Appearing on Pat Robertson's television program The 700 Club just days after the September 11 attacks, Jerry Falwell argued that
what we saw on [September 11], as terrible as it is, could be miniscule if, in fact — if, in fact — God continues to lift the curtain and allow the enemies of America to give us probably what we deserve… . The ACLU's got to take a lot of blame for this…. The abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked… . [along with] the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way…
All of the above-mentioned groups have been complicit, said Falwell, in “throwing God out successfully with the help of the federal court system, throwing God out of the public square, out of the schools.”Footnote 1 Although he did not elaborate, Falwell and other Christian conservatives generally point to a series of Supreme Court decisions and social developments since the 1960s, all of which add up to a cultural transformation that imperils the nation's moral foundation.Footnote 2
But the imagery of divine punishment for social and political misdeeds is not limited to white fundamentalists. Commenting on Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin offered the following interpretation of events:
And as we think about rebuilding New Orleans, surely God is mad at America, he's sending hurricane after hurricane after hurricane and it's destroying and putting stress on this country. Surely he's not approving of us being in Iraq under false pretense. But surely he's upset at black America, also. We're not taking care of ourselves. We're not taking care of our women. And we're not taking care of our children when you have a community where 70% of its children are being born to one parent.Footnote 3
Of course Mayor Nagin's interpretation of Katrina, impolitic in its own way, did not approach the rhetorical excesses offered by the Westboro Baptist Church: “New Orleans, symbol of America, seen for what it is: a putrid, toxic, stinking cesspool of fag fecal matter. America is irreversibly doomed… . Pray for more dead bodies floating on the fag-semen-rancid waters of New Orleans.”Footnote 4 Other commentators saw Katrina as God's punishment on the American nation for sins as varied as its Middle East policy, the invasion of Iraq, its tolerance of abortion, or an overreaching federal government.Footnote 5
Each of these episodes occasioned a great deal of controversy. But the notion that God punishes the United States for its misdeeds is hardly new in the American tradition; it was a common part of public rhetoric during the colonial, Revolutionary, Civil War, and Cold War eras. Indeed, the notion of divine punishment for national “sins” represents the other side of the coin, so to speak, of the common understanding of America — later, the United States — as in covenant with, or “chosen” by, God, in the unfolding of God's intentions in human history; an understanding that clearly occupies the mind of the current occupant of the White House.
This article probes the cultural significance of the jeremiad — a narrative that views society as having turned away from its moral foundations, risking divine punishment if it does not repent and reform its ways, and suffering calamities and misfortunes as evidence of God's wrath — to American political life.Footnote 6 Those who would criticize Falwell and Robertson, or the interpretations of Mayor Nagin, must also look critically at far more entrenched and canonical elements of American sacred rhetoric. How, if Falwell and Robertson's interpretation of September 11 is problematic in political or theological terms, are we then to come to grips with Abraham Lincoln's Second Inaugural, with its speculation about divine justice for American national sins? I argue that despite the broad structural parallels between various types of jeremiads (identification of contemporary crisis, valorization of founders or preceding generations, and call to reform and renewal), important differences exist between the ways in which various narrators — American Jeremiahs — conceive of the nature of the American past and its relation to the present and future. The article advances a distinction between what I call traditionalist jeremiads, which construe the American past's value in concrete institutional or social forms; and progressive ones, which view the past as a repository of fundamental, emancipatory principles. An exploration of the ways in which political narrative in America shapes and gives meaning to political reality promises to raise compelling questions about the future of American politico-religious rhetoric.
I begin with a discussion of the importance of political narrative as a way of exploring the importance of the jeremiad. Having stressed narrative's importance to individual and collective identity-formation, and hinted at some of the dangers that narratives bring with them to politics, I turn to two historically and politically important American jeremiads, one articulated by important Christian Right figures during the 1980s, and the other laid out by Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass during the mid-nineteenth century. While broadly parallel in terms of their rhetorical structure, I argue, these two types of jeremiads are rooted in drastically different interpretations of the American past and thus point us to radically different visions of the American future.Footnote 7
THE AMERICAN JEREMIAD AS POLITICAL NARRATIVE
The American jeremiad is a particular type of political narrative. Although “jeremiad” has a technical definition — a type of Puritan sermon that commented on a text, applied its lessons to contemporary misfortunes, lamented the community's turning-away from its traditional religious values, and called it back to those values — I use the term in a related, yet slightly more expansive, sense. This more general understanding of the jeremiad refers to works of social and political criticism that (1) identify contemporary problems; (2) contrast contemporary degeneracy with past virtue; and (3) warn of dire consequences if behavior is not reformed. Jeremiads thus contain an historical dimension, seeking to reappropriate past virtues in the service of addressing present social pathologies. Let us consider these elements in a bit more detail.
Jeremiads claim that contemporary society has gone badly wrong, and offer vivid examples or statistics to back up this claim. New England clergy, for example, who raised the jeremiad to a distinctive literary genre, produced litanies of their population's sins: impiety, drunkenness, avarice, factionalism, and sexual immorality, to name just a few. Twentieth-century religious conservatives lament rising crime rates and drug use, sexual permissiveness, media violence, and an increasing hostility to religion in the public sphere as evidence of a deeper American moral or spiritual crisis. Contemporary critics from divergent political perspectives offer statistical and graphical evidence of civic decline — from teen pregnancy to league bowling — while Robert Bellah's Habits of the Heart, in a methodologically distinct vein, reports the results of interviews with Americans seemingly cut-off from the rich moral languages of their collective past.Footnote 8
Identifying the problem in contemporary social life, however, is only the beginning. Jeremiads bring an historical dimension to the attempt to explain social crises, proposing a specific time period in the past that did not suffer these pathologies. Early New England jeremiads often explicitly contrasted the behavior of their audiences with that of their more “godly” parents. In more contemporary terms, Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone provides a case in point: if the decline in league bowling represents a troubling social development, one should naturally begin one's investigation of the problem by looking at a time when participation was high (for Putnam, circa 1960). Critics of increasingly individualistic American society almost always refer, explicitly or implicitly, to a time period when communal or collective values held more sway over people's lives.
