5

CHRISTIANITY AND NATIONHOOD

In his epic poem Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion (1804–22), William Blake envisioned a complex and many-layered allegory of primeval humanity and the struggles that animate human nature, all taking place on the shores of the Thames. The story concerns the fate of Albion, the ancient name for England and the name of primordial man whose sleep produces deep rifts in his being that play out against one another, whose reintegration will reverse the fall of humanity. A primary figure in the cast of titanic forces is Los, the representation of inspiration and creativity, and the figure of the artist’s imagination (plate 7). Los longs to reunite reason and imagination in order to awaken the slumbering and divided Albion and to destroy the false truth of religious orthodoxy, which has lost sight of the real nature of the human situation.

The image of Los at his forge conveys the centrality of the imagination as a faculty of revelation for Blake and signals the modern discovery of it as a positive rather than deceptive operation of the mind. Crafting the purpose and scope of the imagination was one of the principal tasks of the forge of vision during the modern era, since seeing owes as much to internal imaging as it does to external perception. Imagination came to be regarded in the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as a very useful mental faculty. As such it became part of Christian thought and practice, as the next two chapters will explore. Already in Blake’s poem and in this image from it we can sense something profound at work. The poem is many things, but one of them is an elaborate emblem of England’s travail as a symbol for the human condition. Albion was both the ideal of humanity and everything that was wrong with it. The image of Los reproduced here makes visible the intrepid struggle of the artist to pursue his imaginative ideal in the face of oppressive religious authority—in Blake’s case, the force of religious orthodoxy. And it is evidence of nationhood as a primary object of imagination.

In this chapter and the next I would like to understand two powerful ways in which imagination—of nationhood and of the founder of the religion—has shaped modern Christianity.1 Often reviled for its perverse effects, imagination has not received its due in religious studies, especially in the study of Christianity. This misses an enormous opportunity to understand more about religious practice and the context in which modern religions have taken shape. With the rise of the modern individual and state, the interiority practiced in the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises and in the Protestant conception of the “religion of the heart” became a fundamental idiom for the imaginative practice of envisioning self, group, and polity in relation to one another. Without these interwoven forms of imagination, it is difficult to see modern Christianity at work since they interact to map the believer’s sense of personal and collective belonging. Identity for moderns is an imagined participation in narrative and nationhood, a status one acquires principally through acts of imagination.

Imagining nationhood was very much a part of the colonialism of early modern and modern Europe. And religion had everything to do with this, since a nation was very often understood in terms of a single religion. Protestantism stood for England, the Netherlands, and the United States. The Kulturkampf that formed the emergence of Germany as a nation in the nineteenth century was fought over the battle line separating Catholic and Protestant allegiance. Catholicism stood for France, Spain, and Portugal. In the colonies, “heathenism” initially stood for everything that was not Christian, Jewish, or Muslim—or monotheistic. But eventually, as national consciousness arose and colonizers learned more about their domains and needed intellectual and cultural tools to organize and dominate them, religious constructions such as “Hinduism” emerged.² Buddhism came to stand for Sri Lanka, Burma, and Thailand. Religion was a powerful way that colonizing nations understood themselves and their subject nations. A nation was envisioned as singular, uniform body and a single religion was its soul.³ In this regard, by imagination I mean the mental act or faculty of visualizing something that one does not and perhaps cannot see. Imagination could therefore help believers to visualize something like a nation or the lost appearance of Jesus. It is an act of seeing that claims to know. Moreover, imagination serves as a medium that allows large and scattered groups of people to come together despite their distance from and unfamiliarity with one another. The need to see, to possess, to know, the need to belong easily trump the risk of misrepresentation.

IMAGINATION

The Reformation and the rise of the nation-state, which slowly reapportioned the hodgepodge territories of the Holy Roman Empire into a shrinking number of polities, provided new geographical and political as well as religious circumstances for Europeans to imagine their relationships to one another. We have seen that images in Catholic spiritual guidebooks, in allegories like Bunyan’s, in emblems such as those deployed by Johannes Gossner, and in texts used by Protestant missionaries were helpful in charting the spiritual path of conversion and sanctification. In all of these settings, the image of the heart was a primary metaphor for the interior state of the soul and tracing its vicissitudes. Showing the interior, imagining its process, was understood as an unfolding biography, a process that occurred in stages. Images served a primary role in imagining what was happening within. The interior came to be the locus of religion.

But as we have seen, imagination has a troubled history in Protestant thought, especially in the Reformed tradition. Calvin developed a strong critique of the imagination as a human tendency to distort God, by substituting human conceptions for the divine as revealed by scripture and the Holy Spirit. In his discussion of the Second Commandment, which he interpreted as strictly proscribing images of God or Jesus, Calvin insisted that “the human mind, stuffed as it is with presumptuous rashness, dares to imagine a god suited to its own capacity; as it labours under dullness, nay, is sunk in the grossest ignorance, it substitutes vanity and an empty phantom in the place of God.”4 The American Puritan minister Thomas Shepard (1605–49) denounced “man’s headstrong presumption,” the way in which people “content themselves with a faith of their own forging and framing.” People “think they hold fast Jesus Christ in the hand of faith, and so perish by catching at their own catch, and hanging on their own fancy and shadow.”⁵ For the Calvinist Shepard, imagination was no more than human self-deception, a vain preference for self-forged shadow or image rather than divine reality. But as a medium for introspection among Evangelicals, the imagination gradually became a resource in the spiritual quest for contrition and rebirth. Knowledge of and interaction with the soul or heart depended on imagination—whether that was accessed by literature, imagery, prayer, or other material practices such as pilgrimage or scriptural study. One of the most important images to signal this shift among Protestants was the first illustration in Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (first published in 1678), where the author himself is shown asleep, dreaming his narrative (figure 33).

Bunyan’s allegory opens with the scene illustrated on this title page: “As I walked through the wilderness of the world, I lighted on a certain place where there was a Denn: And I laid me down in that place to sleep. And as I slept I dreamed.”⁶ He invokes in these lines the opening of Dante’s Inferno: “At one point midway on our path in life,/I came around and found myself now searching / through a dark wood.”⁷ Both authors situate themselves out of the ordinary in the very midst of life. Lost in confusion and spiritual travail, each man resorts to literary imagination to envision a path—a sinuous, difficult, epic journey that will lead to the grand vision that pulls him forward. Bunyan helped Protestants to recognize the power of imagination by using it to narrate the way of the soul. Indeed, in the eponymous figure of “Christian,” shown just behind the dreaming author in figure 33, Bunyan demonstrated how imagination was an indispensable faculty for Evangelical introspection.

