The long divide

Since the American election of 2 November 2004, a map has been whizzing around the liberal parts of the internet. It shows The United States of Canada, which joins the current Pacific, northern midwest and Atlantic states that voted for Kerry to Canada; the rest of today’s US is called Jesusland.

150 years ago, just before the civil war, a religious revival had been building in America’s south. Leading churches in that revival endorsed slavery as a god-given and biblical institution. Their revivalism was emotional, personal, even ecstatic.

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But unlike now, in the mid–1800s a religious revival had also been building in the north. Leading churches in this revival campaigned for the abolition of slavery as the only road a real Christian could take. Their revivalism was also emotional, but on top of the personal it carried the social gospel.

The civil war was Christian against Christian.

The northern Christians, contemptuously called Puritans or “mission” Christians by their detractors, were on a strong moral kick. They promoted prohibition. Leading Quaker abolitionists even argued for rights for women.

Some in the northern states were unsure about splitting with the south over slavery. New Yorkers had until recently had plenty of slaves themselves. Like the Philadelphians they did a lot of business with the south. But the Yankees to their north combined commercial with moral zeal. It was their Puritan fervour that provided the moral righteousness in Lincoln’s cause.

England’s shadow

A curiosity for followers of English history is that this division between a Puritan north and a conservatively religious south can be traced back from 1860 to the English civil war of the 1640s.

In the English civil war a parliament dominated by commercial interests and infected by Puritan fervour fought a feudal aristocracy that believed in the divine right of kings: fiercely different interests and religions.

Some of the defeated royalists in that war emigrated to America’s southern colonies, where they tried to recreate large feudal estates. For lack of enough serfs, they brought in African slaves. Trying to be conservative and maintain feudalism in these new circumstances, they became accidental innovators and invented a new horror of plantation slavery, blessed by their priests.

The Puritans who settled Massachusetts were moral scolds, true, but they were also interestingly egalitarian. They rejected bishops and made every congregation of believers self-governing. A Puritan lord who wanted to bring his title and feudal relationships to Massachusetts was told not to come. Boatloads of indentured servants were turned away to seek their fortunes further south. The Puritans wanted artisans, not servants. They solved their lack of labour by inventing machines.

A fascinating essay by Tom Wolfe argues that the egalitarian, hands-on, inventive culture of Silicon Valley, which is largely responsible for today’s computer revolution, was created by young men from midwest towns originally settled by these devout, egalitarian Yankees.

So for hundreds of years a Puritan Christianity combined commercial zeal, technical inventiveness, and participatory democracy. They claimed their democratic traditions went back to the Saxons, whose self-rule traditions barely survived the Norman invasion.

Interesting that the southern gentry also liked to claim a Norman (as well as a Celtic) inheritance. The Scotch–Irish and others who actually made up the bulk of the white population of the south liked this aristocratic conceit too. The Knights of the Ku Klux Klan refer to this tradition, the knights who conquered the egalitarian Saxons.

If this kind of analysis is basically correct, the most astonishing element is the preservation of cultural attitudes over centuries and across massive geographic and historical discontinuities.

With culture preserving itself for so long, does this provide a background for understanding this election? A Christian conservative south, untroubled by Bush’s preference for the rich, inheritors of a warrior tradition, practicing a religion that focuses on personal salvation and traditional customs, has come into its own once more.

And yet here’s an irony: the Christians who voted for Bush are much liberalised compared to their ancestors in 1860. No serious conservative would now argue for restoring slavery or denying women the vote. Bush-voting Christians also adhere (at least in theory) to a respectable middle–class morality, which we might label Puritan. They aren’t so different now from the northerners then.

The north’s forgetting

But what’s happened to the north? People there too have moved on. The gap is as wide as ever.

It appears to me that the moral fervour of the original Puritans does indeed survive in the “blue” (Democratic) states. But it has been divorced from religion. It’s not even that a majority of Kerry voters are not religious (or “spiritual ”). It’s that they have privatised these tendencies, half-convinced that the most righteous thing would be to face up to the scientific “fact” that there is no purpose to the universe or evolution.

There is indeed much moral righteousness on the secular left, in the universities, in believing in a complex cosmology of quantum weirdness, evolutionary abundance, and the social creation of beliefs. These are hard doctrines to accept, bruising to the collective ego. It requires a kind of elevated humility to acknowledge that the universe is random, and humans are accidental. Having accepted it, postmodern folk feel as superior to those lesser beings who still believe in a personal God and a virgin birth as their religious forebears did to the defenders of slavery.

I am intrigued, though, about what would happen if the few heirs of the progressive religious tradition who are unashamed of their religion were to play a bolder role and be taken more seriously by their secular cousins. I think it might have a reviving effect on the left in general and on its fortunes across the world. In all religious cultures, the progressive religious could be among the most effective evangelists for an unapologetic democratic, egalitarian, compassionate politics, as they once were in America. In America, I am convinced there is a large middle that could be swayed to a social gospel sincerely expressed in such language.