Saturday, November 27, 2010
Friday, November 26, 2010
On Artists and Community...
POINT OF VIEW
The Tricky Thing Is
November 26, 2010 - Rebecca Tirrell Talbot
In 2008, two things troubled me in culture: the death of author David Foster Wallace and a YouTube clip showing youth group kids singing, "You spin me right round, Jesus, right round," and whirling their socks in the air. The worship leader had told them they were on holy ground and needed to remove their shoes and wave their socks.
If I'd seen the YouTube clip at a different time, I might have laughed or felt a moment's dismay and moved on. It was bizarre to see what the quest for relevance can inspire, and it was outrageous to consider Moses' trembling at the burning bush turned into socks wheeling through strobe lighting. But since I felt freshly hurt by the death of an author I loved, the youth group silliness actually felt painful. It felt painful because Wallace's death had made me realize the extent to which I identified with the literary community, and this YouTube clip made me squirm to identify with the church. "Forget it," I wanted to say, "I'm with the cool people."
In college, when I identified that the arts were, unquestionably, part of what made me tick, I thought the most difficult part of being a writer and artist would be discerning acceptable content. Growing up, I had sorted art and entertainment something like this:
* "Edifying"
* "Corrupting"
* "Okay if you fast-forward a scene/mute a song/skip a few pages."
Discernment about content is important. As Cormac McCarthy's protagonist tells his son in The Road, "Just remember that the things you put into your head are there forever." The trickiest thing, though, was going to be that finding community in the arts can be a cause of great hope or great brokenness.
We are made for community—for many communities. Developmental psychologist Erik Erikson saw life as a process of realizing how large one's community really is. The infant thinks life is just him and Mom. The toddler learns to embrace family and friends. The young reader picks up Anne of Green Gables and finds imaginary kindred. The adult risks intimacy. The elderly ponder the world as their community and hope they have made it better for the next generation. We are created not just for one community, but for the expanse of human community.
Art is an essential part of that. Saying that audiences love artists may conjure scenes from Trekkies or images of teeny boppers swooning over Justin Bieber. Yet, in a real, non-creepy, non-adolescent way, there is respect, admiration, and appreciation between artist and audience—and what is that, except love?
It's accurate, then, to say readers loved fiction writer and essayist David Foster Wallace, though most didn't know him and most didn't even know the fact or the extent of the depression he suffered. His suicide, at age 46, devastated the literary community. Reading Wallace's work, one sees a brilliant mind (he won a MacArthur "genius grant") having tremendous fun on the page. One also gets the sense that he was mining postmodern experience and evaluating those aspects that made life by turns delightful and absurd. He connected with a broad community that still grieves for him, and for good reason.
What concerns me is not that art can become a community, but that it is easy for any community to go haywire. Families can become ingrown and be threatened by outsiders. Friends can seek each other's approval to a co-dependent degree. Churches can demand to fill members' every social need.
The arts, too, can become insular. Simon and Garfunkel sing, satirically, "I have no need of friendship. Friendship causes pain. It's laughter and it's loving I disdain . . . I have my books and my poetry to protect me." The listener chuckles, picturing, maybe, a clove-smoking reader holed up in his shelf-lined apartment. The song portrays one harmful use of the arts—a way of avoiding face-to-face friendships and the pain of other communities.
Living in multiple, overlapping communities gets complicated. Where our community is, there, to an extent, our loyalty and love are, and there our identity is. What we love is messy, complicated, and often our loves compete.
C.S. Lewis's Till We Have Faces illustrates this well. Early in the book, the king of Glome sacrifices his daughter Psyche by abandoning her in the land of the gods. Instead of dying, Psyche marries Cupid. Psyche's sister Orual is unaware of this marriage and travels to find Psyche and bring her home. When the sisters meet, Orual demands and wheedles and whines that Psyche must return. Psyche meets this with gravity and calm. "Orual—think. How can I go back? This is my home. I am a wife." Psyche's love for her sister is not lessened one jot by being married to Cupid, yet her love for him means she cannot meet Orual's demand.
