Scholars of American political thought tend to begin their inquiries by making an important decision: to look carefully at a few texts, generally the works of towering figures in the tradition, and tease out larger themes and insights from a small number of sources; or to range more broadly over a wide swath of territory and make larger claims about the nature of the American experience more generally. Each approach has certain advantages and certain risks — looking closely at just a few texts provides a depth of analysis that the macro approach simply can not offer, yet it is vulnerable to the critique that the few texts explored may not be “representative” or influential. On the other hand, taking a larger view of the contours of social and political thought can point to broad developments over the course of American history, but it sacrifices depth for breadth in making such larger claims.

Of the two books under consideration here, Matthew Holland takes the first approach, focusing on individual speeches by John Winthrop, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln as windows onto an enduring American commitment to “civic charity.” By contrast, George McKenna traces the enduring power of American patriotism to the nation's New England roots and sketches, with a broader brush, the ongoing importance of “Puritanism” from those early settlements down to our own day. Writing of Winthrop, Jefferson, and Lincoln, Holland argues that each “consciously worked to channel some understanding of Christian love — what the New Testament calls “charity” — into a central civic, rather than strictly religious, virtue” (5, emphasis in original). McKenna too traces a deeply American way of thinking about the nation and its fundamental values, combining an emphasis on “the continuing influence of American Puritanism on American political culture and rhetoric, particularly its idea of America as a land set aside for a providential ‘errand’” with attention to the “contrasting depictions of ‘the Puritan’ in American life and letters over the years” (8, emphasis in original).

Holland's Bonds of Affection takes it title from Winthrop's “Model of Christian Charity,” delivered (some say) on board the Arbella, on the way to New England in 1630. Winthrop's Model evokes Christian love as the “bond of perfection” unifying the New England community, whom he entreated to be “knit more nearly together in the bond of brotherly affection.” The Model has long been known for its reference to New England as a “city on a hill,” a peroration that has become a favorite way of encapsulating the hope and promise that those early settlements held for the Puritan settlers. That the phrase was used by Winthrop more as warning than as celebration (he worried that if the settlers did not hold fast in the bonds of affection, God would break out in wrath against them) and that it appears only once, at the tail end of an intricate theological reflection on the role of love in building political community, tend to be overlooked by scholars. Holland proves to be a skillful and sympathetic guide through that theology and its political corollaries.

Bonds of Affection begins with an important observation: Winthrop's charity is not contemporary Americans' charity. For Winthrop, Christian charity bound together a hierarchically-ordered society that was shot through with social inequality (28). Holland's analysis of the “Model” in Chapters 1 and 2 is the text's clearest and most careful exposition since John Schaar's “Liberty/Authority/Community in the Political Thought of John Winthrop” more than fifteen years ago (Political Theory 19 [1991]: 493–518). Holland's treatment of Jefferson in the subsequent chapters builds upon that of Winthrop, pointing out areas of convergence and disagreement; and the chapters on Lincoln round out the account of “civic charity” as a key component in the nation's political and cultural life. Each of these treatments is simultaneously a study of one thinker's idea of charity and an act of charity itself, coaxing out from the texts under consideration the many rich and varied lessons they contain.

And yet at times, the line between interpretive charity and piety can seem rather thin. It is not clear how biographical information about Winthrop's personal generosity relates to the less savory elements of early New England legal practices, or settlers' treatment of native populations (practices often deeply implicated in the theology articulated in the “Model”). And it's difficult to assess Holland's claim that at the time of his death, Winthrop was “the most widely adored man of Puritan Boston” (62), nor why this matters. Though Jefferson did say that “I am a real Christian” (134), Holland admits that this acknowledgment took him no further than “some very modest public rhetoric that directs his constituents' minds toward an acknowledgement and appreciation of a divine influence” (140). And is it in fact that case that, as Holland claims, no president was treated as disrespectfully as Lincoln, or that — as he writes of Lincoln's call for “malice toward none” — “Such an act by an official head of state in such a situation appears without precedent in the civil history of the world” (223)? Lincoln's use of proclamations of Thanksgiving is a slender piece of evidence for claims about his religious views, since many of these proclamations came directly from the pen of Secretary of State Charles Seward. Also puzzling is an epilogue in which Holland notices the “uncanny” parallels between the deaths of Lincoln and Jesus and points to Lincoln's “Jesus-like qualities and instincts” (251, 255). Such concerns notwithstanding, Bonds of Affection is a book well worth reading, both in terms of its insights into American politics and as an example of how to read texts carefully.

