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RELIGION AND THE AMERICAN DEMOCRATIC TRADITION
Edward Schwartz
1981
A. Religion and Democratic Values
With the rise of the Moral Majority in the 1980's, organized
religlon once again has become associated with conservatism in
politics. The spectacle of Baptist preachers using their
ministries to advance such causes as opposition to Salt II and
"reckless" federal spending has prompted demands for a rigid
separation of church and state from many liberals who only
fifteen years ago were calling upon all of society to reform
itself in the image of the Golden Rule. As a progressive, God was
a noble source of inspiration to us all. As a conservative, He
appears to be not merely wrong, but unconstitutional.
Yet the American Left shouldn't be hiding behind the 1st
Amendment to defend itself against Reverend Falwell and his
friends. There is still far greater justification in using
Scripture to defend democratic principles in America than in
invoking Deity on behalf of "free enterprise." As Reverend
Walter Fauntroy, Congressman from the District of Columbia, put
"To be a Christian means to bring Good News to the poor." The
Congressman's approach is direct and appealing. If the Moral
Majority bears false prophecy, the truth--and not
legalisms--should set the country free.
Nor should progressives feel that they lack support for their own
claims to the Deity in America. Any serious examination of our
history suggests an interesting proposition: religious justice
was the central demand of virtually every major movement in the
United States throughout the l9th Century, and a prime source of
support for the most democratic causes in this one
One would never come to this conclusion from reading many liberal
accounts of the country's past. These generally argue that early
American society was merely agrarian--idyllic in its way, but
hopelessly backward in every important respect. The farmers were
uneducated--locked to the land, deprived of all benefits which
"broad" understanding might have given them. After the Civil War,
they were no match for the "Robber Barons" who were concentrating
wealth in their own hands. The poor people who fought back--the
early labor organizations, the Populist Party, the immigrant
machines--were trying to stop Progress at a time when to move
forward meant to accept industrialism without complaint. Only
"enlightened," secular liberalism in the 20th Century has shown
the nation how both to pursue economic growth, while helping
those who "cannot help themselves."
This analysis ignores several points:
l.) People were farmers in early America not simply because they
enjoyed the occupation, but because the occupation fostered the
religious values which they shared. Ronald Reagan was quite
correct during his campaign in identifying the real "founding
fathers" as the Puritans who landed in Massachusetts Bay in 1633.
The "City on a Hill" which they envisaged, however, was to be a
citadel of moral excellence--a new Israel, bound by the Prophet
Micah to "do justice, love mercy, and Walk Humbly unto your
God." Laissez faire economics had nothing to do with it.
2.) The main inheritors of the Puritan tradition were the
democrats of the l9th Century--farmers, immigrants, and small
shopkeepers. These groups fought to preserve the only society
which they believed to be consistent with Christian doctrine--a
confederation of small communities, each sending representatives
to a national government that would use its authority to pre-
serve relative equality between rich and poor. When large
corporations did begin to take over the country after the Civil
War, the farmers created the Populist Party to demand the
development of cooperatives in states and localities; direct
democracy to hold the government accountable to the people;
and public ownership of the railroads, telephone, and telegraph.
Religious democrats always feared that in a country of this size,
people would lose control of a technology that reached
continental proportions.
3.) Even today, most of the major causes which Americans identify
as progressive--Civil Rights for minorities; social justice for
the poor; environmental protection; world peace--have received
enormous support from churches and synagogues. It is fair to say
that in the 1970's, churches provided more financial support for
community and citizen organizing than any other institution in
the country.
Therefore, as the 1980's begin, it is critical for political
leaders to recognize that religion in America is as much
responsible for our democratic heritage as for any other, and
that American evangelicals of the past held a vision of our
society not much different from the ideals of many of the
activists today. Indeed, one of the central failings of
what remains of the Left has been its unwillingness to identify
with these democratic movements of the past, whose values are
still shared by millions of Americans.
Therefore, to offer some assistance in this matter, I want first
to discuss what the Puritans did mean by the "City on a Hill,"
in Massachusetts Bay; how the American democrats of the l9th
Century applied this principle to an emerging industrial society;
and what this philosophy would mean now, were activists and
political leaders to use it as a basis for their proposals for
reform.