Thus the jeremiad presents a stark contrast between the virtues of past historical actors and the degeneracy of present ones. In other words, the offending practices of contemporary society do not generally spring from nowhere, but represent departures from formerly-obtaining practices instituted and maintained by founders. Be they second- and third-generation New England Puritans who valorized John Winthrop, John Cotton, or their fellow colonial planters; nineteenth-century figures who apotheosized George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, or John Adams; or contemporary cultural conservatives who look to those same founders, or Abraham Lincoln, or to the “greatest generation” that defeated the Axis in World War II: founders play a key role in bolstering the narrative and rhetorical power of the jeremiad. They provide a concrete (rhetorical) example of individuals who presided over societies where religious or civic virtue trumped, or at least moderated, self-interest; and represent a standing reproach to the current generation. Yet I shall argue as this article proceeds that the particular aspect of the past, or of the founders' examples, on which various Jeremiahs focus tells a great deal about their visions for the future; and that at least two distinct types of jeremiads can be identified, based on founding practices versus founding ideals.
How, specifically, particular narrators understand the virtues of the past has everything to do with the final element of the jeremiadic structure: the call to renewal and reform, always connected to a political agenda aimed at restoring some measure of the lost virtue, be it in traditional standards of behavior or in the fuller unfolding of ideals only implicitly realized in the past. All jeremiads conclude with a call for renewal: to restrict the spread of slavery; to recapture the public piety of the founders; to accommodate religion in the public square; to pass a constitutional amendment barring same-sex marriage; to abolish American slavery. Discussions of past virtue and present degeneracy are never presented simply as a series of empirical statements about the American past; always implicit or explicit is a call to reverse the errors of the present and to reappropriate founding virtues. From early New England to 9/11, the story of American decline and the threat of divine punishment have provided a powerful backdrop for a host of political campaigns and social movements, beginning with the migration to America itself. This call to action and reform is a crucial part of the jeremiad's rhetorical power, as it allows a backward-looking form of rhetoric to speak to future hopes and dreams; and keeps the focus on degeneration from founding virtues from becoming overly pessimistic.
Of course, tales of decline from virtuous foundings are hardly unique to the American tradition.Footnote 9 This article focuses on the particularly American variant of the jeremiad, a version that adds to the structural elements outlined above a sacred story tied to American socio-political origins and development. Since the earliest days of American colonization, America as “chosen” or set apart somehow, with a special relationship to the Creator, has constituted one of the nation's most enduring self-images and played an important role at the nation's founding.Footnote 10 If the progeny of the founders of this “Chosen Nation” have strayed from the path of rightly ordered politics and society, then the consequences are not merely social and political, but world-historical, even transcendent, in nature. In other words, surrounding the historical-relational claims — those that focus on founders and their wayward progeny — we find a theological, even a cosmological, dimension that gives the American jeremiad added poignancy and power.
This theological dimension, though often left implicit, is important to an understanding of the American jeremiad. The jeremiad presumes a God who attends to human history, and acts in history through the distribution of rewards and punishments, victories and setbacks, for communities that (respectively) do or do not follow God's laws. Such a view had its American origins in John Winthrop's evocation of the “city on a hill” in 1630, and the more general Puritan tendency to draw parallels between themselves and the ancient Israelites. Such presuppositions were deepened and strengthened by events of the 1770s and 1780s, in which the notion of an American Israel throwing off oppression in order to take up its national mission settled ever more deeply in American public rhetoric. The link between national virtue and national prosperity was only strengthened by the great evangelical revivals of the early nineteenth century and the nation's first movements westward. Attending to choseness as a national trope can account for both the origins and promise of the American experience and the bitter trials through which it was currently passing.Footnote 11 The jeremiad, with its twin emphasis on promise and decline, represents a uniquely powerful way of conceptualizing the American past, present, and future.
But the jeremiad, as a tale of American decline and renewal, is not merely a story; it is also a powerful tool for political mobilization.Footnote 12 New England colonial authorities proclaimed public fasts as part of a collective political effort to build a godly community in the American wilderness, an effort always threatened by Indian attacks, crop failure, and the indolence and sloth of its members. From the abolitionist movement, with its evocation of God's thundering hand punishing the nation for tolerating slavery, to the Christian Right in the 1980s and 1990s, the narrative of American decline has long provided a rallying cry for citizens concerned about the health of their polity. Each of these efforts at mobilization has been urged on by narratives, stories that offered interpretations of contemporary events and meaningfully connected those events to the American past and future.Footnote 13
In recent years, the subject of narrative has attracted a great deal of attention from scholars seeking to appreciate the power of language for political mobilization, political identity, and a variety of other aspects of political life.Footnote 14 In Dancing in Chains, Joshua Dienstag makes narrative central to his readings of Locke, Hegel, and Nietzsche, arguing that “the project of political theory is often not so much to reform our morals as it is to reform our memories.”Footnote 15 Scholars of American politics and political thought have offered a number of important broader narratives in recent years: such works as James Morone's Hellfire Nation and Eric Foner's The Story of American Freedom present urgent political questions in narrative format.Footnote 16 And no account of narrative and political theory would be complete without recognizing Alasdair MacIntyre's treatment of narrative in After Virtue: describing humans as “story-telling animal[s],” MacIntyre argues that the “narrative concept of selfhood” requires individuals to be both subjects in their own histories and objects in the stories of others.Footnote 17
