An American experiment: 250 years of trying

The American experiment continues. We keep on trying. Yet turmoil, division, distrust, confusion and misinformation batter us daily. Demagogues leverage social cleavage and manipulate nativistic fears. We feel increasingly undone.

Our tendency is to somehow believe this is a new phenomenon. Historically, though, social tensions and cultural inconsistencies represent some of the most predictable aspects of American life. So now, with an anniversary 250 years, let us recall some of our evolving American experiment.

John Winthrop and A City on a Hill, 1630: Winthrop sailed with a group of 11 ships and close to 1,000 colonists from March 29 to July 8 of that year. Following their landing would come a deadly winter of deep New England discontent. It also would be a new start for these hopeful refugees of British overreach.

Winthrop’s lasting image came from Jesus and the Sermon on the Mount: A “city on a hill that cannot be hid.”

On the swaying ocean-tossed ship Arbela, he dreamed that rag tag group to be a model for the world, a shining beacon for others to emulate. He liberally quoted from Galatians 6, Paul’s impassioned imperative to care for one another, to bear one another’s burdens, to work for the common good.

And citing Micah 6:8, he extolled his Puritan travelers: “Now the only way to avoid this shipwreck, and to provide for our posterity, is to follow the counsel of Micah, to do justly, to love mercy, to walk humbly with our God. For this end, we must be knit together, in this work, as one.”

The balance of justice and compassion: Winthrop’s vision incorporated justice intermingled with compassion (for the deeply spiritual Puritans as well as their largely secular escorts, the soldiers and merchants who accompanied them. His vision did not include the Native Americans they would encounter).

They were not attempting to free themselves from anything. Instead, their efforts were to purify the old ways, to work harder, to be more disciplined and together create a new citizenship that would benefit all the members.

Problems would arise in this fragile balancing act, of course. Baptists, Quakers, Native Americans, Seekers and any number of other non-Puritan types generated serious problems for those in charge of regulating social behaviors.

Anne Hutchinson, 1638: She often is referred to as the first female preacher on American soil. A gifted, devoted teacher of the Bible, she intimidated Winthrop and his fellow male Puritan leaders. Because she taught so well and had become so popular, and because she was a woman teaching men, and because she refused to conform to their demand that she simply be quiet and raise her children, she was forced to join other exiles from Puritan life in Providence, R.I., in 1638.

This brings us to one of the great ironies of our founding. Freedom, in those days, was not an operative concept for these spiritual forbears. Liberty — that sacrosanct element of poem, song and American psyche — hid, withered and unused in the Puritan lexicon. For these early New Englanders, “freedom and liberty for all” made no sense. Discipline, obedience and acquiescence to religious authority were the orders of their day and of that place.

This is not to say other colonists in other places agreed. Freedom was being experimented with on the colonial east coast; but to find the experiment in practice, one had to venture a little farther south.

New Amsterdam, 1624: It was a small trading post on the tip of a long island they would call by the Native American term: Manhattan. Crafty Dutch settlers and the merchants who plied their commercial trade were some of the most successful in the world at the time. They discovered that commerce worked best when traders were motivated by profit, not by petty national or religious bigotries.

The Dutch invented the stock market in 1602. With new economic resources, they cultivated a commercial empire that quickly expanded. And their experiment with capital demonstrated the value of multicultural, multiethnic trade. Within a brief time, New Amsterdam and this new harbor on what would be called the Hudson River bustled with every kind of ethnicity, religion and language.

The experiment of freedom here intoxicated those brave enough to imbibe the newly bubbling brew of free enterprise. While terrifying and even evil to some, the early Dutch success revealed a potent message. Commercial freedom worked financial wonders.

And this lesson unveiled another: If liberty of this kind succeeded in the commercial world, perhaps it could work in the religious one as well. In fact, as much as it hurts my Baptist heart to admit, we Baptists did not invent the gift of religious liberty; the clever, open-minded Dutch got there first.

The British took over New Amsterdam in 1664: Expanding their nascent imperial realms, the ever-resourceful Brits renamed this thriving port New York. They also wisely maintained the Dutch commitment to free trade, openness to new ideas, religious liberty and unconcern with national origins.

Although not easy for the highly stratified British imperialists, liberty of thought, heart and pocketbook began to take hold around the expanding New York area. Therefore, in a highly successful secular experiment, this New York model birthed by the Dutch, nurtured by the British and expanded by wily new American ingenuity, helped to evolve a new and growing Mid-Atlantic psyche. This would profoundly affect our national politics, our social cohesion and our faith.

The early commitment to biblical justice and compassion in New England struggled mightily with New York’s money making. These two visions of national identity battled with each other for most of our country’s earliest years.

Both visions were confronted with and confounded by what has been called America’s original sin. The slavery issue and a specifically Southern call for liberty of human ownership would inject lasting tensions into this American experiment. The repercussions rumbling, shaking and erupting in the landscape of our national becoming continue.

