America's Would-Be High Priest

In his successful 1980 presidential campaign, Ronald Reagan wooed voters by conjuring an image from one of the most famous sermons in American history - John Winthrop’s A Modell of Christian Charity.  America, Reagan declared, remained “a shining city on a hill."  

But Winthrop’s sermon, preached in 1629 to Puritan exiles aboard the English ship Arbella, was not all brightness and light.  Winthrop encouraged the pilgrims that they had been called into a special “covenant” by God, but he also cautioned:  "If we should so frustrate and deceive the Lords Expectations ... then All were lost indeed; Ruine upon Ruine, Destruction upon Destruction would come, until one stone were not left upon another."

By the 1660s, many New Englanders, hardened by their experience in what was for them a New World, were haunted by this darker side of their conditional covenant. In a famous 1953 article in the William & Mary Quarterly, Harvard historian Perry Miller resurfaced fire-and-brimstone sermons like Increase Mather’s 1667 A Discourse Concerning the Danger of Apostasy, in which Puritan preachers routinely decried and bemoaned a lack of faithfulness in their younger, American-born generations.

There is no indication that Donald Trump is familiar with this religious history – nor with much history or religion at all, for that matter.  But with his blunt promise to "Make American Great Again," Trump has struck a nerve that runs through the very spine of the American body politic.  The essence of this age-old message is simple: we are not the just and upright people we have long declared ourselves to be.  

Increase Mather in 1688, London. Portrait by John van der Spriett

News headlines and viral tweets seem to confirm this grim conclusion at every turn. Our political parties are corrupt, our rich have forsaken their responsibilities, our communities are being torn apart by suspicion and mistrust.  Our light, which we like to congratulate ourselves for having shone so brightly for so long in the world, now seems to flicker, as if under threat of being extinguished altogether.  Declaring himself a “law and order” President, Trump conjures covenant language, even if unwittingly, and promises to restore the true faith without feeling obligated to say what exactly that might be.

It might seem improbable to consider as essentially spiritual the appeal of an irreligious man like Donald Trump. But Trump the showman, like Reagan the actor before him, has mastered a craft requiring that he understand his audience. And the vast majority of Americans – no matter where they sit on the ideological spectrum – still imbue their presidential politics with peculiarly spiritual dimension. 

Today historians tell us there is no evidence that New Englanders in the late 17th century were any more or less pious than their forebears who first settled the English colonies in North America.  These colonies were not in decline – in fact their best days lay ahead of them.  Neither did God mete out punishment and reward in ways correlating to the moral and spiritual comportment of the English settlers, who proved not only diligent colonists, but also merciless conquerors and ruthless traders and drivers of slaves.

In his 1953 article, Perry Miller argued that the “jeremiads” of second and third generation Puritan divines in New England were not actual chronicles of historical trends. Rather, they represented “a kind of ritual incantation” offering “purgations of the soul.” Paradoxically, Miller concluded, they also offered cheap grace: “The exhortation to a reformation which never materializes serves as a token payment on the obligation, and so liberates the debtors.”

Donald Trump stands squarely in this long American tradition, shamelessly condemning all around him and declaring America to be a sordid mess.  We will soon find out whether American voters in the 21^st century will embrace as their high priest a salesman-shaman who, while pretending to brandish the keys to a corrupt kingdom, immodestly proclaims “only I can fix it.”