Tocqueville and Robinson in Defense of the Puritans’ Sunday

There is little less fashionable today than praising the Puritans, especially for their egalitarian political idealism, their promotion of genuine humane and liberating learning, and their capacity for enjoyment and human happiness. Praising the Puritans is especially difficult for us because even our Protestants have abandoned them. When a European calls us Puritanical we do not say, “yes, thanks a lot, you’re right.” We either deny it, saying we have moved way beyond those days. Or we admit it, saying that, “yes, we should be less capitalistic, less repressed, and more free thinking, just like you.” As far as I can tell, the most able and astute of the unfashionably pro-Puritan writers about America are Alexis de Tocqueville and Marilynne Robinson. The French author Tocqueville, of course, wrote the best book on America and the best book on democracy—Democracy in America, published in two volumes (1835, 1940). And Robinson— author of the celebrated novels Housekeeping, Gilead (winner of the Pulitzer Prize), and the just published Home—might be the best American writer around right now. It is less known that Robinson is quite the theologian, historian, and essayist, and she has devoted herself to recovering—pretty much on her own and against every grain—our authentic Puritan/Calvinist tradition. My modest goal here is to use these two authors to restore the Puritanical case for Sunday today, the case for once again exempting one day from business and for spiritual reflection and reading, for celebrating who we really are. Tocqueville’s Democracy in America almost begins by showing us how much our democracy owes the Puritans. He tells us that the Puritans established colonies with lords— without, in fact, economic classes. And these founders differed from, say, the founders of Virginia by not at all being solitary adventurers. They were not out to get rich or even improve their economic condition; they were in no way driven by material necessity. Their lives were structured by morality; they came to America as family men, bringing their wives and children. They were also extremely educated men—on the cutting edge, in many ways, of European enlightenment. They were, Tocqueville observes, animated by “a purely intellectual need.” Their goal was “to make an idea triumph” in this world. That idea was fundamentally Biblical. And it had radically egalitarian and idealistic political consequences. Tocqueville even says that the Puritans were completely free from the political prejudices that governed their and almost every other age. A democracy more perfect than the wildest dreams of the ancients emerged “fully grown and fully armed from the midst of the old feudal society.” Puritan practice was even better than the Platonic city in speech, because the “air of antiquity” was improved by “a sort of biblical perfume.” The result was that “bold theories of the human mind” actually directed real political communities. For the Puritans, the theory of equality was the source of real political duties that correspond to the truth about the way we are. That meant, Tocqueville explains, that the Puritans had “a more elevated and complete view” of social duties than did their time’s “European legislators.” They took care of the poor, maintained the highways, kept careful records and registries, secured law and order, and, most of all, provided education for everyone—through high school when possible. The justification of universal education was that everyone should be able to read the Bible to know the truth about God and his duties to Him for himself. Nobody Soc (2009) 46:445–451 DOI 10.1007/s12115-009-9239-0