Critical Connections: That Old Time American Religion

Liberalism has become a dirty word in our culture, while white supremacy remains a viable idea for a dishearteningly high number of our fellow citizens. The pejoration of “liberal” is a long story, growing from the twin roots of some Christians’ opposition to science (including a scientific approach to textual interpretation) and some capitalists’ opposition to the emergence of the modern welfare state, particularly to the New Deal. It took a long time for “liberal” to fall out of favor. White supremacy as a political principle and as a fundamental article of faith has been with us all that time – but absent a robust counterargument in word and deed grounded in a deeply informed, deep-rooted pluralist vision of human flourishing, the noxious weed of white supremacy grows unchecked.

So where can we find that deep-rooted pluralist vision of human flourishing? I would recommend we look to Amy Kittelstrom’s book, The Religion of Democracy: Seven Liberals and the American Moral Tradition.

The long cultural and intellectual lineage indicated by these seven thinkers stretches back to classical liberalism, the political commitment of a society to replace coercion with consent. Their genealogy extends forward all the way to modern liberalism, the moral commitment of a society to the collective needs of all its members, regardless of their differences. Between the ideal of modern liberalism that has never been realized and the theory of classical liberalism that has never been dismantled – and amid contrary historical currents, like discrimination and exploitation, that undermine both – these liberals and the rest of their intellectual family tree helped Americans and others think about why human beings ought to treat one another as equals who deserve to be free. This book is a history of that idea.

This passage comes from Kittelstrom’s introduction to her truly masterful work. In this book, Kittelstrom makes good on that preview, tracing the long transformation of “liberalism” in American life and thought from the 18th century to the 20th century. She singles out seven thinkers – John Adams, Mary Moody Emerson, William Ellery Channing, William James, Thomas Davidson, William Mcintire Salter, and Jane Addams – who both reflected and shaped the convictions of their era and of succeeding generations, handing down a set of core ideas and beliefs that were modified and expanded, but never entirely abandoned, by succeeding generations of liberal thinkers during the time period covered in her book. From the Revolutionary War to the end of the Progressive Era and the dawn of the New Deal, liberal thinkers expanded their own and their fellow citizens’ understanding of the religious and moral grounds upon which participatory democracy must function if it is to function at all.

This liberal tradition begins in empiricism and individuality (not individualism), both rooted in Reformation Christianity as it developed in the British Colonies that became the United States. In place of received truths, accepted on authority, the legacy of New England Puritanism was an emphasis on the obligation of each believer and all together to investigate, inquire, seek out what was true, and on a conviction that the communication between each person’s conscience and the truth-giving God was inviolable and was a matter upon which they alone could pronounce, and upon which they were obligated to act as free moral agents who (by the Revolutionary era) had embraced the life of virtue as the mark of a life of truth. Since no one person can know all truth, but each person has, by God’s light, some truth, fellow citizens must recognize the inherent value of those who hold different perspectives than their own. The work of society is to create and sustain the conditions whereby God’s truth can be made known in the multiplicity of its bearers’ lives and perspectives, in a truth-seeking community which had expanded beyond the church or the town to encompass the whole nation and might eventually – if Jane Addams’s vision could find fulfillment – include the whole world in fellowship.

What Kittelstrom’s book does not argue – rather, what it fairly convincingly argues against – is some kind of “secularization theory.” The convictions regarding tolerance, inclusion, being willing to consider that others’ perspectives might be conveying the very truth of God – these are convictions rooted in American Protestant thought and experience. These convictions expanded beyond doctrinal concerns and explicitly theological formulations throughout the 19th century, but did not lose the character of beliefs, religious convictions, principles held in faith upon which people could and did act. Such beliefs became “post-Christian” in the sense that they were not bound to a particular religious world view or creed – they became articles of faith of “humanism,” built upon respect for all creeds. Though Kittelstrom does not explicitly make this claim so starkly, I come away from her book convinced that these core beliefs shaping the American democratic tradition carried with them into the twentieth century (and perhaps bear with them still) a deep sense that humankind’s collective struggle toward goodness in this life, visible only in part, seeks out and will finally come to rest in a Goodness that will someday be manifest to each and all as a whole. Underneath are the everlasting arms…

