- what Fogel terms “egalitarianism” -- so convincing that generations of “enlightened” scoffers would assume they were “self-evident.” 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.[13] Certainly they believed they were improving the radically theocentric world-view 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. The result of the advance of secularism and the laughing question “Sez who?” to even the most reasonable ethical prescriptions, like the “Golden Rule,” was not more freedom. It has not led us to an “end of history” in which egalitarianism has triumphed. But to the blood of Columbine and the presidential question as to the meaning of “is.”

The result of the advance of secularism and the laughing question “Sez who?” to even the most reasonable ethical prescriptions is the blood of Columbine and the presidential question as to the meaning of “is.”

The crisis now, as Os Guinness rightly saw, is a “crisis of cultural authority.”[14] Today, Americans are feeling the shock of the realization that the “sensate system” they built is vacuous, insupportable and, in the end, self-destructive. 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. 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. Even Max Weber could feel the air leaking from the Enlightenment bubble: “The rosy blush of [religious asceticism’s] laughing heir, the Enlightenment, seems also to be irretrievably fading.”[15] 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 Americans from looking to it as source of hope. But rather than boldly go to brave new worlds that promise – but fail to provide – new heights of egalitarianism and autonomy, America would do better to draw from the well of its own City upon a Hill.

John B. Carpenter, Ph.D., is pastor of Covenant Reformed Baptist Church, in Danville, VA. and the author of Seven Pillars of a Biblical Church (Wipf and Stock, 2022).

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[1] Milton Rosenberg, professor of psychology at the University of Chicago and high-brow radio talk show host for WGN, diagnosed today’s American culture: “We have arrived at the virtual nadir point in a process of socio-political regression. That regression was led by supposedly left-wing intellectuals (actually derivative Marxist manqué) who elevated “equality” over “liberty” and grievance over merit . . . . From Freud to Foucault our ideational culture has featured a revival of basic nihilism, denying the possibility of absolute truth whether in religion, ethics or science itself.” (electronic correspondence, May 1999.)

[2] I should make clear that the last two sentences are my own reflection and not necessarily the views of Prof. Fogel.

[3] According to E. Digby Baltzell, Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia: Two Protestant Ethics and the Spirit of Class Authority and Leadership, 1.

[4] Increase Mather for the 1679 Boston Synod, The Necessity of Reformation (1679), i.

[5] original emphasis, 16-17; according to Bernard Bailyn, The New England Merchants of the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1955), 140-41.

[6] Allen C. Guelzo, Edwards on the Will: A Century of American Theological Debate (Middletown, CN.: University Press, 1989), 239.

[7] Talcott Parsons, The Structure of Social Action, 537.

[8] See Robert Fogel’s Without Consent or Contract, which was part of the work that won him the Nobel Prize in Economics.

[9] George Marsden, Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids: Michigan: Eerdmans, 1991), 89.

[10] Max Weber states, “The American War of Independence . . . was waged in the name of the basic principles of Quakerism. . . .” (The Sociology of Religion, 228.)

[11] Timothy Dwight believed the Puritan era was “a normative era during which the American character and nation were formed.” (John R. Fitzmier, New England’s Moral Legislator (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 131.) Some of Dwight’s poems, such as Greenfield Hill, were written to prove this point. Literary scholar, William C. Dowling believes that Dwight, under the influence of the poets of Augustan England, saw an essential equivalence between the languages of classical republicanism and covenant theology; the godly Puritan state remained as a model after which the fledgling republic should strive to emulate. (Poetry and Ideology in Revolutionary Connecticut, [Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press, 1990,] 72-74.)

[12] Puritan leader Samuel Sewall wrote, “These Ethiopians, as black as they are, seeing they are sons and daughters of the first Adam, the brethren and sisters of the last Adam, and the offspring of God, they ought to be treated with respect agreeable.” (1700; according to William Weeden, Economic and Social History of New England, Vol. 1, 429.) In 1698, Cotton Mather baptized two African adult slaves and two African children.

[13] The phrase “nature and nature’s God” is from the US Declaration of Independence.

[14] The American Hour (New York: The Free Press, 1993), 4.

[15] Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 182.