FIGURE 33

Frontispiece and title page of John Bunyan, Pilgrim’s Progress (London: Nathaniel Ponder, 1680), showing Bunyan dreaming. By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

The trope of the dream was very useful for Bunyan. Note how large the word “dream” appears on the title page, as if to assure the reader of the text’s artistic license. As a medium, the dream was understood as visual, a flutter of images, the chimerical but inwardly optical stuff of thought. Its prominent place here implied a new evaluation of epistemology, a shift from regarding the imagination as fancy, phantasy, sensuous indulgence, inherently deceptive and untrustworthy, a means of misrepresentation, to imagination as a figuration of truth. Introspection was not a strictly rational procedure, a logical deduction of convictions, but a discernment consisting of analogies and figures. Consciousness was movement from state to state, episode to episode, scene to scene. Self-awareness, or introspection, arose through a complex relation as a way of locating oneself on a long journey. All of the elements—author, protagonist, and reader, beginning and end—form an imagined matrix in which to locate one’s self.

In the course of the seventeenth century, imagination became a spiritual practice for Protestants. That it could do so owes to the Ignatian tradition that made visualization part of introspection or spiritual discernment. And Bunyan was clearly indebted to the spiritual road trip of Dante’s Divine Comedy, as one instance of the broader tradition of the “dream vision” in late medieval literature.8 But the shift also drew from the seventeenth-century tendency to regard imagination as part of the machinery of cognition. Thomas Hobbes included imagination among ideas, notice, conception, and knowledge as belonging to “the faculty, or power, by which we are capable . . . of knowing or conceiving.”⁹ More famously, in his Elements of Law, he asserted that imagination is “conception remaining, and by little and little decaying from and after the act of sense.”¹⁰ And Milton, in Paradise Lost (1667), described the utterances of Lucifer in the sleeping Eve’s dreams as

. . . imaginations, aery shapes,

which reason joining or disjoining, frames

all what we affirm or what deny, and call

our knowledge or opinion.¹¹

The self, for Bunyan, is inherently in motion, driven by the desire for salvation—by Christian’s opening question, “What shall I do to be saved?” Christian cannot stop or dwell at any point lest he lose himself to the world. Fixture is death; mobility is hope, a foretaste of the ultimate transcendence that is redemption. An Evangelist appears in the midst of Christian’s confusion and unrolls a parchment to reveal the engine of Bunyan’s narrative: “Fly from the Wrath to come.”¹² Christian then runs from his wife and children, stopping his ears in order to mute their pleas for his return. The desperate quest on which he embarks in this flight is for eternal life, for himself, the salvation of his soul, which Bunyan understood as a tearing away from the cares of the world, even those of one’s own family. Driven by the heavy burden of sin that he totes on his back, Christian leaves them and his community of neighbors behind. They occupy the City of Destruction and do not share his painful consciousness of the burden of sin, which sharpens his anticipation of the bliss of the Celestial City. When he resists all attempts to compel him to come back, Christian and another fellow whom he has momentarily persuaded to accompany him are abandoned by a neighbor named Obstinate, who says, “I will go back to my place . . . I will be no Companion of such mis-led fantastical Fellows.”¹³ Obstinate berates their enthusiasm for redemption as “fantastical,” a chimera of feverish imagination.

But Christian reveals a different view of the faculty when his traveling companion asks for more information about what awaits them. “I can better conceive of them with my Mind, then speak of them with my Tongue: But since you are desirous to know, I will read of them in my Book.”¹⁴ Scholars have compared the passage with another in Paradise Lost, in which the Archangel Raphael ponders Adam’s request to tell him the mysteries of time before time, the prehistory of the present world. Raphael wonders how best to “unfold the secrets of another world,” but concludes that

what surmounts the reach

of human sense, I shall delineate so,

by lik’ning spiritual to corporeal forms,

as may best express them,

He then wonders if the analogy of the two domains is really so unsuitable:

though what if earth

be but the shadow of heav’n, and things therein

each to other like, more than on earth is thought?15

Both Bunyan and Milton consider imaging able to capture an otherwise elusive relation. Movement in this likening or analogizing is key. When Christian meets a former traveler to the Celestial City now locked in an iron cage, he learns it is despair, the antithesis of this hopeful movement, that imprisons him. The entire book is structured as a series of passages from one node to the next, propelled by means of analogy that images feelings such as shame, despair, hope, trust, pride, and fear. The result is a narrative that organizes feelings into a landscape through which Christian journeys toward his final deliverance. The succession of scene after scene demonstrates that serial imagery is an ideal medium for introspection because it captures the temporality of the movement from ignorance to knowledge, condemnation to redemption. The revelation is experienced as the formation of a tempered self.

The emergence of interiority that helped define the spiritual path of the pilgrim-soul in the Protestant imaginary is paralleled by that of the lover of Christ in the Catholic baroque imaginary, where imagination was a means of empathy and intimacy with Christ. Jesuits were attracted for a variety of reasons to the Sacred Heart devotion that emerged in late-seventeenth-century France: for one, it fit their emphasis on visualization, which recognized the heart as the organ of interiority. An image from Ronco’s Royal Fortress of the Human Heart portrays Christ at work in the heart, having entered and purged it of vices (figure 34). Jesus then paints the heart’s interior with beautiful images, virtues that destroy the gall of vice that had possessed the heart.¹⁶ Goodness is portrayed in the soul by means of spiritual influence, and the resulting images are models for moral conduct. In the preface to his book, Ronco indicated that the rulers of the human heart are the intellect (the king) and will (the queen).¹⁷ The Christian welcomes Jesus to the fortress and allows him to take up residence there, where he refines, cleans, paints, teaches, illuminates, and reigns. Ronco’s book, like Antoine Wierix’s Cor Jesu amanti sacrum and the anonymously written Geistlicher Sittenspiegel, is not an allegory of the soul’s mystical union with Christ, but rather a practical, moral guide to the several stages of submitting the soul to its spiritual master. As such, it marks a popular portrayal of the soul in visual terms and suited the broad interest in shaping devotional life using forms of visual media.

