The Roots of American Individualism by Alex Zakaras;

Author:Alex Zakaras; [Zakaras;, Alex]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780691226316
Publisher: Princeton UP
Published: 2022-06-20T00:00:00+00:00

The Whig Millennium

Like Democrats, Whigs overwhelmingly rejected Malthusian pessimism.137 The corrupt Old World might well be beset by insoluble economic problems, but in America, the arc of history bent upward. For many Whigs, this confidence was deeply inflected with religious faith: although they believed that progress would result from “consciously arranged” economic order, they also believed that it would be guided by the hand of God. They saw God’s agency in the benign religious and political restraints that shaped American society, preserved it from anarchy and conflict, and guided it toward a beatific end state. Indeed, the Whig mythology of the self-made man cannot be understood without reference to the evangelical conviction that both individuals and human societies were capable of almost limitless perfection, and that America was the historical site of this transformation and uplift.

The foundation of this optimistic faith lay in shifting theological attitudes. The Second Great Awakening marked the culmination of a half century of escalating assaults on the Calvinist idea of predestination, which had taught that individuals had no control over their own salvation. In its place, evangelicals of many different denominations had begun teaching the Arminian doctrine that Christ had died not just to redeem the elect but for all sinners, and that salvation therefore lay within everyone’s reach. With this newfound power came tremendous personal responsibility, which was dramatized over and over in evangelical sermons. The immensely influential Presbyterian evangelist Charles Grandison Finney explained that sin itself was a voluntary condition, a choice to turn away from God. Its renunciation required a change or renovation of the heart, which “consists in changing the controlling preference of the mind in regard to the end of pursuit,” from self-gratification to God’s own glory. This change, he taught, lay entirely within the individual’s power. Those who refused did so out of their own “obstinacy,” not out of any inexorable or predestined proclivity.138

To Finney and many other evangelists, this voluntaristic doctrine suggested that human beings were perfectible: through personal effort, they could cleanse themselves of sin in this world and live strictly holy lives. Orthodox Calvinism had taught that human nature was indelibly tainted with sin and that people could hope, at best, only to mitigate its influence through strict discipline. To Finney, such pessimism was simply an excuse for half-hearted moral and spiritual effort.139 In sermons delivered throughout the country, he and other evangelical preachers offered up spiritual rebirth in Christ as an opportunity for personal uplift and wholesale renewal. And such renewal suggested the realistic possibility of ambitious social transformation. “In philosophical terms,” writes historian William McLoughlin, “it meant that if immediate conversion is available by an act of the human will, then, through God’s miraculous grace, all things are possible: human nature is open to total renovation in the twinkling of an eye and so, then, is the nature of society.”140

Touched by this optimistic faith, many exuberant Whigs wrote progress into the very nature of man. They constantly cited the human impulse to “improve his

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