B. The City on a Hill
Ronald Reagan has been so obviously inspired by the Puritan
image of America as a "City on a Hill" that it is hard to believe
that he actually has read the document which describes it. The
"Model of Christian Charity" was, indeed, prepared by John
Winthrop on the Arabella, as Mr. Reagan informed us in a
television address. It did also warn that, "If we shall
deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so
cause Him to withdraw his present help from us, we shall be made
a story and a by-word throughout the world." There ends the
resemblence between Mr. Reagan's city and Mr. Winthrop's.
To John Winthrop, the "work" of Massachusetts Bay was the
pursuit of God's will, through total involvement in a community
bound by the authority of Scripture. The "end" of the
commonwealth, in turn, was not wealth, but virtue--defined in no
small degree by mutual sharing and giving help to the poor. In
effect, it was as radical in its economics as it was conservative
in its adherence to Christian theology. An examination of its
central tenets reveals a quite different political philosophy
than the doctrines now espoused by the Right.
The Model of Christian Charity was, in effect, a covenant, a
secular replica of the Covenant between God and man in the
persons of Abraham and Christ, whereby a settler was asked to
"bind and engage himself to each member of the society to promote
the good of the whole." The colonist would exercise his free will
in agreeing to this covenant. He then would be held strictly
accountable to its terms. "The end," ultimately, was "to improve
our lives to do more service to the Lord, the comfort and
increase of the body of Christ whereof we are members, that
ourselves and posterity may be the better preserved from
the common corruptions of this evil world, to serve the Lord and
work out our salvation under the power and purity of His holy
ordinances."
Such an undertaking demanded the complete cooperation of all
members of the community. In this era of "Looking Out for Number
1," it is instructive to look back at the sort of society that
the Puritans had in mind:
We must be knit together in this work as one man. We must
entertain each other in brotherly affection...we must uphold
a familiar commerce together in all meekness, gentleness,
patience, and liberality. We must delight in each other,
make others' condition our own, rejoice together, mourn
together, labor and suffer together: always having before
our eyes our commission and community in the work, our
community as members of the same body...
Whatever principles the Puritans did uphold, rugged individualism
was not among them.
Nor did they believe in what we now call "limited" or
laissez-faire government. The role of government was, rather, to
promote both public and private virtue. The Chief Magistrate was,
above all, the moral leader of the people, who achieved his
position by demonstrating his superior ability to relate the
edicts of Scripture to the ongoing social and political issues of
the community. Indeed, Winthrop himself held the view that his
election as Magistrate by his his peers was merely a sign that
God himself had designated him for the post, and that therefore
he was entitled to make almost any decision that Scripture
seemed to require of him. Others in Massachusetts Bay disagreed
with this position--it emerged as one of the central debates of
the 1630's--but no one on either side would have said that the
proper role of government was to remove itself from society in
the interests of personal freedom. Government had to uphold
morality.
One of the central elements of this Puritan morality,
finally, was helping the poor. "God Almighty in His most holy and
wise providence hath so disposed of the condition mankind as in
all times some must be rich, some poor; some high and eminent in
power and dignity, others mean in subjection." the Model of
Christian Charity began, so that, "every man might have need
of other, and from hence they might be all knit more nearly
together in the bond of brotherly affection." There was a "double
law" by which "we are regulated in our conversation, one towards
another...sy the first of these laws, man, as he was enabled so,
withal is commanded to love his neighbor as himself; upon this
ground shall stand all the precepts of the moral law, which
concerns our dealings with men. To apply this to the works of
mercy, this law requires two things: first, that every man affort
his help to another in every want or distress; secondly, that he
perform this out of the same affection which makes him careful of
his own good according to that of our Savior." Nor would what we
now call "expanding the pie" be an adequate solution to poverty.
Puritans had to "be willing to abridge ourselves of our
superfluities, for the supply of others' necessities."
Thus, the Massachusetts Bay Colony was conceived in
Protestant idealism; organized as a cooperative commonwealth;
governed in strict accordance with Scripture; and dedicated to
the proposition that all men and women of character had to make
sacrifices for the poor. It was a long way, indeed, from this
City on a Hill to the San Fernando Valley.
