Introduction
The great Richard Weaver taught us that ideas have consequences. But when they have massive cultural consequences, the mechanism works differently than it does when a solitary individual “gets an idea.” An individual decides that he would like to go out for some ice cream, say, and so he does. Or he has an idea for an invention, and he goes into his shop and builds it. Or he thinks it is high time he proposed to his girl friend, and she becomes his fiance. These are individual decisions that are like trying to put the eight ball in the corner pocket. Agent X does Action Y.
The cultural consequences of a great idea are sometimes like that, but not usually. When JFK announced that we were going to put a man on the moon, that was certainly an idea that was subsequently implemented. You could see a straight line from the announcement to the moon landing. It was like an individual action in that respect. But most examples of cultural formation and achievements do not work like that.
The Social Imaginary
The social imaginary has been defined as “the set of values, institutions, laws, and symbols through which people imagine their social whole.” Another way to saying this is that the social imaginary is the full menu worldview package.
There are aspects our our social imaginary that are obvious and out on the surface. These are the aspects that are contemporary, current, and hopping around in your Instagram feed. What everybody is yelling about is frequently part of the social imaginary. . . although at times there are fads that are nothing more than the foam off the waves of the social imaginary.
But there are other factors that drive the social imaginary that are running in the deep background. We don’t recognize their relevance, but they nevertheless silently dominate our lives. Chesterton pointed out one example of this in The Everlasting Man when he pointed out the impact of the Roman victory over Carthage in the Punic Wars. The difference that made surrounds us every day, and not one person in a million is aware of it.
Another example would be the foundations of our social order that were largely shaped by the Council of Nicea and the Definition of Chalcedon. The civilization that grew to maturity in the light of the doctrine of “fully God and fully man” is an entirely different civilization from what we would have had if the Arian sophisticates and temporizers had gotten their way. Without Nicea and Chalcedon, our constitutional traditions of ordered liberty would have been a non-starter. If the integration point between Heaven and earth had not been recognized as the Lord Jesus, the Incarnation of the Word, then that vacancy would instead have been some popinjay caesar or other . . . Yertle Turtur IV, say.
The American Social Imaginary
We also have an American social imaginary.
The American political settlement, codified in the ratification of our Constitution, was not a simple matter of arranging some furniture. It was far more than deciding whether to call our legislature a Congress or a Parliament. It entailed much more than the decision to paint the White House white instead of blue.
In fact, the American political settlement was actually a reinvention and reapplication of a distinctly Protestant form of feudalism—which is what our structured federalism actually is. This is very much integral to the American social imaginary, up to and including the most recent additions, subtractions, and corruptions. The broad skeletal outlines of the system are still there, and they are still functioning. County government is a key element in this, along with the federal system dividing the central government from the state governments. In this system, a state government is not a mere province or satrapy.
This remains the case despite the single biggest corruption that afflicts our system, which is certainly no trifle. There is another system at work in our body politic, and it is a system entirely at odds with the structured genius of the Founding. I am referring to the administrative state, a form of governance which the Founders of our nation explicitly fought a war in order to exclude. When we fought for our independence from the crown, we were fighting for independence from the “royal prerogative.”
But power always loves to centralize in unaccountable puddles, which it has done yet again, and we are now again dealing with rogue agencies that are ostensibly part of the executive branch, but not really. For a free people, rules promulgated by some agency or other should never be considered to have the force of law, whether or not someone in charge of that agency believes himself to have been granted plenary bossing authority.
It is to be devoutly hoped that the DOGE chain saws that we have all been promised will be fired up in about twenty days, and that they will take care of a bunch of this.
Three More . . .
In addition to all the foregoing, there are three other aspects to the American character that I want to mention. They are still operating and recognizable by any foreigner who has met more than three Americans. The origins of these traits of ours were theological, and even though this fact has been forgotten by most Americans, that doesn’t alter the fact of the family resemblances. You probably don’t know your great great grandfather’s first name either, but that doesn’t keep you from looking just like him, especially around the eyes.
One time I was visiting with a British friend and he was describing for me how terrible the schools were where he lived. I admit that he was doing a really good job of it, and I was entirely convinced. So I said, “Why don’t you start a school?” And his reply astonished me, because he immediately said, “That is just so American . . .” For me it was as though he had been describing just how hungry he was, and so I suggested that he make himself a sandwich. To have the question go immediately to national “types” was a surprise. But I have come to believe that he was right.
