In 1851, Herman Melville published his epic novel Moby Dick. It is Homeric and Virgilian, Shakespearean and Miltonic. But most importantly for Melville, it is distinctly American. Shortly before its release, Melville penned a manifesto for American letters, proclaiming the rise of a new literary movement led by himself and Nathaniel Hawthorne. In the essay, titled “Hawthorne and his Mosses,” Melville pleads with his readers to stop damning New World authors with the faint praise of describing them as like some Old World model:
Call him an American, and have done, for you can not say a nobler thing of him.— … [N]o American writer should write like an Englishman, or a Frenchman; let him write like a man, for then he will be sure to write like an American.
While American letters should acknowledge the “excellence” of ancient and early modern European models, Melville argues, we must now “duly recognize the meritorious writers that are our own,—those writers, who breathe that unshackled, democratic spirit of Christianity in all things, which now takes the practical lead in the world, though at the same time led by ourselves—us Americans.”11. Melville, “Hawthorne & His Mosses” (1850), https://web.english.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-library/Melville_Hawthorne.pdf, pg. 1164.
“The unshackled, democratic spirit of Christianity in all things.” Melville looked ahead to the turn of the 20th century and saw the rise of a superpower, fueled by a vision of Christian liberty which had its roots in the Reformation. “Bear me out in it,” Melville prayed a year later in Moby Dick, “thou great democratic God! who didst not refuse to the swart convict, Bunyan, the pale, poetic pearl.”22. Melville, Moby Dick, (1851), Chapter 26. Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress was the best-selling book in the English language after the King James Version of the Bible for centuries. John Bunyan was a “convict” because he embraced the “priesthood of all believers” and so was imprisoned by the Stuart regime for preaching the gospel without a license. But his Pilgrim’s Progress became a model for those who longed to flee “Vanity Fair” and establish a covenanted Reformed community in a new land. It would be a land where “all men are created equal,” “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,” to quote Thomas Jefferson; and where, to continue quoting Melville, they enjoyed “that democratic dignity which, on all hands, radiates without end from God Himself! The great God absolute! The centre and circumference of all democracy! His omnipresence, our divine equality!” So Melville called for American writers to celebrate this vision. In light of our mission to resource today’s Christians with the riches of classical Protestant thought, this issue of Ad Fontes seeks to do just that on the 250th anniversary of America’s founding.
Glenn Moots kicks off our issue with an account of Anglo-American republican constitutionalism and its roots in resisting the kind of theo-political tyranny which Reformation-era Protestants almost universally labeled “popery.” But a coherent movement cannot just be against something (in this case, Roman Catholicism); it also has to have a positive vision of the good. This is where the splintering of the English Reformation into the various camps of the English Civil War (Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Baptists like Bunyan, and Anglicans like the men who imprisoned Bunyan) complicates Melville’s vision, both in his novel and in his nation. The pieces by Ben Crenshaw, Jeremiah Regan, James Baird, and Matthew Young, however, provide historical examples of those four strands within the Reformational rope (to borrow a metaphor from Melville’s devout Puritan preacher Father Mapple) all contributing to the founding of a new nation committed to preserving the life, liberty, and happiness of its citizens.33. I take the devout Puritan preacher Father Mapple’s sermon early in the novel to be the norming norm for the various other versions of Christianity (some good, some bad, all partial) which Moby Dick presents to the reader.
That founding was 250 years ago. Tyler Bauer asks whether this democratic, Protestant, Christian spirit still shows any vital signs today. On the one hand, he confesses that “a substantial portion of Americans today are either indifferent to the tradition or actively hostile to it.” Bauer here echoes Aaron Renn’s influential argument in his “The Three Worlds of Evangelicalism” that we have passed from a culture that viewed evangelical religion positively, through one that was indifferent to the Protestant churches, and into an era which is actively hostile to the gospel.44. https://firstthings.com/the-three-worlds-of-evangelicalism/ But Bauer sees signs of hope as he contemplates the richness that our tradition can provide to a hungry world.
One such glimmer of a return to a “positive world” for the evangelical churches was the surreal spectacle of the nationally televised memorial for Charlie Kirk last summer. One-hundred-million people watched as a succession of the influential and powerful in academia, media, and politics confessed that our endeavours and our deaths find significance in the resurrection of Christ. Even this was complicated, of course. Many of those speakers are active members of a local congregation that is either Reformed Protestant (such as Pete Hegseth) or the Protestantized form of American Catholicism that operates as if “the Bishop of Rome hath no jurisdiction in this realm” (such as J.D. Vance).55. Article 37 of the Church of England’s 39 Articles of Religion. Others, however, have been public about their unbelief. Does their adoption of evangelical language speak to a revival of the religious spirit of early America, where ‘Enlightened’ skeptics still shared much of the worldview of their Christian neighbors? Or is it a Machiavellian instrumentalizing of theology that will eventually turn such rhetoric into an empty sign?
On the one hand, the Apostle Paul says in similar circumstances that “every way, whether in pretence, or in truth, Christ is preached; and I therein do rejoice, yea, and will rejoice.”66. Philippians 1:18 (KJV). On the other hand, C.S. Lewis’ demon Screwtape charts the path to making such preaching innocuous:
About the general connection between Christianity and politics, our position is more delicate. Certainly we do not want men to allow their Christianity to flow over into their political life, for the establishment of anything like a really just society would be a major disaster. On the other hand we do want, and want very much, to make men treat Christianity as a means; preferably, of course, as a means to their own advancement, but, failing that, as a means to anything—even to social justice. The thing to do is to get a man at first to value social justice as a thing which the Enemy demands, and then work him on to the stage at which he values Christianity because it may produce social justice. For the Enemy will not be used as a convenience. Men or nations who think they can revive the Faith in order to make a good society might just as well think they can use the stairs of Heaven as a short cut to the nearest chemist’s shop. Fortunately it is quite easy to coax humans round this little corner. Only today I have found a passage in a Christian writer where he recommends his own version of Christianity on the ground that “only such a faith can outlast the death of old cultures and the birth of new civilisations”. You see the little rift? “Believe this, not because it is true, but for some other reason.” That’s the game…77. C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (HarperCollins, 1996), 126-127.
To combat the devil, we must always remember that disorder and chaos begin in the human heart. There can be no life, liberty, or happiness while we are dead in our trespasses, enslaved to our passions, and addicted to our misery. Joshua Paladino reminds us that this Christian creed must remain fundamental to our worldview; indeed, it is that which inspires affection and charity for our compatriots. Our Christianity will have nothing to say to the world until it has pierced our own hearts. In fact, it is precisely because of his power to reveal our hearts—“the great Art of Telling the Truth”—that Melville praises his friend Nathaniel Hawthorne as the first master of American letters. And it is certain, Melville continues, that Hawthorne’s power
derives its force from its appeals to that Calvinistic sense of Innate Depravity and Original Sin, from whose visitations, in some shape or other, no deeply thinking mind is always and wholly free. For, in certain moods, no man can weigh this world, without throwing in something, somehow like Original Sin, to strike the uneven balance.
This is the theme of the final section of our issue, a collection of original poetry introduced by Joshua Patch, which meditates deeply on the eternal truth, transcending time and place, that we are all equal in being great sinners redeemed by a great savior.
In the spirit of making this issue even more democratically accessible, I am pleased to announce the launch of Ad Fontes’ free and open-access audio edition, produced through a licensing agreement with Canon+, which you can access here.88. https://canonplus.com/adfontes
