We have too many American leaders today trying to sell us on the notion that America is merely an idea that can be easily transplanted to any place on earth. The concept has always bothered me a lot. It diminishes the efforts of those who came before us.
Some appear to want everyone to believe that America is just an idea because they seek to promote the notion that it is somehow our responsibility to transmit our brand of democracy to all the world. America the Idea is their template for all peoples. And all peoples are going to get fitted for it whether they like it or not.
Others make less of our heritage because they judge our ancestors through their own contemporary lenses, passing verdicts in absentia, making the best of our best into evil men for owning slaves or having wives at home or not being as tolerant as they should have been. And they’re willing to be outright fascist about making sure that history is revised to their liking.
Still others believe that since others from different folkways and cultures have come here and each group has provided a bit of itself to the current fabric, then we should stop reminding ourselves of what it was that made this place one of the greatest wonders of the world. We should stop talking about our origins because some might be offended or make themselves feel less attached to our culture because they come from more recently arrived stock. If there really are that many Americans today who cannot handle not sharing heritage by descent, then we probably have been too lenient regarding the sorts we have allowed to come.
In previous generations - not long ago at all, really - nobody ever considered this nation to be merely an idea.
America the Idea?
Preposterous!
America is a heritage based on an actual people. The founding fathers had a particular posterity in mind when they penned the preamble to the Constitution. Until recently, the idea nation - America the Proposition - was never an issue. It was so much not an issue that nobody ever felt it necessary to come up with an explanation as to why we are a result of heritage that cannot be adequately transmitted solely by words expressing ideas.
I will try. Let’s look upon America like a forest. Whenever we take a walk through it, we need to remain mindful that there is no way to see it all in one journey. Each path is but one of many. Each is informative.
It seems to me that many these days spend their lives talking mostly about the importance of the trees, or the branches, or the leaves on the trees. I’m more interested in the vitality of the soil. Yes, there are many good points to be made about the things we all can see before us that make our American woods. But it seems almost as if a lot of folks don’t want anyone to ever acknowledge, even a little, that everything we see in our forest would not exist were it not for the specific qualities of the soil in which it is rooted.
It is beyond me how anyone can objectively claim that this nation would be anything remotely resembling what it is without the essential nutrients fed into its soil by the lives and deeds of those who envisioned its original essences; I write of the early colonists, particularly those who came with the desire to practice Puritanism because it was their dreams and deeds that made the soil and soul of the American forest rich.
Without all of the things that led to Puritans leaving England, there is no Winthrop. Without a Winthrop, there is no idea of a “City on a Hill” and, later, there is no faith in “Divine Providence.” There is no American understanding of the tension between “natural liberty” and “civil liberty;” nobody would preach or understand omnes sumus licentia deteriores (we are worse for a license). It’s clear the French could have used that understanding.
Without the expansion of Puritan concepts the Calvinism that informed The Great Awakening, there is no American Jeremiad. There is no logical path from the British patriotism that swept colonies after the French and Indian war to a Declaration of Independence a mere 13 years later. The colonies do not reject George III; there is no impetus for it. Without the expansion of Calvinism, this is a land in 1776 with a lot more Quakers, Congregationalists and Anglicans. It is common to be a Tory and difficult to be anything else. There is no reason to declare independence.
Without the Puritan Calvinism that steeped the early New England generations, there is no source for an American version of Great Awakening during the 1730s and 1740s. Our founding fathers and founding generation are not born into a time of revival; they are not raised at a time of expansion and vitality of new and particularly American denominations. There are no American Presbyterians, no Baptists, no Methodists. There is no revolution in the colonies to be derided in the House of Commons and by the King as a “Presbyterian Rebellion.”
Without an America with two thirds of its colonial citizens of 1776 being members of new Calvinist denominations, not only is there no revolution, there is no American Exceptionalism, and later there is no Manifest Destiny. There is no lure for others to come and share in a new creation. There is nothing of particular note that would attract other non-British Westerners.
If American Calvinism is never conceived and transmitted to the middle colonies by Presbyterians, Congregationalists and others, there are no mid-Atlantic states. Without this species of faith being shepherded to the southern colonies by Baptists and others, there is no fertile soil for implanting ideas that challenge long-accepted impositions of the upper classes. Questioning authority does not become in vogue to lubricate revolution there.
Later, there are no allied churches anywhere for the Federalists to enlist in the cause of ratifying the Constitution. There is no Constitution, either.
Without the publication of Puritan and Calvinist sermons that served American Jeremiad, there simply isn’t much for the literate American colonist to read. Of course, there is the Bible. But all of Western Civilization has that.
This is our soil.
When we look at the trees that thrive in our soil, we see early rumblings about emancipation for slaves. We see the themes of the civil rights movement within the language of the Constitutional Convention, and later we see those themes become cacophony during the Second Great Awakening. Eventually these sounds became the dirge of Gettysburg. And yet the forest continued to thrive. It takes very good and special soil for the sort of stuff we have to grow after so much blood has been let into it.
When we look at the trees, we see many branches that support variety in cuisine, in music, and in the arts. When we look at the trees, we can see that much that appears concrete is really only ephemeral, like leaves, subject to the season and subject to the fad. It gives us hope that things like Britney, or Paris, or Brangelina will go the way of the Gong Show. When the soil is so rich, most of what is in the bud and the bloom is ripe and attractive for a time but eventually falls and is common. Qualities within the soil determine what seeds might take root and add to the woodland, not the other way around.
It takes special soil to grow such a mighty forest. There is no point in expecting even the sturdiest oak to thrive in soil stripped of the nutrients laid down beneath its boughs by life and death over time. I have no interest in wasting my time tending in futility to a forest with soil callously depleted to sand by men with high-minded ideas who know nothing of the cultivation necessary.
It is here that I find the clear difference between America the Idea versus America the Venerable Heritage. The former is planted in sand and subject to the wind. The latter is rooted in and nourished by the soil; it is hearty for the storm.
I prefer it.
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