Conlaw is for people who need to get to the bottom of things and lawyers are people who need to do that.
But once you find yourself at conlaw bedrock, you find it rests on a mass of cultural magma that goes far down indeed.
Needing to know more about the cultural antecedents to the founding of the nation, I’ve recently completed reading the new biography of Jonathan Edwards by George M. Marsden
(Yale U. Press, 2003, 600 pp including notes).
Marsden is the Francis A. McAnaney Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame.
Jonathan Edwards, perhaps the last great Puritan, was born in Connecticut in 1703 (that’s Cotton Mather territory) and died in Princeton in 1758 of smallpox inoculation; at the time he was president of what became Princeton University.
Jonathan's daughter Esther married Aaron Burr, the previous president of the College of New Jersey.
The school was founded in Newark, close to New York, and later moved to Princeton, closer to Philadelphia, the leading city of the British colonies. Esther and Aaron's son, Aaron Burr, Jr., was the fellow whose good friend was Alexander Hamilton, whom, as he was fond of saying, "I shot." The famous duel at Weehawken in 1804 produced a murder indictment which Burr, Jr. beat. Grandpa was the Puritan, Junior was not.
Since it is often observed that the Puritan influence in this country is great and persistent, I was interested in seeing what the Puritans actually believed and what later became of them.
Did they just die out, or into what did they transform themselves?
How has their influence manifested itself?
Given our situation in the world today, do we still show Puritan influences?
How does this work its way into constitutional law?
A life of Edwards would provide background and context.
Marsden places Edwards in a time and place “when there was a substantial cultural overlap between the late medieval-Reformation outlook, preserved largely intact in Edwards’ Puritan heritage, and the world of the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment.”
“Edwards saw the immense challenges to a rigorous God-centeredness in the modern era.”
The Puritans were a dissenting group of English Protestants who followed the belief of the Swiss theologian, John Calvin.
For a good modern example of Calvin's God at work over a long period in the world, the following:
The painful, modern 86-year stretch of losing Boston Red Sox baseball, epitomized as the curse of the Bambino, for the 1918 trade of Babe Ruth to New York, which was broken only a few days ago, was taught by the elders of the Red Sox Nation in Massachusetts and surrounding New England to be a lesson in Calvinism.
This is the notion that bad things will happen to good people, because God is, deep down, the Devil himself, deny it how they will.
Having beaten the dreaded New York Yankees, God's team for lo these many decades, for the pennant, coming from three down, then winning a most unlikely four straight, then winning the World Series in another four straight, it is perfectly clear to religious and non-religious Americans alike that the Red Sox fans all sold their souls to the Devil.
This accounts for the reports out of Boston lately that they are deservedly heart-broken over no longer being heart-broken.
New England Calvinism remains alive and well.
Maybe next year God will return to the Damned Yankees.
A key tenet of Calvinist belief is that God so controls the world that everything in it is pre-ordained, from Billy Buckner letting the ball go between his legs to allow the scoring of the winning run in the 1986 World Series, down to the flight of the smallest sparrow.
God knew this was going to happen.
God made it happen.
God always does something like this.
God punishes us for our sins like this.
That makes it sort of immaterial whether a person behaves badly or well, doesn't it?
Because God must cause bad behavior as well as good.
Not only that, but good behavior and faith in God were not enough to earn one’s way into Heaven.
According to Jonathan Edwards, you had to be born again, for God held you by a string over the pit of Hell.
President Jimmy Carter, a Southern Baptist from the Bible Belt of Plains Georgia is a Born Again Christian.
President George W. Bush, of Crawford, Texas (and Yale, as were his pappy and grand-pappy), another Baptist, is a Born Again, since he found the Lord.
President William Jefferson "Bill" Clinton also professes to be a servant of the Lord and sings a lot of hymns at black church meetings, but whether he can be saved or not is too soon to tell.
And let us pray that the Lord finds us PDQ.
We do have an election in two days, on Tuesday, Lord!
Are you listening?
Hello?
Hello...?
Jonathan Edwards fomented the first broad, significant "revival" in the Connecticut River valley, 1735.
If you recall seeing on television, which is my experience in this, revival-meeting audience members coming to the stage to receive the laying on of hands, after which they collapse in a faint into the arms of the assistants standing there to catch them, you’ll have an idea of what it means to be ‘revived’ with the spirit or light of the Lord.
First you swoon, then you faint, then you awake, revived, reborn purged of sin, Born Again! Had the Jews something this good 2,000 years ago, we probably wouldn't be bothering with Christians today.
This, at any rate, is why they call them Revival Meetings.
Edwards sent an account of his revival meeting experiences to London. Outbreaks of such behavior soon became a phenomenon there.
