Hellfire Nation: The Politics of Sin in American History. By James A. Morone. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003. xiv, 575 pp. Cloth, $35.00, ISBN 0-300-09484-1.)

Abstract

Liberalism, according to the standard account of U.S. political history, has fostered free markets, limited government, and the sovereign rights of the individual. The resulting momentum toward a purely liberal society is held in check, however, the story goes, by a strain of communitarianism in the American character— a robust commitment to the collective life, which is given expression in social movements, labor unions, churches and synagogues, and other voluntary associations of civil society. James A. Morone, a political scientist at Brown University, believes that this familiar interpretive framework is inadequate. “Liberal political history,” he argues, “underestimates the roaring moral fervor at the soul of American politics” (p. 7). Not infrequently, the liberal state, hijacked by this or that moral crusade, has faltered: particular minority communities have been targeted, their constitutional safeguards skirted, and their rights, properties, and even lives taken away. The Puritans and their cultural-political heirs are to blame. To demonstrate the point, Morone has written a persuasively detailed and insightful history of the perennial dynamics of “sin” and sociomoral reform that have shaped public policy debates, laws, and the size and purposes of government in the United States since John Winthrop and crew set out in 1629 to carve “‘a shining city on a hill’” (p. 9) out of the New England wilderness. Within a generation, shamefaced Puritan preachers, confronted by their society's failure to honor the covenant, were perfecting the American jeremiad—a rhetorical mode that combines stylized laments over the fall from grace, exhortations to reform, and dire warnings of the divine wrath in store for the morally complacent. (See, for a recent example, the remarks of Reverend Jerry Falwell, who blamed the 9/11 terrorist attacks on “‘the pagans and the abortionists and the feminists and the gays and the lesbians,’” whose gross immorality had compelled God to withdraw His divine protection from the United States, p. 494).