The turn to narrative offers several important insights for political theorists. First, narrative is central to individual identity, articulating of a sense of self grounded in the particularities of one's community. Responsive to a human need to discover, articulate, and communicate a unified sense of self, the construction of a narrative out of a series of life events makes individual lives comprehensible by configuring events into sequences and, eventually, a unified whole.Footnote 18 Narratives are not just descriptive accounts of individuals, but carry normative evaluations as well: “Telling a person's story tends invariably to plot the type of moral agent he or she is or was; it reveals the value directions in his or her life by selectively plotting only those actions relevant or tributary to certain central purposes.”Footnote 19 Second, narrative is crucial to communal meaning, and thus to political identity. Stephen Crites has explored the importance of “sacred stories” to the formation of communal identities, and David S. Gutterman has shown how one of these formative cultural understandings — the Exodus story — plays a central role in the ongoing narration of American politics.Footnote 20 Third, in a complex world that threatens to overwhelm us with stimuli, narrative and story serve to organize and provide meaningful contexts in which to interpret a surfeit of data. In fact, the creation of a story can provide a sense of mastery in such a world: “when we turn raw events into personal sagas, parables, tales, and anecdotes, we are often struggling to come to terms with one of the inescapably difficult and puzzling facts of existence. Storytelling is an attempt to deal with and at least partly contain the terrifyingly haphazard quality of life.”Footnote 21
And yet, if narrative is ubiquitous and essential to our individual and social being, a few cautionary observations about this human tendency to tell stories are also in order. “In seeking and being granted rights to a lengthy verbal contribution,” notes Michael J. Toolan, “narrators assert their authority to tell… . To narrate is to make a bid for a kind of power.”Footnote 22 After all, the narrative is not merely a set of statistics or abstract logical deductions, nor a year-by-year chronicle of events, but a story about how and why the past has led to the present.Footnote 23 The narrative represents a particular slice of social reality, arranged in such a way as to develop the plot that the narrator wants to present. And in doing so, narrators must ignore or hide elements of that social reality that do not comport with their plots: “Narrative succeeds to the extent that it hides the discontinuities, ellipses, and contradictory experiences that would undermine the intended meaning of its story. Whatever its purpose, it cannot avoid a covert exercise of power: it inevitably sanctions some voices while silencing others.”Footnote 24 Anyone dealing with political narratives would do well to remember the words of literary scholar Wesley Kort,: “When most effective, plot draws little attention to itself; it seems unforced by tone, unplotted, natural.”Footnote 25
TWO AMERICAN JEREMIADS
In this section, I survey two American jeremiads, each of which carried real political influence in its time; in the following section, I use those narratives to draw out a contrast between what I call traditionalist and progressive jeremiads. It will be easier to illustrate these distinctions than to explain them at this point, so I move now to the jeremiads themselves.Footnote 26
The Past as Model: The Christian Right
The basic elements of the Christian Right jeremiad will be familiar to anyone who has observed American politics since the 1970s: due to an increasingly liberal and permissive social morality, exemplified by (but by no means limited to) Supreme Court rulings on public school prayer, displays of religious symbols on public property, personal privacy, and sexual intimacy, the nation has abandoned the moral and spiritual moorings that cemented politics and Christian piety since the earliest days of colonization. The consequences of this abandonment — divorce, abortion, violence, sagging public spirit, sexual promiscuity, the decline of individual responsibility — betray a moral and spiritual decline that threatens the very continuation of the American experiment in self-government. Such a view has long been common among segments of the American evangelical and fundamentalist communities, and the reemergence of the “Christian Right” as a force in American politics since the late 1970s (a particularly powerful response to perceptions of moral decline) has been well documented in the political science literature.Footnote 27 Despite reports of its demise, the Christian Right clearly survived the Clinton years intact, if not strengthened, and exercises considerable political influence both within the Republican Party and in national politics more generally.Footnote 28 Part of the Christian Right's cultural and political power lies in its ability to give voice to a sense of discontent and alienation felt by many traditionalist Americans in the wake of the 1960s and 1970s; in other words, to narrate a story of American decline, lament the decay of traditional standards of individual behavior, and call fellow believers to political action in order to reverse these trends.
The jeremiad is, as mentioned above, first and foremost an account of crisis, and begins with a litany of social pathologies or national “sins.” Summing up the “forces of secularism” in American culture that threatened traditional “Judeo-Christian” values, Jerry Falwell's longtime collaborator, Ed Dobson, provided an exhaustive list, including Roe v. Wade, the removal of God from the nation's public schools, the breakdown of the traditional family, a pornography epidemic, the gay rights movement, the proposed Equal Rights Amendment, and the federal government's encroachment into church affairs. All of these developments, he argued, “generated a perception among fundamentalists that a new religion of secularism was evolving and that it threatened the extinction of the Judeo-Christian values.”Footnote 29 On such a view, American society is awash in the fruits of sin: Richard John Neuhaus noted
the understandable reaction to the lethal liberationisms that reached their frenzied apex in the late sixties and early seventies. Drugs, cults, mass murders, the explosion in divorce, teen-age pregnancies, and abortion — all these have, in the eyes of conservatives, vindicated their warnings about the consequences of cultural decadence.Footnote 30
At a most basic level, critics decried a departure from traditional standards of sexual behavior. The increasingly organized movement for gay rights attracted attention as a highly visible and public way in which an aggressive and countercultural minority threatened traditional sexual values. In his landmark 1980 book Listen, America! Jerry Falwell lamented that what was once widely understood as “the zenith of human indecency” had become an acceptable alternative lifestyle. Homosexuality and the growing movement for homosexual rights figured heavily in Falwell's explanation of why he formed the Moral Majority.Footnote 31 In addition to the growing tolerance of homosexuality, Christian Right leaders pointed to rising divorce rates, the overturning of traditional gender roles and the growing acceptance of cohabitation by unmarried couples, and/or children born to unmarried parents.Footnote 32 Falwell linked sexual promiscuity, feminism, and the entry of women into the workforce with the acceptance of divorce and cohabitation as key factors undermining male headship within the family.Footnote 33