Itinerant preachers from London, and Scotland which was becoming the leading intellectual center of the day (the Scottish Enlightenment, David Hume), soon began arriving in New England to conduct revival meetings of their own, here.
Saving souls was their game. They’d borrow a pulpit and congregation and soon have the parishioners swooning in ecstasy, revived, reborn, ‘awakened.’
The problem this led to was that the ‘reborn’ parishioners soon rebelled against their own pastors who had not undergone the same revival experience.
Why should a saved parishioner obey an unsaved pastor?
The authority of the pastor over his flock began breaking down as parishioners invented ways that suited themselves better.
A step towards becoming more American, one might say. We never did like to be lorded over by the holier-than-thou, especially when threatened with Hell and Damnation. We anticipated the overthrow of the Taliban before we knew it existed.
Meanwhile the students of Harvard and Yale, the important divinity schools of the day, Yale having broken from Harvard to perpetuate Puritanism, likewise rebelled against their school presidents, ministers all.
Another step in our direction as the Puritans became less pure.
Were this trend to continue we'll soon have businesses open and selling beer, wine, and liquor on Sunday, and then where will we be?
California.
The first “Great Awakening” of 1741-1742 was a milestone of new religious thinking and practice in the New World, part of an international revival movement.
Soon a division arose between those newly saved who accepted the New Light versus the Old Lights.
Meanwhile, the descendants of the Puritans were becoming less like the stereotypical strict and obedient Puritans and more like the free-thinking “I’ll decide for myself” Americans whom we all know and love so well.
Puritans, the first Americans, were born rebels. Where do you think we get it from? The Spirit of 1776 is the Spirit of 1688, the victory of Parliament over the king. See Kenneth Phillips's "The Cousin's War" (Broadway Books/Random House), tracing the continuity of attitude and spirit from the English Civil War (aka Glorious Revolution) to the American Revolution, to the American Civil War against the tyranny of slavery. All part of the same notion of morality from the same group of Calvinists and their descendants in the New World.
Puritans had rejected the authority of their Anglican bishops, for being insufficiently pure of Catholic rite after the Reformation struck England.
Protestants, after all, had been in rebellion against Catholicism since Martin Luther, on October 31, 1517, 487 years ago to the day, tacked his 95-Theses (gripes) to the cathedral door in Wittenburg, Germany.
Aided by the internet of the day, the invention of the printing press (see Johannes Gutenberg, first bible in German), Luther's dramatic protest caught the imagination of Europe. It soon sparked followers and imitators everywhere, and setting off dynastic struggle between Wittelsbach and Habsburg, Habsburg and Bourbon, and similar royaltrash, all over Europe, including England, as in Henry VIII who broke with Rome, setting up the Church of England (Anglican in England, Episcopal today in America) and his daughter Elizabeth I.
The British Act of Succession, barring Catholics, provides that only a Protestant shall succeed to the throne. Prior to Henry VIII, England had been all-Catholic and following the ornate, by Puritan standards, Tridentine Rite, named after the Council of Trent.
Puritans saw themselves as reformed, as in Reformation. They called their church here “Congregational,” to stress that they were self-ruled by the congregation, not by bishops.
Meanwhile, colonist Roger Williams broke from orthodox Puritanism and founded Providence, Rhode Island, by rejecting infant baptism in favor of adult baptism. Hence the origin of the Baptist Church, said to be the largest church in America today.
Does the Born-gain movement play a role in presidential politics today? Southern Baptist Texas vs. Boston, New England? What do you think the powerful "Moral Majority" of the Reagan Era was? And the Right-Wing of the Republican Party which controls the Republican Party, giving fits to liberals?
I heard George Soros the multi-billionaire Hungarian immigrant financier who is funding an anti-Bush campaign, state on the radio yesterday (Oct. 30, 2004), that he expects, should Bush and the right-wing win election Tuesday, that there will be a more intense cultural war in this country, beyond the current slow-rolling one that has been in progress for decades.
The Puritan influence? Look around you.
The Ivy League schools are the Puritan product of the Puritan need to educate in order to understand God’s light.
Puritan society was in constant transition between the old communal economy (e.g. communal grazing, Boston Common) which gave way to individual property owning and the grasping Yankee peddler-trader.
Puritans were the first to follow their missionaries and settle western lands (western Massachusetts and Connecticut), negotiating land from the Indians, as the individualized market economy, capitalism, grew and took hold.
Puritans eventually rejected their own Calvinism in favor of scientific reason following Galileo, Newton, the Royal Society, etc.
Edwards’ influence nevertheless remains strong.