There are three theological strains that have gone into the composition of this kind of thinking.
The Postmill Vibe
One of the unique features of Puritan Calvinism was its interesting mash-up of eschatological optimism and soteriological pessimism. There are two doctrines involved in both that some might want to understand as being in conflict with each other, but they are not in conflict at all. They are rather like onions and apple slices in a really good salad.
These two doctrines are postmillennialism and total depravity. Apart from Christ, man is a total and complete loser, and at the same time, man in Christ is going to restore the world to its Edenic and pristine condition.
Wait. This is going to be done by loser guy? Exactly.
In the early American centuries, the theological consensus was overwhelmingly postmill. From the New England Puritans like Edwards to the Old Princeton theologians like Warfield, American eschatology was postmill. When you couple this with the fact that we had a wide open continent in front of us with a lot of work to do, and a civilization to build, this resulted in a true “can do” spirit.
Because of Darwin, and because of the great apostasies of the early twentieth century, and the rise of pessimillennialism in the believing quadrant of evangelicalism, this robust theological conviction was on the endangered species list by the mid-twentieth century. But even with the theological underpinnings rotted out, the “can do” American spirit remained. This helps explain the foreign policies of Woodrow Wilson and George W. Bush. It helps explain how Jerry Falwell Sr., a premillennialist, still wanted to built Liberty University into a Protestant Notre Dame. If Jesus is coming back in three weeks, that makes no sense . . . unless you are American.
This is why the unofficial motto of the Navy’s Construction Battalion (Seabees) makes sense to us. “The difficult we can do right away. Impossible takes a little longer.”
Calvinism
Not only was the theology at the Founding overwhelmingly postmill, it was also thoroughly Calvinistic. This brought with it certain specific doctrines, like the total depravity mentioned earlier, but it also brought in a certain frame of mind. That frame of mind was an unflinching frame of mind. The doctrines of grace put iron in the blood.
“American Calvinism possessed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and lost in the nineteenth, a toughness, a sternness, an intellectual rigor which our society then and since has been accustomed to identify with ‘masculinity’ in some not totally inaccurate if circular sense.”
Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture, p. 18
There is a gospel paradox in this. When God is great and man is small, one of the results of this kind of thinking is that man becomes capable of doing great things. When man exalts himself, God opposes him. God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble.
American theology today is a huge vat of soupy treacle, and the only thing we can really do with it is make everything sticky.
At the same time, and to the point of this article, there is an American tough-mindedness, evident in many quarters, but it is a tough-mindedness that has forgotten its ancestry. If we want to recover and sustain that frame of mind, we are going to have to return to that point of origin.
Baptistic, With All Due Respect for Evangelical Paedos
This last point is one I just want to mention, with the full recognition that I need to develop the idea more fully later on.
The revival tradition in America has done a lot of damage, and has been a mess in a lot of ways. I have addressed this reality in various other places, and don’t mean to rehearse the point here. But there has also been an up side to the whole thing.
Individuals are key to reformation and revival, while individualism has been a curse and a blight. There is a tightrope that needs to be walked here, and so you may consider this a call for more ecclesiastical funambulists.
In North America, the evangelical tradition is a revivalist tradition. It has, to its credit, emphasized the need for individuals to “get saved.” This tradition has been overwhelmingly baptistic, but it has also been historically friendly to those paedos (like myself here) who have also placed an emphasis on the absolute need for the new birth.
And by the new birth, I do not mean the liturgical routine of going forward in a Southern Baptist church on your thirteenth birthday, but rather the real thing, the result of the Spirit moving in a sovereign way.
And so this has been a distinctive contribution to the American social imaginary. Every man is by nature an object of wrath, and needs to be converted to God in order to do anything worthwhile. That conversion is going to happen, if it happens at all, on God’s terms and not man’s. The timetable for that was settled in the eternal decree, long before Genesis 1:1. And moreover, we were promised—in the law, in the prophets, and in the psalms—that a day was coming when Connecticut would no longer be sunk in her apostasy, but would rise from the dead, and New Haven will be as full of the knowledge of the Lord as the ocean is wet.