"BOURGEOISOPHOBIA," MATHER, FRANKLIN AND LINCOLN

HOME There is a very thoughtful article in The Weekly Standard called, "Among the Bourgeoisophobes: Why the Europeans and Arabs, each in their own way, hate America and Israel," by David Brooks. It's long but well worth the read. Brooks' thesis is that America generally and Jews specifically are resented and often hated in Europe and the Third World (which means, just about everywhere) because of their success and presumed spiritual barrenness. BOURGEOISOPHOBIA is really a hatred of success. It is a hatred held by people who feel they are spiritually superior but who find themselves economically, politically, and socially outranked. They conclude that the world is diseased, that it rewards the wrong values, the wrong people, and the wrong abilities. They become cynical if they are soft inside, violent if they are hard. In the bourgeoisophobe's mind, the people and nations that do succeed are not just slightly vulgar, not just over-compensated, not just undeservedly lucky. They are monsters, non-human beasts who, in extreme cases, can be blamelessly killed. . . . America, too, was stereotyped as a money-grubbing commercial land and Americans a money-grubbing people. Francois La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, who traveled in the United States in the 1790s, declared, "The desire for riches is their ruling passion." In 1805, a British visitor observed, "All men there make [money] their pursuit." "Gain! Gain! Gain! Gain! Gain!" is how the English philosopher Morris Birbeck summarized the American spirit a few years later. In 1823 William Faux wrote that "two selfish gods, pleasure and gain, enslave the Americans." Fourteen years after that, the disillusioned Russian writer Mikhail Pogodin lamented, "America, on which our contemporaries have pinned their hopes for a time, has meanwhile clearly revealed the vices of her illegitimate birth. She is not a state, but rather a trading company." Read the article; it's very informative. An early American bourgeoisophobe was the Puritan leader Cotton Mather, who complained that Americans were too materialistic, when the whole American enterprise was barely 200 years old. When Mather died in 1728, Benjamin Franklin was twenty-two. Mather, obsessed with saving souls for the next world, was philosophically succeeded by one equally obsessed with making it big in this one. The philosophies of these two men form a dialectic tension within American culture that is not yet resolved today. Here's an exploration (since it's Sunday, I'm going to preach a little): Puritanism wasn't really about sex There's an old joke that the Puritans came to America to worship in their own way and make everyone else do the same. It's an accurate description. Historian Perry Miller wrote that Puritan government was coercive and disciplinary, willing to reply on what one Puritan leader called "club law" to have its way if necessary. The Puritans thought that their government should interfere with private lives and should control as much as possible. Puritans saw individualism as dangerous. Puritan settlements were oppressive, and many times some Puritans would just up and leave to found another town elsewhere. A Puritan named Cotton Mather, chief prosecutor of the Puritan witch trials in Salem, Massachusetts, wrote the first great work of literature produced in America, Ecclesiastical History of America. In it, he explained the inherent contradiction of Puritan life. The Puritan ethic and intense religion were the source of their industriousness, but contained the seeds of their own dissolution. "Religion brought forth prosperity," Mather wrote, "and the daughter destroyed the mother." Mather complained of conformist preachers who goaded their complacent congregations to amass wealth as an outward symbol of inward grace. With the experiment in the New World not even two hundred years old, Mather wrote that the whole enterprise was already undermined. He observed of Americans, "There is danger lest the enchantments of this world make them forget their errand into the wilderness." The Franklin Succession The ideal of America as the Land of Opportunity was a true ideal. In Europe, labor was plentiful but status depended on land ownership. In America, land was plentiful and cheap, but skilled labor was scarce. From the earliest days, skilled workers commanded high wages and soon became major landowners. From the beginning, the American dream always had a substantial material base. Equality, freedom, and individual rights were important, but America's main promise was improvement in one's economic condition. The working political philosophy, which survives to this day, was that democracy really meant something only when it was accompanied by widespread opportunity to participate in economic abundance. (This emphasis on material achievement, writes James Nuechterlein, has always been the serpent in the garden of American civilization. "Always there has been the fear that the material drive would overwhelm the idealistic vision, that prosperity was becoming not one goal but the ultimate end of American life. Americans have, in their self-critical moments, regularly invoked the biblical judgment on those who gain the whole world but lose their own souls.") Benjamin Franklin has been called the patron saint of material success. Franklin secularized the American dream. The Puritans saw themselves as citizens of a City on a Hill, showing the world, like Jerusalem of old, the pure and correct worship of God in both church and society. Led by Franklin, American thinkers in the 1700s threw out this vision of heavenly inheritance for one of a secular city. Franklin's primary concern was happiness, which he thought had to include material success. He told Americans how to achieve prosperity. He supported religion mainly for its