Of all these sexuality-related issues, however, it is difficult to overstate the importance of abortion in the Christian Right's narrative of American moral decline. The Supreme Court's decision in Roe v. Wade was a wakeup call for conservative Christians; Pat Robertson included it among his twenty-three “Dates with Destiny” as indicating “the loss of human rights for unborn children.”Footnote 34 Elsewhere Robertson claimed that the “abortion movement … may prove to be the greatest holocaust in history.”Footnote 35 “If we expect God to honor and bless our nation, we must take a stand against abortion,” wrote Falwell, who included abortion at the top of his list of the nation's five major political sins.Footnote 36
But if these sexuality-charged issues formed a significant part of the Christian Right's rise to national prominence, they by no means exhausted it. A series of related concerns animated support for voluntary school prayer, opposition to activist courts removing religion from the public sphere, and denunciations of media violence and the epidemic of drug use in American society. Neuhaus noted the importance of the school prayer decisions in marking the nation's moral decline, arguing that the Abington decision “set asunder what had been a unified tradition.”Footnote 37 Ralph Reed noted that the nation had seen a 560% rise in violent crime since 1960, along with overcrowded prisons, declining SAT scores, a rise in divorce, and so on; in other words, “a correlation between a decline in the role of religion in our society and the rise of social pathologies of every kind.”Footnote 38 Reed placed the “drug culture” alongside the sexual revolution, Vietnam, Watergate, and the growth of the welfare state” as things that tore the cultural fabric of the United States late in the twentieth century.Footnote 39
The jeremiad, to recall, is more than simply a litany of communal sins; it is crucial, rhetorically speaking, that there was a time prior to the onset of these national sins, a time of national moral and political health. Christian Right jeremiads hearken back to the nation's founding era, and to the colonial past, for examples of a time in which liberty, religion, and authority coexisted in a proper balance. Regardless of their degree of personal belief, the founders understood the importance of an accommodating relationship between religion and the state, one that cemented citizenship, shared sacrifice, personal piety, and the common good.Footnote 40 Many such accounts trace the religious impulse in American history back to the origins of American colonial settlement: Falwell highlighted the Jamestown settlement, the religious formulae in the Mayflower Compact, the early New England towns, William Penn's dedication to religious liberty, and the role of churches in the formation of the colonial universities, as elements of the American nation's Christian character.Footnote 41 “God has blessed this nation because in its early days she sought to honor God and the Bible, the inerrant Word of the living God… . [The founders] developed a nation predicated on Holy Writ. The religious foundations of America find their roots in the Bible.”Footnote 42
When did things begin to go wrong? Christian Right critics generally point to the tumultuous moral-social-political changes of the 1960s and 1970s as the pivotal time frame for the onset of our most recent decline. Although official disestablishment was the law of the land under the First Amendment, a general (Protestant) culture of religiosity, and a publicly-influential role for churches and church leaders, characterized the nation's public life well into the twentieth century.Footnote 43 But in post-1960s America, significant segments of the American elite (judges, journalists, academics) no longer proved willing to endorse the close accommodation between church and state so common to previous eras in American history.
The removal of religious imagery and practices from the school systems represents just the leading edge of a much broader social transformation, founded on a fundamental misunderstanding of the intentions of the founders and previous institutional relationship between church and state. “The Founders never intended for the First Amendment to restrain government, in its legitimate role of fulfilling a secular purpose, from accommodating religious faith,” wrote Ralph Reed. “Sadly, American legal culture has shifted from neutrality to hostility towards religion, something the founders never intended.”Footnote 44 A broader set of social practices and developments fired the narrative: Falwell emphasized the drug use, violence, callousness, titillation, skepticism, narcissism, and disbelief that seemed widespread during the 1970s, a series of crises that liberal theology only made worse.Footnote 45 Four of the nine “dates with destiny” that Robertson grouped under the heading “Losing Our Way” took place in either the 1960s or 1970s. In a passage penned during the Clinton years, Pat Robertson distilled this larger narrative of American decline:
Until modern times, the foundations of law rested on the Judeo-Christian concept of right and wrong and the foundational concept of Original Sin… . Modern, secular sociology, however, shuns such biblical teachings in favor of an evolutionary hypothesis based on the ideas of Darwin, Freud, Einstein, and others. This view, often called “secular humanism,” takes the view that man has evolved from the slime and that with time and ever greater freedoms, mankind will ascend to the stars. These ideas, which are contrary to the Word of God, have led directly to the bitter conflict and social chaos of our day… . The legacy of the 1960s is still with us today. The free-love, anti-war, psychedelic 1960s proclaimed not only the right of dissent but the right to protest against and defame the most sacred institutions of the nation… . Free love, the rise of pagan cults, and the New Age movement have all thrived in this atmosphere of defiance. And what may prove to be the greatest holocaust in history — the abortion movement — is one of its most sinister expressions.Footnote 46
Finally, the jeremiad is not simply a story about the relationship between past and present. The Christian Right jeremiad has always been closely aligned with a particular vision of the American future, drawing heavily on perceptions of Christian dominance in the American past, and a particular political agenda designed to advance that vision.Footnote 47 The main features of that agenda follow rather directly from the particularly religious character of the Christian Right narrative, rooted in the history of American evangelicalism and fundamentalism:Footnote 48 the outlawing of abortion, opposition to gay marriage and, indeed, any notion of rights for homosexuals as homosexuals, and the return of voluntary prayer into the nation's public schools. Support for school choice programs and home-schooling seeks further to enhance the ability of born-again Christians to live lives free from the legal and bureaucratic reach of the secular school system.Footnote 49
