We Americans are the peculiar, chosen people—the Israel of our time; we bear the ark of the liberties of the world.

In the eighteenth century the heirs of the Puritans played a key role in the American Revolution. “Puritanism,” notes the religious historian Mark Noll, “is the only colonial religious system that modern historians take seriously as a major religious influence on the Revolution.” In the generations following the Revolution, Congregationalists and Presbyterians from New England carried their campaigns of evangelical Calvinism into the upper Midwest and other areas of the Puritan diaspora, and by the 1830s their voluntary organizations of evangelization and moral reform had combined budgets larger than that of the federal government. They brought with them their distinctive brand of “moralistically inflected republicanism.” “Wherever you go, you will be a polis”: the watchword of the ancient Greek city-states as they created new colonies could also apply to the Puritan polis, whose people brought with them their own matter-of-fact assumptions of moral rectitude and cultural superiority. A writer in the proslavery United States Democratic Review in 1855 paid rueful tribute to the Puritans in language that almost mirrored the motto of the ancient Greeks. Referring to what he called “the New-England hive” established by the Puritans, he wrote, “No class of people are so prone to emigration. … But wherever they go they are sure to combine together, and act in concert for the furtherance of their own peculiar opinions and interests.” Harriet Beecher Stowe said the same thing but more admiringly: “New England has been to these United States what the Dorian hive was to Greece. It has always been a capital country to emigrate from, and North, South, East, and West have been populated largely from New England, so that the seed-bed of New England was the seed-bed of this great American Republic, and of all that is likely to come of it.” Despite sometimes fierce resistance from Catholics and midwesterners, by the outset of the Civil War “the Puritanization of the United States” had become a fact of life throughout most of the North, and the war itself marked the beginning of its century-long march into the heart of the South.

[They placed] emphasis on human passivity, a passivity that hardly seems compatible with an ethical community. If humans are utterly passive in receiving God's grace, then outward behavior ("works") has nothing to do with salvation. But what is ethics if not outward behavior? And how can a political community function without ethics? There is a disturbing note of fatalism here. If I have been selected from eternity for heaven, and if my conversion comes to me via God's "free grace" without the least effort on my part, why should I worry excessively about how I act toward my neighbor? No doubt I should be as pleasant as possible, but there does not seem to be any categorical imperative to behave well if my behavior is not causally linked to the fate of my soul. Emery Battis, the author of the standard work on the antinomian controversy, notes the popularity of spiritism with the better-off elements of Boston society. He suggests that one reason for it was that many of the wealthy Boston merchants engaged in sharp practices—buying cheap and selling dear—at variance with well-understood community norms. Free grace seemed to give them a free ride.

Before the antinomian controversy broke out, the differences between the spiritists and the preparationists were expressed in the etiquette of Christian fellowship. They could even be papered over by saying that, yes, we are passive in receiving God’s grace, but we can have our hands extended to receive it. It was the spiritists in the Boston congregation who forced the crisis by accusing John Wilson, the minister of the Boston church, of preaching a graceless, pharisaical legalism, a doctrine of works rather than grace. Wilson barely escaped a censure vote, and Hutchinson and her followers were so contemptuous of him that they would leave the meeting whenever he rose to give a sermon. Not content to express these sentiments within their own church, Hutchinson’s followers journeyed to other towns and heckled the ministers during their sermons. Winthrop later termed the antinomian challenge “the sorest trial that ever befell us since we left our Native soil.” The virus of subjectivism was always lurking in Protestant doctrine, but Hutchinson’s followers came close to making it an epidemic by presuming to judge the state of the souls of those duly elected to the ministry of their communities. It is hard to dispute the contention of Thomas Shepard (who had once flirted with spiritism but later became the ministry’s chief enemy of the antinomians) that such an approach would “make every man a king” and result in “the destruction of civil government.” Edmund S. Morgan, a respected intellectual historian not given to hyperbole, calls antinomianism “seventeenth-century nihilism.”

In those days the “religious” and the “secular” were not sealed into watertight compartments. Public officials freely discoursed on religion—Jefferson even re-wrote the New Testament to suit his sense of what Jesus must have been like—and clergymen freely wove the events of politics and history into their sermons. The clergy at that time played a different role than they do today. Today, except in African American congregations, respectable churchgoers often get uncomfortable when sermons venture outside the religious box. It was not so in those days. The exhortations of the clergy were not always followed, but they were respected. In the eighteenth century there was still something left of what the seventeenth-century minister Samuel Stone said about the ministry in his own time, that it was “a speaking Aristocracy in the face of a Silent Democracy.” There was, to be sure, a two-way process going on; sometimes the clergy themselves were dragged along by lay sentiments. But in this dialogic relationship, the views of the clergy carried weight and authority. In some ways they were comparable to modern-day "scientific experts," whose pronouncements are cited, often selectively, by partisans on all sides of an issue.

In the internal struggles of nations there are winners and losers, but in most cases the losers do not simply melt away. They stay around in their own survival communities, keeping alive the memories of what they were and what they believed. In America the losers in the seventeenth-century antinomian struggles went a step further: they stayed around in the memories and consciences of those who defeated them. As we saw in the last chapter, the spiritists—Anne Hutchinson and others who took her approach to Puritan orthodoxy—were quickly defeated by the preparationists, whose members included Governor Winthrop. Yet the victors were never entirely at ease with their victory, for the questions raised by the spiritists could never be entirely quieted. How do we know that our religious and spiritual leaders are really godly men? How do we know we are saved? How do we know we are saved? Puritanism is often, and rightly, associated with great external changes in the world, but it is also a deeply subjective religion which emphasizes, to an almost unbearable degree, the need for self-examination. We are not, after all, saved by external works, but solely by faith. And how do we come by faith? Not by works, certainly. Then how? And how do we know when we have it?

The preparationists, victors in the contest, were activists, practical men who wanted to be up and doing, but as orthodox Puritans they could hardly ignore these vexing questions. Their solution was to shift the emphasis from the individual to the faithful community. We call ourselves saints because we have testified to our conversion experiences, but we may well be pharisees and hypocrites. Yet our community is holy, because we have bound ourselves together in covenant with God. Therefore, we may at least hope for individual salvation as long as we as a community remain faithful to the covenant.

Laissez-faire may encourage individual energy in pursuit of happiness, but collectively it is a doctrine of-passivity. It is, indeed, the economic counterpart of antinomianism: let every individual take care of himself and God will take care of us all.