Christian Sparta

The revolutionary generation who separated the American colonies from Britain and crafted a new nation managed to blend the secularism of the Enlightenment with Puritan Christianity into a consistent view of themselves, their needs, and the nature of government. At the heart of their views was the public interest. Gordon S. Wood explains in his seminal The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 (1969).

The traditional covenant theology of Puritanism combined with the political science of the eighteenth century into an imperatively persuasive argument for revolution. Liberal rationalist sensibility blended with Calvinist Christian love to create an essentially common emphasis on the usefulness and goodness of devotion to the general welfare of the community. Religion and republicanism would work hand in hand to create frugality, honesty, self-denial, and benevolence among the people.
Wood, Creation, 118.

One almost gets the impression that Wood had been listening to The Youngbloods while writing this book. In 1969, their version of "Get Together" peaked at number 5 on the Billboard Hot 100.

Come on people now
Smile on your brother
Everybody get together
Try to love one another
Right now
Chet Powers, "Get Together" (1964)

Maybe he was listening to The Kingston Trio who first brought the song to the attention of the public several years earlier.

For Wood, this view of the blending of Puritanism and eighteenth century rationalism embodied the hope that America could become what Samuel Adams called "the Christian Sparta".

I love the People of Boston. I once thought, that City would be the Christian Sparta. But Alas! Will men never be free! They will be free no longer than while they remain virtuous.
Samuel Adams to John Scollay, 30 Dec. 1780

Republican virtue meant shunning luxury and privilege. The common good took precedence over individual ambitions.

My Journey to Medieval Spain

When I began reading A Patriot’s History of the United States eight months ago, perusing the footnotes quickly carried me astray. I’ve mentioned repeatedly that a long footnote embedded as a two and one-half page sidebar was the critical prompt the motivated my purchase of this text and the beginning of this blogging project (See especially “Patriot’s and People’s Histories” and “Depopulation and Demography”). Footnotes are central to my focus, but the text itself also beckons. I’ve been neglecting the text during my blogging holiday, but have been reading.

This morning’s coffee went down with a narrative lauding the intellectual contributions of Moses Maimonides, Ibn Tufayl, and Ibn Rushd (known in European literature as Averroes). Wikipedia describes Ibn Rushd as “the founding father of secular thought in Western Europe.” I’m reading a celebration of the development of Western secular thought in a book written by a former Jesuit seminarian whose book on Medieval Spain has much of prescriptive value for the twenty-first century: Chris Lowney, A Vanished World: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Medieval Spain (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).

Earlier in this book Lowney delves into two classic European texts, Chanson de Roland (Song of Roland) c.1100 and Poema de Mio Cid (Poem of My Cid, or commonly called El Cid) c.1201-1207. Lowney writes, “the confrontation between Christianity and Islam forms a overriding preoccupation of both these semi-legendary tales” (119). His narrative offers brief summaries of these texts, including discussion of how their legends square with history. His chief concern through this section, however, highlights the complexity of El Cid in contrast to the simplistic ideology of Roland.

Roland painted a global struggle between Christian right and Muslim wrong as Charlemagne squared off against Baligant, emir of Babylon. Roland’s universal struggle between good and evil contrasts with El Cid’s personalized study of the noble person. What makes the Cid, or anyone, honorable is neither station in life nor religious beliefs but deeds. … In Roland, honor includes religious creed. Some of Roland’s Christian characters may fail the standards expected of honorable men, but all Muslims fail the same standard simply by virtue of their pagan beliefs. … El Cid’s very different outlook is personified in the Muslim Abengalbón, El Cid’s vassal and friend. In a remarkable gesture, the Cid confides his daughters to this Muslim’s care as they journey through Spain’s frontier. Abengalbón serves the Cid’s family “for the love he bore to the Campeador.” In the Cid’s world, so profound a bond as love can even bind Muslim to Christian.
Lowney, A Vanished World, 137.

The more nuanced relationship between Christians and Muslims in El Cid, Lowney argues, reflects the realities of multicultural Spain. But he warns against oversimplification of this point.

It is gross oversimplification to pluck Barbastro and Toledo from the Reconquest’s long history as Exhibit A demonstrating that El Cid offers a more enlightened vision of a multifaith Spain because its authors hailed from Spain, whereas Roland reflects the outsider’s harsher viewpoint. A century separates the epics and three centuries the historical events on which they are based; both bear many authorial fingerprints, from chroniclers determined to advance particular religious or political views to entertainers determined only to tell a good story.
Lowney, A Vanished World, 141.

