Thanksgiving ... for Anglican poetry and piety in the Great Republic
It may seem rather inappropriate to quote Grant as friends in the United States celebrate Thanksgiving. Grant's contention is that a 'thicker' vision of the common good "which transcended the simply contractual" - such as that embodied in an Anglican vision of society - was excluded from the social and cultural order of the United States from the outset.
But was it so? Was the United States merely Lockeanism writ large?
Perhaps surprisingly, the Loyalist cleric Jonathan Boucher suggests otherwise. He dedicated his 1797 collection of sermons, preached amidst the turmoil before and during the Revolutionary War, to none other than George Washington. Boucher approvingly quotes Washington's Farewell Address as president, describing it as a "decided protest against the fundamental maxim of modern revolutionists, that religion is no concern of the State". What else should have been expected from an Anglican gentleman such as Washington?
With slight shades of difference, you have the same religion, manners, habits, and political principles ... let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion.
No less surprisingly, Boucher also praises the constitutional order of the United States. Yes, he does say that it is "defective in many parts", but he goes on to declare that it has "in the unity of its executive, and the division of its legislative powers, been framed after a British model". This is significant for the purposes of this discussion because the British constitutional order both reflected and shaped an Anglican vision of ordered liberty.
Rather than either Anglophone/Anglican wishful thinking, Boucher's description of the United States' constitutional order reflects a wider tradition of thought. W. Bradford Littlejohn suggests that if we pose the question which philosopher and which theologian most influenced the Founders, the answers are not Locke and Calvin. Rather:
there is a strong case to be made that the answer for both questions should be the same, although it is a name probably unknown even to the vast majority of well-educated Americans - Richard Hooker.
He goes on to quote Russell Kirk:
probably Richard Hooker, directly or indirectly, had more to do with the fundamental opinions of the founding Fathers than did Locke.
As Kirk says elsewhere:
Hooker's understanding of the benign character of law, of historical and cultural continuity, of constitutional government, and of prudent toleration would persist even among most leaders of the American Revolution - whether or not they had been reared as Anglicans, for Hooker's arguments penetrated beyond the communion of the Church of England.
Yoram Hazony has also recently restated this understanding of what he terms "the Anglo-American constitutional tradition", contrasting it with "Lockean assumptions", and including Hooker as an exemplar of this tradition.
If, then, Hooker rather than Locke is the philosopher of the Founding, and mindful of the significance Grant perceived in Hooker's thought as an Anglican humanist alternative to the poverty of Lockeanism, there are grounds for questioning Grant's view that the Anglican vision was banished from the United States.
That Cooper has been described as an "apologist for the Episcopal Church" and that Irving did not only write about place but came to embody in Tarrytown the Anglican commitment to parish and place, exemplifies how an Anglican artistic vision could take root in the United States, celebrating a 'thick' and attractive account of civic well-being and flourishing in contrast to the desiccated order proposed by Lockean propositions.
All of this is obviously not to suggest that the Lockean tradition was absent from the United States or that the "contractualism" which Grant so powerfully critiques was not an influential public dogma in the Great Republic. It is, however, to suggest that Grant overstated the exclusion of an Anglican political and cultural vision from the Republic. Another story is to be told, of characteristically Anglican understandings of religion and the public realm, the common good, and artistic celebration of place and continuity present and flourishing in the first century of the American Republic.
At least part of the success of Episcopalianism throughout the 19th century was caught up with the attraction and potency of such a vision of civic flourishing. This reflects the long history of the Church's mission, that for mission to resonate it has to, as Andrew Davison describes it, set forth "an attractive, sane and wise account of being human", which inherently includes the political and the cultural. The culture of repudiation and the anti-Christendom theologies which emerged in TEC in the 1960s led to a rejection of such "an attractive, sane and wise account" of polity and culture, profoundly limiting TEC's ability to meaningfully address, in the words of John Milbank, the "inalienable social character of human beings".
On this Thanksgiving, we can offer thanks that, in this case, George Grant was unusually wrong. "Anglican poetry and piety", challenging cold Lockean propositions, demonstrated how a traditionally Anglican account of the common good could take root in the American Republic.
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