social benefits. "For [Franklin], a stable, free, and progressive society required contented, hard-working, and optimistic citizens, and necessary to both goals was widespread prosperity" (Nuechterlein). Americans rapidly achieved Franklin's goals. By the American Revolutionary War, the standard of living in the American colonies was higher than in England. In 1839, after two years of traveling throughout the United States, Englishman Charles Murray almost disbelievingly wrote that he had encountered only one beggar, a fact simply incredible to any European of the day. That was about the same time that a French nobleman named Alexis de Tocqueville also toured America, publishing his observations in a book never out of print since then, Democracy in America. The Character of America Historian Paul Johnson wrote that de Tocqueville's account is memorable because of the way de Tocqueville grasped the moral and religious character of the nation. France had longed been abused by its clergy and the French people were strongly anti-clerical. In America de Tocqueville encountered Christianity presented in a free society for the first time, "intimately wedded" to political freedom and markets rather than as a tool for totalitarianism. He wrote, "In France I had almost always seen the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom pursuing courses diametrically opposed to each other, but in America I found that they were intimately united, and that they reigned in common over the same country. Religion . . . must be regarded as the foremost of the political institutions of the country, for if it does not impart a taste for freedom, it facilitates the use of free institutions." De Tocqueville held that American religion was "indispensable" to maintaining the republic. The only places in America where de Tocqueville thought the American dream was broken was in the slave-holding states. However, he condemned not so much slavery in itself as slavery's effects on free men. He compared "industrious Ohio" with "idle Kentucky," and blamed slavery for causing white Kentuckians to be "a people without energy, ardor [or] enterprise." It was the issue of slavery, of course, which propelled Abraham Lincoln to national prominence. According to historian Jean Elshtain, Lincoln concluded that because of existence of slavery, America was not the democracy the Founders had intended it to be. Lincoln believed that the Founders had deliberately postponed the question of slavery. Lincoln moved to resolve the question with an obligation that he did not hesitate to call sacred. Was Lincoln a righteous bourgeoisophobe? In his 1858 debates with Stephen Douglas, Lincoln was clear that popular sovereignty may not trump moral right. Lincoln thought idolatrous the notion that the voice of the people was the voice of God. The infamous Dred Scott decision of 1857, said Lincoln, was responsible for "blowing out the moral lights" of the nation. The "real issue" was whether slavery should be treated as a "moral, social, and political wrong" or whether it should be made "perpetual and national." Lincoln broke with the usual American mold in the way he conducted the Civil War. Americans are usually quick to make great causes into crusades. The prohibition movement, both world wars and even women's suffrage were cast in crusading terms, just as today gun controllers rail against firearms companies with the same sort of vitriol that mid-1800s abolitionists used against plantation owners. Lincoln never did this. He never depicted his opponents as wholly evil while casting himself and his allies as the "children of light." "A terrible duty had to be done and a terrible price had to be paid, and, in doing that duty and paying that price, good and evil were to be found on both sides of the conflict" (Elshtain). Lincoln knew that politics is always a limited and blunt instrument, and therefore bringing about justice is always unfinished. The nation could be purified of the great wrong of slavery but would not thereby be fully pure. In Gettysburg Address, Lincoln used explicitly religious language - consecration and hallowing, new birth, a nation under God, but he never made explicit reference to the Bible or direct action by God in the national convulsion. Just war leaves everyone wounded Lincoln was impatient with people who thought they could discern the purposes of God in current events. The proper human stance before the ways of the Lord, he believed, was that of deep humility. Political historian John Diggins said that Lincoln helped heal the "Machiavellian wound" of separating politics from morality. Lincoln insisted that "ultimate moral questions did not admit of relativistic interpretations," yet he realized that righting moral wrongs may have tragic consequences and will rarely be fully successful. Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address of March 4, 1865 was openly partisan; his hearers had no doubt where he stood. What was remarkable was that he refused to enlist God as his partisan ally. Incredibly, he did not see the "terrible war" as vindicating Northern virtue but as the divine judgment of God upon North and South alike. It was on that basis that the nation was to be renewed: common judgment and common grace. Like Augustine, Lincoln saw that the will to dominate is woven even into human yearnings for peace and justice. Even a justifiable war leaves the victor morally scarred. The echoes of these three figures, Mather, Franklin and Lincoln, are still strong. Both the Puritan and Franklin mercantile legacies run deep in American culture, having long ago been interwoven with Christianity into a sort of national theology that is uniquely American. Sadly, while Lincoln's political legacy remains, his truly profound theological insights into political life are all but lost. American Puritan bourgeoisophobia I