“I want to introduce you to the American jeremiad. That’s the term scholars have given to what one has called “a mainstream and deeply American way of thinking about the nation’s past, present, and future.”^[1] The term comes from the prophet Jeremiah, who catalogued Israel’s fall from fidelity and warned of the horrible judgments to come.”

You don’t need me to tell you that things are not what they once were for Christians in America. Much has changed in the last two decades, let alone the last two centuries. And some of this change hasn’t been good—not for America, not for American Christianity.

But there is a way of responding to declension—real or imagined—that only compounds the problem. We must guard against any response to decline that appeals to a past that never existed or to a future that God hasn’t promised us.

In this little article, I merely wish to sketch a cautionary tale. Narratives of decline, especially in our American context, build on an approach to history with a long history of its own.

INTRODUCING THE AMERICAN JEREMIAD

I want to introduce you to the American jeremiad. That’s the term scholars have given to what one has called “a mainstream and deeply American way of thinking about the nation’s past, present, and future.”^[1] The term comes from the prophet Jeremiah, who catalogued Israel’s fall from fidelity and warned of the horrible judgments to come.

The jeremiad is a rhetorical tradition—a literary genre, even—that has appeared in every phase of America’s history—from King Philips War to Hurricane Katrina.^[2] But the place to begin is Puritan New England. That’s where the jeremiad got its American stamp, where it was most commonly applied and most fully developed.

Most Puritan jeremiads were preached not during regular corporate worship but on special occasions appointed by the government. There were sermons delivered on election days. There were artillery sermons on days set for review of the colonial militia. There were thanksgiving sermons on days celebrating great blessings. But the jeremiad was most at home on days of colony-wide fasting in response to some crisis.

We think of Puritan New England as a society where Christian ethics and civil government were thoroughly intertwined. It’s tough to imagine a society where religion had greater influence. But to her Puritan pastors, just a generation or two removed from the founding, New England was a world of decay and fearful decline.

Theirs was also a world of wonders, a world in which events we consider mundane had discernible providential significance. There were of course the large-scale stressors of war and violence, especially their conflicts with Native Americans. But preachers also traced the hand of God in shifting weather patterns, in the failure of local crops, in the appearance of a comet in the sky, or in the occasional “monstrous birth”—their term for a child born with obvious deformity.^[3]

Behind concern for this or that circumstantial event lay a deeper angst: what if no one outside our colony cares any longer for what we’re trying to accomplish? John Winthrop at their founding had described their society as a city on a hill on which the eyes of the world would be riveted. By the second generation they had good reason to wonder whether anyone was still looking.^[4]

It was in their jeremiads that Puritan pastors interpreted such calamities and tied them to the moral problems in their society. Scholars speak of the jeremiad as a rhetorical tradition—as an identifiable genre—because these sermons followed a really predictable formula.

In his Prodigal Nation, which begins in New England and traces the jeremiad’s role in America into the 21st century, Andrew Murphy identifies three basic steps in these sermons.^[5]

First, jeremiads lamented the harsh realities of the present. They took up the crisis du jour and tried to explain it in light of the sins of the people. They pointed to Sabbath-breaking and apostasy, to sensuality and profanity, to worldliness and luxury and a host of other problems.

These moral failures appeared all the more clearly in light of the second theme in the jeremiad: a contrast to the ideal purity of the founding generation. “Rather than an abstract critique,” Murphy writes, “jeremiads claimed that piety and godly order had once existed and had subsequently been lost.”^[6] New England had been smaller in those early years. Its population consisted mostly of those who chose for themselves to take part in this “errand into the wilderness.” They were zealous and bought-in. Then the next generations brought a population boom, a surge in material prosperity, and, so their preachers believed, a society more fixated on the profits of the market than the profits of godliness.

But the jeremiads did not end in despair. The third element was a call for repentance and renewal, backed by a promise that God would not forsake them if they returned to him.

Here’s how one pastor, Samuel Torrey, put it in 1683: “May we not with fear and trembling apprehend our selves: even this whole People, New England, as it were standing before God, upon our great Trial for Life and Death [?] . . . If you do thus chuse [sic] Life, all will be well with New-England [sic], but if you should refuse, you will likely, not only destroy your selves; but all.”^[7]

What Murphy and others have noticed about the American jeremiad, especially in its Puritan form, is that there’s a tension at its heart—a tension between despair and hope. Despair over how far society has fallen. Hope for how God would honor renewed obedience. And underneath the despair and the hope is the confidence that God has established a cause and effect relationship between Christian faithfulness and social flourishing.

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