It has often been difficult to explain the crazy oscillations in American politics and policies to European colleagues. Citizens of more homogenous countries find it difficult to imagine the scale of the United States (nearly the size of Europe, including European Russia) or the heterogeneity of American culture. Most Europeans find it hard to picture the US as more nearly equivalent to half a dozen assorted European nations than a single large European state like France of Germany. This makes it shocking when the same country that elects W. Bush and Dick Cheney reverses course and elects Barrack Obama.
It is by now apparent that the American melting pot was not very well stirred, resulting in geographical and cultural divisions popularized as ‘Red State vs. Blue State’, Liberal vs. Conservative, and Bible Belt vs. Secular Rationalist. The cultural landscape of the US might be better described in terms of the dough produced by a cheap bread maker than as the contents of a fondue pot, with regions of unmixed disparate ingredients, some of questionable provenance and others long past their expiration date. This goes a long way toward explaining the existence of phenomena like ‘dry counties’ in less than cosmopolitan corners of our great land, and might also explain why some parts of the national loaf rose higher than others. (Here in beautiful West Georgia, with Atlanta looming somewhere over the horizon, it is apparent that the region is overdue for a good kneading.)
Much of this division arose from the earliest events in our national history, and it’s worth exploring how we got where we are. A major difference between many European derived cultures and non-european cultures is a unique transformative event that altered the way that European cultures viewed the world and themselves. Many cultures can point to their own transformative upheaval, but nothing comparable to the Enlightenment in scope, impact and direction is easily identified . Europe had emerged from the middle ages as the Renaissance propagated from its Italian origins through the north and west. The corruption of Avignon and the Renaissance papacy generated the Reformation, and this in turn provided the freedom from authority needed to rethink the relationship between human individuals, governments, and religious authority. One of the products of this cultural and intellectual ferment was the United States of America.
America wasn’t a passive product of the Enlightenment. The birth of the United States (and the independence of other American countries) was part of the process, both effect and driving force, and Americans such as Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin were major Enlightenment figures. The east coast from Virginia to Boston had leaders who were influenced by the movement and had great influence on it. The Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution are among the most significant Enlightenment documents in the world, along with the French Declaration of the Rights of Man.
The first English and Dutch settlers of the east coast were for the most part products of the Reformation, but they were pre-Enlightenment colonists, and for the most part the early stages of the Enlightenment had limited influence in the colonies. The ideas of leaders like Roger Williams and William Penn, who were defenders of religious tolerance, helped set the stage for the American enlightenment, but Williams and Penn were tolerant Protestants more interested in religion than rationalism. Cotton Mather, sometimes proposed as an early American Enlightenment figure because of his interest in science and rationalism and promotion of education, falls well short of this. He famously defended the Salem witchcraft trials and attempted to use pseudo-scientific analysis to study demons. His role in the founding of Yale was undertaken because of his dissatisfaction with the 'liberalism' of Harvard. The rise of the American Enlightenment began in the early decades of the eighteenth century as prosperity and security expanded and America began to have intellectuals who weren’t primarily clerics.
America had a ready-made counter-Enlightenment of its own: the Great Awakening. A response to increasing secularization in America life, its genesis is often credited to the Connecticut preacher Jonathan Edwards. The Great Awakening was a revival movement featuring a whole lot more of Jesus and whole lot less of the moral equivalent of rock n’ roll. From its origins in the New England pulpits of Edwards and his allies, the Great Awakening swept the colonies, calling for a rededication of Americans to the spiritual Christian life. Its impact was lasting. Right now somewhere in the South a revival tent is being unloaded from a tractor-trailer covered with signs promising faith healing, speaking in tongues, and maybe snake handling or casting out demons; to paraphrase Jimmy Buffet, it’s 1720 somewhere. In less extreme form the Great Awakening was a major factor in shaping the beliefs of much of the rural and southern United States.
