Scott Freeman

Potent Quotables

The top 10 list will be here this afternoon. In the meantime here are some thoughts from some of my recent reading.

From Gary Wills’ Head and Heart: American Christianities

America has defied predictions that secularization will dry up religious devotion. Separation of church and state did not endanger this religiosity but protected it. There are many sources of this strong historic fact–other streams than that of the Puritans. But they set much of the style for American religiosity, its biblical rhetoric, its sense of vocation. The jeremiad, that self-castigating sermon based on the sense of American mission, continues down through our history–in Lincoln’s Second Inaugural, In William Jennings Bryan’s Cross of Gold Speech, in Martin Luther King’s oratory. It was apparent in the millennial hopes of the Great Awakening and the chiliastic imagery of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” It shows up in the hellfire sermons of the revivals, in the question “Are you saved,” in “testifying” and “witnessing” to personal conversion. Our political conventions take some of their ritual from the revivals.

Again from Wills on American Individualism:

But the aspect of the Puritan heritage with the deepest impact was what Herbert Hoover would call “the American system of rugged individualism.” The Puritan’s introspection, their self-examination, the private conversion experience that set off soul from soul by God’s election, the minute scrutiny of the stages of conversion–all this made the individual prize his or her singular experience. Tocqueville discerned something like this when he introduced the new word individualsime into the analysis of America: ‘Individualism is a considered and tranquil trait that inclines each citizen to separate himself from the crowd of his fellows, withdrawing into the conclave of his family and friends so that, having formed a little society of his own, he gladly lets the larger society go its way without him.’ One coming to that passage directly after studying the Puritans could well imagine that it was meant to describe New England, where the individual withdrew into a private experience of being saved and then joined the elect circle of “visible saints,” separating himself from the unregenerate world, which had to wallow along toward damnation apart from him and his. And that private experience of being saved was like the personal assurance that would later be called “self-confidence” by Emerson–the highest virtue in his eyes.

From The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America by Susan Faludi:

In the years since 2001, we’ve been on a circus ride of impractical policies and improbable “protective” politics predicated as much on the desire to reinstate a social fiction as on the need to respond to actual threats. The enemy that hit us on September 11 was real. But our citizenry wasn’t just asked to confront a real enemy. The arrest and prosecution of our antagonists seemed to be only a part of our concern. We were also enlisted in a symbolic war at home, a war to repair and restore a national myth. Our retreat to the fifties reached beyond movie tropes and the era’s odd mix of national insecurity and domestic containment. It reached back beyond the fifties themselves. For this particular reaction to 9/11–our fixation of restoring an invincible manhood by saving little girls–was not so anomalous. It belonged to a long-standing American pattern of response to threat, a response that we’ve been perfecting since our original wilderness experience.

Thoughts? Agree? Disagree?