FIGURE 34

Seventh meditation, “Paint the Heart,” in Alberto Ronco, Fortezza reale del cuore humano (Modena: Cassian, 1628), 54. Photo by author.

Catholicism and Protestantism were each developing a treatment of the heart as the dominant emblem of the soul, a shift which injected Christianity with a material referent for devotional practice and nurtured the intensified sense of interiority that slowly came to characterize early modern Christianity at a time when the body painfully marked one’s membership in the Catholic or Protestant party. The tribulations of Christian and his traveling companion, Faithful, in Bunyan’s book allegorize the suffering of the true Christian. After their arrest in Vanity-Fair, the two are tried and found guilty of civil disorder. Faithful is denounced as a heretic, then scourged, stoned, lacerated, and burned at the stake, although Christian eludes the punishment by divine aid.

The trial and execution of Faithful is composed and illustrated in Pilgrim’s Progress in a way that explicitly recalls the description and depiction of the fiery deaths of countless Protestant martyrs in Foxe’s Acts and Monuments. “Heart religion” meant much more than intellectual assent to theological principles. It was the embodied faith of ardent commitment that might be put to the test of martyrdom, or, more likely, the ridicule and emotional suffering endured by Christian on his long pilgrimage, or by the Catholic heart-soul suffering the lacerations and arrows of providence. For Evangelicals, “heart religion” came to mean the experiential or, to use their term, “experimental” search for contrition and spiritual graces that would somatically mark God’s work on the soul.

Hannah More (1745–1833) was an Evangelical in the Church of England, an abolitionist and author who joined with Beilby Porteus, bishop of London, to produce the Cheap Repository, a series of very popular religious tracts in the 1790s. In her widely read tracts and essays, More described Evangelical Christianity as a thorough transformation of the human being, touching all aspects of the person and transfiguring emotional and cognitive life. Simply put, she wrote in Practical Piety, a volume published in 1811, “heart” meant the entire person:

The change in the human heart, which the Scriptures declare to be necessary, they represent to be not so much an old principle improved, as a new one created; not educed out of the former character, but infused into the new one . . .

The sacred writings frequently point out the analogy between natural and spiritual things. The same spirit which in the creation of the world moved upon the face of the waters, operates on the human character to produce a new heart and a new life. By this operation the affections and faculties of the man receive a new impulse—his dark understanding is illuminated, his rebellious will is subdued, his irregular desires are rectified; his judgment is informed, his imagination is chastised, his inclinations are sanctified; his hopes and fears are directed to their true and adequate end . . . . The lower faculties are pressed into the new service. The senses have a higher direction. The whole internal frame and constitution receive a nobler bent.18

Yet as deep and as thorough as this infusion seems to be, it did not, More insisted, erase the old character. The faculties and the flesh remained, the human heart was as inclined to evil as ever. More described the countervailing need for what others called introspection but she called “introversion,” and placed under the more general heading of “Self-Examination.” She considered the need for self-examination to be habitual, an ongoing, regular practice of self-scrutiny that might regulate the will of the flesh to conform to its sinful inclinations. “We have appetites to control, imaginations to restrain, tempers to regulate, passions to subdue, and how can this internal work be effected, how can our thoughts be kept within due bounds . . . how can ‘the little state of man’ be preserved from continual insurrection . . . if this faculty of inspecting be not kept in regular exercise?” The rhetorical framework in which self-examination is visualized continued to describe a politics of introspection: “This inward eye, this power of introversion, is given us for a continual watch upon the soul. On an unremitted vigilance over its interior motions, those fruitful seeds of action, those prolific principles of vice and virtue, will depend both the formation and the growth of our moral and religious character. A superficial glance is not enough for a thing so deep, an unsteady view will not suffice for a thing so wavering, nor a casual look for a thing so deceitful as the human heart.”19 If imagination remained a suspect faculty for some, including More, the language and instrument of self-examination—the medium of the heart’s life and regulation—was nevertheless visual.

More’s visualization of the psychological politics of self-control is striking, for she articulated it in terms that resonated within the social framework of British Christianity. The concern for social control is never far from More’s portrayal of humble, industrious peasants who respect the gentry and prefer hard work, frugality, and piety to social unrest and the French Revolution. Her various personae encouraged the working class to read the Bible and tracts; one, a Mrs. Jones, a Sunday School activist, informs a recalcitrant farm owner that knowledge of the Bible “and its practical influence on the heart, is the best security you can have, both for the industry and obedience of your servants.”²⁰ As the recommended tracts were also authored by Hannah More, it is easy to understand why she felt they had this effect. In what was perhaps her most famous tract, The Shepherd of Salisbury Plain (1795), Mr. Johnson, “a very worthy charitable gentleman,” is riding across the plain when he encounters a lonely shepherd whose colorfully patched coat bespeaks his poverty but “equally proved the exceeding neatness, industry, and good management of his wife.”²¹ The distinction in social station between the two interlocutors could not have been more sharply drawn. Mr. Johnson discerns that the shepherd is without “any kind of learning but what he had got from the Bible” which he puts to use in the conversation reluctantly since “it better becomes me to listen to such a gentleman as you seem to be, than to talk in my poor way.”²² The spirit of the encounter is visually conveyed in the tract’s cover illustration (figure 35), where the unequal rank is announced in the unmistakable differences between the peasant on foot and the mounted gentleman and their clothing. (For an American tract’s portrayal of class difference and tract distribution, see figure 23). For More, the narrative of Christian fiction envisioned British Christianity as it was properly constituted: pious gentility and pious peasantry both at home in the rustic beauty of the English countryside, sharing a religion that buffers but also clearly reinforces their class differences while helping them to imagine a common purpose and national identity. Condescending gentility and self-effacing peasantry (we never learn the shepherd’s name) were the complementary social units of English social order. If peasants needed to know their place, so did gentlemen, whose problem was not poverty but infidelity and dissipation. Mr. Johnson represents the proper English gentleman and he is the vehicle for the reader’s presence in the story. His is the eye the reader assumes in the inspection of the shepherd and his family.

FIGURE 35

Cover illustration of Hannah More, The Shepherd of Salisbury Plain, Cheap Repository for Moral and Religious Tracts (West-Smithfield: J. Evans & Co.; London: J. Hatchard; and Bath: S. Hazard, 1795). Photo by author.