Union with Christ changes everything. There will be demands from other communities that Christians cannot meet. The arts bestow an aura of "cool," of wisdom, and of knowingness on those who drop the right names. It's easy to bask in the hipness of contemporary literature. Craving this identity-validating hipness can turn the arts into Community Number One, and instead of making and enjoying art as worship to God, we can make this an object of worship, an end in itself.
The arts can be a radiant part of a flourishing identity that Christ is remaking. Nonetheless, true flourishing cannot happen if the arts become the community around which everything else orders itself. And so, I can't say "I'm with the cool people" or, borrowing from Simon and Garfunkel, "I have no need of Christians, Christians cause me pain." (Or embarrassment.)
The pressure to say this is crushing. Christian visual artist Makoto Fujimura participated in a conference in which presenters wrote open letters to North American churches, and in his, he incisively identified the uneasy relationship between churches and artists: "We are often in the margins of your communities, being the misfits that we are." Artists sit on the outskirts, perceiving. They are fantastic at deconstruction. Writers can't read a book without deconstructing how the writing works, so it's hard for them not to look at how church is put together. To artists (and to many other postmodern folk), the way church looks is as much a message as the sermon. It can be difficult for the perceptive misfit to embrace the church as home. Certainly many have decided—most recently and famously novelist Anne Rice—that finding community there is impossible. As with Rice, they say, "I've tried. I've failed. I'm an outsider."
It's essential for the Christian artist to know, setting out, that the artistic community will tug strongly. This false promise will ring out again and again: "If I immerse myself in the arts, I will be made new; I will be a more whole person, with respected insight into culture and truth." The Christian artist must stare down this desire and know it is Christ who makes all things new, whole, right, and bountiful.
The Christian who wants to nurture Christian artists could help greatly by addressing questions of identity and community. The person who wants to encourage Christian artists could show hospitality, making artists at home in the church, and helping them, more and more, to make Christ their home. We need each other's help. All Christians will have other communities, but we have no other true home, and what one defines as home changes everything.
Copyright © 1974-2010 Cardus. All Rights Reserved.
The Tricky Thing Is
November 26, 2010 - Rebecca Tirrell Talbot
In 2008, two things troubled me in culture: the death of author David Foster Wallace and a YouTube clip showing youth group kids singing, "You spin me right round, Jesus, right round," and whirling their socks in the air. The worship leader had told them they were on holy ground and needed to remove their shoes and wave their socks.
If I'd seen the YouTube clip at a different time, I might have laughed or felt a moment's dismay and moved on. It was bizarre to see what the quest for relevance can inspire, and it was outrageous to consider Moses' trembling at the burning bush turned into socks wheeling through strobe lighting. But since I felt freshly hurt by the death of an author I loved, the youth group silliness actually felt painful. It felt painful because Wallace's death had made me realize the extent to which I identified with the literary community, and this YouTube clip made me squirm to identify with the church. "Forget it," I wanted to say, "I'm with the cool people."
In college, when I identified that the arts were, unquestionably, part of what made me tick, I thought the most difficult part of being a writer and artist would be discerning acceptable content. Growing up, I had sorted art and entertainment something like this:
* "Edifying"
* "Corrupting"
* "Okay if you fast-forward a scene/mute a song/skip a few pages."
Discernment about content is important. As Cormac McCarthy's protagonist tells his son in The Road, "Just remember that the things you put into your head are there forever." The trickiest thing, though, was going to be that finding community in the arts can be a cause of great hope or great brokenness.
We are made for community—for many communities. Developmental psychologist Erik Erikson saw life as a process of realizing how large one's community really is. The infant thinks life is just him and Mom. The toddler learns to embrace family and friends. The young reader picks up Anne of Green Gables and finds imaginary kindred. The adult risks intimacy. The elderly ponder the world as their community and hope they have made it better for the next generation. We are created not just for one community, but for the expanse of human community.
Art is an essential part of that. Saying that audiences love artists may conjure scenes from Trekkies or images of teeny boppers swooning over Justin Bieber. Yet, in a real, non-creepy, non-adolescent way, there is respect, admiration, and appreciation between artist and audience—and what is that, except love?
