With Daniel Elazar’s four
views of how Americans have seen the relationship between the individual and
government were reviewed in the last four postings, this blog can resume its telling
of how federalism, the last of the four views, has fared during the history of
this nation. By way of review, the other
three views are individualism, collectivism, and corporatism and each of the
previous four postings describes and somewhat explains what each of these perceptions
are and have been.
Again, federalism, as
Elazar defines it, is a perspective that denotes that the individual citizen
faces his/her social world through his/her membership in various cooperative
networks, they include such groupings such as family and local associations, and
all the other partnerships one joins through life. It is a view that transcends legal
definitions and gets at the very human emotions that are stirred as one
interacts with other members of these collectives.
And, as such, it provides a
motivation to be cooperative, collaborative, and communal. As one becomes informed of how American social
history evolved, one can ask: was any
portrayed behaviors or behavior patterns a reflection of individualism,
collectivism, corporatism, or federalism?
All four were present from the beginning and, from a practical sense,
all four provided functional perspectives to the various sorts of challenges a
people might and do face.
With that sort of mental
scheme – a categorizing model – one can pick up the history of the colonial
settlers through the first generation.
That story, in this blog, left off with the conflict between the
religious intellectuals and the more emotionally based advocates that found the
intellects being too beholden to pagan authority of the ancient Greeks and
Romans, especially Aristotle and Cicero.
In a sentence, the intellects promoted logic and the more “feeling”
contingent promoted the will.
Of most relevance to the
concerns of this blog was that the “will” contingent added an element of
selectivity to the question of who belongs to the church, not a small concern
when one wishes to determine who had influence, both socially and
politically. They relied on the
Puritanical belief that members of the congregation are made of those who have
been chosen by God. To remind the
reader, one can get a good grasp of pure Puritanical beliefs by reviewing the
acronym TULIP.
It stands for the
following:
“T”
for total depravity; the human condition ameliorated only by God’s grace.
“U”
for unconditional election; that is, God determines who is saved.
“L”
for limited atonement; that is, God’s grace results from the suffering of
Christ.
“I”
for irresistible grace; that is, if chosen, a person will not reject God’s
grace. And
“P”
for perseverance of the saints; that is, the chosen will be accordingly active and
known by others.
And of importance here is
the “U.” That is, if one is not selected
by God for salvation, one is not among the advantaged. This is usually detected by being one of need
or otherwise inordinately challenged.
This ran in direct opposition to the Church of England that
mandated everyone born on English soil was automatically a member of that
church. Therefore, one religion was
restrictive, the other open. This had
its effects in how open the two sets of believers defined membership to the
church, and to the polity. But there was
an ironic twist to this distinction.
That turn resides in the fact that it is the individual who
claims his/her selection by God. This
was done through a willing profession by the person who falls within God’s
grace. The individual, through this act,
“volunteers” for his/her inclusion into this faith. Here is how Allen C. Guelzo describes this
arrangement:
… if … it was the will
which ruled, then sincerity could be served by nothing less than the full
conscious embrace of those propositions as an act of love, and that could only happen
by divine grace. If the Voluntarists
were right, then the corresponding notion of the church and society had to be
that of the Separatists, who denied admission to the church to all but those
who could make a conscious, willing profession of divine grace.
Of course, to embrace Voluntarism meant surrendering the
pretense that Puritanism was only about rehabilitating the Church of
England. It meant, in fact,
revolutionizing it, and junking any basis for establishing a Puritanized
version of a natural church in Massachusetts.
If that happened, the Massachusetts society would become completely
detached from the church. It would, even
worse, become exactly the sort of Pagan society described by the classical
authorities of which the Puritans were so suspicious.[1]
And if one remembers that
the head of the Church of England was the monarch, the king or queen, then this
detachment had more to it than just attending another church, it could, if an
ocean weren’t in the way, verging on traitorous behavior. In addition, this sense of the individual
making a reflective, faith claim put the onus on the person to join. Yes, a certain level of good fortune added legitimacy
to that claim, but regardless, it is the individual who decides to join.
This is a very federalist requisite. That is, one, from exercising free will,
joins into a federalist arrangement.
He/she agrees to the terms of membership which includes the aims and
goals of the arrangement. One can sense from
this thinking what would become “We the People of the United States, in Order to …”
Here, at this earlier date, one is considering
religious commitment, but one cannot ignore the implications this belief would
have on the approach one is encouraged to take when defining one’s role in
social institutions in general and that includes the polity. But there is not a straight line from this
early “revolution” to the political revolution that gained Americans their
independence or, later, their lasting compact-al agreement, the US
Constitution.
For one thing, the very next generation, born
and raised in the years from 1630 to 1660 rebelled against this form of
Puritanism, at least the virulent form that the first generation espoused and
practiced. For them, they never
experienced the direct oppression of the Crown attempting to curtail their
religious practice. This, in turn,
cooled their sense of rebellion and it wasn’t until 1687 that the English
government even exerted any control.
In
that year, the original charter was replaced with a document that allowed for
the Church of England to establish itself in the colony – more specifically in
Boston. They also restructured Harvard
that had been giving Puritans, by popular demand, a meaningful presence on that
campus. But all of this will be paled by
an overwhelming new force emanating from Europe. The Enlightenment is gaining ground and it
will prove to be highly influential among the educated class of Americans as
the seventeenth century is drawing to close.
[1] Allen C. Guelzo, The American Mind, Part I –
transcript book – (Chantilly, VA: The
Teaching Company/The Great Courses, 2005), 30-31. The factual information contained in this
posting is taken from this source.
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