One day Mr. Johnson decides it would be “neither unpleasant nor unprofitable to observe how a man who carried such an appearance of piety spent his Sunday,” so he pays a visit to the shepherd’s cottage. But as he approaches it, Mr. Johnson

wished to take the family by surprise; and walking gently up to the house he stood awhile to listen. The door being half open, he saw the Shepherd (who looked so respectable in his Sunday-coat that he should hardly have known him), his wife, and their numerous young family, drawing round their little table, which was covered with a clean though very coarse cloth. There stood on it a large dish of potatoes, a brown pitcher, and a piece of coarse loaf. The wife and children stood in silent attention, while the Shepherd with uplifted hands and eyes, devoutly begged the blessing of Heaven on their homely fare.23

In this act of genteel espionage, the reader is made privy to a portrait of humble country life as a model of the Christian virtues of frugality, contentment, filial duty, and domestic piety. The gaze that Mr. Johnson constructs is clearly one that presumes the privilege of station. The peasant who placed himself at the door of a country mansion and presumed to spy on his or her betters would not be likely receive so charitable a treatment. More deploys the voyeur as a conceit to deliver a bona fide snapshot of the authentic life of pious peasants, but it is a snapshot that only the genteel viewer could take.

Yet More had at least two audiences in mind for her tract. The point was not simply to preach to peasants, but also inversely to present them to the genteel class as models of self-restraint. In fact, the scene of the furtive Mr. Johnson engrossed in quiet inspection of the family fits very well within the visual scheme that we have already seen at work in Practical Piety. The Christian, More wrote, will uncover in the relentless practice of introversion the idols that were the heart’s manufacture: “The faithful searcher into his own heart, that ‘chamber of imagery,’ feels himself in the situation of the prophet [Ezekiel], who being conducted from one idol to another, the spirit, at sight of each, repeatedly exclaims, ‘here is another abomination!’”²⁴ Calvin’s forge of idols remains in force. The pious heart or interior of the self is a temple swept clean of idols, purged by an iconoclastic procedure of self-examination that sees in order to eliminate what the self might display to boast its value. All virtue, More contended, “is founded in self-denial, self-denial in self-knowledge, and self-knowledge in self-examination.”²⁵

In the place of self-love, the Christian seeker hoped eventually to see spiritual virtues installed by God, moving the soul toward greater and greater perfection. But this meant that the entire spiritual life was a restless motion, never fixed or stable. The same anxiety that was the driving force animating Bunyan’s pilgrim would relentlessly purge the heart of the idols that gather there. “No one,” More argued, “can be allowed to rest in a low degree and plead his exemption from aiming no higher. No one can be secure in any state of piety below that state which would not have been enjoined on all, had not all been entitled to the means of attaining it. Those who keep their pattern in their eye, though they may fail of the highest attainments, will not be satisfied with such as are low.”²⁶ In the visual register of Christian introspection, a filmography that can capture the restive trajectory of spiritual progress, advancement is prompted by virtue of design. Endemic to the medium of self-knowledge, progress is a duty, an inner compulsion. “Let us strive every day for some superiority to the preceding day, something that shall distinctly mark the passing scene with progress; something that shall inspire an humble hope that we are rather less unfit for heaven to-day, than we were yesterday . . . . The Christian, like the painter, does not draw his lines at random, he has a model to imitate, as well as an outline to fill. Every touch confirms him more and more to the great original.”27

In More’s extended metaphor of visuality the holiness of God operated as the engine of Christianity, and imagination was the means of discerning its work. By subduing the self through introspection, the Christian replaced the idols of vice with the vision of God’s holiness, a dazzling spectacle that induced self-forgetting. When in scripture the “saints of old” are seized by the praise of God, she said, “they display a sublime oblivion of themselves, they forget every thing but God. Their own wants dwindle to a point. Their own concerns, nay the universe itself, shrink into nothing. They seem absorbed in the effulgence of Deity, lost in the radiant beams of infinite glory.”²⁸ These images carry the soul out of itself, push it beyond its idols toward the face of the divine. With the retooling of imagination, the forge of vision had become an Evangelical work. Introspection was the heated internal search for the idols of sin and the radiance of the divine.

NATIONHOOD

More framed her concern regarding the application of Protestant morality and religious faith among all classes of Britons within a commitment to recovering national well-being. The legacy of the French Revolution was the immediate occasion for her concern, but her interest in the social and political relevance of a revival of faith ultimately unfolded within the British tradition of the Christian nation-state. Religion was not simply a personal matter for More or her contemporaries. It was also national. Religion went to the core of the nation’s character. This of course can be traced to Henry VIII and an age when the king embodied the nation. To throw off the shackles of Rome and proclaim the king the protector of the Church of England meant to liberate the polity of the nation from foreign rule and to align true religion with a people. Britons were quickly encouraged to regard themselves as the new Israel, an idea that is at least implicit in the portrayals we have discussed of Edward VI as the latter-day Josiah, rediscovering and reestablishing true religion. Thomas Hobbes promoted the idea of the people composing the body politic of the king, who in turn is their head, the head of state, containing the people within his person, balancing both secular and sacred power in his reign (figure 36).²⁹ The medieval European ideology of the king’s two bodies, famously studied by Ernest Kantorowicz, identified the king’s natural and political bodies as interrelated and the basis for the unity of his body and the kingdom he ruled. In the words of a sixteenth-century report to Queen Elizabeth, the king “has not a Body natural distinct and divided by itself from the Office and Dignity Royal, but a Body natural and a Body politic together indivisible; and these two Bodies are incorporated in one Person, and make one Body and not divers, that is the Body corporate in the Body natural, et de contra the Body natural in the Body corporate.”³⁰