It's accurate, then, to say readers loved fiction writer and essayist David Foster Wallace, though most didn't know him and most didn't even know the fact or the extent of the depression he suffered. His suicide, at age 46, devastated the literary community. Reading Wallace's work, one sees a brilliant mind (he won a MacArthur "genius grant") having tremendous fun on the page. One also gets the sense that he was mining postmodern experience and evaluating those aspects that made life by turns delightful and absurd. He connected with a broad community that still grieves for him, and for good reason.
What concerns me is not that art can become a community, but that it is easy for any community to go haywire. Families can become ingrown and be threatened by outsiders. Friends can seek each other's approval to a co-dependent degree. Churches can demand to fill members' every social need.
The arts, too, can become insular. Simon and Garfunkel sing, satirically, "I have no need of friendship. Friendship causes pain. It's laughter and it's loving I disdain . . . I have my books and my poetry to protect me." The listener chuckles, picturing, maybe, a clove-smoking reader holed up in his shelf-lined apartment. The song portrays one harmful use of the arts—a way of avoiding face-to-face friendships and the pain of other communities.
Living in multiple, overlapping communities gets complicated. Where our community is, there, to an extent, our loyalty and love are, and there our identity is. What we love is messy, complicated, and often our loves compete.
C.S. Lewis's Till We Have Faces illustrates this well. Early in the book, the king of Glome sacrifices his daughter Psyche by abandoning her in the land of the gods. Instead of dying, Psyche marries Cupid. Psyche's sister Orual is unaware of this marriage and travels to find Psyche and bring her home. When the sisters meet, Orual demands and wheedles and whines that Psyche must return. Psyche meets this with gravity and calm. "Orual—think. How can I go back? This is my home. I am a wife." Psyche's love for her sister is not lessened one jot by being married to Cupid, yet her love for him means she cannot meet Orual's demand.
Union with Christ changes everything. There will be demands from other communities that Christians cannot meet. The arts bestow an aura of "cool," of wisdom, and of knowingness on those who drop the right names. It's easy to bask in the hipness of contemporary literature. Craving this identity-validating hipness can turn the arts into Community Number One, and instead of making and enjoying art as worship to God, we can make this an object of worship, an end in itself.
The arts can be a radiant part of a flourishing identity that Christ is remaking. Nonetheless, true flourishing cannot happen if the arts become the community around which everything else orders itself. And so, I can't say "I'm with the cool people" or, borrowing from Simon and Garfunkel, "I have no need of Christians, Christians cause me pain." (Or embarrassment.)
The pressure to say this is crushing. Christian visual artist Makoto Fujimura participated in a conference in which presenters wrote open letters to North American churches, and in his, he incisively identified the uneasy relationship between churches and artists: "We are often in the margins of your communities, being the misfits that we are." Artists sit on the outskirts, perceiving. They are fantastic at deconstruction. Writers can't read a book without deconstructing how the writing works, so it's hard for them not to look at how church is put together. To artists (and to many other postmodern folk), the way church looks is as much a message as the sermon. It can be difficult for the perceptive misfit to embrace the church as home. Certainly many have decided—most recently and famously novelist Anne Rice—that finding community there is impossible. As with Rice, they say, "I've tried. I've failed. I'm an outsider."
It's essential for the Christian artist to know, setting out, that the artistic community will tug strongly. This false promise will ring out again and again: "If I immerse myself in the arts, I will be made new; I will be a more whole person, with respected insight into culture and truth." The Christian artist must stare down this desire and know it is Christ who makes all things new, whole, right, and bountiful.
The Christian who wants to nurture Christian artists could help greatly by addressing questions of identity and community. The person who wants to encourage Christian artists could show hospitality, making artists at home in the church, and helping them, more and more, to make Christ their home. We need each other's help. All Christians will have other communities, but we have no other true home, and what one defines as home changes everything.
Copyright © 1974-2010 Cardus. All Rights Reserved.
Thursday, November 25, 2010
Of Providence and Squanto... Thanksgiving 2010
Strangers, Saints and Indians
Squanto was 'sent of God,' wrote Pilgrim Governor William Bradford.
By JOHN A. MURRAY
There's little question that we live in a hyperpartisan country, and it might seem that only divine intervention can bring about the cooperation needed to move our nation forward. Perhaps in this light we might pause to remember it was only the cooperation of some very unlikely parties that made possible the first Thanksgiving.
