Puritanism: What “Liberals” and “Conservatives” Have In Common?

America has still to come to terms with its Puritan past. When the founders of the USA thought they had accomplished separation of church and state they did not accomplish the disappearance of religion from the culture as a human factor and a sociological reality. Nor was that their intention. What they did pretend was to protect the new state from the institutional church, and the institutional church from the state. But what did happen was that the state almost became the church. 

The moral absolutes and standards of personal holiness that were once found in the church and its religion-based morals were transferred from the church to the state, and from the private life of the believer to the life of the public servant respectively. Some sociologists of religion call it the “migration of the holy” from the church to the nation-state. 

So “the church”, understood in Christian theology as the “assembly of the people of God”, became the “American people” assembled in the nation-state. The religious church became the secular church.  The “American people” assembled in Congress became the new church; which together with a priestly class residing in the Supreme Court (from whom all sanctity, personal holiness and orthodoxy are expected, lest they commit heresy in their pronouncements and guidance about the sacred texts of the state-church, i.e., the Constitution), the migration was complete.

The “migration of the holy”, from the sphere of the sacred to the sphere of the secular, created a secular church with two wings within one and the same religion ("liberals" and "conservatives") each with their own sense of mission of that church.  The two wings do not disagree on the religion, or its God (the nation-state "America"), but on what is the right way to obey that God.

But what is that American “religion” that divides America while at the same time holds it together?  Years ago, another sociologist called it “civil religion”.  But, then again, that is a reference to the secular or external expression of the religion.  In my view, the religion is “classical Liberalism” (capital “L”).  And no, I’m not talking about “liberals” alone but about the political philosophy expressed as two wings of that religion, “liberals” and “conservatives”. Classical Liberalism is the political philosophy coming from the Enlightenment whose central beliefs are liberty and equality, and their derivatives, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of the press, free markets, individual property, individual freedom of conscience, representative democracy, individualism.  In America, “liberals” and “conservatives” are two wings of the secular religion “classical Liberalism”.

This is perhaps why great social moral issues (like “abortion”, “gun control”) although settled by courts and laws, will not be settled culturally anytime soon—because both sides claim to defend either the right to life or the right to choose, for example, from different sides of the civil religion spectrum; each side accusing the other of the contrary by way of their own self-definitions and by defining of the other, and do so both from moral claims (see liberals Lawrence Tribe and Ruth Ginsberg objections to Roe v. Wade).  This is what we have seen behind the recent drama about the nomination of judge Kavanaugh.

Both sides want the state to judge and regulate morality, one way or the other. To put it half-way jokingly, “conservatives” want the state to regulate who can people have in their beds, “liberals” want the state to regulate the price of the bed. Both sides either ignore, select or share inconsistencies in the practice of liberty and equality when both sides want to regulate or exclude the other from moral choices they don't approve.

But why America? Modern Europe is also the result of “classical Liberalism” and then some. The thing with America is its Puritan past. The missiology of America’s secular church is tied to the mission of its Puritan aspirations of becoming a “shining city on a hill.”  This theme has served at different times as a prophetic device in calling the country back to its exceptional aspirations when finding that at times the “shining city” has not shone for all. In times of crisis both sides call back to a time when America "was great", making it the moral imperative to make "America great again". In religious terms, "to get right with God" as a nation.

But the very emergence of the United States in world history was the revolutionary experience (ambivalently and contradictory as sometimes it is) that the American nation-state doesn’t come from hundreds of years of one single-ethnic-nation in search of a state (as the case of the nations of Europe), but from the belief that the nation-state known as the United States is a nation-state still in the process of forming a "nation". This aspiration is not based on ethnic exclusivity but on egalitarian civil aspirations, and a civil practice which recognizes its own limitations. I would rephrase it this way, contradictory as it may seem, the United States aspires to be the “anti-nation-nation-state” best expressed in its inclusionary and pluralistic motto “E pluribus Unum” (“Of the many, one”). This is not a call to ethnic unity but to political unity. 

What makes America great and keeps alive the hope of becoming “the shining city on a hill”, for us and the world, is not just the promise of ethnic and cultural diversity but most fundamentally important is its political pluralism. But as long as America does not realize that political pluralism goes beyond the gathering around of one’s ethnic, gender, or religious political tribes, we will still practice inconsistencies that are anti-liberty and anti-equality. And in the process we will be adding new lists of "social sins" and tests of ideological purity.  Dynamic, opposite poles necessary for democratic social progress will become unhealthy polarization. We will be engaging in political puritanism rather than political pluralism.  We will have continuous political witch hunts or ideological lynchings on each other, instead of the practice of democratic political pluralism and citizenship as the way out of the past.