The first wave of the Great Awakening was a response to secularization arising from an overweening concern with business (and in some cases to outright debauchery), not to enlightenment philosophy, so it didn’t have to wait for the spread of Enlightenment ideas. The result was two movements spreading like waves that started on the east coast and moving inland. They didn’t spread evenly. Cities and certain wealthy societies like the tobacco planter aristocracy of Virginia were much more fertile ground for Enlightenment ideas than populations of frontier settlers, hardscrabble upcountry farmers, or the developing agricultural society of the deep south, which was much less literate than New England or the Middle Atlantic colonies. As a result Greater New England, the swatch of America extending across upstate New York and including much of the northern Mid West, wound up more Enlightened, while the deep south, the Appalachians, and the mid-western Butternut country settled from the South wound up more Awakened and less Enlightened (see 'The Cousins Wars', Kevin Phillips for a map and some insights).
This leads to confusion when the intellectual and/or spiritual heirs of these movements discuss the intent of the founders; they both have strong traditions leading back to colonial times, and both are quick to claim important colonial and revolutionary figures as the forbearers of their movements. The problem is that all such leaders didn’t subscribe to either movement; Edwards was the father of the Great Awakening in America, but Jefferson, Adams, Washington, Franklin, Paine, Henry, Madison and Monroe were Enlightenment figures who had little use for fundamentalist religion, and in some cases little use for religion at all.
The confusion is understandable. Franklin, for example, printed sermons of Awakening preachers and, while not sharing their theology, appreciated the new emphasis on good works that they espoused. Enlightenment lawyers often supported the religious freedom of fundamentalist Awakening preachers who were at odds with the establishment of their colonies.
Because the Enlightenment and the Great Awakening spread at such different rates through different regions, they produced an inhomogeneous mixture of cultures. This was only exacerbated by subsequent waves of immigration. The Awakened South was and is far less tolerant of other cultures and other faiths than the Enlightened North, and this, along with northern industrialization, played a major role in directing the flow of immigration and cultural admixture over the last two centuries. Even in the first decades of the twenty-first century southeastern metropolitan areas are in general less cosmopolitan than equivalent northeastern, middle Atlantic, or west coast cities, although these differences are being gradually eroded by internal migration. An exception is the influx of Latin Americans into Florida and their gradual spread into neighboring states.
Bifurcation
The political history of the United States is complex, and Awakening and Enlightenment forces have not always been opposed. Broadly speaking, the liberal and libertarian traditions are both derived from Enlightenment ideas. Traditional Tory-derived conservatism is neither Enlightenment nor Awakening, but arises from respect for tradition and orthodoxy and predates both. Populist political figures such as Lincoln and the Roosevelts are for the most part in the enlightenment tradition, while other populists (e.g., William Jennings Bryan) were children of the Awakening and derived their ideas about social justice from the Bible. Strains of both traditions run through the works of Martin Luther King and the words of many other African-American religious leaders.
Later waves of the Awakening helped fuel the abolitionist movement (John Brown was scarcely in the Enlightenment tradition) and later populist movements (Free Silver) that had a profound influence on the shape of American culture.
What is different about fin-de-cycle American politics is that the heirs of the Awakening have been largely co-opted by the extreme right wing, and in this they are bitterly opposed by the heirs of the Enlightenment. This is most obvious in the manipulation of fundamentalists by the Republican party as part of the second stage of the Southern Strategy. The manipulation runs both ways; fundamentalist leaders are quite aware of the quid-pro-quo enforced by the growing co-dependence of evangelical religion and republicanism, and have carved out powerful positions in American politics as a result.
So why are we now an unstable state that pitches back and forth between an oligarchy with imperial pretensions and a republic with pretensions of liberal democracy? There is a roughly equal division between Enlightenment and Pre-Enlightenment regions in America, and this has been skillfully exploited by political strategists backed by money. Attacks on education and science are not just byproducts of the Southern Strategy; for the politics of division and oligarchy to work it is essential to suppress modernity and education. Enlightenment based ideas are not consistent with Calvinist ideas of elect and the Divine favor shown to the Job Creators (blessed be their names). They know very well what they are doing. Backwardness and superstition are features, not bugs.
Happy 2015.