C. The American Democrat
It was the farmer, the worker, the independent
entrepeneur--the American democrat--who made the major case for
religious justice after the demise of the Puritans in the 18th
Century. There was some irony in this, of course. The Puritans
had feared democracy. They had opposed demands to institute
democratic procedures in the Church, arguing that a congregation
would fail to make the right choices if given the opportunity to
vote on everything. Only those whose lives had been devoted to
the study of Scripture could promote adherence to God's will.
Yet the agrarian democrat had a mind of his own, one quite
resistant to an establishment of this kind. As Henry Mumford
Parkes notes, he, too, was religious. "Evangelists soon went to
work in the Mississippi Valley and made it the most religious
part of America. The inhabitants of the Valley responded quickly
to the more emotional forms of religious appeal, of the type that
had originated with the Great Awakening and had been syste-
matized by Jonathan Edwards, and the power of the churches was
established through a series of violent and hysterical revivals."
In other respects, however, Western religion was "similar to
that of the New England Puritans and the Southern
Scotch-Irish...It was essentially an instrument for imposing
social order and discipline. The democrats believed that everyone
could make the right moral decisions, providing that society
encouraged them to do so. In social life, they hoped that
communities would remain sufficiently small to permit citizens to
hold one another accountable to proper ethical standards--just as
the early Protestant magistrates had demanded. In politics, they
expected the government both to reflect and encourage the highest
virtue of the people, and the people to make similar claims upon
the government.
What applied to politics was even more important in
economics: if decentralization was the democrat's third principle
of government, after liberty and equality, it was his first
principle of economic development. Democrats did not oppose
business. Alexis de Tocqueville pointed out in 1833 that
"almost all the farmers of the United States combine some trade
with agriculture.w2 Yet De Tocqueville himself was impressed not
so much "at the marvelous grandeur of some undertakings as the
innumerable small ones."3 Industry had to remain small, the
democrats believed, in order to preserve the "countryside of
flocks and herds and cultivated farms, worked in seasonal
rhythm."4
In short, throughout the l9th Century, the American democrat
attemgted to build a society in which the values of the people
would come first, their affluence and power would come second.
There were many individual causes that brought these ideas to the
attention of the larger public--the anti-Federalists' efforts to
protect the Articles of Confederation against what they believed
to be undue concentrations of political power permitted by the
proposed Constitution in 1787; the Jacksonians' war against con-
centrations of economic power represented by the Second National
Bank of the United States in the 1830's; the programs of the
National Labor Union (13.) and the Knights of Labor in the 1860's
and 1870's, which sought to establish a cooperative society based
upon a large number of small producers, and called for the
destruction of monopoly, to be achieved in large part through
currency and banking reform.
Yet by far the broadest and most effective response to the
industrial challenge was made by the farmers in the Midwest and
South who, in the 1880's,formed the Populist Party. Populism
represented the most significant effort to reconcile the
philosophy of the American democratic tradition with cen-
tralized industry that the country has seen before or since. In
1892, the Party won a series of stunning victories, receiving
twenty-two electoral votes in the Presidential election;
capturing eight to ten seats in the House of Representatives;
winning the governorships of Kansas, North Dakota, Colora-
do; and making inroads in state governments throughout the
Midwest and South. KaNsas was so shaken by the Populists that an
attempt to organize its House of Representatives, where
Republicans held a slight majority, turned into a siege.
Populist representatives literally held their opponents in the
Statehouse in an effort to force their capitulation. No other
third party on the Left has come close to this performance.
Populism was not merely an effort to elect candidates to
public office, moreover. It was, above all, a mass movement
designed to hold the country accountable to its own democratic
ideals."Populism," Lawrence Goodwyn observes, "is the story of
how a large number of people, through a gradual process of
self-education that grew out of their cooperative efforts,
developed a new interpretation of their society and new political
institutions to give expression to these interpretations. Their
new ideas grew out of their new self-respect."5 The organizing of
Populism required an intensive campaign to teach Americans the
fundamental civic and religious principles that had shaped the
early years of their country. It also involved sustained efforts
to rebuild the local communities in which citizens had learned to
practice Christian charity with one another. Only on this basis
would average Americans gradually be able to control their
government and to use it as a vehicle for economic and social
justice. Each element of the strategy depended upon the
others.