The Pilgrims who set sail for the New World on the Mayflower in September 1620 embodied two groups: the Saints and the Strangers. The Saints were Christians who had fled England to Holland. Although they lived free of the religious intolerance of King James I, the Saints were still not happy with their Dutch surroundings. They sought a place where their children could be raised both Christian and English.
The Strangers, on the other hand, had no concern for religious freedom. These merchants, tradesmen and servants chiefly sought economic opportunity in the New World.
As we read from the historical accounts, the voyage was difficult and the first winter dire. At one point, only a small group of adults was strong enough to care for the others and oversee the building of the main common house. Miraculously, all 30 children survived.
When spring arrived, nearly half of the original 102 were dead from lack of food and medicine. Many of the survivors debated whether to sail back to England.
But on one early afternoon in March, as Captain Miles Standish was discussing defense plans in case of an Indian attack, a visitor appeared at the door of the common house. Surprisingly, it was an Indian.
Samoset—who had learned to speak some English from a British sea captain who'd made an earlier voyage to what is now Maine—greeted them. He told them a large, hostile tribe, the Patuxets, had cleared the land they now inhabited but had been completely wiped out by a mysterious disease four years before. As a result, no Indian tribe would settle the area.
This unusual event—and what happened next—is recounted by Pilgrim Governor William Bradford in his work "Of Plymouth Plantation":
"About the 16th of March [1621], a certain Indian came boldly amongst them and spoke to them in broken English," Bradford wrote. Samoset "told them also of another Indian whose name was Squanto, a native of this place, who had been in England and could speak better English than himself. . . . Squanto continued with them and was their interpreter and was a special instrument sent of God for their good beyond their expectation."
"Sent of God?" That sounds quaint to modern ears. But consider Squanto's story. Many years before the arrival of the Pilgrims, he and several other Patuxet Indians had been kidnapped along the New England coast and transported to Spain to be sold into slavery. Providentially, Squanto was purchased by a group of Catholic friars who taught him about the Bible and Jesus Christ in preparation to send him back to America to be a missionary among his tribe.
After Squanto completed his Christian education, the friars freed him and enabled him to make his way to England. Learning English while working aboard British ships, he boarded a ship in 1619 to return to America. Upon his arrival Squanto learned of the Patuxets' untimely demise.
With Squanto's help, the Pilgrims were able to survive their first year. He taught them agriculture and fishing. As an interpreter, he also helped the Pilgrims establish a peace with the local Indian tribes that would last for close to 50 years.
In the fall of 1621, the Pilgrims reaped a bountiful harvest. To thank God for their deliverance and the help they had received from the Indians, Bradford held a three-day Thanksgiving feast inviting the Indians to join them in their celebration.
Squanto remained friendly with the Pilgrims until he succumbed to an unknown fever and died in 1622. Amazingly, he bequeathed his possessions to the Pilgrims, as Bradford would document, "as remembrances of his love."
Considering the trials of his own life, it would have been understandable for Squanto to sow bitterness and seek war against the Pilgrims. Instead, his generosity and forgiveness enabled their survival.
Exemplifying St. Paul's challenge to "not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good," Squanto's cooperation would not be forgotten by the Pilgrims. Nor should it today.
Mr. Murray is headmaster of Fourth Presbyterian School in Potomac, Md.
Squanto was 'sent of God,' wrote Pilgrim Governor William Bradford.
By JOHN A. MURRAY
There's little question that we live in a hyperpartisan country, and it might seem that only divine intervention can bring about the cooperation needed to move our nation forward. Perhaps in this light we might pause to remember it was only the cooperation of some very unlikely parties that made possible the first Thanksgiving.
The Pilgrims who set sail for the New World on the Mayflower in September 1620 embodied two groups: the Saints and the Strangers. The Saints were Christians who had fled England to Holland. Although they lived free of the religious intolerance of King James I, the Saints were still not happy with their Dutch surroundings. They sought a place where their children could be raised both Christian and English.
The Strangers, on the other hand, had no concern for religious freedom. These merchants, tradesmen and servants chiefly sought economic opportunity in the New World.