The horrors of the Civil War appeared to some and for a time to solve the complex question of human bondage. Lincoln’s words of solace attempted to repair a ruptured union that never was all that united. Divisions persisted. Anger simmered. And a new voice articulated a new vision.

Frederick Douglass, 1867-68: He preached a series of sermons in these two post-Civil War years. As a person who had escaped slavery, Douglass embodied a potent message. His intellect, experience and growing name recognition communicated across the bounds of race, class and geography.

He crossed the country to challenge and to bring healing to a land still ravaged by horrible wounds. Young men, north and south, were scarred for life. Families were torn asunder by poverty, loss and grief. But even more, his was a sacred, nationally inclusive challenge.

These sermons of 1867-68 cast a broad and lasting vision. He artfully alluded to John Winthrop, Anne Hutchison, the city on a hill from Jesus, the caring for one another in Galatians 6, and the justice, kindness and humility of Micah.

He creatively combined biblical imperative with secular discoveries begun in New Amsterdam and adapted in New York. Intrinsic equality and helpful mutuality should be the order of the land he preached. Justice and compassion should balance the freedom, or the rational liberty we crave.

He said: “In whatever else other nations may have been great and grand, our greatness and grandeur will be found in the faithful application of the principle of perfect civil equality to the people of all races and of all creeds, and to those of no creeds. We are not only bound to this position by our organic structure and by our revolutionary antecedents, but by the genius of our people. Gathered here, from all quarters of the globe by a common aspiration for rational liberty as against caste, divine right governments and privileged classes, it would be unwise to be found fighting against ourselves and among ourselves; it would be madness to set up any one race above another, or one religion above another, or proscribe any on account of race, color or creed.”

The lasting brilliance of his words echoes among our daily debates. How equal are we? How much common ground can we find? We continue to live in the tense balancing act of freedom, justice and compassion Douglass cast before us. And he would not be alone.

Emma Lazarus and The New Colossus, 1883: She grew up in New York City, the daughter of immigrants, a Jewish woman ministering to Jewish refugees. They came to this harbor on the Hudson fleeing the pogroms of Russia, Poland and Eastern Europe.

Arriving with nothing, many sick and malnourished, Emma Lazarus witnessed the tragedy of poverty and the travesty of prejudice. She also saw in these survivors of genocide and ethnic cleansing a compelling resiliency. She wrote a poem with words inspired by these irrepressible men and women. She saw them rising from their wounds to generate new energy in her native city.

Her poetry still beckons from the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired, your poor,  your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”

Notice how the vision of Winthrop, the mutuality of Galatians, the vibrancy of New York, the equitable and colorblind calling of Douglass coalesces in the compassionate, welcoming justice of Lazarus all “yearning to breathe free.”

All this, while another American vision rises, summoning us to better natures.

Katherine Lee Bates and Pike’s Peak, 1893: She taught English at Wellesley College. She was a single woman struggling for recognition and tenure. Like Anne Hutchinson, she was battling the consistent tides of prejudice because of her giftedness and gender. And in 1893 she took a vacation to the Rocky Mountains of Colorado.

There, she found inspiration at the summit of Pike’s Peak. She titled the resulting poem by that name. But later, she and others realized her lyrics captured a far larger vision she offered as a blessing:

O beautiful for spacious skies
For amber waves of grain
For purple mountains majesties,
Above thy fruited plain

America, America
God shed His grace on thee
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea

O beautiful for heroes proved in liberating strife
Who more than self their country loved
And mercy more than life!
America, America, may God thy gold refine
Till all success be nobleness
And every gain divine!

Katherine Bates’ inspired words we now sing as “America the Beautiful” rekindle a hopeful vision. She lived for years as a single woman, a professor committed to the craft of writing, to the call of teaching and to the need of social reform.

She also was devoted to her roommate, a woman she loved with passion and deep loyalty. She never could acknowledge their mutual love publicly. But her letters reveal decades of faithfulness that today would allow us to celebrate her affiliation with the LGBTQ community. Her descriptive lyrics in America articulate the delicate balancing act so painstakingly raised over the centuries.

Although battle lines have been forming from our earliest days, we can again shape a judicious path through our current discontent. With these wise voices of our past, we can still forge more lasting and respectful bonds. Our visions differ. But our calling remains.

Winthrop, the Dutch of New Amsterdam, the dissenters like the Baptists and Quakers, the preachers like Hutchinson and Douglass, the poet visionaries like Lazarus and Bates, they speak with distant but clarion voices. Their common courage and eager passions call out. Their collective tones spark biblical flames that our current flaws have yet to extinguish.

Therefore, may freedom, justice and compassion for all be sensibly balanced, courageously guarded and humbly lived. And like these who have gone before, let us keep on trying.

 

David Jordan serves as senior pastor at First Baptist Church of Decatur, Ga.