One of the recurring themes in American religious history is the adoption of religious ways of thinking in non-religious parts of life. Of course many scholars have studied the direct influence of these religious ideas on American history. But here I’m suggesting that patterns of thinking, ultimately derived from religion, control or affect much of non-religious American thought.
Let me briefly list some of these patterns of thought. The millenarian or utopian pattern of thought looks forward to a golden age of peace and prosperity. This millennium is sometimes explicitly Christian, as it was for George Rapp’s New Harmony, and sometimes it is explicitly secular, as it was for Robert Owen’s New Harmony. The primitivist or fall/redemption pattern of thought, on the other hand, looks back to a golden age before the man’s sin destroyed it. Environmentalists often regard the wilderness as Eden and civilization as fallen. The scriptural or hermeneutical pattern of thought treats political documents as sacred and suggests that they be interpreted by methods of interpretation roughly analogous to methods of interpreting the Bible. The obvious examples are the ways that Declaration of Independence and the federal Constitution are reverenced. The jeremiad or covenant pattern of thought treats America as a covenanted nation subject to God’s blessings or cursings depending on whether it keeps the covenant or sins against God. Two examples of mostly secular jeremiads are Abraham Lincoln’s “Second Inaugural Address” and Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream Speech.” The service pattern of thought is an ethic of leadership that demands that leaders be servants. Some of these other patterns could probably be classified under a providentialist pattern of thought. Most of these patterns are specifically Protestant and generally Christian, but I suspect that there are also Catholic and perhaps Jewish ways of thinking that have influenced American history.
This line of inquiry could be a means of synthesizing religious history with American history more generally, and of understanding American’s ambivalent relationship with religion.
Over at the much better known blog on American religious history, Paul Harvey has posted excerpts of a review of Jackson Lears’s Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877-1920. According to the review, Lears uses the metaphor of regeneration to synthesize American history during the Progessive Era. The idea of regeneration is another religious pattern of thought that I could add to the list above.
Both the reviewer and Harvey criticize Lears’s use of regeneration to synthesize Progressive Era history. Leaving aside the question of whether that criticism is warranted (I’m inclined to think that it’s not, but I haven’t read the book), I should point out that the way Lears is synthesizing is different than what I’m suggesting above. Lears is using regeneration as a metaphor, which can be seen in many aspects of American culture during the period he studied. My suggestion is one level of abstraction above that: the metaphor of regeneration could be just one of a group of metaphors that have influenced American culture. But at the same time, my suggestion is not abstract: it deals with specific patterns that influenced people’s thinking directly, rather than being metaphors in which they expressed their ideas.
Another pattern of thought that I should have mentioned is the exodus. That is a way of thinking that is profoundly influential in African American culture and religion.
As an example of scriptural pattern of thought, see this (perhaps tongue-in-cheek) article from the Brandeis Hoot about carrying around a pocket Constitution.
Lincoln, you might be interested in Will Herberg’s 1955 book Protestant, Catholic, Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology. He was one of the earliest guys to note that American civil religion was the descendant of American Protestantism. He coined the phrase “secularized Puritanism” to describe the “American Way of Life.”