think Americans are much more Puritanical than we realize, indeed, much more than we can justify. "Puritan" is word that nowadays denotes prudish strictness about sexual matters, but in fact the Puritans were surprisingly sexually liberated for their day. What I refer to is the Puritan drumbeat that pervades American politics and Protestant clergy both liberal and conservative: we want to tell you what to do and we deride personal or national prosperity. America was founded on individual freedom exercised voluntarily for the common good. The Christian Scriptures teach clearly that God is freedom-oriented: bringing the slaves out of Egypt (an event both spiritual and political), being freed from the power of sin and death, the banishment of distinctions between slave and free in the unity of Christ. Yet God never coerces human beings or human societies. If it is possible for a national political system to mirror this divine principle, then the promotion of personal freedom must be its compulsion. God compels no one to righteousness. Likewise, our political freedom is not freedom at all if we are compelled by law to good works in the public arena. Political freedom, actually to be freedom, necessarily includes the freedom to be a stinker. That is, in fact, the natural state of human beings and human societies; which the Scriptures teach is spiritual slavery. The liberating work of God is breaking that bondage through the transformation of persons, from which Kingdom living on earth might actually erupt. Americans have inverted that order by attempting to build the kingdom through the coercion of law. As a result, we are politically less free and spiritually less clean than ever. The sins of Franklinite enthusiasm Yet if sins of Puritan micromanagement rest on the heads of generations of religious and political leaders, how much do sins of Franklinite enthusiasm reside on the rest of our citizens? Mather's fear, shared later by Methodist reformer John Wesley and others, was that material prosperity would become its own self-justifying objective. Wesley's greatest fear about the Methodist movement was that the people called Methodist would become middle class, and that would be the end of Methodism. Their fears seem justifiable. Americans have constructed the most massive welfare state in history, yet we seem oblivious to the fact that the mere fact we need government welfare programs at all condemns American churches before God. "Aimlessness" describes America today, despite the waging of the Terror War. We seem to have no unified national purpose - no great, national crusade, even though enemies want to destroy us. We continue to pile up wealth, but we don't know what for. Household giving to charitable causes is at the lowest level ever recorded, but household debt is at the highest ever. (Might the two be related? With rare exceptions, debt results from self love, while giving results from love of others.) This state of affairs not only offends the teachings of Scripture, it would shock Ben Franklin himself. As a national people, what are we doing, and why are we doing it? We don't seem to know. Would that we could have another Great Awakening! National purpose: Humanity's "last best hope" Lord Acton, one of the most respected British historians, observed, "No country can be free without religion. It creates and strengthens the sense of duty. If men are not kept straight by duty, they must be by fear. The more they are kept by fear, the less they are free. The greater the strength of duty, the greater the liberty." At the dawn of our republic John Adams wrote, "We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." "America is great because America is good," wrote de Tocqueville, "and if America ever ceases to be good, America will cease to be great." A huge dose of Lincoln-like humility before God would be a good thing for us. God does not love the rest of the world less and America more. Our prosperity has little to do with God's favor because even the wicked prosper. Lincoln realized a great thing: that all persons and all nations, great or small, are alike under the judgment of a just God, and that this truth should cause us to consider our relationships with God and one another with fear and trembling. In his Second Inaugural Address, Lincoln said, "With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds . . . to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and a lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations." That Lincoln mentioned the other nations was not merely incidental. He understood what was at stake in America, the only nation, it is said, founded upon an idea. In history's ongoing struggle between freedom and tyranny, Lincoln believed that America was humanity's "last best hope," not as the world's economic or military superpower, but as the best example of what one nation, under God, with all its limitations, can be: a shining city on a hill, indeed. HOME

About me I started this blog as a hobby. I am in my late forties and have lived on four continents. I spent several years in Washington, D.C., serving in an executive department of the federal government. I served as a combat-branch military officer for many years. I hold a BA and a Master degree. I am married with children. I write and speak for a living. The opinions expressed in this blog are my own, and I do not insist that anyone agree with me. My favorite hobby is target shotgun shooting, which explains the "shooting sports" links on the main page. You are welcome to email me. I will read your email, but I cannot promise I will be able to answer soon, or even answer at all, for that matter. (This blog is strictly spare time for me.) I'll assume it's okay to use all or part of your email in my blog unless you tell me otherwise. I will not sell or give away your email address to anyone. Home