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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - I. The Approach - 1. American Ideals and the American Conscience - 5. The Roots in Christianity
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10 An American Dilemma
already in the period of the Revolution and continued to grow. A small
proportion of new immigrants throughout the nineteenth century came
for religious reasons, or partly so, and a great many more wanted to
rationalize their uprooting and transplantation in such terms. So religion
itself in America took on a spirit of fight for liberty. The Bible is full of
support for such a spirit. It consists to a large extent of the tales of oppres-
sion and redemption from oppression: in the Old Testament of the Jewish
people and in the New Testament of the early Christians. The rich and
mighty are most often the wrongdoers, while the poor and lowly are the
followers of God and Christ.
The basic teaching of Protestant Christianity is democratic. We are all
poor sinners and have the same heavenly father. The concept of natural
rights in the philosophy of Enlightenment corresponded rather closely
with the idea of moral law in the Christian faith:
The doctrine of the free individual, postulating the gradual escape of men from
external political control, as they learned to obey the moral law, had its counterpart
in the emphasis of cvangclicism upon the freedom of the regenerated man from the
terrors of the Old Testament code framed for the curbing of unruly and sinful
generations. The philosophy of progress was similar to the Utopian hopes of the
millennarians. The mission of American democracy to save the world from the
oppression of autocrats was a secular version of the destiny of Christianity to save
the world from the governance of Satan.^^
But apart from the historical problem of the extent to which church and
religion in America actually inspired the American Creed, they became a
powerful container and preserver of the Creed when it was once in exist-
ence. This was true from the beginning. While in Europe after the Napo-
leonic Wars the increasing power of the churches everywhere spelled a
period of reaction, the great revivals beginning around i8cx) in America
were a sort of religious continuation of the Revolution.
In this way great numbers whom the more-or-less involved theory of natural
rights had escaped came under the leveling influence of a religious doctrine which
held that all men were equal in the sight of God. Throughout the Revival period the
upper classes looked upon the movement as “a religious distemper” which spread
like a contagious disease, and they pointed out that it made its greatest appeal to
“those of weak intellect and unstable emotions, women, adolescents, and Negroes.”
But to the poor farmer who had helped to win the Revolution only to find himself
oppressed as much by the American ruling classes as he had ever been by Crown
officials, the movement was “the greatest stir of Religion since the day of Pentecost.”^®
Religion is still a potent force in American life. “They are a religious
people,” observed Lord Bryce about Americans a half a century ago, with
great understanding for the importance of this fact for their national
ideology.*^ American scientific otservers are likely to get their attentions
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