As we read from the historical accounts, the voyage was difficult and the first winter dire. At one point, only a small group of adults was strong enough to care for the others and oversee the building of the main common house. Miraculously, all 30 children survived.
When spring arrived, nearly half of the original 102 were dead from lack of food and medicine. Many of the survivors debated whether to sail back to England.
But on one early afternoon in March, as Captain Miles Standish was discussing defense plans in case of an Indian attack, a visitor appeared at the door of the common house. Surprisingly, it was an Indian.
Samoset—who had learned to speak some English from a British sea captain who'd made an earlier voyage to what is now Maine—greeted them. He told them a large, hostile tribe, the Patuxets, had cleared the land they now inhabited but had been completely wiped out by a mysterious disease four years before. As a result, no Indian tribe would settle the area.
This unusual event—and what happened next—is recounted by Pilgrim Governor William Bradford in his work "Of Plymouth Plantation":
"About the 16th of March [1621], a certain Indian came boldly amongst them and spoke to them in broken English," Bradford wrote. Samoset "told them also of another Indian whose name was Squanto, a native of this place, who had been in England and could speak better English than himself. . . . Squanto continued with them and was their interpreter and was a special instrument sent of God for their good beyond their expectation."
"Sent of God?" That sounds quaint to modern ears. But consider Squanto's story. Many years before the arrival of the Pilgrims, he and several other Patuxet Indians had been kidnapped along the New England coast and transported to Spain to be sold into slavery. Providentially, Squanto was purchased by a group of Catholic friars who taught him about the Bible and Jesus Christ in preparation to send him back to America to be a missionary among his tribe.
After Squanto completed his Christian education, the friars freed him and enabled him to make his way to England. Learning English while working aboard British ships, he boarded a ship in 1619 to return to America. Upon his arrival Squanto learned of the Patuxets' untimely demise.
With Squanto's help, the Pilgrims were able to survive their first year. He taught them agriculture and fishing. As an interpreter, he also helped the Pilgrims establish a peace with the local Indian tribes that would last for close to 50 years.
In the fall of 1621, the Pilgrims reaped a bountiful harvest. To thank God for their deliverance and the help they had received from the Indians, Bradford held a three-day Thanksgiving feast inviting the Indians to join them in their celebration.
Squanto remained friendly with the Pilgrims until he succumbed to an unknown fever and died in 1622. Amazingly, he bequeathed his possessions to the Pilgrims, as Bradford would document, "as remembrances of his love."
Considering the trials of his own life, it would have been understandable for Squanto to sow bitterness and seek war against the Pilgrims. Instead, his generosity and forgiveness enabled their survival.
Exemplifying St. Paul's challenge to "not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good," Squanto's cooperation would not be forgotten by the Pilgrims. Nor should it today.
Mr. Murray is headmaster of Fourth Presbyterian School in Potomac, Md.
getting the puritans right... thanksgiving 2010
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
Peace, Love and Puritanism
By DAVID D. HALL
Published: November 23, 2010
Arlington, Mass.
THANKSGIVING 1971, the 350th anniversary of the “first” of the harvest celebrations in Plymouth, Mass. Invited to speak to a local historical society about that long-ago event, I described the ritual significance of food to the colonists and the Native Americans who attended. Afterward, someone asked, “Did they serve turkey?”
This was no idle question, for it captured the uneasiness many of us feel about the threads that connect past and present. Are our present-day values and practices aligned with the historical record, or have they been remade by our consumer culture? Is anything authentic in our own celebrations of Thanksgiving? And isn’t the deeper issue what the people who came here were like, not what they ate in 1621?
To return to the first of these harvest feasts is to return to the puzzling figure of the Puritan, the name borne by most of the English people who came to New England in the early 17th century. What did they hope to gain by coming to the New World, and what values did they seek to practice?
The easy answers simplify and distort. Nathaniel Hawthorne, who came along a couple of centuries later, bears some of the blame for the most repeated of the answers: that Puritans were self-righteous and authoritarian, bent on making everyone conform to a rigid set of rules and ostracizing everyone who disagreed with them. The colonists Hawthorne depicted in “The Scarlet Letter” lacked the human sympathies or “heart” he valued so highly. Over the years, Americans have added to Hawthorne’s unfriendly portrait with references to witch-hunting and harsh treatment of Native Americans.
