The sky is falling! The end is near!

Just in time for the Christmas season, Pat Buchanan has published yet another jeremiad warning that America is about to go belly up. You'd think that the American public would get tired of the unrelenting gloominess of the far right and left. But you'd be wrong. Already the book is climbing up the bestseller lists, giving us further proof that, despite our collective obsession with living the good life, we Americans love the sweet rush of anxiety. Maybe it's just the antidote for our apathy....

But like it or not, it's part of who we are, the flip-side of our patriotic jingoism and a legacy of those intensely religious Puritans that lives on in this secular age. In the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan called the United States a "shining city on a hill," he was borrowing -- and embroidering -- a famous line from the 17th century governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, John Winthrop. Winthrop didn't use the word "shining" in his original 1630 sermon; his message was not triumphalist.

Winthrop and his fellow Puritans believed that in their escape from religious persecution and their settling of a new world, they had entered into a covenant with God. They were ordained to be an example to the world and to establish God's kingdom in wild, chaotic North America. ...

But today as in the past, that sense of biblical errand is coupled with a profound fear of failure. "We've carried forward the Puritans' sense of anxiety," says political scientist George McKenna, the author of "The Puritan Origins of American Patriotism." "It underlies a great deal of American political rhetoric. While we believe we have a role to play in the world, we are not certain that we are destined to succeed."

At its best, says Mckenna, the Puritan tradition of anxious providentialism has inspired the likes of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to improve the nation. King proclaimed that African Americans would win their freedom "because the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal will of God are embodied in our echoing demands." But anxious providentialism can also devolve into self-indulgent cynicism, the kind that not only does not inspire but kills the very impulse to make the world better.

The same is true for the jeremiad. From the Puritans on, it has been used to exhort Americans to step up and fulfill their "errand into the wilderness" (in the words of another Puritan preacher). As one scholar put it, we experience a process of "liberation through lamentation." But since the late 1960s and the demoralizing effects of the Vietnam War, too many jeremiads have held out too little hope, abandoning the promise inherent in the Puritans' covenant -- the possibility of redemption. In these works, a new "reverse exceptionalism" has emerged, with critics portraying the United States as exceptionally bad, not exceptionally blessed. Although it's easy to identify the origins of the post-modern jeremiad in the New Left, a generation later, plenty of disgruntled right-wingers employ the same grim, apocalyptic rhetoric.

In either case, apocalypse without the possibility of redemption amounts to little more than a tantrum....

Arnold Shcherban - 12/12/2007

The Puritans historically have been one of the most intolerant religious
groups. In practice they always were
and still remain among the most self-righteous, racist, arrogant, and despised folks on the face of Earth.
But I guess some so-called historians such things as historical heritage and the common-place fact that present grows from the past don't exist.

Vernon Clayson - 12/11/2007

Mr. Shchnerman, is your argument with me or the author? You quote me but I can't tell whether you think the Puritan influence is the reason for the killings in the past and now. I've heard no reference that religion had anything to do with any of the school killings, maybe the freak that killed the Amish girls earlier this year held some weird belief they were a danger to him, maybe they had to die so that he wouldn't be urged to violate them. What is your point??

Arnold Shcherban - 12/10/2007

No one faults Americans for every wrong happened in the world, but many do for what Americans... are at greater or lesser fault!

Arnold Shcherban - 12/10/2007

<...the author overlooks the murderous culture in our cities to say nothing of the random killings in our schools.>
As if religious extremism has been historically opposed to violence...
As if Wild West wasn't run by religious folks...
As if today's religious right don't kill people over the acts of group or state terrorism...

Vernon Clayson - 12/9/2007

Only the desperate to fault America and Americans for all things would blame a small group of religious zealots largely lost in the course of history for the present conduct of a nation of 300 million persons. It sounds like the author overlooks the murderous culture in our cities to say nothing of the random killings in our schools. It also sounds like he overlooks that we are the most giving of all cultures for disasters and emergencies all over the world, e.g., even people that seem to hate us ask "Where are the Americans" within minutes of a disaster. They were a quaint group, we are too complex a society to blame one group of colonists for our current affairs, they were a few hundred people trying to exist on bare essentials, living in fear of witches among them and the so-called savages they encountered; they hadn't the slightest notion that their small commune would have an effect on a nation that is the most prosperous and powerful in history. They were supremely religious and surely would have been appalled at the conduct of the licentious Kennedys, the duplicity of John Kerry and the acceptance of same sex marriages and an openly homosexual man, Barney Frank, as popular among voters. How can the author speak of Puritanism as affecting any phase of our society, they are polar opposites in any comparison.

Lee J Rickard - 12/5/2007

Another good recent work on this is Garry Wills's Head and Heart.