Yet within the jeremiad, narratives of decline are never the whole story. A sacred story always surrounds, enfolds, and gives meaning to the tale of decline from virtuous founders and the hope for national renewal. In the context of the Christian Right jeremiad, such a story interprets the American experience as part of God's unfolding plan for human history. “God promoted America to a greatness no other nation has ever enjoyed because her heritage is one of a republic governed by laws predicated on the Bible …”Footnote 50 In Robertson's view, the fact that the United States leads the world in military might, wealth, science, technology, and economic output is no accident: “It happened because those men and women who founded this land made a solemn covenant that they would be the people of God and that this would be a Christian nation.”Footnote 51 The founding of the nation in both Revolutionary action and the drafting of foundational documents, according to Paul Johnson, illustrates “the centrality of the religious spirit in giving birth to America.”Footnote 52 As opposed to the French Revolution, the American was fired by, and friendly toward, Christianity; and religious and political notions of liberty mutually informed and supported each other. The founders “were united by a common belief in the importance of religion as an aid and a friend to the Constitutional order [and] spoke with one voice about the import of religion in civic life.”Footnote 53
The nation, according to the Christian Right jeremiad, has fallen far from the founders' vision, and this betrayal of the founders' intentions represents a more general betrayal of the social practices and behavioral standards of earlier generations of Americans. Falwell's September 2001 jeremiad emphasizes the role played by left-leaning politicians, pagans, feminists, abortionists, activist liberal judges, the American Civil Liberties Union, and People for the American Way in this narrative of decline, and views a secularist and antireligious American elite as responsible for the lifting of God's protective hand from the United States. But there is another character, or set of characters, in Falwell's narrative: as Bruce Lincoln puts it, “There is a good, faithful Christian America that has been brought to mortal peril by the actions and views of another part of the nation that is secular and immoral. Secular America was the problem, to which Christian America … was the solution.”Footnote 54 Thus, for those within Falwell's community, the narrative serves to ground individual identity, not only within national identity, but in a subcommunity of conservative Protestants who lament the loss of traditional values and the socio-political structures (traditional marriage and gender roles, small government, public schools friendly to Christian rhetoric, crèches on courthouse lawns) that served to buttress them.
The emergence of the Christian Right during the 1980s depended on a compelling narrative employing characters, plot, and setting; and represented a bid for political and cultural power by a group that felt alienated and displaced from mainstream centers of power in American society. This mobilization was powered by a story of the nation abandoned to the forces of godless secularism, as Joel Carpenter has powerfully articulated.Footnote 55 Such an understanding of the nation's history — involving a steady assault on traditional social forms and religious practices by the forces of secularism, modernity, and humanism — shaped the interpretation of developments in American religion as well as social life more generally. For example, the growth of cults and Eastern religions during the 1960s and 1970s was not, in this narrative, primarily about the flowering of religious liberty, a basic American ideal, but rather marked a decline in the degree to which contemporary religious landscape mirrored that of earlier generations.Footnote 56 Similarly with the rise of homosexuality: the Christian Right jeremiad sees not the American dedication to individual liberty or civil rights, but a deviation from the traditional hegemony of heterosexual monogamy.Footnote 57
I call this sort of political narrative a traditionalist jeremiad. In the Christian Right jeremiad, the critic constructs a past that serves as a limiting or constraining condition, a sort of empirical checklist critics hold up to the present in order to assess the propriety of certain features of contemporary life: family structure, gender roles, sexual behavior, and religious piety. The political goal of such narratives is largely to retain as much similarity between past and present practices as is possible. The claims of Christian Right thinkers not to want to “return to the past” ring a bit hollow given the well-established yearning for the social conditions of pre-1960s America: in Ralph Reed's words, an America that looks “much as it did for most of the first two centuries of its existence….”Footnote 58. Such an understanding of the role and relevance of the past for the present and future suggests a constant emphasis on constraint, the minimization of variation, and thus a problematic relationship to the kinds of political, religious, and cultural diversity that characterize American society at the dawn of the twenty-first century.
The Past as Promise: Lincoln, Douglass, and American Slavery
I turn next to a jeremiad from the nineteenth century, one that proved as influential in its own day as that of the Christian Right in our own. I group Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass together in this discussion. Although important political and philosophical differences existed between the two for much of their careers, Lincoln came gradually to share Douglass' position on abolition and the importance of securing the political liberties of freed slaves, while Douglass, after deep disappointments during the sixteenth president's first term, came increasingly to admire Lincoln, and offered one of the few positive reviews of his Second Inaugural at the time.Footnote 59
For both Lincoln and Douglass, the crisis of their time had to do with slavery and a host of social and political disputes that involved slavery in one way or another, be it the Dred Scott decision, the ongoing sectional strife that implicated slavery, or the outbreak of hostilities in 1861. Although Douglass agitated for the elimination of slavery from the beginning of his public career, and Lincoln only arrived at such a position after several years of civil war, both saw slavery as implicated in the growing disunity, rancor, and sectional divisiveness of the 1840s and 1850s, and behind the eventual outbreak of armed conflict. Echoing the American jeremiad's fundamental theological assertion that God tracks injustice, Douglass asked his audience — and his country — “Do you really think to circumvent God? Do you suppose that you can go on in your present career of injustice and political profligacy undisturbed? Has the law of righteous retribution been repealed from the statutes of the Almighty?”Footnote 60 And those who waged war on God, Douglass insisted, would always end up on the losing end of history. Lincoln, though no abolitionist, clearly viewed slavery as lying at the root of a variety of steadily worsening domestic political disputes. As the 1850s progressed and a series of political compromises seemed to further entrench the slave interest at the highest levels of the American government, Lincoln repeatedly argued, most visibly in his “House Divided” speech, that slavery lay at the heart of the nation's many problems and would demand a national settlement.Footnote 61