The king’s unification of corporate and personal identity is famously visualized in the frontispiece to Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651), which depicts the monarch as the head of the body politic, the corporate body of the commonwealth, holding a sword in one hand and an ecclesiastical staff in the other (see figure 36). According to Hobbes, the commonwealth only works when it appoints “one man or assembly of men to bear their person.”31 This is conveyed in the engraving by the gaze of the members of the host of people: each of them looks to the head of the king. Horst Bredekamp has argued that this visual convergence was in fact understood by Hobbes as a force that constituted the body politic and stature of the king.³² Kings were made by natural force or by agreement among those who become the king’s subjects. In either case, the act of looking exerted force and was therefore the emblem of the king’s sovereignty. As Hobbes put it, “the miserable condition of war” follows from the natural inclination of humankind “when there is no visible power to keep them in awe, and tie them by fear of punishment to the performance of their covenants” and the observation of laws.³³ Awe, like fear, signals the power of submission induced by the visible presence of authority. But that very authority, Hobbes contends, results from “a real unity” of the members of a realm “in one and the same person, made by covenant of every man with every man.” More than consent, the people’s conferring “all power and strength” to one ruler produces what Hobbes called “that great LEVIATHAN, or rather (to speak more reverently) of that Mortal God to which we owe, under the Immortal God, our peace and defence.”34 The mortal God is fashioned by humans via the visual traffic of awe. This definition pivots on an analogy linking personal and collective personhood. The body politic corresponds to the individual body or person of the monarch. The monarch decides for the subjects just as the individual decides for his or her body’s parts, which are unified in each individual by means of will. This conception ranked monarchy above republic, disparaged democracy, and centered nationhood in the person of the king—and did not survive the seventeenth century in England. Yet the frontispiece to Hobbes’s book and the idea it conveyed marks an important point in the history of national imagination, for even the popularly elected president of a modern republic comes to assume in his or her person an aura of the nation. In a mystical way, the leader of a commonwealth personifies it, and therefore allows its people to imagine their collective reality as a nation. For this reason, the piety of the leader has been important to British and American national imaginaries. The American president and the British monarch as protector of the Church of England are high priests in civil religions that are understood to secure national unity.

FIGURE 36

Abraham Bosse, engraver, “Leviathan,” 1651, frontispiece to Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, or The Matter, Forme, and Power of A Commonwealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil (London: Andrew Crooke, 1651). Photo by author.

The literature on the history, origins, and constitution of the nation and nationalism is very large. Suffice to say here that I understand the nation to be a modern invention, emerging in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Europe as a form of political imagination and social organization shaped by ethnicity, geography, language, commerce, and conceptions of monarchy that made use of religion to challenge older arrangements of power.³⁵ Imagination, as Benedict Anderson argued, made modern media into powerful instruments for manufacturing extended yet cohering communities of thought and feeling that reinforced the footprints of nations along lines of increasingly uniform language use.³⁶ But of course the formation of the nation-state was about more than language. The concentration of capital in historically established and geographically defined provinces with dominant ethnic identities reinforcing linguistic and religious majorities, intensified by competition for colonies and markets, and enabled by humanist republicanism and, in Protestant settings, by recognition of secular authority and national sovereignty over the primacy of the pope or imperial ruler—all of these combined to create the opportunity for new forms of political power and organization to emerge. The far flung network of global colonialism took the practice of the nation-state and nationalism around the world, planting it in the colonized populations that eventually freed themselves of their occupying states and joined the global marketplace to craft their own national polities. This is, of course, only one scenario for reading global history over the last several centuries. But my interest in national imagination is not in principle limited to the Eurocentric model, though for the global spread of Catholic and Protestant influence and the rise of the Western geopolitics of modernity, it remains my focus here.

By Hannah More’s day, the rise of the middle class had already begun to replace an often impoverished nobility as the locus of national identity. It was More’s own stratum and she took pleasure in endorsing the middle classes as the hope of Britain. For this reason she was alarmed by the allure of French taste among the British bourgeoisie, whose commerce, travel and wealth took them to France and allowed them to keep houses there, where they were “more than ever assimilated to French manners.” The result was not encouraging. “It is to be feared,” she wrote in 1819, “that with French habits, French principles may be imported . . . . We are losing our national character. The deterioration is by many thought already visible.”37 The hope, she maintained, was Britain’s Protestant faith and a long list of items that touched on everything important to More: the rejection of French influence and bad literature, the return of the middle classes to “their ancient sobriety and domestic habits,” the resumption of the “ancient rectitude, the sound sense, and the native modesty which have long been the characteristics of the British people,” prison reform, care for the poor, the abolition of the slave trade, the return of British universities to “moral discipline and strict religion,” Bible reading, Sabbath keeping, family prayer—only when these triumphed would England “not only excel her present self, but be continually advancing in the scale of Christian perfection.”³⁸ The relationship between true religion and the English nation was special. More had no doubt that “the Christian religion, grafted on the substantial stock of the genuine British character, and watered by the dews of heaven, may bring forth the noblest productions of which this lower world is capable.”³⁹ In contrast to France, in England, “Christianity presents herself to us neither dishonoured, degraded, nor disfigured. Here she is set before us in all her original purity; we see her in her whole consistent character, in all her fair and just proportions, as she came from the hands of her Divine Author.”⁴⁰

NATIONAL IMAGINATION IN FRANCE AND AMERICA

But this idea was hardly limited to the English imagination. Margaret Mary Alacoque, for example, had framed devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus in the theological narrative of reparations to be paid for neglect of the Eucharistic body, but also with the motif of a divine lover spurned by his national paramour. France was God’s chosen people, the new Israel, and Jesus divulged his longing for the nation through his chosen servant, Margaret Mary.⁴¹ Near the end of her life she described the political desire of the Sacred Heart for royal recognition at the court as a reversal of Jesus’s suffering and humiliation. Jesus wanted justice and designated the Sacred Heart as the focal object of national devotion so that he might receive it:

He desires, then, it seems to me, to enter with pomp and splendor into the palaces of princes and kings. He wants to be honored there as much as He was outraged, contemned, and humiliated in His Passion, and to receive as much pleasure at seeing the great ones of the earth abased and humiliated before Him as He felt bitterness at seeing Himself spurned at their feet. Here are the words I heard with regard to our king [Louis XIV]: “Make known to the eldest son of My Sacred Heart that, as his temporal birth was obtained by devotion to my Holy Infancy, so will he obtain his birth into grace and eternal glory by consecrating himself to My adorable Heart. It wants to triumph over his and, through him, over the hearts of the great ones of the earth. It wants to reign in his palace, be painted on his standards, and engraved on his arms, so that they may be victorious over his enemies. It wants to bring low these proud and stubborn heads and make him triumphant over all the enemies of holy Church.”42

