O’Donovan and American Christendom – I

Christendom is often seen as a uniquely European development. But does that really hold up?
As Oliver O’Donovan argued in The Desire of the Nations, the legal and political structure was embedded in scholastic and early modern constitutionalist theory. Its fullest expression lay in the “fruitful constellation of social and political ideas which came together in a decisively influential way in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.” According to O’Donovan’s narrative, the symbolic end of Christendom arrived in the United States Constitution’s formal adoption of ecclesial disestablishment. While the early Protestant civic tradition assumed the magistrate’s explicit submission to the rule of Christ, the emerging American civic tradition dispensed with that formal conception of Christendom, and “effectively declared that political authorities were incapable of evangelical obedience.” While O’Donovan cites various Christian parties who supported this dismantling of Christendom, he argues that by accepting a formal secularity (in the more modern sense of the term) the American civic tradition “gave away more than [it] knew.” This critique of disestablishment highlights an important aspect of the early Protestants’ implicit reliance on the patronage of the civil magistrate. Certainly, in the migration from the Old to the New World, that civic tradition underwent a crucial transition. Yet, O’Donovan’s narrative gives very little attention to the uniquely American project of Christendom in Puritan New England. However, the disintegration of the Puritan Christendom raises critical questions about O’Donovan’s political narrative. In the decades leading up to the adoption of the First Amendment, late colonial Puritans were still trying to defend a civic tradition which was under direct assault by the very secular and social forces which O’Donovan laments. A reconsideration of how Christendom was reshaped by the dynamics of the Puritan experience may lead to fruitful deliberation on what conditions are necessary to maintain an explicitly theological system of civic virtue.
The civic theology of the American Puritans occupies a transitional space between the Old and New Worlds. As descendents of the Protestant civic tradition – largely mediated through the evangelical wing of the English church – the New England Puritans had inherited the concept of a “national covenant.” According to the terms of this covenant, God established conditional relationships with specific peoples in which He promised to extend corporate blessing or judgment depending on the nation’s fidelity to the terms of the covenant. In effect, this particular instantiation of Christendom implied a far more tenuous status for political legitimacy. Since the nation was under the direct lordship of Christ, the entire body politic fell under the purview of divine judgment. In the context of this “federal” theology, all citizens of the Puritan commonwealth fell under the terms of the visible-political covenant established at the founding; corporate disobedience resulted in corporate penalty, whether in war, natural disaster, famine, or other temporal means of chastening.
This synthesis of moral and political terms served to establish a basic social cohesion – or what Mark Noll has termed the “Puritan canopy.” At the same time, like the early Reformed tradition, the idea of a national covenant did not preclude certain distinctions of ecclesial and magisterial roles. For example, Jonathan Edwards wrote of how civil authorities properly “have nothing to do with matters ecclesiastical, with those things which relate to conscience and eternal salvation, or with any matters religious as religious” (emphasis original). But he clarifies that there are some civil matters which do “concern religion.” Civil interest is what lies in the general interest, and may therefore intersect with religious affairs precisely because “many things by reason of religion become their civil advantage.” That is, the civil authorities ought to defend religion because religion itself is of general public interest, even as they justify and fulfill their task in a non-ecclesial context.
This presentation of civil authority stands within the bounds of early Reformed civic theology. Yet, at the same time, it appears to open the possibility for a re-definition of ecclesial establishment. While many European forms of Protestant political power abided by the settlement of cuius regio, eius religio, the American Puritans allow for a more dynamic relationship between the body politic and divine lordship. In other words, while the nation as a whole is represented by a legitimate political authority, there is a sense in which the terms of the national covenant are not exclusively channeled through the head of state. This is not an acephalous view of society so much as it is an emphasis on the political – and therefore moral – agency of the entire nation. Within the broadly theocentric framework of the national covenant there was concerted movement for moral reform – one which could often be expressed in moral rigorism.