When Lincoln and Douglass looked for a solution to the nation's difficulties, they each evoked the spirit of the nation's founders, looking to their vision for insights into the problems of the present. Both men saw the problems of the 1850s as stemming from a failure to implement the founders' vision for the nation. Indeed, one of the most significant moments of Douglass's public career came on May 23, 1851, when he renounced his earlier, Garrisonian view that the Constitution was a pro-slavery document.Footnote 62 But unlike Falwell, Lincoln and Douglass valorized the past not because of its concrete practices, but because of the radical potential of the ideas inherent in the American founding experience. Douglass located the moral significance of the American founding in its radical principles and not the mundane (slaveholding) realities of its time. In his famous July 4 speech from 1852, Douglass told his audience that “[t]he principles contained in [the Declaration of Independence] are saving principles. Stand by those principles, be true to them on all occasions, in all places, against all foes, and at whatever cost.”Footnote 63 In the midst of war, Douglass pointed to “principles in the Declaration of Independence which would release every slave in the world and prepare the earth for a millennium of righteousness and peace.”Footnote 64 After pronouncing that the Emancipation Proclamation would doom slavery once and for all, Douglass announced that “Henceforth [1 Jan, 1863] shall take rank with the 4th of July.”Footnote 65
Lincoln, too, valorized the nation's founders for their commitment to the ideals of liberty, although he made no claims that they had fully realized those ideals in their own day. Rather, Lincoln argued that the founders understood the incongruity of slavery in a nation dedicated to liberty, and had placed limitations on it and had expected that the slave system would gradually but inexorably vanish. In response to the Dred Scott decision, Lincoln offered the following reflection on the Declaration of Independence:
I think the authors of that notable instrument intended to include all men, but they did not intend to declare all men equal in all respects. They did not mean to say all were equal in color, size, intellect, moral developments, or social capacity… . They did not mean to assert the obvious untruth, that all were then actually enjoying that equality, nor yet, that they were about to confer it immediately upon them. In fact they had no power to confer such a boon. They meant simply to declare the right, so that the enforcement of it might follow as fast as circumstances should permit. They meant to set up a standard maxim for free society, which should be familiar to all, and revered by all; constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated, and thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence, and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people of all colors everywhere.Footnote 66
In his debates with Stephen Douglas, Lincoln described his own position as putting slavery “where Washington, and Jefferson, and Madison placed it … in the course of ultimate extinction.”Footnote 67 In his Cooper Union speech, Lincoln covered the history of the federal government's involvement with slavery in painstaking detail, rejecting the claim that the spread of slavery was consistent with the founders' views of the matter: “[A]ll Republicans ask … . . in relation to slavery … [is that] [a]s those fathers marked it, so let it be again marked, as an evil not to be extended, but to be tolerated and protected only because of and so far as its actual presence among us makes that toleration and protection a necessity.”Footnote 68
When Lincoln did praise the founders in more particular ways, it was always as propounders of an ideal, and articulators of the principles of liberty and equality. He praised Jefferson as “the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times.”Footnote 69 His attack on Stephen Douglas's reading of the Declaration went directly to this contrast between the letter and the spirit of the document: “Douglas' version of [the Declaration] … confines its meaning to an assertion of the equality of British subjects in America with British subjects in England.”Footnote 70 The praise Lincoln offers for the founders in his Gettysburg Address, in marked contrast, has to do with their bringing forth a nation “conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”Footnote 71
The simultaneous praise of founders and dismay at contemporary prospects implies a view of national development as a downward trajectory. For many opponents of slavery, such a view was often phrased in an inverse manner, as the steady rise of the slave interest's power over national affairs. Lincoln taunted Douglas with this charge, which was part of a larger antislavery trope opposing the “slave power” and its purported designs on national affairs.Footnote 72 Frederick Douglass, for his part, defended his outspoken position on the Kansas-Nebraska bill by affirming that “[the] Constitution knows no man by the color of his skin. The men who made it were too noble for any such limitation of humanity and human rights. The word white … was never used in the better days of the Republic, but has sprung up within the period of our national degeneracy.”Footnote 73 The government's refusal to use African-American troops during much of the Civil War, in Douglass's view, “shows the deep degeneracy of our times — the height from which we have fallen — that, while Washington, in 1776, and Jackson, in 1814, could fight side by side with Negroes, now, not even the best of our generals are willing so to fight.”Footnote 74
Finally, the jeremiad calls for action, for reform of the offending practices in contemporary society and recommitment to the values of the founders. For Douglass, again, the call for reform was fairly straightforward: the abolition of slavery and the securing of civil rights for former slaves. “Slavery is the disease, and its abolition in every part of the land is essential to the future quiet and security of the country.”Footnote 75 At various points in this struggle, however, more particular goals occupied his attention: for example, in the wake of the Kansas-Nebraska bill, Douglass stressed the need for a new national political party opposing slavery.Footnote 76 Initially, Lincoln sought to preserve the Union above all else. As his presidency, and the war, continued, he became increasingly aware of the centrality of abolishing slavery, concluding the war with a general amnesty, and envisioning a plan for reconciliation between the warring sections.Footnote 77 The realization of the founders' principles, in Lincoln's view — Jefferson's “abstract principle” — would require the eradication of a concrete social practice central to those founders' world.
Like the Christian Right jeremiad, Lincoln's and Douglass's jeremiads also presumed a theological understanding of the American nation's status as part of God's plan for human history. Lincoln, whom Mark Noll calls a “holdout” from the most simplistic sorts of providentialism that characterized so much nineteenth-century public rhetoric, famously called the Americans “an almost-chosen people,” a puzzling construction that seems to grant a kind of special status (“chosen”) with one hand while taking it away with the other (“almost”); Douglass aimed to illustrate the ways in which “principles in the Declaration of Independence … would release every slave in the world and prepare the earth for a millennium of righteousness and peace.”Footnote 78 When announcing that he would end publication of Douglass' Monthly in order to promote black enlistment in the Union armies, Douglass cited providence.
