005. The Grammar of Power III: The Errand That Never Ended

Puritanism, Power, and the Grammar of American Politics

In 1630, aboard the Arbella before it reached Massachusetts Bay, John Winthrop delivered a sermon that every American president from Kennedy to Obama has cited as founding inspiration. The routine treatment of "city upon a hill" as aspirational metaphor is precisely the error this essay intends to correct. The sermon was not a metaphor. It was a typology: the assertion that the New England settlement was not like the Israelite exodus but was its continuation, the next chapter in a providential narrative whose terms were binding. Obedience brings blessing; deviation brings catastrophe; catastrophe is not failure but the mechanism of correction, calling the people back to their founding purpose.

Sacvan Bercovitch demonstrated that this structure — the American jeremiad — became the organising grammar of American political discourse across every subsequent generation, with one modification from its biblical source: where the original prophet was genuinely uncertain whether the people would repent, the American version added the assurance that they would, that national decline is always the prelude to a purer recommitment, that America cannot ultimately fail because its mission is providentially guaranteed. Reagan: America has declined through moral permissiveness and state overreach; a return to founding values will restore greatness. Obama: America has betrayed its founding promise through inequality and injustice; civic renewal will restore the more perfect union. The sins diagnosed are mirror opposites. The grammar is identical. To speak politically in America is, almost inescapably, to speak jeremiadic — to locate oneself within a narrative of promise, declension, and inevitable renewal. The scaffolding within which the identifications are made is fixed. The content is interchangeable.

The scaffolding was built by anxiety. Weber's argument in The Protestant Ethic is that Calvinist predestinarianism — salvation determined before birth, unaffected by works — produced a psychological impossibility: life in genuine uncertainty about one's eternal fate. Systematic worldly success became the sign of election, not its cause. The accumulation of wealth was not the pursuit of pleasure but the disciplined reinvestment of evidence of divine favour. This engine drove industrial capitalism. What Weber did not fully examine was what happens when the theological scaffolding collapses while the psychological structure it produced remains. Lasch's answer, in The Culture of Narcissism, is that the dissolution of the covenant community left individuals with the anxiety without the consolation — the compulsive productivity, the equation of failure with moral deficiency, the terror of idleness — and that the consumer economy and therapeutic culture stepped into the space the congregation vacated, offering secular procedures for the resolution of a structurally theological distress.

The structural consequences are visible in American social policy in ways no purely secular analysis can explain. The resistance to universal healthcare, the punitive character of criminal justice, the persistent moralisation of poverty — these are not policy failures produced by dysfunction. They are the necessary expressions of a theological anthropology that remains operative beneath the secular surface: in Calvinist logic, suffering is either the sign of sin or the mechanism of sanctification, and to relieve it artificially is to interfere with the providential economy. The theology has retreated from explicit statement. Its structural effects have not.

The most counterintuitive implication — and the one most fiercely resisted within the American intellectual field, for reasons that will be obvious — is that the contemporary left and the contemporary right are not opposites. They are variants of the same grammar. Voegelin, in The New Science of Politics, identified the characteristic pathology of modern political movements as gnosticism: the claim to possess a special knowledge of the true order of things, whose application would redeem the world from its fallen state, requiring the division of humanity into the illuminated and the unredeemable. The progressive politics of the American left — with its sharp distinction between the morally enlightened and the irredeemably prejudiced, its conviction that correct consciousness is the mechanism of transformation, its contempt for those who fail to achieve the requisite awareness — is structurally Calvinist.

The elect are those who see; the damned are those who refuse to; the sin is epistemic. MAGA is equally, and more obviously, Calvinist: the elect are the real Americans; the damned are the globalists and coastal elites; the sin is cultural; the mechanism of salvation is covenantal restoration. Schmitt observed that the political is constituted by the distinction between friend and enemy. What both versions of American political theology produce is a politics in which the enemy is not merely someone whose interests conflict with yours but someone whose standing is ontological — the unredeemed, with whom compromise is betrayal.

This is why polarisation cannot be resolved by better information or improved procedure. It is not a product of epistemic failure. It is the structural expression of a grammar that divides the world into elect and damned, and that has found in the contemporary media environment an infrastructure perfectly suited to its continuous reproduction. Winthrop's errand has never ended. It has only changed its name — most recently, into the language of democracy, human rights, and the liberal international order, which presents the universalisation of a specific theological-political inheritance as the neutral aspiration of humanity, and reads resistance to that universalisation as evidence of the deficiency it diagnoses. The city upon a hill requires an audience. It has always required one.

Works Cited

Asad, Talal. Formations of the Secular. Stanford UP, 2003. — Bercovitch, Sacvan. The American Jeremiad. U of Wisconsin P, 1978. — Cavanaugh, William T. The Myth of Religious Violence. Oxford UP, 2009. — Lasch, Christopher. The Culture of Narcissism. W.W. Norton, 1979. — Schmitt, Carl. The Concept of the Political. Trans. George Schwab, U of Chicago P, 1996. — Voegelin, Eric. The New Science of Politics. U of Chicago P, 1952. — Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Trans. Talcott Parsons, Routledge, 1992. — Winthrop, John. "A Model of Christian Charity." 1630. The Puritans in America, ed. Heimert and Delbanco, Harvard UP, 1985.