Where liberal reformers appeal to reason as a basis for
social change, and socialists attempt to heighten class
consciousness, Populist speeches and writings made their case in
terms of traditional civic and religious ideals. Above all, this
was a national movement, devoted to a distinctively American
creed. The purposes of the Populist Platform of 1892 were to
be "identical with the purposes of the National Constitution,"
whose preamble it proceeded to recite almost in entirety. Even
when the platform condemned the major parties for "struggles for
power and plunder" carried on "for more than a quarter of a
century," it insisted that the Populist program was offered
merely, "to restore the government of the republic to the hands
of the 'plain people,' with which class it originated." James
Baird Weaver, Populist candidate for President in 1892, opened
his own "Call to Action,"on the same theme:
If the master builders of our civilization one hundred years
ago had been told that at the end of a single century,
American society would present such melancholy contrasts of
wealth and poverty, of individual happiness and widespread
infelicity as are to be found to-day throughout the
Republic, the persons making the unwelcome prediction would
have been looked upon as a misanthropist and his loyalty to
Democractic institutions would have been seriously called in
question. But there is a vast difference between the
generation which made the heroic struggle for
Self-Government in colonial days, and the third generation
which is now engaged in a mad rush for wealth.6
Significantly, the People's Party convention assembled not on
some arbitrary date in 1892, but on July 4th--"the 116th
anniversary of the Declaration of Independence." Thus, throughout
the movement, Populists saw themselves as the true inheritors of
Jefferson's dream, which they believed had been shamelessly
betrayed by established political and corporate leaders.
It was their religious faith, moreover, that gave this civic
commitment an added appeal. "Enlightened self respect and a
quickened sense of justice," James Baird Weaver proclaimed, "are
impelling the multitude to demand an interpretation of the
anomalous spectacle, constantly presented before their
eyes, of a world filled with plenty and yet multitudes of people
suffering for a11 that goes to make life desirable. They are
calling to know why idleness should dwell in luxury and those who
toil in want; and they are inquiring why one-half of God's
children should be deprived of homes upon a planet which is large
enough for all?"7
Populists recognized the difficulty of redressing the
inequalities they saw, but they were confident of ultimate
success. "You ask me how? You ask me why?" a prominent orator
challenged his audience. "For my reason, if must be given, I must
reply, a just God sits on the throne in Heaven. So relief will
come. I believe this inspiration will be found in every ear...
When the numan soul becomes inbued with a great principle like
that, when we are unified and stand together, then we become
Godlike, and the might of the people rises like the tiny zephyr,
to the temptuous whirlwind, like the murmuring rills of the
surging torrent."8 If civic idealism gave the Populists a
grounding in the past, religious faith gave them hope for the
future.
The religious values of Populism also brought them back to
their own communities, as centers for moral education and
political mobilization. True to the Puritan legacy of the
covenant, the People's Party spent a considerable amount of time
in building local cooperatives through which farmers could
share in production and distribution of their goods. Lawrence
Goodwyn observes that, "the cooperative crusade not only
recruited the farmers to the Alliance; opposition to the
cooperatives by bankers, wholesalers, and manufacturers generated
a climate that was sufficiently radical to permit the acceptance
by farmers of the greenback interpretation of the prevailing
forms of American finance capitalism."9 To many agrarians, these
local institutions proved what platforms and speeches could only
suggest--namely, that the Golden Rule was possible in economic
life, as well as in social and political affairs.
Ultimately, cooperatives became the instruments though which
the farmers entered local, state, and national elections. The
procedural reforms demanded by the Populists are well-known--the
secret ballot, the direct election of Senators, a one-term limit
on the President and Vice President. They understood well that
fear of public tyranny was an American tradition at least as
old as the RevolutiOn, especially in relation to the national
government, and that efforts to extend political authority had to
incorporate a clear plan to hold the system accountable to the
people.
Yet fear of centralized power did not cause the Populists to
reject government itself. Indeed, like the Puritans, they viewed
government as the one institution that could hold society
accountable to a higher moral ethic than competition. "What is
government to me if it does not make it possible for me to live?
and provide for my family!" Lorenzo Dow Lewelling demanded dur-
ing his term as Populist Governor of Kansas in the 1890's. "The
trouble has been, we have so much regard for the rights of
property that we have forgotten the liberties of the
individual...I claim it is the business of the Government to make
it possible for me to live and sustain the life of my family.
