John Witte with the co-author Joel Nichols
provide their readers a helpful overview of the Protestant Reformation.[1] This is relevant to this blog in that one of
the forms of that reformation would have a profound effect on the direction
American colonists took in their political thinking. But at least having a summary view of what
constituted that overall religious development helps one have a contextual frame
of mind as to the events that led up to the colonists breaking away from
British rule.
Witte
and Nichols identify four reformation models.
They are the Lutheran Reformation, Anglican Reformation, Anabaptist
Reformation, and the Calvinist Reformation.
Each, through its structural format, had foundational assumptions about what
people should consider in forming their social arrangements, including their
political, governmental structures. That
is, each model supported different arrangements and they could not help affecting
how their believers thought societies should organize their governing efforts.
In
simple terms, here is how each saw what optimal arrangements looked like:
· the Lutheran model
supported a regional formula that mirrored the feudal political structure of
Germany. That is where Lutheranism took
hold and that highly divided nation – into principalities and further to the
local authorities of nobles – disposed that population to see regional authorities
as having legitimate power.
· the Anglican model
mostly mirrored the Roman Catholic model but on a national level. With King Henry VIII setting himself as head
of the Anglican Church, he simply put himself, the monarchy, in the place of
the Pope in England. This established a
national model.
· the Anabaptist model
has a bifurcated view between the religious and the fallen. This is an extremely local emphasis, and
their churches were communalized with little effort to go regional or national
much less global in their organizing efforts.
Generally, Anabaptists were judged to be too radical a form of
Lutheranism.
· the Calvinist model
was also a locally based movement but promoted a definite organizational arrangement. “Calvinist consistories [local administrative
bodies] in many communities became elected, representative bodies with
jurisdiction only within their congregations.”[2] Specific organizational elements that Calvinist/Puritanical
churches established and maintained were separation among offices or officials
(e.g., preaching was set up separately from discipline, from charity, etc.), collective
worship, regular election of officials, and congregational meetings. Calvinism found expression in Scotland (the
Presbyterians), England (the Puritans), the Dutch (the Pietists), France (the
Huguenots), and other groups.
These models would affect
politics and governance on both sides of the Atlantic. This posting wishes to continue commenting on
what was happening in England.
According to Gordon Wood,[3] Americans
were drawn to the more extreme faction of the British Whig party of the early
eighteenth century. The moniker,
Commonwealthmen, has of recent times become fashionable to designate this
group. They emphasized various issues of
that day. These issues included restrictions
on membership to Parliament (the House of Commons), concerns over the growth of
the public debt, concern also over the established formula of representation, the
length of Parliaments (they argued for shorter Parliaments), and the right to
instruct Parliamentary representatives.
But over all of these concerns there was a more basic issue.
That is,
The revolutionary character
of these radical Whigs came more fundamentally from their fierce and total
unwillingness to accept the developments of the eighteenth century. They were reacting against the maturation of
the empire, with all that this meant in the use of money and bureaucracy in the
running of government.[4]
Sensitive to the history
and traditions of England, these Whigs were upset with the actions their nation
was taking in advancing an empire. In
effect, they saw developments as abandoning their ancient constitution. Unfortunately, they lacked either the ability
or disposition to apply disciplined analysis of what was happening but kept
their protest to broad, unfocused criticism.
But in this, Americans picked up on these sentiments. They rebelled, if only emotionally at the
beginning, to the alienation they felt from a cosmopolitan London. There, the center of a social and political
milieu of arbitrary decision-makers – officials more concerned with global interests
of empire maintenance – exerted, in the eyes of Whigs, a sense of superiority
over their English and American subjects.
What this caused among these populations were more of a paranoia outlook. They began to interpret
policies as being purely exploitive. The
slightest disagreements turned into magnified issues and much of those concerns
revolved around issues of liberty. And
as such, those policies were interpreted as expressions of tyranny. The emotion of jealousy and the outlook of
suspicion can be heard by what the colonists, in evermore frequency, expressed.
And those expressions adopted the language of heightened
liberalism, paranoia reactions, and entailed anxieties over their relationships
with the mother country. And these
utterances can be readily found in the publications of that day. There, one can find original works, republished
works, cited works, and plagiarized works with recurring themes that reflected
an anti-royal rhetoric.
And not only was that
rhetoric against the national bias of British governance – recall the Anglican
influence above – but the now global thinking the British, as reaction to their
empire building, were incorporating into their views and rationales for public
policy. And leading this anti-empire view
in Britain was the Whig faction as expressed in their literature.
As an earlier citation in
this blog shared, the combined sense for the English past – its constitutional
tradition – and Whig rhetoric, the colonists felt justified in their growing
animosity of British rule both generally and in terms of specific policies,
e.g., the imposition of new taxes. The
difference being that while in Britain this argumentation remained mostly
visceral, the colonists became intellectually serious over their concerns.
They produced “a
complicated medley of notions taken from Enlightenment rationalism and New
England covenant theology.”[5] They did this to germinate, develop, and then
apply its revolutionary – or was it restoration of? – political application of
British constitutional values. One can
only sense the feelings of betrayal both American colonists and British Whigs
felt in how Britain was changing.
[1] John Witte and Joel A. Nichols, Religion and the
American Constitutional Experiment, 4th Edition (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2016).
[2] Ibid., 17.
[3]
Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic 1776-1787 (New York, NY: W. W. Norton and
Company, 1998).
[4] Ibid., 15.
[5] Ibid., 17.
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