William F. May, Testing the National Covenant

Abstract

In 1985, Robert Bellah and his co-authors published the first edition of Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life. It was an instant classic—a profound cultural analysis of American individualism and a sophisticated moral Jeremiad against its destructive consequences. The problem, as they identified it, was not the presence of individualism in American culture, but its growing tyranny over the moral imagination of the American people. Their remedy was to strengthen other significant, yet neglected, strands of the American cultural conversation, including, especially, its biblical and republican heritage. American social life and democratic public discourse required, they proposed, a richer, more communally oriented set of moral resources than individualism alone could provide. Over a quarter century later, William F. May’s Testing the National Covenant: Fears and Appetites in American Politics makes a similar argument in a different historical context. In fact, May’s volume can be seen, in style and substance, as an heir to that classic work. Testing the National Covenant is a profound theological and moral Jeremiad against possessive individualism and social contract liberalism. Like Habits of the Heart, it does not so much propose to eliminate individualism from the American cultural consciousness—as though that were even possible—but to point out its moral insufficiency and restrain its hegemonic pretensions. And also like Habits of the Heart, May’s volume enriches the moral