It is a remarkable passage for its blatant expression of ambition. The economy of reparations is fitted over the national apparatus of France as the most Christian nation, the ever insecure kingdom of Christendom that had long pitted its national pride and interest against the rival Holy Roman Emperor as favored ally of Rome. Alacoque would make of Louis XIV another Constantine, who had affixed the emblem of Christ to his battle standards in order to achieve victory over his rival and establish Christianity as the religion of the Roman state. Alacoque called on the king of France to become the instrument of Jesus, reversing the centripetal force of the Reformation and European national politics that was already creating autonomous nation-states and eroding the power of the Roman pontiff. According to Alacoque, Jesus wanted to enter many palaces, not only that of the French king, in pomp and splendor. But the honor that Louis was called to bestow on the Sacred Heart would be the first step. Alacoque offered France this special recognition, but her letter continued to say that the Society of Jesus, through the intervention of her spiritual confessor, Father de la Columbière, would enjoy the blessings and graces of devotion to the Sacred Heart. And indeed, the Jesuits were the international force behind the long struggle to secure the spread of the devotion, its papal recognition, and Alacoque’s eventual canonization. The Jesuits had long fought against the Jansenists and their commitment to a Gallican understanding of French Catholicism.⁴³ Embedded in Alacoque’s words to the French monarch was a negotiation that at once privileged France and subjugated it to Rome in accord with Jesuit ultramontanism. Proponents of the Sacred Heart opposed the French Revolution and cheered the restoration of the monarchy in the nineteenth century. They renewed the push for the monarchy to embrace devotion to the Sacred Heart as means of making good on a national vow that eventually was fulfilled in the construction of the Sacré-Coeur de Montmartre in Paris.⁴⁴ Building the church was undertaken as a national act of penance, reparation for national failure, most immediately associated with the humiliating loss to Germany in 1870, but going back to the violence of the Revolution. The rapprochement of humbled nation and triumphant but gracious savior was visualized in an endless number of allegorical images such as figure 37, where we see France on her knees, eyes averted in shame, presenting a model of the Sacré-Coeur to Jesus, who condescends to accept the vow and reconcile himself to his favored daughter. France had strayed, but now as penitent Magdalene, prodigal son, or errant Israel—the biblical metaphors for national penance and redemption were manifold—the hope for regeneration was taken up in a sacred economy of reparation and pledge.

FIGURE 37

“Most Sacred Heart of Jesus with Gallia penitent and devoted,” Messager du Sacré-Coeur 39 (January 1881): 2. Photo by author.

The imagination of Christian nationhood took a different form in the United States owing to greater British influence and to the dominant Protestant tradition. Protestant groups who migrated to the New World in the early seventeenth century understood the migration and formation of community settlements such as the Massachusetts Bay Colony in terms of a collective purpose blessed by divine providence. John Winthrop’s famous 1630 sermon, “A Modell of Christian Charity,” was delivered to frame the endeavor as a quest for a social body in which, as he put it, “the care of the publique must oversway all private respects.”45 “Wee must be knitt together in this worke,” Winthrop declared, “as one man.”⁴⁶ The mutual consent of the company was based on “a special overruleing providence” and an extraordinary agreement among Christian churches “to seek out a place of Cohabitation and Consortship under a due forme of Government both civill and ecclesiasticall.”⁴⁷ This form of government was not what Hobbes had praised, but it clearly intermingled church and state. Its model, however, was not that of the parliament, monarchy, and Church of England, but the theocracy of ancient Israel. Winthrop used the rich rhetorical register of the prophetic tradition of the Hebrew Bible to configure the relationship between the Puritan company and their God.⁴⁸ The sermon established a parallel between the group’s task and the biblical Exodus, a trope that would remain in place by figuring the colony, and later the nation that followed, as a new Israel. The endeavor would be blessed, Winthrop assured his listeners, with an unusual outpouring of spiritual blessings and divine presence. The new Israel would enjoy a new dispensation of grace, a growth of religion that Jonathan Edwards associated one hundred years later with the wave of revivalism spreading through the colonies, leading him to claim that the millennial age would dawn in America.49

The idea of a special mission in which the remnant of the true church, sets out in a world hostile to it, breaking away from the reign of worldliness to seek the distant promise of the heavenly Zion, was of course the master trope of the second part of Bunyan’s allegorical epic. Part 2 corrected the individualism of Christian’s lonely trek in Part 1 by narrating, under the trope of Christiana, his wife, and the band of their children, the collective quest of the body of true believers for redemption. Christiana and her company are introduced by the Interpreter, Bunyan’s allegory of the Holy Spirit, to his “man-servant,” named Great-Heart, whose “business is to perswade sinners to Repentance” (figure 38).⁵⁰ A tradition of commentary identifies Great-Heart as Bunyan the minister and, by extension, all Dissenting ministers, leaders of their flocks, who were concerned to guard, but also to instill proper discipline within their congregations.⁵¹ Great-Heart is bade by the Holy Spirit to take sword, helmet, and shield with which to protect and conduct the congregation to their next destination. The second part of Pilgrim’s Progress becomes the adventures of the intrepid minister and his faithful flock.

The significance of Great-Heart’s arms bears consideration as part of the Protestant imagination of the Christian polis. The Puritans, who avidly read Bunyan, wielded weaponry and executed a king; they were subjected to imprisonment, persecution, and execution. What does Great-Heart’s sword mean for the pilgrimage of the true church? He first draws his sword when the band approaches two lions, who had represented civil and ecclesiastical powers in Part 1, when they tried and executed Faithful as a heretic. In Part 2, the Pilgrims encounter the lions that are guarding a highway. When the Pilgrims seek to enter the road, they are accosted by Grim or Bloody-Man, a member of a race of giants, we read (and possibly a reference to the Leviathan of Hobbes). Grim represents the civil and ecclesiastical powers oppressing the Dissenters, the very powers that had imprisoned Bunyan himself. The sword that might have seemed allegorical performs in a hideously literal way: Great-Heart hews Grim into pieces and smashes his helmeted head before dispatching him.

