Pubdate: Sat, 29 Mar 2003
Source: San Jose Mercury News (CA)
Copyright: 2003 San Jose Mercury News
Contact:  http://www.bayarea.com/mld/mercurynews
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/390
Author: David L. Beck, Mercury News
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?1043 (Christianity)

GOD'S COUNTRY

When in the course of divine events God saw fit to punish his wayward New 
Englanders in the 17th century, he sent them drought, disease, crop 
failure, Baptists, Quakers and, of course, "barbarous heathens," whom we 
now politely call Native Americans.

And the New Englanders, being hip to the ways of the Lord, knew exactly why 
they were being punished. "Children and servants . . . are not kept in due 
subjugation," pointed out a 1679 synod of ministers. 'Christians . . . have 
become too like unto the Indians" -- wild clothes, immodest displays of 
flesh, adultery, the works. Family values were in abeyance. "Most of the 
evils that abound amongst us, proceed from defects as to family 
government," the synod explained.

More than three centuries later, apparently we still haven't learned. When 
thousands of Americans lost their lives in terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 
2001, the Rev. Jerry Falwell knew exactly why.

"The abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will 
not be mocked," he said. Pagans, feminists, gays and lesbians -- "I point 
the finger in their face and say 'You helped this happen.' "

The idea that God takes a personal interest in local affairs is hardly 
unique. Indeed, the notion that there is a covenant between us and the 
deity is at the heart of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic-Western tradition. But 
other nations grew, in a haphazard, organic way. We were founded, and 
founded by people who had a very specific goal: to get it right. "We must 
consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill, the eyes of all people are 
upon us," said John Winthrop, governor of what became the Massachusetts Bay 
Colony, while still at sea.

And from that mindset flows practically everything that has followed, 
argues James A. Morone, a political science professor at Brown University. 
It has long been a commonplace that American moral attitudes somehow, 
despite growth, change, education, immigration and the Internet, derive 
from our Puritan ancestors.

But Morone goes farther. Surveying American history -- from the decks of 
Winthrop's flagship, the Arbella, to the crumbling towers of the World 
Trade Center -- he sees a nation continually driven by moral fervor, 
advancing in an almost Hegelian way from crusade to backwash to synthesis 
to the next crusade.

I admit to a certain fascination with unified field theories of history, 
such as last year's intricate and compelling "Measuring America," in which 
Andro Linklater finds "the promise of democracy" in the surveyor's 
measuring chain invented by Edmund Gunter in 1607.

But Morone's book is especially persuasive.

It explains almost everything: why we prefer to ban rather than to 
regulate, why we throw rocks at economists in Seattle, why the Vietnam War 
had to be opposed as evil rather than merely stupid, why the jeremiad is 
the theme song of right-wing talk radio (and why talk radio is right-wing, 
for that matter), and so on, right down to why public comment at local 
school board meetings often focuses on the presumed mendacity of officials.

We're not good at understanding systems; we prefer personalities. On the 
larger scale, that inadequacy is played out in the supremacy of the gospel 
of individual responsibility -- if you're poor, it's your own fault -- over 
what Morone calls the social gospel -- if you're poor, it's society's 
fault, and how can we help?

Moral conflicts -- "slavery, purity, the rise and fall of liquor 
prohibition -- rarely got resolved by splitting differences," he writes. 
"The partisans stuck to their sides. Instead, shifts in the larger 
political economy pushed the old debate into a new framework."

Thus, free-labor Republicans in the mid-19th century melded the fiercely 
moralistic debate over slavery into a new economic vision and, later, the 
Hoover administration wedded its economic vision to Prohibition -- a 
blunder that allowed the Depression to make both Hoover and Prohibition 
irrelevant.

Interwoven with our moral obsessions has been a persistently Manichaean 
vision of a world divided: between us and them, men and women, black and 
white, patriots and traitors. Those who disagree with us are not merely 
damned fools, but damned. As one preacher put it not long ago: America -- 
"You're either for her or against her. There is no middle ground." As it 
happens, the preacher was country musician Charlie Daniels, but John 
Winthrop couldn't have put it better.

For the Puritans, them quickly became anyone who disagreed with the elders 
theologically or (the two were basically the same) politically. A man's 
inability to "crucifie his lusts" made him an enemy. Without self-control, 
a man was nothing but an Indian.

As for women -- well! Sex and gender wind through American history, as 
Morone tells it, as prominently as race and class do. The Puritans insisted 
they were hanging Anne Hutchinson for preaching heresy, but her real crime 
was having the temerity to preach at all. And once they started looking 
into her religious beliefs, which seem pretty orthodox from our 
perspective, they were able to see with perfect clarity that she was not 
merely wrong but evil. Sound familiar?

The abolitionist movement was bitterly divided over the gender issue. It 
was all very well for women to oppose slavery -- women, with their higher 
moral purity and tender sensibilities, were naturally shocked at the 
cruelty of it all -- but that didn't mean they should be up on the platform 
preaching about it. Why, who knows where such promiscuity might lead? When 
Victoria Woodhull, long after the Civil War, ran for president with 
Frederick Douglass, their intergender/interracial ticket brought into high 
relief all the twisted strands of sex, politics and race that troubled 
abolitionists in the 1840s (and conservatives in the 1960s).

As each American crusade swells like a giant wave and then subsides, it 
leaves the shoreline permanently altered for the next wave that will come 
along. The Post Office shocked Puritan sensibilities by delivering on 
Sundays. Later, in the great purity movement of the last third of the 19th 
century, the Post Office would become the nation's morals police, as 
Congress passed sweeping laws about what could and could not be mailed -- 
and, therefore, published -- and turned their enforcement over to the 
leading crusader, a former postal clerk named Anthony Comstock.

The great white-slavery scare of the early 20th century gave a fledgling 
Bureau of Investigation something to do. (The bureau's first name, Federal, 
came later.) The 18th amendment to the Constitution, and the Volstead Act 
Congress passed to enforce it, turned the FBI into the nation's liquor 
cops, and by association -- since liquor, its consumption, creation, 
importation and sale and the crime waves associated therewith were the 
chief evil in the land in those days -- its moral police.

It was a short step from J. Edgar Hoover's FBI to the launching of a 
federal War on Drugs and the creation of a vast police bureaucracy to fight 
that war, and an even shorter step from the Drug Enforcement Administration 
to a Department of Homeland Security equipped with the power to hack into 
e-mail systems and browse library records. Not the least of the ironies 
that attend politics in modern America is the fact that those who bray the 
loudest against big, intrusive government are generally those who demand 
the creation of its some of its biggest and most intrusive agencies, all in 
the name of what's good for us. Cotton Mather, meet John Ashcroft.

"Hellfire Nation" is long and repetitive. Morone could, I suppose, have 
made his point in an essay rather than a book. But his style is lively and 
his examples entertaining (how delightful to find John C. Calhoun, 
historian Paul Johnson's candidate for the ablest public man America ever 
produced, explaining that slavery is good for the slaves).

The book has the force of its repetitiveness. With each new detail, Morone 
is able to show how this connects with that -- the First Great Awakening 
with the American Revolution, the Second Great Awakening with the 
abolitionist movement, the Women's Christian Temperance Union with the New 
Deal -- until the reader is not just convinced of Morone's truth but 
chagrined at not having thought of it himself. I will listen with new 
insight to the Austin Lounge Lizards' anthem, "God Loves Me (But He Can't 
Stand You)."

[SIDEBAR]

HELLFIRE NATION: The Politics of Sin in American History

By James A. Morone, Yale University Press, 576 pp., $35
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