But in Hawthorne’s day, some people realized that he had things wrong. Notably, Alexis de Tocqueville, the French writer who visited the United States in 1831. Tocqueville may not have realized that the colonists had installed participatory governance in the towns they were founding by the dozens. Yet he did credit them for the political system he admired in 19th-century America.
After all, it was the Puritans who had introduced similar practices in colony governments — mandating annual elections, insisting that legislatures could meet even if a governor refused to summon a new session and declaring that no law was valid unless the people or their representatives had consented to it. Well aware of how English kings abused their powers of office, the colonists wanted to keep their new leaders on a short leash.
Tocqueville did not cite the churches that the colonists had organized, but he should have. Like most of their fellow Puritans in England, the colonists turned away from all forms of hierarchy. Out went bishops, out went any centralized governance; in came Congregationalism, which gave lay church members the power to elect and dismiss ministers and decide other major matters of policy. As many observed at the time, the Congregational system did much to transfer authority from the clergy to the people.
Contrary to Hawthorne’s assertions of self-righteousness, the colonists hungered to recreate the ethics of love and mutual obligation spelled out in the New Testament. Church members pledged to respect the common good and to care for one another. Celebrating the liberty they had gained by coming to the New World, they echoed St. Paul’s assertion that true liberty was inseparable from the obligation to serve others.
For this reason, no Puritan would have agreed with the ethic of “self-reliance” advanced by Hawthorne’s contemporary, Ralph Waldo Emerson. Instead, people should agree on what was right, and make it happen. Wanting social peace, the colonists experienced plenty of conflict among themselves. It was upsetting when this happened, but among the liberties they carefully guarded was the right to petition any government and to plead any grievance, a liberty that women as well as men acted on.
The most far-reaching of these Puritan reforms concerned the civil law and the workings of justice. In 1648, Massachusetts became the first place in the Anglo-American world to publish a code of laws — and make it accessible to everyone. Believing that the rule of law protected against arbitrary or unjust authority, the civil courts practiced speedy justice, empowered local juries and encouraged reconciliation and restitution. Overnight, most of the cruelties of the English justice system vanished. Marriage became secularized, divorce a possibility, meetinghouses (churches) town property.
And although it’s tempting to envision the ministers as manipulating a “theocracy,” the opposite is true: they played no role in the distribution of land and were not allowed to hold political office. Nor could local congregations impose civil penalties on anyone who violated secular law. In these rules and values lay one root of the separation of church and state that eventually emerged in our society.
Why does it matter whether we get the Puritans right or not? The simple answer is that it matters because our civil society depends, as theirs did, on linking an ethics of the common good with the uses of power. In our society, liberty has become deeply problematic: more a matter of entitlement than of obligation to the whole. Everywhere, we see power abused, the common good scanted. Getting the Puritans right won’t change what we eat on Thanksgiving, but it might change what we can be thankful for and how we imagine a better America.
•
Oh, and what did they eat? Although the menu in 1621 is nowhere specified, it certainly included venison, Indian corn, fish and “wild turkeys,” one species of the fowl that the Pilgrim Edward Winslow reported were accumulated in abundance just before the celebration.
David D. Hall, a professor at Harvard Divinity School, is the author of the forthcoming history “A Reforming People: Puritanism and the Transformation of Public Life in New England.”
A version of this op-ed appeared in print on November 24, 2010, on page A27 of the New York edition.
Peace, Love and Puritanism
By DAVID D. HALL
Published: November 23, 2010
Arlington, Mass.
THANKSGIVING 1971, the 350th anniversary of the “first” of the harvest celebrations in Plymouth, Mass. Invited to speak to a local historical society about that long-ago event, I described the ritual significance of food to the colonists and the Native Americans who attended. Afterward, someone asked, “Did they serve turkey?”
This was no idle question, for it captured the uneasiness many of us feel about the threads that connect past and present. Are our present-day values and practices aligned with the historical record, or have they been remade by our consumer culture? Is anything authentic in our own celebrations of Thanksgiving? And isn’t the deeper issue what the people who came here were like, not what they ate in 1621?