The portrayal of violence, punishment, and execution in Bunyan’s allegory seems to disentangle itself from metaphor and limn actual or anticipated retribution. The illustration of Great-Heart that appeared in numerous editions beginning in 1684, when Part 2 appeared, and was emulated by subsequent engravers many times, shows him at the head of the small company, large sword over his shoulder, with three figures hanging from a gibbet on the hilltop beyond them. They are Simple, Sloth, and Presumption, whom Christian had encountered. When Christiana learns who they are, she refuses to lament their fate and coldly dismisses them: “They have but what they deserve, and I think it is well that they hang so near the High-way, that others may see and take warning.” Mercy, her traveling companion, agrees: “Let them hang, and their Names Rot, and their Crimes live for ever against them.”52

FIGURE 38

“Great-Heart with Christiana and children,” in John Bunyan, Pilgrim’s Progress, part 2 (Boston: Joseph Bumstead, 1800), 164. Photo by author.

Violence serves in Pilgrim’s Progress as a necessary means for separating oneself from the corrupting city of the world in order to make the pilgrimage to Zion. No champion of tolerance, Bunyan put in the mouth of none other than Ignorance the pacific sentiment of relativism: “Be content to follow the Religion of your country, and I will follow the Religion of mine.” It was what Native Americans would tell Puritan colonists and it was the basis for negotiating territorial sovereignty in the peace treaties of Augsburg (1555) and Westphalia (1648) following the interminable religious conflicts: cuius regio, eius religio. But for Bunyan, and for the citizens of Puritan settlements in Massachusetts, violence against those infidels who threatened the community was a necessary means of preserving the community and maintaining its covenant with God. The illustration of Great-Heart leading Mercy, Christiana, and her four sons implied something powerful about the sovereignty of “mutual consent” that Winthrop identified as the political basis of his group’s migration to North America. Violence is not only a physical act but also a powerful form of imagination, able to draw the boundaries of those who envision its use by identifying authority, in the form of the bodies protected by violence and those damaged or destroyed by its use. The evocation of violence in literature, song, art, film, and folklore as well as in pious narrative likely constitutes the most prevalent role of violence in a national life. Imagining the destruction of “the bad guys” reinforces the broadly shared sense of a nation’s boundaries and moral rationale. Protestantism came to the New World with a clear preconception about group cohesion and the symbolic as well as actual role of violence in maintaining that cohesion. After all, the new Israel had patterned itself after the old one, whose God endorsed the sort of violence that Great-Heart practiced against the church’s foes, and which had been practiced on the church by monarch and state. Belief in the power of righteous and redemptive violence never left the American imaginary.

The tradition of Puritanism was arguably a living tradition in British America until the mid-eighteenth century. The Revolutionary War changed the key in which Puritanism was regarded, however. With the gradual ratification of the Bill of Rights, the disestablishment of religion became part of the culture of the new nation-state. But many Protestants, especially those of Calvinist descent, looked to the Puritan past as the proper ancestry of something many of them felt was now threatened by the separation of church and state: the Protestant ethos of the Christian nation. Rising immigration of Catholics in the 1830s and 1840s only exacerbated their anxiety. Evangelicals and other Protestants mobilized efforts at proselytism, tract and Bible distribution, the formation of Sunday schools, and promotion of the use of the King James Bible in public schools. Voluntary organizations such as the ATS and the American Sunday School Union produced primers, almanacs, and children’s literature to support the instruction of children along Protestant lines. Narratives of the nation’s origin commonly stressed the Puritan founders of colonies in New England.

Although the observation of Thanksgiving, established as a national practice in the midst of the Civil War by President Lincoln, included no reference to the Pilgrims or Puritans, the state-sanctioned act of ritual thanksgiving dated to the days of Puritan governments. The trope of the “Pilgrim Fathers” can be traced at least as early as the 1790s, and became the title of a best-selling history by British author William Henry Bartlett in 1853: The Pilgrim Fathers; or, The Founders of New England in the Reign of James the First. After the Civil War, as immigration once again flourished and was opened to immigrants from far more varied backgrounds than Irish and German Catholics and European Protestants who had arrived in earlier periods, the public iconography of Thanksgiving fixed increasingly on seventeenth-century Puritan life and slowly came to include Pilgrims, a separatist sect of Puritanism. One of the most popular and widely reproduced paintings of the early colonial Puritans was George Henry Boughton’s 1867 canvas, Pilgrims Going to Church (figure 39). Boughton had read Bartlett’s narrative and even copied out several passages of it, which may document his inspiration for the picture.53 Bartlett’s text stressed the precarious state of affairs among the early settlers on lonely trails in the forest wilderness, “armed to protect themselves from the Indians and wild beasts,” as they made their way to church. Bartlett mentioned a wedding party en route to the church, but Boughton portrayed instead a small company with armed men at front and rear enclosing the privileged company of the pastor and his wife and female family members. Life was rustic and risky in those days, the painting implies, but Puritan piety and chivalry prevailed (Boughton’s original title made no reference to Pilgrims, only to Puritans). In the beautiful but dangerous countryside, the group bands together to secure civilization in the wild. The world that Victorian viewers of the image inhabited, it intimates, was the result of the Puritan effort at Christian community. Just as Christiana and her band of Christians had been led by armed force in the person of Great-Heart, so Boughton’s band of Puritans risks life and limb in the pursuit of the holiness that was the very reason for their errand in the wilderness. In effect, Boughton updated the seventeenth-century illustration of Great-Heart and Christiana, giving Americans an appealing way of imagining their joint enterprise at a moment of dual national crisis: civil strife and division, on the one hand, and massive immigration and demographic change, on the other. The world founded by the Puritans was crumbling, and in places like Boston, now a dominantly Catholic urban center, even disappearing. The mythos of Thanksgiving, ritualized by Lincoln and visualized in the corpus of Boughton’s many paintings of Puritan life in the early seventeenth century, offered an alternative narrative of national origins and purpose. Perhaps many admirers of Boughton’s picture wanted to imagine a Christian nation’s beginning as something that might be reclaimed, or at least used as a steady mooring in the troubled waters of the present.

FIGURE 39

George Henry Boughton, Pilgrims Going to Church, 1867, oil on canvas. Collection of the New York Historical Society.

COUNTERVAILING FORMS OF NATIONAL IMAGINATION IN THE UNITED STATES

But not everyone was convinced by the Protestant propaganda lauding the Puritan Thanksgiving as the originating moment of the nation. As early as 1842, a year in which tensions between Protestants and Catholics in the United States were boiling over (see figure 24), the Philodemic Society of Georgetown College, a collegiate debate society, sponsored the first commemoration of “the Landing of the Pilgrims of Maryland” with an oration by local Catholic author and activist William George Read (1800–46). “Why are we so late,” the speaker asked the gathering at St. Mary’s City on the western shore of the Chesapeake Bay in the spring of 1842, “in the proud ceremonial of this day?”

