Thoughts On the Development of the Modern American Religious Self

At the risk of glaring selectivity, I must nevertheless point out three predominant features of the American mythos: 1) Liberty, by which we mean self-determination, freedom from the external demands of others; 2) Prosperity, by which we mean the possession of expendable wealth; and 3) Security, by which we mean the extermination of all threats to the preceding two points. Translated into religious sensibilities, this first idea of liberty becomes a pristine, immediately accessible potential for real or genuine existence which lays dormant in the soul, awaiting only proper motivation for actualization.

The prevalence of this anthropology during the past century in America could be elucidated from any number of sources, but here I will only reference the year 2000 survey by George Gallup on the spiritual habits of Americans, reported in the book The Next American Spirituality. His findings are intriguing: when asked to define the term “spirituality,” almost a third explained their understanding of it with no reference to God or even a higher authority; when confronted with the admittedly constraining either/or choice of defining spirituality as corporate or individual, seventy-two percent said they understood it in a personal sense. Gallup’s commentary on the survey is helpful:

Hunger for the divine sometimes places Americans, bred on the glories of self-determination and having it my way, in a quandary. It certainly does not always help people transcend the confines of self. It can lead to a mindset that appears individualistic and self-improved to the extreme. It fosters spiritualities that exalt the self and downplay God, that elevate our needs and whims and neglect divine mystery and sovereignty (48-49).

How did it come about that not an isolated few, but the majority of Americans could understand their spiritual lives as wholly contained within themselves? What, if any, theological presuppositions led to this?

Certainly it has not been brought to us through Puritan/Calvinist tradition by likes of Roger Williams, Jonathan Edwards, and George Whitfield. Yet our nation’s religious history has, until recent times, been unanimously told as the blooming of this one bloom of Edwardian Calvinism. The Puritan anthropology of utter depravity left us with no recourse for tracing any possible theological origins of an undeniably prevalent mood of great optimism concerning human potential. Among the many works addressing this one-sided approach is the excellent essay of Nathan Hatch, “The Puzzle of American Methodism.” Indeed, he argues, Edwards and company were tremendously influential for the intellectual development of the Americanism. Yet popular religion apart from the “civilized” population centers of the northeast was virtually untouched by their theology. The glaring absence in tracing American religious history, says Hatch, is Methodism.

Led by Francis Asbury, the Methodists were armed with a dogged determination to convert the masses of the west. Says Hatch,

Methodism in America transcended class barriers and empowered common people to make religion their own. Unlike Calvinism, which emphasized human corruption, divine initiative, and the authority of educated clergymen and inherited ecclesiastical structures, the Methodists proclaimed the breathtaking message of individual freedom, autonomy, responsibility, and achievement. (179).

This message found a strong correlate in the burgeoning post-revolution American ethos: for those who embrace upstart-ism in all other aspects of life and culture, why would they not embrace it in religion? Here they found a religion that spoke to their sensibilities of self-sufficiency and the utter uselessness of established formalities and structures of religion.
Now, America is by no means alone in its individualism. Europe has a strong witness of an analogous strain spirituality in the pietist tradition. Thus, European theologians indeed do well to turn to Schleirmacher as the chief modern progenitor of such ills. In America, however, reference to Schleirmacher ought to be made only by way of analogy when dealing with the diagnosis and treatment with the prevalence of individualism in the pews. A more accurate redress will be served by turning to a source that Americans have actually read, or at least heard of, on a broader level: our most prominent and distinctively American philosophers – Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman. We are only kidding ourselves if we assume that Williams, Edwards, and Whitfield had anywhere near the influence transcendentalist movement of the first half of the eighteenth century.

The import for our discussion comes in the anthropology of the transcendentalists. For them, we are able to discern the pristine image of God both in nature and in the human self. This allows for a sort of analogia entis, by which we are able to engage with God through nature. Here salvation is self-actualization—full awareness of self, world, and God, and openness to all the potentialities contained therein. Emerson’s remarks in his seminal essay, “Self-Reliance” stand as a succinct presentation of transcendentalist thought:

To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men—that is genius. Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense; for the inmost in due time becomes the outmost, and our first thought is rendered back to us by the trumpets of the Last Judgment…. A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. (p.132)

For them, perceptual distortion comes only when we neglect the inner voice for that of others. Whether these voices come to us through the opinions of popular culture or the canonized works of art and literature, their success in revealing divine truth is measured not by whether they impart a new and accurate thought, but whether they reflect an or elucidate an extant thought of our own.

This is the hotbed of individualism in which Ralph Waldo Emerson ripened as a thinker. No philosopher has been so popular and influential on the whole of American society as he. The shining example of this individualist sentiment, it is hard to say whether he is its progenitor or distillation. In either case, his way of thinking is representative, and so engagement with it is important.

Emerson was a Congregationalist minister until, obedient to his convictions, he resigned his pastorate, being unable in good conscience to minister the sacrament, which he saw as hocus-pocus. This rejection is paradigmatic for the entire Transcendentalist movement: spiritual things are transcendent realities which are immediately accessible for the individual without mediation of any external form or tradition. It is in this complete rejection of any immanent process outside of the self in the gifting of faith that the transcendentalists seem to share so much kinship with modern evangelicalism.