Chapter Five is where David Gelernter and I part company most drastically, for reasons easily anticipated. In this chapter, Gelernter tackles the subject of Abraham Lincoln, “America’s last and greatest founding father.”
As usual, Gelernter is uncannily accurate in his description, and flies wide of the mark in his evaluation. Lincoln was the great founder of Americanism, the religion that Gelernter celebrates, and Lincoln was the founding father of the American Empire. That, however, is not the same thing as being a founding father of the American Republic.
But lest we go astray, let me begin with some concessions. Abraham Lincoln was a very great man. What I have written elsewhere should make it plain that I believe that he was wrong-headed on many issues, and with the exception of the moderation he advocated in the course of reconstruction, I would have been four-square against pretty much everything he ever proposed. Nevertheless, it is hard to read any account of his life without coming away with deep-seated respect for the greatness of his abilities, and for the uncanny way in which he fulfilled his role in those days of our nation’s paroxysm, death, and subsequent resurrection as something else, something new in the world. Our war with Great Britain in 1776 is popularly called the American Revolution. A better name for it is the War for Independence — it was not a revolution in the modern sense of the word at all. But this is not because America did not have a revolution, like the one in France. We most certainly did have one — in 1861-1865. And, as happened throughout the Western world, the revolutionaries won.
But Lincoln was a moderate revolutionary — he was not a fire-eater like the men who followed him. Gelernter, to his credit, understands this moderation that Lincoln urged and seeks to practice it himself. “But men like Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee had more than enough nobility of character to justify any American child’s (black or white) knowing and admiring them. They were more than the sum of their sins — just as we hope to be” (p. 144). In the same spirit, I am happy to honor Lincoln in this limited way, and to respect his critical role in the founding of a new America, the one that replaced the old American Republic. But what I cannot do, and what Gelernter tries to get us to do in this chapter, is venerate him as the apostle of a new religion, a saint in the American church, and a martyr who shed his blood for the nation. More about this in a moment.
Before getting to that, something should be said about the tendency of modern politics to demonize political opponents. This is one of the sure-fire indications that politics has become a religion. Religions have devils, demons, and things that go bump in the night. Politics just has boneheads that want to set the tax percentages at a different place than you do. And when every political difference turns into the battle between light and darkness, this is a sure indication that politics is turning into a religion. This is something that Gelernter (and Lincoln) misses. If it is a sacred crusade, you can’t be having this “with malice toward none” business afterwards with all the captured demons and orcs.
In contemporary politics, this is something the rabid Bush-haters always miss. I say this, not as a supporter of Bush, for I am not, but as someone who believes that the kind of chicanery that is going on in America currently is something that is as old as dirt. In domestic policy, and in foreign policy, whether we are talking about bureaucrats, arms manufacturers, spies, false flag operations, broken treaties, neglect of international standards, or injustice in the courtroom, we are looking at the way the world has always worked. What Israel has done to Lebanon, Egypt has done to Israel. Russia exiled Jews; we exiled the Cherokee. The Iranians are certified nutjobs and there are people in Washington on a par with them who think that war with Iran would be a good thing for Bush to start up before he leaves office. I remember an old Tom Lehrer song (I think), “The British hate the Germans, and the Germans hate the Dutch. And I don’t like anybody very much.” Welcome to earth.
Because the twentieth century did see some genuine moral monsters (Stalin, Hitler, et al.), it is easy for people who have sacralized the political process to try to get all their adversaries promoted into the moral monster big leagues. But most of our political leaders are mere sinners, and they are continuing to do what mere sinners do in those circumstances. They sin. They do it on the sly, they brag about it on the campaign trail, they tax me to pay for it, and they do it in bathroom stalls. And whenever the issues are clear, and the Scriptures unambiguous, the Church should certainly call them to account for it. But our demeanor should be like Ambrose of Milan challenging Theodosius than Bishop Suzy breathing into a paper bag because she read somewhere that some terrorist in Guantanamo doesn’t have a lawyer trained in the Ivy League. I hope that my complaints about the emerging American Empire are in the first category, and nowhere close to the second.
But Gelernter, on the opposite side, invites this kind of demonization because he is, at bottom, a hagiographic writer. Read what he attributes to Lincoln — it takes the breath away.
“Abraham Lincoln completed the work of the founding fathers and thereby became, in effect, the last and greatest of them. Lincoln and the Civil War completed the American Religion . . . Lincoln completed the transformation of Puritanism into Americanism” (p. 103).
“The Civil War, as Lincoln came to understand it, changed all that. It restored Americanism to its original spiritual purity and readied it to take the place of dying Puritanism” (p. 109).
“Today anyone of any faith can celebrate those beautiful blossoms whether or not he believes in Puritanism or any other Judeo-Christian religion. Anyone can believe in and practice Americanism. (Yet America remains the biblical republic that is her history and identity and will never change.)” (p. 109).
“By speaking these worlds from the steps of the Capitol on democracy’s most sacred occasion, he didn’t Christianize America — he Americanized Christianity” (p. 139).
Again, I think that Gelernter is right in his observation of the sociology of the thing. Anyone who has been to the Lincoln Memorial should to be surprised that there is no altar on the front steps where the sacred heifer is sacrificed. There was this drift; Puritanism did collapse. A civic religion did replace it. And since the godhead is always indivisible, we soon found that word in our pledge . . . “one nation, indivisible.” But of course, nations are the most divisible entities on the planet, and so the fact that this idolatrous claim to be indivisible was not greeted by raspberries from all orthodox Christians showed how far we had drifted from our Puritan roots, and how right Gelernter is about the change that took place — even if he were to include the Church in his observation.
One last comment. The God of American civic religion is a monad. He is a unitarian god, and like all unitarian gods, the cultus of his worship grows, as Mao might say, out the barrel of a gun. Force is necessary because the relation between this god and his creatures is simply a power relation. Devotees of this god can find it hard to admit this, but it is true nonetheless. For example, on the field of Gettysburg, Lincoln engaged in some brilliant revisionism. Our forefathers did not bring forth on this continent a new nation. The authors of The Federalist Papers were at great pains to explain that what the Constitution formed was not “a nation.” And there were men on that field who were fighting for the right to political self-determination, but they were all dressed in gray. But Pickett’s charge failed, and the facts of the case became irrelevant.
But they are not irrelevant to those who want to understand how we got here. This kind of faith in this kind of god, coupled with the kind of economic and military might that we have, will result military campaigns all over the place, a perverse parody of the Great Commission.
“Of course he did not say that America must use military force to ensure ‘an equal chance’ for all men. Such an idea would have been nonsense in 1861; America was no global power and had no global presence” (p. 142).
But just you wait. The Religion was going to grow up.