James Davison Hunter… reminds us that a nation’s political life rests upon cultural foundations. Each society has its own way of seeing the world, its own basic assumptions about what is right and wrong, its own vision of a better world that gives national life direction and purpose. Culture is the ocean of symbols and stories in which we swim.
American culture, Hunter argues, was formed within the tension between Enlightenment values and religious faith. America was founded at the high point of the Enlightenment, and according to Enlightenment ideas: a belief in individual reason, that social differences should be settled through deliberation and democracy, that a free society depends on neutral institutions like the electoral system or the courts, which will be fair to all involved.
But over the centuries many Americans have also believed that America has a covenantal relationship with God — from Puritan leaders like John Winthrop on down. The Bible gave generations of Americans a bedrock set of moral values, the conviction that we live within an objective moral order, the faith that the arc of history bends toward justice. Religious fervor drove many of our social movements, like abolitionism. Religious fervor explains why America has always had big arguments over things like Prohibition and abortion, which don’t seem to rile other nations as much.
Source: The New York Times
Subjects: America, Culture, History, International, Life & Society, Politics & Public Policy
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