If the Government don't do that, what better is the Government to
me than a state of barbarism and everywhere we slay, and the
slayer in turn is slain and so on the great theater of life is
one vast conspiracy...That my fellow citizens is the law of
natural selection, the survival of the fittest--not the survival
of the fittest, but the survival of the strongest. It is time
that man should rise above it.10
Indeed, a democratic government had to assume broad
responsibility for running the economy in the interest of
justice. "The time has come," the Platform asserted, "when the
railroad corporations will either own the people or the people
must own the railroads." It demanded that the "telegraph,
the telephone, like the post-office system, being a necessity for
the transmission of news, should be owned and operated by the
government in the interests of the people." Nor were these
proposals radical to the Populists. They were merely extensions
of services that cities offered,as Ignatius Donnelly explained in
Ceasar's Column:
There was a time when the town simply represented cowering
peasants, clustered under the shadow of the saron's castle
for protection. It advanced s'owly and reluctantly along the
road of civic development...There was time when every man
provided, at great cost, for the carriage of his own
letters. Now the government, for an infinitely small charge,
takes the business off its hands. There was a time each
family had to educate its own children. Now the state
educates them. Once every man went armed to protect himself.
Now the city protects him by its armed police. These hints
must be followed out. The cities of the future must furnish
doctors for all; lawyers for all; entertainments for all;
business guidance for all. It will see to it that no man is
plundered, and no man starved, who is willing to work.ll
Just as in the 17th Century, the Puritans had regulated
commercial practices in the primitive economy of Massachusetts
Bay, so in the l9th Century the Populists believed that
government had to promote justice in the industrial sys-
tem of America as a whole.
Thus, for the greatest portion of our history after 1776,
religious idealism provided justification not for a
"free-enterprise system," but for movements that were organizing
local cooperatives, building democratic participation in
politics, and demanding public control of the national economy.
To be sure, the Populist Party did fail, and the character of
politics in the 20th Century moved in a substantially different
direction. Yet the Populist tradition survives, as is evidenced
by the enormous success of those who appear to be speaking in its
name--whether a Martin Luther King, Jr. on the Left; or a
Reverend Jerry Falwell on the Right. The central issue faced by
progressives in the 1980's, then, is not how to keep religious
idealism out of politics, which is all but impossible--but how to
restore religious idealism to its original meaning.
D. Religion and Politics in the 1980's
Whether a strategy to promote a democratic conception of
religious idealism in America today would win favorable response
is problematic. It has hardly been tried. It appears to have died
in the 1960's, or perhaps with the defeat of George McGovern in
1972. Instead of reassessing why citizens failed to respond to
appeals to "come home to the principles upon which our country
was founded," activists merely gave up on the principles. At this
point, they, no less than the most hard-boiled of conventional
politicians are proud to assert that power is their primary
objective--power to satisfy the private interests of various
dispossessed groups. sy seeking power in this way, they say,
justice will take care of itself.
To be sure, a few modern citizen movements have adopted many
of the specific tactics that proved useful to democratic
movements in the past. There are community organizing efforts
taking place in cities throughout the country, comparable to the
cooperative movements of the l9th Century. These, in turn, are
spawning regional centers for political education and democratic
participation, especially aimed at broadening grass-roots
involvement in elections. Finally, there are a growing number of
national and regional "think-tanks" developing proposals for
democratic control of corporations and a just distribution of
wealth.
Yet the recovery of democracy requires more than a handbook
of organizing tactics, a list of campaign slogans, and a manual
of innovative public policies. It also needs some of the
philosophical glue that held the Populist plan together: a sense
of the past, a sense of place, and a sense of the public good.
Unless modern democrats can respond to these deeper dimensions of
politics, they can expect religious idealism to remain the ex-
clusive property of the Right for the remainder of the decade.
Unfortunately, most progressive organizers and elected officials
haven't even defined their problems in these terms.