To return to the first of these harvest feasts is to return to the puzzling figure of the Puritan, the name borne by most of the English people who came to New England in the early 17th century. What did they hope to gain by coming to the New World, and what values did they seek to practice?
The easy answers simplify and distort. Nathaniel Hawthorne, who came along a couple of centuries later, bears some of the blame for the most repeated of the answers: that Puritans were self-righteous and authoritarian, bent on making everyone conform to a rigid set of rules and ostracizing everyone who disagreed with them. The colonists Hawthorne depicted in “The Scarlet Letter” lacked the human sympathies or “heart” he valued so highly. Over the years, Americans have added to Hawthorne’s unfriendly portrait with references to witch-hunting and harsh treatment of Native Americans.
But in Hawthorne’s day, some people realized that he had things wrong. Notably, Alexis de Tocqueville, the French writer who visited the United States in 1831. Tocqueville may not have realized that the colonists had installed participatory governance in the towns they were founding by the dozens. Yet he did credit them for the political system he admired in 19th-century America.
After all, it was the Puritans who had introduced similar practices in colony governments — mandating annual elections, insisting that legislatures could meet even if a governor refused to summon a new session and declaring that no law was valid unless the people or their representatives had consented to it. Well aware of how English kings abused their powers of office, the colonists wanted to keep their new leaders on a short leash.
Tocqueville did not cite the churches that the colonists had organized, but he should have. Like most of their fellow Puritans in England, the colonists turned away from all forms of hierarchy. Out went bishops, out went any centralized governance; in came Congregationalism, which gave lay church members the power to elect and dismiss ministers and decide other major matters of policy. As many observed at the time, the Congregational system did much to transfer authority from the clergy to the people.
Contrary to Hawthorne’s assertions of self-righteousness, the colonists hungered to recreate the ethics of love and mutual obligation spelled out in the New Testament. Church members pledged to respect the common good and to care for one another. Celebrating the liberty they had gained by coming to the New World, they echoed St. Paul’s assertion that true liberty was inseparable from the obligation to serve others.
For this reason, no Puritan would have agreed with the ethic of “self-reliance” advanced by Hawthorne’s contemporary, Ralph Waldo Emerson. Instead, people should agree on what was right, and make it happen. Wanting social peace, the colonists experienced plenty of conflict among themselves. It was upsetting when this happened, but among the liberties they carefully guarded was the right to petition any government and to plead any grievance, a liberty that women as well as men acted on.
The most far-reaching of these Puritan reforms concerned the civil law and the workings of justice. In 1648, Massachusetts became the first place in the Anglo-American world to publish a code of laws — and make it accessible to everyone. Believing that the rule of law protected against arbitrary or unjust authority, the civil courts practiced speedy justice, empowered local juries and encouraged reconciliation and restitution. Overnight, most of the cruelties of the English justice system vanished. Marriage became secularized, divorce a possibility, meetinghouses (churches) town property.
And although it’s tempting to envision the ministers as manipulating a “theocracy,” the opposite is true: they played no role in the distribution of land and were not allowed to hold political office. Nor could local congregations impose civil penalties on anyone who violated secular law. In these rules and values lay one root of the separation of church and state that eventually emerged in our society.
Why does it matter whether we get the Puritans right or not? The simple answer is that it matters because our civil society depends, as theirs did, on linking an ethics of the common good with the uses of power. In our society, liberty has become deeply problematic: more a matter of entitlement than of obligation to the whole. Everywhere, we see power abused, the common good scanted. Getting the Puritans right won’t change what we eat on Thanksgiving, but it might change what we can be thankful for and how we imagine a better America.
•
Oh, and what did they eat? Although the menu in 1621 is nowhere specified, it certainly included venison, Indian corn, fish and “wild turkeys,” one species of the fowl that the Pilgrim Edward Winslow reported were accumulated in abundance just before the celebration.
David D. Hall, a professor at Harvard Divinity School, is the author of the forthcoming history “A Reforming People: Puritanism and the Transformation of Public Life in New England.”
A version of this op-ed appeared in print on November 24, 2010, on page A27 of the New York edition.
Thursday, November 4, 2010
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