Of course such a faith is not necessary for the principles of an inclusive democratic liberalism to bear good fruit in this life, which is – for many of us – all that we can be certain of and all that ought to matter. The “faith tradition” of American democracy can function almost entirely in the realm of immanence – as long as the firm conviction of the sacredness of each individual human soul does not waver. And one does not need a God to have a sense of the sacred.

Kittelstrom published her book with Penguin Press, as part of the Penguin History of American Life series, and she wrote it in a lovely plain speech style without sacrificing any analytical precision. It’s a fine book to recommend to anyone who expresses a flattened, simplistic idea of what liberalism means or has meant in American history – so a good read for willing interlocutors across the political spectrum.

But even this outstanding book has a weakness. It is a weakness all works of history share: their authors cannot see the future.

In the conclusion to her book, Kittelstrom offers this reflection as an afterword on the long career of liberalism through the twentieth century, the period that lies beyond the scope of her most focused analysis:

Liberal efforts helped make racism a social sin, such that by the twenty-first century an African American could become president and even the most publicly condemned racists knew better than to admit that they adhered to a passé ideology. The discrediting of white supremacy may be the most significant parcel of liberal common ground cultivated in the twentieth century, but on social questions from gender and sexuality to the environment, liberals built on the American moral tradition they had established over so many decades.

Kittelstrom’s book was published in 2015. As we know to our dismay, racism and white supremacy are not passé ideologies, and people who embrace such beliefs feel newly emboldened to proclaim them publicly. Yet I would view this phenomenon not as a fact that somehow discredits Kittelstrom’s book – remember, her main argument runs through the long 19th century – but as a problem that could drive us to seek a solution using the old and sturdy intellectual tools she has laid out for us on the workshop table.

Who will pick up the square and the level and the compass from where Jane Addams left them? Who will be the lantern-bearer who carries the light by which James saw even farther along the dark and windswept shore upon which we stand blind to one another?

And what would it mean to pick up those tools? What would it mean to see by James’s light, to practice Addams’s inclusive tolerance? We must despise and discredit and dismantle racism and white supremacy and sexism and all the other -isms that render people “less than.” We must demolish racism. But – God help us all – what are we going to do about all these racists?

What are the limits of “tolerance”?

At the end of his essay “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings,” James argued that we must “tolerate, respect and indulge those whom we see harmlessly interested and happy in their own ways, however unintelligible these may be to us.” The key word there is “harmlessly.” There is nothing harmless about racism as a political ideology. We cannot afford to indulge racists, or tolerate their beliefs, because their beliefs set limits upon the full humanity and moral agency and participatory citizenship of others. Their beliefs set limits on the very goodness possible through tolerance. I think this is the core of Popper’s paradox – one cannot tolerate an intolerance so menacing as to undermine the very foundations of tolerance itself.

That is one of the many inner tensions and contradictions of liberalism – it’s the tension that “free speech activists” exploit when they try to peddle race science or white supremacy or retrograde sexist paternalism on college campuses and then complain that their free speech is being stifled. In their perfect world, our Black and Latinx and queer and feminist classmates and coworkers would have no voice, yet they want to presume upon liberal tolerance to insist that their exclusionary voice be heard.

There are no easy ways out of this situation. But again – that’s why I’d recommend Kittelstrom’s book, particularly her chapter on Jane Addams, who exemplified more than anyone else the hard work necessary to even try to achieve a society in which all will value one another, all will welcome one another, all will gladly stand as one another’s equals, and in which the democratic will of the people will be reflected in a government designed to stand between the sovereign individual conscience and the coercive forces of unfettered capitalism. It is worth trying, again and again and again.

That’s how it seems, at least, to this bottled-lightning girl.