Mark Twain, who thought Edwards “a splendid intellect gone mad,” commented that he was still contending with Edwardsean theology that Twain had first encountered on the Missouri frontier.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.’s “The Wonderful One-Hoss Shay,” Marsden points out, is a lampoon of the dramatic collapse of New England Calvinism.
Another commentator, Joseph Conforti, calls Edwards “a kind of white whale of American religious history.
Calvinism has by now nearly succumbed to strong forces, yet Edwards foresaw deficiencies in successor ‘modernist’ thinking, such that in the 20th century, despite the Enlightenment, the Scientific Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, etc., we managed to produce the bloodiest century ever, along with the threat of total nuclear destruction.
Edwards began with belief in God and reasoned from that as the premise, while the modern thinking begins with reason and tries to find a place in it for God, first coming up with Deism, the remote impersonal God favored by Thomas Jefferson and his compatriots.
Meanwhile, the morality which guided Edwards's and New England's life tended to fall by the wayside.
Does this have anything to do with Con-Law? Only if you want to see it. Those rebellious New Englanders were rebelling long before 1776...
I thoroughly enjoyed entering an area of history whose light shines on us, through the mind of a leading participant.
Marsden, who at one point referenced himself as a member of a faith community, Notre Dame, is an excellent guide through the theological thickets that turned the Puritans into the Americans of today over the generations, Blue and Sunday closing laws and all. Perhaps not incidentally, the Puritans were not as sexually constricted as we caricature them to be.
Imagine living on a frontier of farmhouses, little towns far apart, no cars or electricity, and farm-boy meets farm-girl at (mandatory) church on Sunday, and the smile of love melts their hearts.
The delightful practice of bundling (sleeping at the girlfriends,’ with her parents’ permission, in her bed, more or less fully clothed, perhaps with a sufficiently low 'bundling board' to provide a fig-leaf) contributed mightily to their increase in number, I’m reasonably confident.
Any young man unable to surmount a board was probably not good enough to marry your daughter anyway.
The parents, of course, would know who had impregnated their daughter. A reasonable solution, don't you think? Clever people, those Puritans. The Moral-Majority of their day.
Sex and power, religion and morality, what could be better in a book.
-rs
sfls
The Yale University site on alum J. Edwards is here.
Would you like to see a real, perhaps the original "Fire and Brimstone" speech? Edwards either invented or popularized it. He frightened his parishioners witless. At first he thought it was God showing himself when parishioners fell into a religious swoon and felt either damned or cleansed of sin.
Brimstone is sulphur, incidentally, found pure at the mouths of some fiery volcanoes such as Etna, in Italy, by intrepid hikers. Smelly, sulphurous, fuming, fiery, just like Hell must be.
Who did Dante reserve the lowest level of Hell for, apart from lawyers? Those who betrayed their friends? Let me know, when you've looked it up.
But how could one really tell?
Upstate New York was visited by so many fire-and-brimstone preachers so often that it was called "The Burned Over District." No sense looking for fresh souls to save among the Upstate Apple-Knockers.
Edwards's famous "Sinners In The Hands of An Angry God" is here, but be warned, you may find yourself burning in Hell after reading it.
The fictional Elmer Gantry, the real Jimmy Swaggart, the "Praise the Lord" (or Pass the Loot) Bakers, and perhaps even Smilin' Pat Robertson (another Yalie) of 700 Club money-raising fame are spiritual descendants of Edwards and his like. It's enough, perhaps, to make you want to bring back the witches of Salem, 1692.
For a visual reference, see the Coen Brothers motion picture starring the terrific George Clooney, John Turturro, Tim Blake Nelson, and John Goodman, "O Brother Where Art Thou." The music alone is worth renting the DVD.
My favorite cut is "He's in the Jailhouse Now" by the Soggy Bottom Boys, but "Down to the River to Pray" sung by Allison Krause is more to the revival meeting point, as is "Angel Band" by the Stanley Brothers." Hear also, "I'll Fly Away" by Allison Krause and Gillian Welch.
America today is a product of those Puritans. We need to know where they came from and how they changed from what came before to what we are today.
For excellent books providing the necessary background, see:
1. Diarmuid MacCulloch's excellentThe Reformation Viking, the Penguin Group, 2003, 792 pp.
2. David Starkey's Elizabeth, The Struggle for the Throne, a bio of the young Elizabeth I, Perennial/Harper Collins, 2000, in paperback. The story of the Catholic-Protestant contest for supremacy in England as it affected and almost killed the young woman before she almost didn't become Queen of England.
3. Stephen Greenblatt's Will in the World, How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare W.W. Norton, 2004, 430 pp. Greenblatt explains Shakespeare, and his works, through the lens of what was happening around him during Elizabethan and post-Elizabethan times when England, or at least the monarchy was flip-flopping (on the religious question) in a way that would make Sen. Kerry envious.
