A Sinful People

Abstract

A Sinful People Peter Heinegg These Truths: A History of the United States. By Jill Lepore, New York, NY: Norton, 2018. xx + 942 pp. $39.95. This spirited, angry history of America is not primarily concerned with religion, though, needless to say, Lepore covers the piety of the pilgrims, the country's Great Awakenings, the Social Gospel, the growth of fundamentalism, the Moral Majority, and so forth. And her approach is secular throughout. Nevertheless, this nation was born with the Bible in its veins; the intensity of its faith makes it an outlier in the First World; its currency still proclaims “IN GOD WE TRUST”; and so, it turns out that These Truths supplies a thick body of evidence for the charge that we are indeed a sinful people. The map of America is spangled, and not by accident, by place names from the Hebrew Bible: Bethel, Canaan, Carmel, Gilead, Goshen, Hebron, Jericho, Moab, Nebo, Rehoboth, Salem (over thirty of them), Tekoa, and many others. This wasn't just a pious gesture. Christian immigrants to America famously saw themselves as heirs to a vastly superior New Covenant and a uniquely grand Promised Land. In this sense, it was only logical to presume that in their new home the ideas of the old Deuteronomic principle would come to mind: Obedience to divine law guarantees prosperity; disobedience brings disaster. Generations later, this belief would be diluted into a quasi‐religious patriotic pride: God had blessed America after all, from sea to shining sea; so evidently the nation must, for the most part anyway, have deserved it. Against this widespread and still current assumption, Jill Lepore, the only Harvard professor who also serves as a staff writer for The New Yorker, presents American history more as a series of infidelities to our supreme (though flawed) sacred texts, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. The “truths” enshrined in them, she says, are the basis of the American experiment, namely “political equality, natural rights, and the sovereignty of the people.” Jefferson's description of these truths as “sacred & undeniable” was replaced by Ben Franklin's “self‐evident”; but, given that the Founding Fathers are still considered the Apostles and Saints of our civil religion, “sacred” can stand. But when those same truths are de facto denied or made a mockery of, what you have is desecration. And Lepore concentrates on various modes of such desecration, above all on slavery. She opens her story in October 1787, after the Constitution was signed, but before it was ratified (something like a moment from the days of the Primitive Church), and quotes from an ad in New York's Columbian Almanac: “TO BE SOLD. A LIKELY young NEGRO WENCH, 20 years of age, she is healthy and had the small pox, she has a young male child.” And she ends with Black Lives Matter and the horrors that engendered it, like the white supremacist march in Charlottesville. After four centuries, the BLM movement's title remains a utopian vision, not a reality, as shown by, among other things, the failure of Reconstruction, Jim Crow, the KKK, segregation, the ongoing suppression of the black vote, and countless other forms of systematized bias. The Constitution gave slaves no rights, but let the southern states enlarge their population by counting slaves as 3/5ths of a person. Bibelfest American Christians could always fall back on the acceptance of slavery in both the Old and New Testaments, while ignoring biblical laws aimed at mitigating the harshness of slaves’ lives (Ex. 21.26‐27, etc.). Perhaps most strikingly (though Lepore doesn't mention this), slave owners flouted Dt. 23.15 (“You shall not give up to the master a slave who has escaped from his master to you”), which effectively overrules the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. On a similar note, savage, even genocidal attacks on native Americans could be, and were, justified by the principle of herem, or merciless ethnic cleansing, announced in Dt. 7.1‐7 and illustrated by Joshua's (fictionalized) annihilation of the Canaanites. But again, the Bible has countervailing themes of kindness toward aliens and “sojourners” that might have inspired a different history than the one encapsulated...