The overall thesis is that American politics has been shaped by what Hunter calls a “hybrid Enlightenment” mindset – a distinctive blend of the Enlightenment values of emancipation, opposition to sacralised authority, civic activism and reverence for rational discourse with something more organically and theologically grounded. This other element is a diffuse but deep religious sensibility, much influenced initially by the Calvinism of the first generation of English (and Scots) migrants, but increasingly modified by the less doctrinally precise piety of the 18th century. The alliance between rational ethics, often identified with the virtues of classical republican Rome, and fervent but doctrinally loose devotion survived well into the 20th century as a common national myth, maintaining its hold even through successive evangelical “Awakenings” that intensified popular religious practice. “Evangelically infused republican virtue” became the default setting for public and private life.
But this myth, says Hunter, was holed below the waterline well before the end of the 19th century, its force steadily eroding as a result of the Civil War. The myth had presented the United States both as a model of rational and egalitarian political life and as an earthly sign of the coming heavenly kingdom – a nation established by the sovereign providence of God to offer both challenge and hope to other polities. As other scholars have argued, it depicted the US as a kind of church at least as much as a nation, a community created by divine guidance, consolidated in a “covenantal” understanding (God’s solemn promise to the nation reflected in the mutual commitment of its citizens), legislating and educating on the basis of Christian principles.
But it was impossible to ignore indefinitely what the myth conveniently obscured. This sacred commonwealth, participatory and democratic, a nest of responsible civic communities peaceably negotiating their internal and mutual differences in patient deliberation, was in fact ruthlessly exclusive of a whole series of collective “others” – Catholics and some other Christian dissidents (including Mormons by the later 19th century), indigenous Americans and, above all, the enormous population of enslaved black people. The debates over slavery before and during the Civil War showed that the theological authorities seen as upholding the cultural solidarity that made virtuous public life possible were the same texts appealed to by many to support the institution and practice of slaveholding, and the radical dehumanising of black populations (enslaved and otherwise). The evangelical/republican, hybrid Enlightenment model was coming to look deeply flawed and, worse, deceitful.