Let the oppressor fall by the hand of the oppressed, and the guilty slaveholder, whom the voice of truth and reason could not reach, let him fall by the hand of his slave. It is in accord with the all-wise ordering of Providence that it should be so. Eternal justice can thunder forth no higher vindication of her majesty nor proclaim a warning more salutary to a world steeped in cruelty and wickedness, than in such a termination of our system of slavery.Footnote 79
In a similar vein to the Christian Right jeremiad, the Lincoln-Douglass jeremiad also seeks to narrate a crisis and to call people to action, employing plot and characters in the service of returning to foundational values. The idea of a slave power — with its cast of characters including slaveholders, slave traders, and captive politicians and judges — progressively gaining control, hijacking the radical potential of the founding moment, provided not only a rhetorically powerful plot but also a call for political action.
Yet, in contrast to Falwell and the Christian Right, the Lincoln-Douglass jeremiad called the nation to action in order to reform the nation not to a set of specific social structures or institutions, but to a set of founding principles, a national founding promise embodied in the Declaration of Independence. In Lincoln's view, the Americans of his generation were called to fulfill the promise of the American Revolution in new and different times. Lincoln's early Lyceum speech noted the generational transitions from the founding generation to his own: members of that founding generation, he told his audience, “were the pillars of the temple of liberty; and now, that they have crumbled away, that temple must fall, unless we, their descendants, supply their places with other pillars, hewn from the solid quarry of sober reason.”Footnote 80 The pillars must be replaced, certainly, in order to buttress the nation's founding principles, but they will be hewn from different material than those supplied by the founders. In such a way, the task of the founders will be advanced in a new setting. I term this sort of political narrative, a progressive jeremiad. Both Lincoln and Douglass understood that the task of their contemporaries, although structured and bounded by the towering historical figures of the nation's founders, was essentially about moving their ideals forward and not holding on to specific institutional manifestations from a bygone age. At Gettysburg, Lincoln identified the root of the American experiment in self-government as a “proposition” and placed responsibility for realizing the full implications of that proposition on “we, the living.”Footnote 81 Given the radical potential present in the U.S. founding, the ground of political identity, for Lincoln and Douglass, lay in the nation's promise, and not in the replication of concrete aspects of a reconstructed past. Indeed, the fulfillment of foundational American promises would require movement beyond the founders' achievements and into a new American racial reality.
TRADITIONALIST AND PROGRESSIVE STORIES OF AMERICAN NATIONHOOD
I have, admittedly, moved rather briskly over large categories of political thought and rhetoric in the preceding section. In the remainder of this paper, I seek to draw our attention to the status of the jeremiad as a political narrative, and reflect on the implications of this term for our understanding of the relationship between past and present, and between religion and politics, in the American tradition. I quoted Michael Toolan above, in the ways in which narration represents a bid for power. Toolan's insights here move us from a relatively banal observation about the inevitably social aspect of narrative — humans as storytelling animals, a commonplace among narrative theorists and scholars in all fields — to a more politically sensitive understanding of the degree of active authorial construction always present in stories about the American past and present; and of the implications of these authorial constructions for an engagement with a diverse and plural American future.
We are dealing, in these two jeremiads, with the ways in which stories of the American experience — its fundamental meaning, its virtuous founding past, and imperiled present — constitute political identity and undergird national purposes. Both types of jeremiads construct their critiques of the present on an understanding of the value of the past and the imagery of decline from virtuous foundations. But the progressive narrative views the past and founders as sources of principles or ideals that have been gradually eroded by recent developments, while the traditionalist jeremiad laments the decline or decay of traditional social forms or practices that existed in the social world of those founders (e.g., the traditional family, sexual morality, the size and scope of the federal government). With such a different view of the importance of the past, the two jeremiads present radically different visions for the future, with the traditionalist narrative emphasizing restorationism (a rolling-back of recent events), and the progressive looking for new ways to embody founding values and ideals.
Jeremiads, I have stressed, are political narratives, and are thus about the use of power to effect social change. With regard to the Christian Right, such power-seeking is fairly easily observed: calls for overturning Supreme Court decisions striking down religious symbols and rhetoric in public life, recriminalization of abortion, anti-gay rights initiatives, and so on. So too did Lincoln and Douglass seek to bring state power to bear on political disputes. Their jeremiad self-consciously sought to decenter certain key constellations of power in the American political system in its day, namely the slave system and its monopoly over the federal government and Supreme Court, in the service of redeeming foundational American values. Like the Christian Right narrative, Lincoln-Douglass's jeremiad sought to call the nation to action, in service of a vision of America based on values present in some way at the nation's founding.
I have used Falwell, Robertson, and the Christian Right on one hand, and Lincoln and Douglass on the other, to stand in for larger families of political narratives across American history. In this sense, the contrast between traditionalist and progressive narratives points to something larger in the history of American religious and political rhetoric. The traditionalist jeremiad, for example, is hardly limited to the Christian Right. We see elements of such an approach to the past in the early New England jeremiads, as well, with their contrast between the piety and godly behavior of the founders and their children and grandchildren, their hostility to alternative religious experiences, and their deep-seated objections to commercial growth and mobility. We see such constraint at work in the disdain voiced by Stephen Douglas at Lincoln's expansive readings of the “spirit” of the Declaration of Independence at the expense of the plain sense of the document's text.