"Will in the World" is SO good for its actual history and possible psychology (there's a fair bit of speculation going on, nicely supported, however, to the extent possible), that, as one reviewer noted, it will set the standard for future biographies not only of Shakespeare but for anyone, and will require the invention of new words, as Shakespeare himself was wont to invent, to describe how good it is.
That''s pretty good, don't you think?
What makes "Will in the World" so rich for Con-Law students interested in understanding the religious background that led to the Puritans and their settling of America, and their influence with us today, is the fact that Shakespeare lived during major flip-flops of the British ruling family, hence the country, at least in name, and Greenblatt describes how people felt about it.
The real effect was to upset and confuse leading families and the common people, and presumably Shakespeare, who lost a child, his son, Hamnet (that's correct HamNet). Hamnet wasn't permitted a Latin mass burial service, and there is evidence that Shakespeare, according to Greenblatt, was a closet Catholic. Religious allegiance and identity is not easy to turn on and off. In fact it's close to impossible if the will isn't there. Prisons, torture, and burnings at the stake are famous for producing martyrs, not forcing people to really change their identity.
Look at our own experience in trying to force, or persuade, people to change for the better. Parents have their hands full shaping kids up, as do religious leaders with their parishioners and drill sergeants with their recruits.
And I haven't even gotten into the criminal justice system with its police, prosecutors, judges, probation and parole officers, and prisons. What comes out the other end? More than frequently enough, the same as went in, only sometimes worse.
In Shakespearean England, if you didn't keep your mouth shut and cooperate with the monarch, you had every chance of being tried for treason, and losing. Hanging, drawing, quartering, and having your head displayed on a pike on London Bridge for townspeople and traveler alike to ponder would make you ponder. It was not an easy time.
English Protestantism was an extremely strong reaction to English and Continental Catholicism. There was something about the ornate and Latin Roman Catholic that English people, many of them, found impossible to tolerate. A wave of icon destruction smashed stained glass windows and church statuary, leaving a stark praying room indeed. In English. Using James I's new translation, called the King James Bible, a work of Puritans.
Part of what exercised England so much was that it was in rivalry with the Bourbon Catholics of France (Louis Xiv) and the Hapsburgs of Spain (Phillip and Carlos).
The English sea-dogs, under Elizabeth I, Raliegh and Drake, were arch-anti-Catholic Protestants. Protestant means anti-Catholic, in those days. Now they get along, but the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre in France murdered thousands of Protestant Huguenots who were forced to flee to the Netherlands, Britain, and the New World.
It is against this background that our Puritans rebel against the insufficiently pure Protestants of England.
But James I, who followed the rebellious Henry VIII, and his clever, well-educated, daughter, Elizabeth I, was a Catholic. People and monarch were out of sync.
Cromwell, who overthrew Charles II, James I's son, beheading him was a Puritan.
So troubled were British waters that the replacement monarch, in what was called the Restoration, looked to the Netherlands for a Protestant, William and his queen, Mary. You've heard of William and Mary College, in Williamsburg, Virginia, all British monarchical names, mentioned above. This is where Thomas Jefferson and I believe his cousin, John Marshall attended college.
Our Puritans were such a nuisance to more moderate English Protestants that they were forced to flee to Holland. There were too many Dutchmen there, however, and no land and jobs, so they had to make plans to leave.
Unwelcome in Holland and England, the New World beckoned. They obtained a charter from the restored king, who was only too happy to see them depart for the New World, never to be heard from again, with any luck.
You know the rest of the story. After a struggle, they thrived and became us.
Our institutions are the product of their experience.
Monarchy?
We knew that didn't work.
Democratic, republican government, with a tripartite division of power (omitting the states, a fourth branch, and the press, a fifth), with sovereignty residing in the people, not a king, president, or legislature, is a product of the Puritan sensibility, through Madison (College of New Jersey at Princeton; President Aaron Burr, Sr., son-in-law of Jonathan Edwards, the last great Puritan) and others, transplanted from there to here.
Greenblatt traces the religious-political flip-flops and their effect on the people and presumed effect on Shakespeare, personally and in his plays.
Our Puritans personified a purified reaction to ordinary church-cleansing, iconoclastic English Protestants who weren't quite pure enough. Puritans in London, who were in the ascendance during Shakespeare's later years, forced the theatres to shut down for a time, an experience Greenblatt describes, even though the player's companies were sponsored by royal and aristocratic families.
What has this got to do with Con-Law?
Only everything.
Their problems are our problems.
Old (sour) wine, new bottles.
Today's newspaper: same story, different names.
Get into it.
Enjoy!
You can read more about Puritans here.