He goes on to note some practical realities of our world today vis-à-vis Charlemagne’s perspective as depicted in Roland. The notion of a Frankish king invading Spain, driving out the Muslims, and then returning home “is an elegantly simple worldview,” but not one embraced by twelfth- or thirteenth century Spanish monarchs. Yet, “Ferdinand and Isabella’s counselors would goad them into just such a policy and devise ways to make it eminently (if tragically) practical by banishing Jews and Muslims who refused to embrace Christianity” (141).

One is tempted to think that Lowney had the current American adventures in Iraq in mind as he crafted those sentences, and this presumption is borne out on the next page.

[One cannot] forcibly reorder another community’s lives and affairs, then assume, as Charlemagne did, that it will be possible to separate oneself from the consequences and repercussions. To assume the posture of the outsider is as naïve as to imagine that Muslims, Christians, and Jews can today carve out completely separate futures in a world that will continue to grow smaller with each passing generation.
Lowney, A Vanished World, 142.

The Route to Spain from A Patriot’s History

Schweikart and Allen’s A Patriot’s History relies upon Victor Davis Hanson’s Carnage and Culture for its account of the conquest of Mexico by the Spanish. Hanson’s depiction of Cortés’s Spain as exemplar of Western Reason was the source for Schweikart and Allen’s image of Spanish proto-republicans. Their views caught me by surprise, which led to my preliminary assessment in “Sixteenth Century Spain: Contrasting Images.” There I noted that my own knowledge of Spanish history was shamefully deficient, and I alleged that such deficiency was characteristic of Americanist historians as a group with a handful of exceptions. A Patriot’s History drove me to Hanson; Hanson drove me to Hugh Thomas, Conquest: Montezuma, Cortés, and the Fall of Old Mexico and other texts, including Lowney’s A Vanished World. I’ve mentioned a few tidbits from Thomas, including his demythologizing of the story that Cortés burned his boats. Lowney adds a piece of information that further contextualizes this legend. The Muslim conqueror of Spain in 711, Tariq ibn Ziyad, allegedly burned his boats after landing at Gibraltar—a rock named for him, Jabal Tariq, Tariq’s Mountain.

Chroniclers credit Tariq with the gutsy gesture of burning his ships on the spot and weaving his soldiers’ resulting dilemma into a stirring oratorical exhortation: “Whither can you fly,—the enemy is in your front, the sea at your back. By Allah! There is no salvation for you but in your courage and perseverance.”
Lowney, A Vanished World, 30.

The legend of Cortés in Mexico reveals his debt to legends of the Muslim conquest of his native Spain eight centuries earlier. This legacy is not surprising when we contemplate the degree to which Renaissance Europe, and all that is civilized on that continent, to the extent that it can be traced to the ancient Greeks and Romans, also must be traced through Muslim civilization. During the so-called Dark Ages of Europe, science and reason continued its development in Muslim society. It may be simplistic to assert that Europe’s Crusaders that sought to wrest the Holy Land from Muslims brought home the seeds of the Renaissance, but it is far closer to the truth than to assert that Petrarch reinvented classic learning from sources wholly European.

Roland’s Patriots

In response to my “The Sixties: A Patriot’s History,” Historiann quipped regarding Schweikart and Allen, “They want to mislead their readers into believing that Democrats are all bad, and Republicans are all (or mostly) good (if they are "true conservatives," anyway.)” As she understands A Patriot’s History—and I suspect she’s close to the mark, if not right on,—Schweikart and Allen’s narrative resembles a modern day Chanson de Roland. Paraphrasing Lowney, some of Schweikart and Allen’s Republican characters may fail the standards expected of honorable men, but all Democrats fail the same standard simply by virtue of their misguided beliefs. Their simplistic moral tale that distinguishes the true Republicans—Reagan and Bush—from the fallen ones—Nixon and McCain, and all Republicans from Democrats, who can never be right is less nuanced than even that of some of their ideologically driven sources. Hanson, for example, was once a Democrat, and may still be so on paper.

All I can tell you is I'm still a registered Democrat. I have a liberal twin brother who disagrees with everything I write. And I have a far more liberal older brother who not only disagrees with what I write, but I imagine is really bothered by it. I had two conservative Democratic parents who were in the Populist tradition of farmers, sort of William Jennings Bryan types.
Interview with Victor Davis Hanson, The Naval Institute: Proceedings

I will show in blog entries still to come how some of the nuances of Hanson’s history in Carnage and Culture morph into something far more simplistic in the hands of Schweikart and Allen.

Fundamental Questions: Paul Johnson

Paul Johnson’s majestic A History of the American People (1997) purports to address three fundamental questions. These questions concern expiation of national sins, the balance of moral ideals and practical needs, and a sense of national mission. Rooted in these questions are fundamental assumptions.

