The Puritan Origins of American PatriotismIn this absorbing book, George McKenna ranges across the entire panorama of American history to track the development of American patriotism. That patriotism—shaped by Reformation Protestantism and imbued with the American Puritan belief in a providential “errand”—has evolved over 350 years and influenced American political culture in both positive and negative ways, McKenna shows. The germ of the patriotism, an activist theology that stressed collective rather than individual salvation, began in the late 1630s in New England and traveled across the continent, eventually becoming a national phenomenon. Today, American patriotism still reflects its origins in the seventeenth century.
By encouraging cohesion in a nation of diverse peoples and inspiring social reform, American patriotism has sometimes been a force for good. But the book also uncovers a darker side of the nation’s patriotism—a prejudice against the South in the nineteenth century, for example, and a tendency toward nativism and anti-Catholicism. Ironically, a great reversal has occurred, and today the most fervent believers in the Puritan narrative are the former “outsiders”—Catholics and Southerners. McKenna offers an interesting new perspective on patriotism’s role throughout American history, and he concludes with trenchant thoughts on its role in the post-9/11 era.
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From inside the book
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... sermons and jeremiads. It reappears each time the nation needs to gird its loins, concentrate its mind, and throw itself against whatever threatens its life: a foreign foe, a domestic rebellion, a Great Depression, a conspiracy of ...
... sermon entitled A Brief Recognition of New England's Errand Into the Wilderness, the people of New England were well prepared for the typology: the people of New England stood for the children of Israel; their parents' three-month ...
... sermons a mystical spontaneity that was often lacking in preparationist preaching. Anyone who still sees Puritans in the stereotypical image of grim-visaged preachers of a rigid, joyless religion would be surprised by Sibbes. Though he ...
... sermons. The senses and the heart play a direct role in his theology, and at times he seems to be saying that the ... sermon. The sinner is like "a man that hath a bone out of joint and it is now festered"; "it will make him cry many ...
... most sensitive to the criticisms advanced by the opposition party."22 To modern sensibilities, the Sibbeseans' sermons are perhaps the more appealing. Their lyrical, "melting" language, their emphasis on love THE PURITAN NARRATIVE 23.
Contents
16 | |
Revolutionary Puritanism | 44 |
Romantic Puritanism | 79 |
The Holy War | 128 |
Puritans in the Gilded Age | 164 |
Puritanism Debunked and Revived | 207 |