Christianity for the American Left

Over the Memorial Day weekend, my wife and I visited Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's childhood home in Portland, ME. Curiously well-preserved by Henry's obsessive little sister, this is an unusual peek into the life of an American family in the first half of the 19th century. Of course, any historic domicile can give you that feeling of trans-historical voyeurism, but Anne Longfellow Pierce had so devoted herself to maintaining everything precisely as her parents and brothers knew it that this house seemed like a candid snapshot, rather than the usual posed family portrait.

One striking feature of the Longfellow house is the inhabitants' apparent infatuation with George Washington. Not only did they post a large engraved portrait of General Washington over the fireplace in the drawing room, they also displayed "The Apotheosis of Washington" in the corner of the same room. Henry even rented and eventually owned a home in Cambridge, MA, which Washington had once used as his headquarters. And the Longfellow's Washington was not a a mere abstraction: Henry's maternal grandfather, Peleg Wadsworth, who built the Portland house, had served as an officer with Washington in the War for Independence.

The obvious admiration and affection which the Longfellow family cherished for George Washington struck me as odd, since that type of rock star adulation is today usually reserved for, well, rock stars. I wondered what it would have been like to have lived in an America where bourgeois families actively idolized military and political heroes. I decided that I had no concept of what that would look like.

As the Longfellows were Unitarian by conviction, I also started wondering why the American liberal elite do not utilize the rationalistic religiosity of some of America's founders to their advantage. It wasn't too long ago that Arthur Schlesinger opined in the New York Times that it would behoove the politically active segment of American Christianity to rediscover Reinhold Niehbur. And the Democratic Party is trying to re-brand itself in '06 and '08 as "the other religious party." Intellectuals, pundits, and politicians have all been united recently in sermonizing on the virtues of an inclusive, tolerant, universalistic sort of Christianity. So why don't they start peddling a "21st-century John Adams Protestantism"? It's American, it's scientistic [sic], it's rationalistic (America's elites being on the whole still stuck in modernity), and it's eminently marketable. Maybe Arthur Schlesinger and Howard Dean should add Jefferson's letters to their summer reading lists?

Gallantly, I do hereby freely offer the Left full marketing privileges to the Founders' Christianity, with only one stipulation: an official confession that the Right wins the Culture War on the Founding Viewpoint front.