For McKenna, the movement away from traditional understandings of Puritanism has paved the way for secular humanism and an increasingly negative view of the nation by the ancestors of those very Puritans who did so much to shape its religious foundations. McKenna begins where Holland does, with Winthrop. He offers a lively narrative tracing the transformation of a religious myth into one of national meaning and purpose over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; and punctuates that narrative with succinct character sketches of important figures (Charles Gradison Finney, Lyman Beecher, Daniel Webster, Harriet Beecher Stowe, John Brown, Horace Bushnell, Edward Bellamy, and an especially fine treatment of the Puritan and the populist in Franklin D. Roosevelt).

Much of McKenna's narrative retraces ground long familiar to students of American religious history, and shares the weakness of all such New England-centric approaches to understanding the American experience dating back to Tocqueville and even Cotton Mather. The South, apparently, contributed nothing to American identity or patriotism before the appearance of Billy Graham; John C. Calhoun receives one paragraph (118–119). Nor did the Middle Atlantic states, with their vibrant traditions of commerce and religious pluralism. Nor do we hear about American Catholicism, nor eighteenth-century enlightened rationalism (unless as a secularized form of Puritanism). McKenna admits that “I would have liked to have paid more homage to Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton, archrivals who both had enormous impact on our thought today, but neither of them fit the mold of Puritanism. The point here is that one can't do everything” (12–13). Fair enough, but perhaps one ought to temper one's conclusions about American political development in light of this admittedly partial portrait; instead, McKenna ends the book with an apparent call for revival of traditional Puritan categories in order to “gird our loins” to combat Islamofacism (373).

As the book goes on, it becomes increasingly polemical. What began as a careful treatment of the importance of New England to the young nation ends in a screed about Hillary Clinton; along the way, McKenna labels Walter Rauschenbusch's narrative as crude (199) and his approach to the history of Christianity “ham-handed” (199). Pro-choice Americans, apparently, are anti-Catholic bigots who throw condoms and tampons around Catholic churches (335–336). By the time we reach page 344, McKenna has descended to the level of criticizing Bill Clinton for allowing his wife to oversee his health care reform proposal in 1993. Similarly, the focus of the narrative becomes increasingly diffuse, including a plot summary of The Crucible as well as an ad hominem attack on Arthur Miller as a “fellow traveler” of Communists during his youth (277) and an extended discussion of the Alger Hiss case (260–266).

McKenna's polemical tone seems closely linked to his disdain for where late-twentieth century events have left the Puritan narrative, sidelined as one voice among many in a pluralistic American landscape. But more fundamentally, this polemical orientation results from and is egged on by a deficient historical sensibility. McKenna is eager to see parallels, if not outright equivalences, between widely divergent historical periods and actors. Anne Hutchinson's followers were “the flower children of Puritanism” (21); Stephen Douglas's “position was identical with that of the ACLU today” (150); Lincoln's message to Congress on July 4, 1861 “was John Winthrop again” (155). But if, as he claims, the abolitionists “became the lyricists of the Civil War” (142), and if the Gettysburg Address shows that “[t]he ideal — the reality — of equality was in the air that most white Americans breathed during those years” (156), how do we explain the massive resistance to the war in the Northern states, or the racial riots that broke out across the North after the publication of the Emancipation Proclamation (just three months before Lincoln went to Gettysburg), or the deep white resistance to the use of black soldiers in the Union Army? Unfortunately, The Puritan Origins of American Patriotism can not help us make sense of these crucial questions about American patriotism and identity.