Americanism:

The Genesis of a Civil Theology

by Juergen Gebhardt

Dr. Gebhardt is emeritus Professor at the Insitute for Political Science at the University of Erlangen-Nürenberg.  He is the editor of the just released final volume of the Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Selected Correspondence, 1924-1949.  We are featuring here Chapter 4 from his Americanism: Revolutionary Order and Societal Self-Interprestation in the American Republic, Louisiana State University Press, 1993. It will appear in nine parts. It is reproduced here with permission.

1. Monumental History

The process by which the founders' consciousness created itself a social field in the new society and the authority of an ultimate source of order was accrued to them lasted half a century. This process was accelerated because it fit seamlessly into the traditional thought patterns of New En­gland speculation on history and heroes.

New England historiography,¹ formally an Anglo-Saxon variant of reformation historiography, has, since the end of the seventeenth century, dealt with "the wonders of the Christian religion, flying from the depri­vations of Europe to the American strand"² and thus dealt predomi­nantly with those "godly men" who were at once founders and fathers of the New England colonies: "particularly after 1676, a theme receives literary formulation which henceforth was to be a staple of the New En­gland mind: ancestor worship. Virtually every one who migrated as an adult before 1640 was gone; in order to lay the covenant of the golden age upon their descendants. . . , the spokesmen called for such a venera­tion of progenitors as is hardly to be matched outside China."

An im­pressive document for this attitude was the previously mentioned Magnalia Christi Americana of Cotton Mather, who, as the grandson of John Cotton and Richard Mather and the son of Increase Mather, was a le­gitimate prophet of the Founding Fathers' fame. The Magnalia was "under the guise of history, a sustained chant to the glory of might and already misty ancestral heroes."³ And "it is a monumental piece of an­cestor veneration, full to the brim of 'Heroes worthy to have their lives written."⁴ Perry Miller saw the cause of this phenomenon in that func­tional nexus of the cult of the founders with the ongoing controversy concerning the right order, which was later to become so important for all modern societies grounded in revolution and which had been anticipated in the New England of the early eighteenth century: "Soon empha­sis upon this theme was carried to such length of abjectness. . . , that we marvel how any Protestant culture could so abnegate its Christian liberty, until we remind ourselves that the preachers were fighting tooth and nail for what they considered survivival, that these gestures were not so much humble submissions to the past as a discharge of heavy artillery against their antagonists."⁵

The same period saw the beginning of the outward practices of the cult of the hero: in 1729 in Salem for the first time on the American continent a centennial celebration in memory of the Founding Fathers' landing was held, and numerous sermons in Massachusetts recalled the event. Shortly thereafter, Plymouth Rock emerged as a monument to be worshiped and a symbol of the colony's founding. The intensification of outward forms of hero worship does not occur until the prelude to revo­lution.⁶ In any case, at the end of the eighteenth century a "composite ideal called the Pilgrimfathers or the Puritans"⁷ emerges; in the years when the republic was being consolidated, this model fused into a unified national symbolism by merging with the more recent small and large, as well as regional and national, heroes, and the symbolism of the Revolution. In this symbolism the heroic fathers of the first founding served as Johannine heralds of the heroes of the Revolution: "The sons of the fa­thers became fathers themselves in the course of the Revolution." The patriots' "actions possessed warrant and metaphysical validity because they were patterned on the model that had existed from time immemo­rial: they in the present were secure because they were repeating an ex­emplary action from out of the past. Yet while still invoking their fathers, the patriots were finding in their actions a creative power without ref­erence to the models from the past. They began to function as self-constituting and self-commanding figures."⁸