The Puritan Origins of American Patriotism

by George McKenna

In this absorbing book, George McKenna ranges across the entire panorama of American history to track the development of American patriotism. That patriotism—shaped by Reformation Protestantism and imbued with the American Puritan belief in a providential “errand”—has evolved over 350 years and influenced American political culture in both positive and negative ways, McKenna shows. The germ of the patriotism, an activist theology that stressed collective rather than individual salvation, began in the late 1630s in New England and traveled across the continent, eventually becoming a national phenomenon. Today, American patriotism still reflects its origins in the seventeenth century.

By encouraging cohesion in a nation of diverse peoples and inspiring social reform, American patriotism has sometimes been a force for good. But the book also uncovers a darker side of the nation’s patriotism—a prejudice against the South in the nineteenth century, for example, and a tendency toward nativism and anti-Catholicism. Ironically, a great reversal has occurred, and today the most fervent believers in the Puritan narrative are the former “outsiders”—Catholics and Southerners. McKenna offers an interesting new perspective on patriotism’s role throughout American history, and he concludes with trenchant thoughts on its role in the post-9/11 era.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, American, Politics, Religion, American History, Theology

448 pages, Hardcover

First published August 28, 2007

Reviews

[Douglas Wilson · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was magnificent. Man, what a book.

[Jonathan Brown · Rating 5 out of 5]

I cannot hype this book enough. I really can't. It's just that good. George McKenna has achieved a truly masterful feat. He begins by exploring the nature and character of New England's early Puritans, examining contrasts within factions of Puritan theology (e.g., preparationists vs. spiritists), and then traces the way American self-conceptions have basically been variants on, or reactions against, the Puritan sense of national mission ever since (and the ways in which that overall outlook, once resisted most by Catholics and Southerners, is now most greatly championed by those same groups).

And McKenna does it with great aplomb, covering the religious perspectives of the Founding Fathers, the course of the Revolution, the Civil War (with some great material on how Lincoln's thought shifted more and more toward his religious upbringing as it went on), the Gilded Age, the Scopes trial, Watergate, the Vietnam War, reactions to 9/11...

Really, it's a beautifully written history of American politics and culture, tying together threads and trends with such insight that my greatest complaint with the book is that it wasn't published yesterday, so it couldn't cover the last ten years! This book is essential reading for any American, I should think.

[Melanie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Traces Puritan influence through America's history. Some parts were more engaging than others; I particularly enjoyed the chapter on the 60s and 70s.

[Russel Henderson · Rating 4 out of 5]

An impressive and erudite treating of the Puritan legacy in America, tracing its purported influence upon the Founding, the Civil War, the Progressive Era, the New Deal, Reaganism, and the War on Terror (it was published in 2007) and much else in between.

I lodge two criticisms of the book, though in a sense they are one. That is, McKenna is obtuse in shoehorning data into a metanarrative while ignoring alternative sources of at least some of that energy. Most notably, the late 18th Century/early 19th Century moralizing trend in Britain, which brought the world the movement against the slave trade and ultimately (in Britain) abolitionism and then the revolution in "manners" that paved the way for the Victorian Age, clearly influenced the Anglophilic New Englanders of the era, perhaps as much as did the legacy of the Puritans. And the absence of similar trends in the Francophilic, Anglophobic South of the era would suggest that tie as well. And yet Wilberforce and More are nowhere to be found in its pages.

McKenna discusses the jeremiad, the notion of a chosen people who have lost the favor of God because of sinfulness and who are being called to repent. But the Indian Wars of the 17th Century were the cause of numerous jeremiads and deeply upsetting to the notion of the Puritans' receipt of divine favor, and yet they're barely mentioned (with a handful of exceptions, such as to say Anne Hutchinson died in an Indian attack and to discuss the later French and Indian Wars). And if I was inclined to trace a path from the Puritans to Abraham Lincoln in 1862, King Phillip's War would probably be the place I would start.

McKenna takes significant liberties in what he includes and what he omits to drive his narrative. The result is a hypothesis that might serve as a useful analytical tool but does not strike me as an effective summation of American history, the history of the Puritan religion in America, or any other broad-brush topic in American historiography.

[Adam Bradley · Rating 4 out of 5]

A march through American history, tracing the impact and influence of the Puritans and their posterity and legacy -- from settlement to the Revolution to Whiggery to the Abolitionist Republicans to Progressivism to the modern Democrats (and noting along the way the Great Reversal, that Southern Evangelicals and Catholics who were the anti-Christs of early Puritan polemics now constitute the heart of that polis whose philosophical and ideological sentiments bear the most similarity to the Puritans'.

The closing chapters -- spanning from the end of World War II to shortly after the 2006 mid-term election -- have a noticeably faster tempo and more critical tone, and are worth the read on their own.

[Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very good book. Traces a couple of Puritan themes through American History and shows how most politicians have used Puritan themes to promote their agendas or to slam other people's agendas.

[JR McCravy]

Excited to get into this, especially in light of the heavy exposure to Puritanism I've had this semester under Dr. Ramsey.

[Michael Greening · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wildly ambitious, it is both absorbing and satisfying. A terrific book.

[Cody Bertram · Rating 5 out of 5]

A wonderful read. Sweeping in scope and rigorously in depth.