It was because of professors like Pocock that I received the lenses through which I learned to observe reality and gained perspective on how religion and politics interact. And it was there that I learned to ask the abiding question that Pocock would always ask: “What is it possible for a generation to think?” What languages and meanings were available to them—in their own time and place—that were not present in vocabularies before or would not be after?

I entered graduate school to study history in the spring of 1970—a wild and contentious time. President Nixon had just expanded the Vietnam War into Cambodia and college campuses erupted. On more than twenty-five campuses, violent clashes pitted students against police; four students were killed at Kent State. Over thirty Reserve Officer Training Corps buildings were burned down, including the one at Washington University, where I was studying. I recalled walking into Holmes Lounge seething with angry students planning what they might do next. One morning, heading to Professor John Pocock’s graduate seminar on the political rhetoric of the English Civil War, I found him standing in the doorway debating a student radical who was demanding the cancellation of all classes. Pocock, almost like a good seventeenth-century commonwealthman, argued for freedom of student choice.

It was because of professors like Pocock that I received the lenses through which I learned to observe reality and gained perspective on how religion and politics interact. And it was there that I learned to ask the abiding question that Pocock would always ask: “What is it possible for a generation to think?” What languages and meanings were available to them—in their own time and place—that were not present in vocabularies before or would not be after?

My study grew more focused, and I found myself fascinated by the clergy in eighteenth-century New England. Both Massachusetts and Connecticut supported a state church—whose heirs we now call Congregationalists or the United Church of Christ. These ministers in local New England towns were well-educated, typically at Harvard or Yale, and wielded great intellectual and political authority. Almost uniformly they came to support the cause of the American Revolution and the founding of the American Republic as divinely ordained. They regularly taught their congregations that the cause of American liberty had become sacred.

The book that came out of this research, The Sacred Cause of Liberty: Republican Thought and the Millennium in Revolutionary New England (Yale, 1977), wrestled with questions about how the clergy came to hold such views. What influences, religious and political, were shaping their convictions over time? My argument was that, as a group, the New England clergy became swayed by a powerful political ideology that dramatically shaped their theology and overall worldview.

Tracing this eighteenth-century story presents certain clear parallels and warnings about our own day. Believers today are powerfully influenced by certain dominant political perspectives. This is so much the case that I fear an actual crisis of faith—the political captivity of the faithful. That danger is evident, I will suggest, both among those who adhere to more orthodox belief, evangelicals and Catholics; and those mainline believers of more progressive inclination.

A Soul Transplant from Church to Nation

I learned at least three things about how the convictions of New England ministers changed over time.

First, their views did not show secularization by contraction of the influence of religious concepts but rather by their expansion, transferring to the political realm some of the supernatural and transcendent values normally owned by the church. Thus New England’s cause became not so much the purity and vitality of its churches, but the sacred cause of “liberty”—both civil and religious—posited first as British citizens against the French, and later as the united colonies against the tyranny of Great Britain.

The second thing I noticed is that political convictions did not follow the traditional fault line that religious and literary scholars had assumed, that is, the divide, created by the Great Awakening, between evangelicals in the tradition of Edwards and Whitefield, and rationalists or so-called Arminians like Charles Chauncy.

My own conclusion was that the scholars had missed the most towering feature before them, the overwhelming political unity of the New England clergy throughout the eighteenth century. Nobody agreed with each other on matters of doctrine, but everyone assumed the presence of a clear political unity around the centrality of liberty. This reminds me of the point made by C.S. Lewis that it is always dangerous to underestimate the similarities of disputants: “Nothing strikes me more when I read the controversies of past ages than the fact that both sides were usually assuming without question a good deal which we should now absolutely deny. They thought that they were as completely opposed as two sides could be, but in fact they were all the time secretly united—united with each other and against earlier and later ages—by a great mass of common assumptions.”

A third conclusion was that these clergy were being swept along by prevailing currents of thought with little self-consciousness as to what was happening to them. They claimed to uphold the traditional moorings of New England religion—pure and lively churches—but gradually shifted to define their primary purpose as sustaining political and religious liberty. Their convictions came to be defined by others, those like John Adams, whose categories were fundamentally political. They were fully in line with what Edmund S. Morgan captured poignantly: “In 1740 America’s leading intellectuals were clergymen and thought about theology; in 1790 they were statesmen and thought about politics.” But the clergy now championed politics with a fierce religious intensity.

Who Is Influencing Whom?

So, what does all this have to do with today? Some thirty years ago, sociologist Robert Wuthnow said that the basic intellectual and cultural divide among Christians in America is not the fault line of their theology but the cultural divide between a conservative and progressive worldview, a chasm deeper and more formative than any theological debate. I agreed with him in the 1980s. And I think today his point could be made with much greater emphasis. A divide has become a chasm. Dominant political and cultural values, left and right, have washed over churches and come to dominate their respective worldviews.

There are certain things, like oxygen, that become most noticeable by their absence. In the 1980s one still had leaders like Cardinal Joseph Bernardin, whose moral views were always difficult to pigeonhole. In 1983, he developed the “Consistent Ethic of Life” ideology, or “seamless garment” approach, which held that a wide spectrum of issues—abortion, capital punishment, militarism, euthanasia, social and economic injustice, and racism all demanded a consistent application of moral principles. He argued that a systematic ethic of life sought to present a coherent linkage among a diverse set of issues. And believers, he suggested, should use such nuanced judgments to test party platforms, public policies, and political candidates. He also drafted a pastoral letter on the morality of nuclear deterrence in the 1990s, and he launched the Catholic Common Ground Initiative, which sought to mediate between diverging parties in the Catholic Church.

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