Were the pilgrims really ‘ethno-nationalists’?
Were the pilgrims really ‘ethno-nationalists’?
T he Federalist’s John Daniel Davidson recently advanced a provocative theory, one summarized in the headline of his piece: “The Pilgrims Were English Ethno-Nationalists.”
According to Davidson, the popular history you’ve learned about colonial New England is, if not inaccurate, at least “incomplete.” Yes, the early 17th century Puritans who fled from England were escaping religious persecution. But in Holland and America, the Congregationalist diaspora established for themselves a “self-consciously English” — indeed even “hyper-English” — social covenant. Davidson cites in support of this contention Cotton Mather’s trepidation over the prospect of “Criolian degeneracy” descending upon Massachusetts Bay. The colonists never gave up on participation in English politics, even English civil wars, and they embraced and promulgated English customs.
And that’s why the notion of America as a “creedal” nation is bunk, Davidson writes. The Puritan experience betrays the lie behind the notion that “anyone, from any part of the world, can simply adopt and become American.” Thus, we should dispense with the childish notion that America is a product of the contributions of immigrants.
That’s quite the argument — one that uses “pilgrims” and “puritans” interchangeably and in ways the subjects about whom Davidson writes would not recognize. But if we’re going to rely on Cotton Mather’s outlook to support the contention that the Puritans conceived of themselves as a homogenous ethnic sect as well as religious enterprise, we should be comprehensive about it. Davidson’s contention doesn’t sit well with the universality of the Puritan ideal.
Membership in the Puritanical elect in Mather’s time was not a function of accidents of birth but of faith and ritual. In 1647, he sought to boost the ranks of “visible saints” by advocating infant baptism — a controversial proposition at a time when baptism was reserved for those who had and could expound upon their own conversion experience.
It was a seminal transition, argues the scholar George McKenna in his absorbing 2007 book, The Puritan Origins of American Patriotism. “Look, it was saying, we concede that many, maybe most, of our ‘visible saints’ are hypocrites,” McKenna summarized. “But our community is holy; it is bathed in grace, a grace that adheres to all of its members. That does not mean they will all be saved, but that they have a chance to be saved, for they are participants in the covenant — they ‘and their seed.’”
Which is to say that there was a hereditary element to the propagation of Puritanism, but it was a function of your parents’ willingness to buy into the covenant. It could be entered into as well as born into. And if you adhered to the Puritan creed — the evidence of which could be found in your observance of ascetism, the sweat on your brow, and the instrumentally useful works you left behind — you could ascend to membership in the church (with all the accompanying benefits, like voting rights).
This wasn’t just Mather’s outlook. The influential minister Peter Bulkeley adopted it, too. He cited the Jewish experience in the Old Testament, which, McKenna wrote, “many Protestants considered a covenant of works,” and was “‘in substance’ the same as the Christian covenant of grace.” In 1651, Bulkeley put his finger on the scale in favor of infant baptism because “God conveys his blessings only by covenant.”
By the end of the 17th century, the Puritans themselves believed their way of life was coming undone. Indeed, they resented their fellow New Englanders for bringing down on them so many ills: King Philip’s War, the monarchical nullification of their colonial charter, and the disaggregating influence of commerce. “By loathing of himself continually, and Being very sensible of his loathsome Circumstances, a Christian does what is very pleasing to Heavan,” Mather wrote in the effort to reconcile his contempt for what had become of a people he still believed were marked by God for great things. But the Puritans left behind a missionary legacy to which future generations of New Englanders would adhere.
Mather, Bulkeley, and others crafted a social contract they believed had and should have universal application. In their gloom, these founding fathers of Puritanism probably could not have foreseen the intellectual fad that would emerge around the study of their republished works in the early-to-mid-19th century. They represented an origin myth that Harriet Beecher Stowe said would imbue in her the feeling that “the very ground I trod on” is “consecrated by some special dealing of God’s provenance.” Stowe’s staunch abolitionism was prevalent among the New Englanders who emerged from the Puritan experiment. Indeed, Stowe was preceded and succeeded by generations of New Englanders who committed themselves to the “New Englandization of the nation” — a project that produced tangible results even before the American Revolution.
At the outset of American nationhood and in the throes of the Second Great Awakening, “we see an erosion of existing theological differences between major Protestant denominations and a new style of preaching that puts emphasis on the spiritual brotherhood of all Americans,” McKenna noted. That was not a departure from the sermons delivered by Puritanism’s leading lights but the application of their teachings.
The scholar Perry Miller famously described Puritanism as “not merely a religious creed and a theology” but also “a program for society.” Our popular perceptions of what Puritanism was are shaped today by what it became. The stereotypical bluenose who is haunted by the “fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy,” as H.L. Mencken put it, is a caricature derived more from the Victorian ethos that prevailed in Mainline Protestant New England after the Puritans were gone. Likewise, the notion that the Puritans were fiercely protective of their ethnic homogeneity is more a product of the later 19th century, when “cultural pluralism was not in vogue” as McKenna observed. But the original Puritan ideal was as ecumenical as the progressive movement that arose from the ashes of the Puritan experiment.
Davidson concludes by expressing gratitude for the Puritanical effort to preserve “English folkways.” That is “our sacred patrimony,” he writes. Like his critique of the early colonial period, that story is not inaccurate, but it is incomplete.
As Will Herberg put it in his 1995 book Protestant — Catholic — Jew, “The Puritan’s dream of a new ‘Israel’ and new ‘Promised Land’ in the New World, the ‘novus ordo seclorum’ on which the Great Seal of the United States reflect the perennial American conviction that in the New World a new beginning has been made, a new order of things established, vastly different and superior to the decadent institutions of the Old World.”
He continued:
This conviction, emerging out of the earliest reality of American history, was continually nourished through the many decades of immigration into the present century by the residual hopes and expectations of immigrants … and this conviction still remains pervasive in American life … It is the secret of what outsiders must take to be the incredible self-righteousness of the American people, who tend to see the world divided into an innocent, virtuous America confronted with a corrupt, devious, and guileful Europe and Asia.
It was the creed that drew those immigrants to America, and, to some degree, it was their expectation that we would live up to our ideals that compels the rest of us to confront our failings when we don’t. A belief in the universality of that liberal social covenant — the enlightened American ideal that all men are made in their creator’s image and their rights are derived from God — is the Puritans’ most lasting contribution to the American national character.
If that’s ethno-nationalism now, it is a very strange sort.