When James Davison Hunter publishes a book, people need to take notice. Hunter’s 1991 book The Culture Wars: The Battle to Define America He offers one of the most useful and commonly used metaphors for political change in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. His new book, Democracy and Solidarity: On the Cultural Roots of America’s Political Crisisdoes the same for the present, pointing to the most fundamental question our nation must face and answer: Can our democracy survive when the cultural wellsprings of social solidarity have dried up, when we can no longer generate a common mythology that unites Americans?
Hunter starts off with a rich and nuanced historical survey, which we’ll focus on today, and on Monday we’ll wrap up with a look at how Hunter analyzes the current situation.
Hunter’s historical investigation is brought to bear a sharp historiographical lens, which he articulates. “While it is true that politics is primarily about the use and control of power, to be about more than power, such as justice, freedom, and equality, it relies on spheres relatively independent of politics,” he writes. “That is why, after all, culture precedes politics,” he argues. “All cultures implicitly raise and address (in different ways) proto-philosophical questions of metaphysics, epistemology, anthropology, ethics, and teleology,” he argues. And Hunter is battling a powerful disciplinary trend that only analyzes power, or at best considers ethics separately from anthropology and metaphysics.
It is this deep level of cultural analysis that makes the book so accessible to Catholics who know that reducing politics or religion to questions of ethics is the first step to misunderstanding.
Another important point Hunter makes at the beginning, and repeats many times throughout the book, is that these deep cultural sources he explores are most powerful when they are implicit — when they are believed so widely and deeply that they need not be mentioned. This is why so many attempts by non-historians to tackle history fail: they do not realize that what was not said in speeches or written in letters, was in the air people breathed.
Turning to the founding, Hunter argues that “the layer of social thought that underpinned liberal democracy took shape as a hybrid Enlightenment, a mixture of cultural sources drawn from different tributaries of thought and practice.” The hybrid had to be opaque enough to allow people who understood concepts like “freedom” and “equality” in ways quite different from one another to forge a “positive solidarity” that would be the basis of a “common understanding and common affection.” It wasn’t enough then, and it’s not enough now! Negative solidarity – a “solidarity that arose as a reaction to the presence of an enemy, or perhaps as a response to a crisis” – was not enough.
The hybrid Enlightenment was not just a softening of Voltaire’s roughness with Calvin’s roughness. Hunter writes that “the American Enlightenment had a Calvinist idea of morality, even though it rejected doctrines such as original sin, the divinity of Christ, the Trinity, and the existence of miracles. The reason for this was that everyday personal ethics and social ethics were essentially the same.” The Founding Era syncretism was thoroughgoing, but uneven, leaving room for deists and orthodox Christians. What it produced was a new idea of citizenship, one in which “the common people had the power to determine the framework of public life.” This caused endless political debates, as ideas such as freedom and equality differed from one person to another, but these ideas had their own power, and were powerful enough to bind early Americans to a common sense of purpose.
In the first half of the nineteenth century, the democratizing forces of the Second Great Awakening had a profound effect on the nation’s self-perception, “during this period, Reconstructionist evangelicalism came to dominate the cultural logic of public life.” Hunter examines Lyman Beecher, who epitomized the interpenetration of religious and political ideas in the antebellum period and who forged a narrative of America as a new Israel from which various social reform efforts, including the abolitionist movement, sprang. During this period, America was self-consciously a Christian republic, not just a Christian nation.
I asked Hunter how the millennial understanding of American destiny he enumerated in the antebellum era relates to today’s concerns about an often vaguely defined Christian nationalism.
“I think we’re seeing a couple of things,” he told me. “One is that for much of American history, particularly since the founding of the country in the first two-thirds of the 19th century and continuing into the middle of the 20th century, Christianity, in all its complexity, was central to elite institutions of culture-making. In short, slogans about “Christian nationalism,” whether for or against, misunderstand much of American history.
Hunter focuses on the many ways Americans fought each other over a common national myth, and the many ways the country as a whole fell short of its professed ideals. He examines the “boundary work” of national identity at each stage of history, how enslaved black Americans, Native Americans, Catholics, and Mormons were placed into and then dissolved as “others,” and how organizations like the black church and movements like the abolitionist movement all grew out of a shared, democratized Christian tradition that was also supported by southern slave owners. As he says, a national myth must be opaque.
The Civil War remains remembered as a moment in American history when tensions in our national mythology could not be “resolved.” The anthropological conflicts that sought to answer the question, “Who is man?” could not be resolved. The differences were critical. “Since we could not resolve these contradictions in our national life rationally, constitutionally, or theologically, we could only resolve them forcibly through military strategy and force,” Hunter writes.
Towards the end of that war, Abraham Lincoln delivered his Second Inaugural Address. Hunter echoes Alfred Kazin’s view that this speech was the culmination of an era of faith, and makes an argument that I find hard to understand: “By taking such a prominent position in the war and by heightening the moral stakes of the conflict, Bible Faithin fact, It has lost credibility as an institution that interprets and guides policy issues and directly impacts people’s lives.“I believe the Union side felt vindicated by the outcome of the battle. Hunter argues that religion’s loss of authority in public life began to dissolve at that moment.
I asked Hunter about the claim that religion began to lose cultural authority at the end of the Civil War.
“I don’t think they realized it at all,” he told me. “I think the tragedy of the Civil War wasn’t just the number of deaths, but the number of injuries, which were far greater. Given the medical system of the time, it was true that the Southern economy was destroyed, but it was like the whole country got run over by a truck.”
“The Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments did the work of bringing about national unity quickly, but emotionally and socially, this was a very personal blow that permeated every aspect of the social order, and so created a lot of doubt as we recovered from it,” he added. “And, of course, at the time Darwin published, there was a heightened Enlightenment sensibility, the promise of a kind of secular science, and the Berlin model of the German university had just been embraced by Johns Hopkins and other major universities. I think it was a confluence of a few things, but at the very least there was an emotional aftershock.” [after the Civil War] At the national level.”
This paper requires further study, particularly of how elite institutions and popular imaginations interacted as the acid of modernity corroded the very notion of transcendence. This is important not only for understanding our shared history but also for understanding our current moment.
The decline of religion as a source of cultural authority is clear, and it is becoming harder to argue that it has benefited society. This will not be the first, nor the last, time that an elite institution of culture-shaping takes a major step down the wrong path. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. I will conclude my review of this important book on Monday with Hunter’s profound and provocative assessment of political polarization and its cultural sources.