Expiation of Sins

Johnson assumes that taking possession of the North American continent proceeded through injustice to its indigenous inhabitants. He also assumes that American self-sufficiency was rendered possible through the suffering of enslaved labor. These assumptions are well-supported historical generalizations, although some balk at their expression. In a dissenting opinion, for example, Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist deployed the moniker “revisionist history” as a pejorative description of specific allegations of injustice towards the Lakota and other Native peoples of the northern Plains.

I think the Court today rejects that conclusion largely on the basis of a view of the settlement of the American West which is not universally shared. There were undoubtedly greed, cupidity, and other less-than-admirable tactics employed by the Government … but the Indians did not lack their share of villainy either. It seems to me quite unfair to judge by the light of “revisionist” historians or the mores of another era actions that were taken under pressure of time more than a century ago.
U.S. v. Sioux Nation 448 U. S. 371, at 435

More recently, Michael Medved has suggested that there was little out of the ordinary in the American institution of slavery, expiating the sins (as Johnson would have it) by noting that all have sinned. Medved’s distortions are well enough exposed by Timothy Burke that there is no need to rehash them here.

The point is that such exceptions as Rehnquist and Medved stem from a handful of ideologues that cling to a peculiar conservatism; these do not negate Johnson’s assumption in his first question. Has the United States “expiated its organic sins” (3)?

Moral Ideals and Practical Realities

Johnson’s first question, he suggests, logically leads to the second. Has the United States found the correct mix of “ideals and altruism” with “acquisitiveness and ambition” (3)? Despite origins in “sin,” the United States is steeped in the eighteenth century ideals of liberty and equality. It is true that it was formed by merchants and planters that intended their government to protect property and commerce. Competing self-interest was the necessary “hidden hand” behind healthy economic growth, according to a leading theory of the day. But, did the society created by these American colonials become one in which “righteousness has the edge over the needful self-interest” (3)?

Johnson seems to suggest that if the balance is right, the sins of dispossession and slavery are expiated.

Sense of Mission

The third question ties together the first two. Has the “republic of the people,” rooted in “an other worldly ‘City on a Hill’,” proven “to be a model for the entire planet” (3)? The notion of racism as a national sin reveals a secular application of religious themes. The third question reveals the heart of this trope. From its origins in Puritan New England, as expressed by Cotton Mather (quoted in “From Chiasmus to Columbus”) and his predecessors, the sense of divine mission became secularized.

The Puritan settlers that debarked from the Arbella in 1630 began in congregation as hearers of John Winthrop’s seminal sermon, “A Model of Christian Charity.” In this sermon, Winthrop referenced Matthew 5:14 in a line that has become one of the most frequently repeated sentiments in American rhetoric. The twin notions that America is an example to the world, and that God is the protector of this nation get invoked with regularity in public discourse. An old book sitting on my shelf explains the theme.

Every President, from George Washington to Lyndon B. Johnson, has included in his inaugural address one or more references to his and the nation’s dependence upon God. These statements have become the documented and lasting records of the religious expressions of our presidents.
Benjamin Weiss, God in American History, 47.

Johnson was President when Weiss published his book in 1966, but subsequent Presidents have not deviated from the pattern. Some, to be certain, sound more like preachers than others. Historiann pointed out in reply to my article “A City on Hill” in January that Ronald Reagan’s Farewell Speech must be remembered in this context.

The past few days when I've been at that window upstairs, I've thought a bit of the "shining city upon a hill." The phrase comes from John Winthrop, who wrote it to describe the America he imagined. What he imagined was important because he was an early Pilgrim, an early freedom man. He journeyed here on what today we'd call a little wooden boat; and like the other Pilgrims, he was looking for a home that would be free.
Reagan, “Farewell Address”

Of course, Winthrop was a Puritan, not one of the early Pilgrims that came ten years earlier. One benefit of living through the Eighties with a keen ear and a sense of the past is freedom from all expectations that President Reagan would ever be correct in his summary of historical particulars. Nevertheless, the larger sentiments he expressed were shared by enough shakers and movers that the erroneous details are insignificant.

Despite the omnipresence of God in such rhetoric, the question Johnson asks assumes that this sense of mission became secular. It has not become thus without considerable resistance from true believers, so some confusion remains. Earlier in his address, Reagan emphasized the core values.

Countries across the globe are turning to free markets and free speech and turning away from ideologies of the past. For them, the great rediscovery of the 1980s has been that, lo and behold, the moral way of government is the practical way of government: Democracy, the profoundly good, is also the profoundly productive.
Reagan, “Farewell Address”

One gets the impression from Paul Johnson’s beginning that his final answers to all three questions are affirmative.