Up to this point, for example, contemporary democrats have
resisted identification with any distinctively American
tradition. The most common pattern is to portray modern society
as having changed so rapidly that nothing that took place prior
to the New Deal, or even 1948, could possibly bear any relevance
to what we need to do now. Those who see themselves as heirs to a
past most often identify with a "critical" tradition of idealists
and intellectuals who always have defied the dominant institu-
tions of society. Revisionist historians do not even offer us
this slender inheritance. In their accounts, previous generations
have committed a relentless succession of atrocities for which
present-and future Americans must atone. The net effect of all
these formulations is to leave modern activists isolated from
both the principles and precedents that might give them
credibility with the broader public. G.K. Chesterton once
observed that, "Man will sometimes act slowly upon new ideas; but
he will only act swiftly upon old ideas. If I am merely to float
or fade or evolve, it may be towards something anarchic, but if I
am to riot, it must be for something respectable." It is a
principle which l9th Century American democrats understood, and
which their potential successors would do well to learn.
Not only are modern movements suspended in time, they are
frequently lost in space. Where the Populists found ways to
relate local instit:utions to national programs, activists today
feel that they must choose between them. On the one hand, there
are Washington-based organizations rallying working people
and the poor behind campaigns to break up multinational
corporations, especially in the fields of energy and food.
Simultaneously, there are a wide range of neighborhood and
consumer groups fighting for cooperative community develop-
ment, fair utility rates, and equity from banks and insurance
companies in cities. Rarely do the two causes get together.
Indeed, more often than not, partisans within these various
groups attack one another: with national activists accusing the
neighborhoods' movement of parochialism, while community
organizers reject frontal assaults against corporations as being
irrelevant to immediate concerns. The Populists found in the
tension between local and national concerns a challenge to their
skills as teachers and organizers. The movements today see to
find in it only an excuse to wage faction fights.
The greatest gap between contemporary movements and their
democratic predecessors, however, lies in their respective views
on how to achieve a "public good." The Populists genuinely
believed that under the proper circumstances, participation in
politics would encourage citizens to modify their immediate
private claims in the interest of achieving a just society. Their
appeals to traditional values, coupled with their efforts to
organize cooperatives, aimed at creating the ethical climate
within which civic idealism would emerge. Politicians had to
teach, if not outright preach, the vision to their constitu-
ents.
No such lofty conception of politics guides the movements
today. The accumulated frustrations of the past twenty years have
convinced many activists that established institutions respond
only to threats, not to appeals to conscience, and that the only
relevant consideration in building a political organization is
how disruptive it is prepared to get. Demands for justice--
equality--democratic rights--these are all echoes of a past
which, it is said, was hopelessly naive in its strategic
thinking. Thus, modern American seems to have spawned the first
movement of idealists in history that lacks confidence in its
ideals.
Ironically, the American people are not nearly so cynical,
even now. Indeed, they seem to long for a new moral vision to
guide us into the 21st Century. An unknown Jimmy Carter offered
such a vision in 1976 and got elected on the strength of it. Now
Ronald Reagan steps forward, speaking of the City on a Hill, and
th~- people respond again. Indeed, every movement in America
now seems anxious to use religious idealism to suit its
purposes--anti-abortion groups; neo-conservatives; apostles of
balanced budgets. The list is endless. Only the liberals haven't
gotten the message.
Yet it was religious idealism that brought the Puritans to
this country; religious idealism that fired up an American
Revolution; religious idealism that gave blacks women, and poor
people courage to fight for freedom in the l9th Century; and
religious idealism that has sparked a Civil Rights Movement,
a Peace Movement, and an Environmental Movement in our own day.
If the defenders of privilege and power want to appropriate
religious idealism to themselves, the last response that today's
Populists ought to make is to disparage religious idealism
itself. Ronald Reagan can talk all he wants about the
City on a Hill. If the country ever gets there, it will be the
Left that leads the way. That is a thought that ought to guide
America's democrats as we move through this difficult period.
FOOTNOTES
1. Henry Mumford Parkes, The American Experience, (New York,
Vintage, 1959)
p. 179.
2. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Vol 2. (New York,
Vintage,1945) p. 166.
4. Marvin Meyers, The Jacksonian Persuasion: Politics and Belief,
(New York, Vintage, 1957) p. 26.
5. Lawrence Goodwyn, Democratic Promise, (New York, Oxford
University Press, lD76), p.88.
6. Cited in Tindall, A Populist Reader (New York, Harper & Row,
1966), p.60.
7. Ibid., p.64.
8. Ibid., p.73.
9. Goodwyn, op. cit.,p.142.
10.Tindall, op. cit., p. 49.
ll.Ibid., p.ll4.
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