Nor is the traditionalist jeremiad, in contemporary times, strictly the property of conservative Republicans. Since the 1990s, for example, a revived American communitarian movement, which draws adherents from a variety of political perspectives, has lamented the decay of traditional forms of community involvement and civic engagement. Many works of communitarian and civic republican social criticism — most notably in recent years, the work of Robert Bellah, Amitai Etzioni, and Robert Putnam — have lamented the loss of earlier modes of interaction in an increasingly individualistic American society, and sought to revive, in practical ways, the spirit of community and social connection.Footnote 82 In such accounts of the American experience (although communitarians do not share the explicit theological canopy often employed by the Christian Right), we find the past as model for the present and future, and a failure to entertain the possibility that the present represents, not a loss of what was most important about the future, but a development of sorts. Putnam, for his part, was able to make such a pointed contrast between present and previous levels of civic involvement only by refusing other modes of engagement — book groups, self-help programs, national-level environmental groups — the status of “social capital.” Like those of many communitarians, his account remains imprisoned in an exclusive focus on the form of social interaction as it existed in the 1950s and 1960s, the local chapter/national-level organizations such as the Elks, Moose, Kiwanis, and Jaycees. An exclusive focus on such concrete forms can easily blind us to the reality of new forms of engagement that drew on technological advances and differing modes of engagement among a younger generation.Footnote 83
As with the traditionalist jeremiad, the progressive jeremiad is not limited to these two nineteenth-century thinkers. We see this type of thinking at work in other American historical movements, and it has a twentieth-century face as well. Consider, for example, Martin Luther King's celebrated “I Have a Dream” speech. King knew that it was no coincidence that his own great speech was delivered at the monument dedicated to Lincoln, that “great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today.” He narrated the story of America as based most fundamentally on a founding promise, a birthright of sorts: the “check” written to all Americans by the nation's founders, “a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir.” By pointing out the nation's default, that this check had been returned unpaid, King identified the crisis of his day. Yet his imagery of African-Americans coming to Washington to re-present the check skillfully accomplished two rhetorical purposes: in true jeremiadic fashion, it blended a lament over the realities of contemporary American life (the check has been returned marked “Insufficient funds”) with an endorsement of fundamental American ideals (“we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt”). King reached deep into the American tradition — as he put it, his dream was “deeply rooted in the American dream” — not to recapture a set of past practices, but to reclaim a promise, to fulfill the radical potential of those founding principles. Like Lincoln, King embraced a capacious understanding of the symbolic, and not merely the literal meaning of the Declaration and Constitution: “This note was a promise that all men — yes, black men as well as white men — would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, a check that declared that all men were created equal.”
King viewed this promise, this check written at the founding, as the birthright of all Americans, and such terminology returns us to questions of narrative, since a birthright implies a story. As Sheldon Wolin has observed:
A birthright is defined by the historical moments when collective identity is collectively established or reconstituted. For Americans, these moments include the seventeenth-century beginnings in New England; the revolutionary founding and the redefinition of it symbolized by the ratification of the Constitution; the Civil War, with its vision of a nationalized society and its inconclusive attempt to radicalize republicanism; and two world wars that have affixed collective identity to the dream of world hegemony… . Birthrights are transmitted, and because of their meaning will have to be reconsidered amid different circumstances. We inherit from our fathers, but we are not our fathers… . We cannot, for example, experience the past directly. We can, however, share in the symbols that embody the experience of the past. This calls for a citizen who can become an interpreting being, one who can interpret the present experience of the collectivity, reconnect it to past symbols, and carry it forward.Footnote 84
Likewise, progressive narratives much more controversial than King's — arguments for the rights of gays and lesbians, not to mention even more controversial calls for animal rights — have been articulated in similar ways, against the backdrop of an American birthright and the emancipatory potential of American founding documents; potential that has been consistently frustrated by the actions of power-hungry elites throughout American history.Footnote 85
The goal of this article is not to leave the impression that there is some sort of “true” narrative waiting to be discovered “out there,” a story that is more “authentic” regarding the facts of American history than that of its opponents (that is, less simplified and obfuscating). Whereas I have suggested that the portrait of the past put forward by the traditionalist jeremiad fails to do justice to the permanent nature of diversity in contemporary social life,Footnote 86 it is equally difficult to articulate what the “authentic” progressive instantiation of American ideals of liberty or equality might be. At the same time, certainly the way in which one goes about the narrative task is crucial in terms of the political and ideological uses to which various narratives lend themselves. Somewhere in the distinction between these two ways of valorizing the past — between emphasizing the principles and promise versus empirical realities — lie two quite different ways of envisioning the American future.
In addition, the distinction I have drawn between these two types of political narratives is meant less as an airtight set of boxes within which we should seek to “file” competing political movements and the stories by which they interpret their worlds and motivate their members (or potential members). Instead, I hope to draw our attention, as scholars and citizens, to the continuing importance of the past to political discourse in the present. Certainly the progressive and traditionalist narratives map, at least very loosely, onto the orientations identified by James Davison Hunter in his seminal account of the culture wars in American politics.Footnote 87 And we might reflect on the ways in which traditionalist and progressive jeremiads animate debates over constitutional interpretation between, to be broad and schematic, proponents of some version of original intent and those who endorse a “living constitution.”Footnote 88
We are, as MacIntyre and so many others have claimed, storytelling animals, narrating ourselves and our communities into a meaningful relationship with the past and future. But we are also, as another political thinker long before MacIntyre pointed out, political animals. And in the interstices of these two descriptors, I suggest, we find a political imperative for our times, a task of democratic citizenship, for those involved in studying American political thought and practice. In proposing a rejuvenation of progressive jeremiads, I am suggesting that we move beyond nostalgic laments over declining bowling leagues or a naked public square, and employ the jeremiadic format in the interest of religiously pluralistic narratives that speak to a religiously and politically vibrant American future from deep within the American tradition; that we refuse to allow the most fundamental understandings of American nationhood to be limited to replicating demographic, cultural, or religious profile of a previous time. John Higham and David Hollinger, for example, have called for narratives of American identity that are neither captive to narrow particularisms of class, gender, or race, nor make discredited appeals to the kinds of universals that underwrote American assimilation in years past.Footnote 89 A full and frank set of conversations about national meaning and values, and the nature, complexity, and legacy of the American political experience, might lead us to create ever more capacious narratives in which many American voices can find a place.