Why so far behind our brethren of Massachusetts, in testifying veneration for the founders of a time-honored community? Why is the rock of Plymouth classic ground, consecrated by annual outpourings of the mind and heart of cis-atlantic Attica, while old St. Mary’s and St. Inigo’s, the primal seats of civil and religious liberty, are known but to an occasional wanderer? What has made the Mayflower, the Argo of American story, while the Ark and the Dove, that bore the mysteries of Religion, and the olive branch of peace, to a benighted people who as yet knew the pale face only by his wrongs, have perished uncelebrated and unsung, till their very names have faded from the knowledge of more than half our people. I will not enforce the humiliating answer.54

The New England Puritans commanded more cultural capital than the Catholic party aboard the Ark and the Dove, which landed in 1634 on an island off the coast of what would soon become the colony of Maryland, where the second baron of Baltimore and his brother founded St. Mary’s City. A small engraving on the cover of the oration pictured the scene of the arrival of Father White, a Jesuit priest who was among the Ark’s company (figure 40). We see the Ark anchored in the Potomac and the small company gathered about the cross that the priest had raised in honor of the day.⁵⁵ William Read, in his speech, not only recounted the story of Father White’s arrival, but framed it within the plans of George Calvert, first baron of Baltimore, for founding the colony of Maryland, and within the long history of Catholic conversion of “pagans” to Christianity. Calvert’s sons brought to the New World ideas later used by the founders of the nation, ideas which, Read pointed out, Calvert had found in Catholic teachings much older than John Locke, Thomas Paine, or Thomas Jefferson, “the principles of civil liberty, diffused throughout the works of the most approved divines of those and yet earlier ages.”⁵⁶ Read cited Thomas Aquinas as endorsing the equality of human beings, the justification for overthrowing a tyrannical government, and the confessor of Charles V as espousing the idea of political authority derived from “the people.”⁵⁷ He held up “the unprecedented legislative declaration of religious liberty” as the “crowning glory of the Calverts and of Maryland.”⁵⁸ In 1840 the Catholic Tract Society of Baltimore issued its first tract, the Address of the Editorial Committee, and placed on the cover the same engraving used two years later on the cover of Read’s Oration. The Address explained that the image portrayed “the example of those holy and patriotic men who first unfurled the banner of civil and religious liberty,” which deserved to be remembered because “the spirit which glowed in their hearts is the spirit of our religion and of our government.”59 The idea that American ideals of liberty were grounded in Catholic thought and example would continue to figure in Catholic social thought and scholarship well into the twentieth century.⁶⁰

FIGURE 40

“Pilgrims of Maryland,” cover illustration of Address of the Editorial Committee of the Catholic Tract Society of Baltimore (Baltimore: Catholic Tract Society, circa 1839). Courtesy of Library Company of Philadelphia.

The celebration of civil liberty as a soundly Catholic heritage was a point that Read was moved to argue in the face of Protestant Nativists in the United States, who claimed and would continue to assert that Catholic immigrants could not make good citizens in a democratic republic since they recognized a supreme and autocratic authority in the Roman pontiff. To counter this claim, Read unleashed a rhetorical fusillade against a host of Protestant patriarchs in the Northeast and in Anglican Virginia:

Tell me not of the liberal principles of Roger Williams, under whose rule of near half a century at Providence, the Rhode Island ordinance excluded the Catholic from the franchise of his own asylum from Puritan persecution! Tell me not of the charity of Penn, who could rebuke his officers for toleration of the Catholic worship! . . . while Winthrop was recording his discontent at the “open setting up of Mass” in Maryland; and the Law-established Church, in Virginia, was wielding the scourge of universal proscription, the Catholic of Maryland alone was found, to open wide his door to the sufferer of every persuasion.61

Read pointed proudly to the Maryland Toleration Act of 1649, passed by the second baron of Baltimore, which ensured freedom of religion to any Trinitarian Christian. Referring obliquely to the law’s intolerance of Jews and Unitarians, Read conceded that the act “was but the opening of the glorious day we have been permitted to see.”⁶² But in doing so he cleverly stressed that Catholicism was part of a historical progression toward increasing civil liberty in America. In the midst of nineteenth-century Protestant anti-Catholicism, Read urged his audience to recognize a useable Catholic past to challenge Protestant hegemony’s claims to a Protestant nation. A countervailing national narrative would make room for Catholic founders, pilgrims of another tradition, and ones who contributed to the formation of the nation in ways that contradicted latter-day attacks from Protestant Nativists.

The battleground for this clash soon became the public schools, since the schools were seen as democracy’s necessary means of civilizing and moralizing citizens. The disestablishment of religion and the rise of immigration combined to intensify the anxieties caused by democracy. Education was considered the best way of inculcating a necessary influence. And the Bible was among instructional texts widely in use in the opening decades of the nineteenth century. But Catholics soon challenged this, pointing out that the King James Bible was a Protestant rendition.⁶³ In 1841 Archbishop John Hughes addressed a gathering of angry Catholic parents in New York City on the matter of the public school use of the Protestant Bible and even of anti-Catholic tracts. He stipulated that Catholics were not asking for sectarian schools or for public money to support them. “We do not ask for the introduction of religious teachings in any public school,” he proclaimed, “but we contend that if such religious influences be brought to bear on the business of education, it shall be, so far as our children are concerned, in accordance with the religious belief of their parents and families.”⁶⁴ Nativists were alarmed at the spread of Catholic schools and by the prospect of public monies spent on the Roman faith. In the end, it made more sense to a growing number of jurists to remove the Bible from the public schools altogether.

In fact, Bibles had been dropping out of public education since the antebellum period, well before the much-discussed controversy in Cincinnati from 1869–72, which ended with the removal of Bibles, although a few states and school districts continued to mandate Bible reading well into the twentieth century.⁶⁵ In its place, a contemporary and more uniform movement began to claim the public schoolroom as the space for a civic piety dedicated to making American citizens, targeting its efforts on the sacralization of the American flag. In the final decades of the nineteenth century, flag piety become the focus of veterans organizations such as the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR), the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR), the Sons of Veterans, and Protestant clergy who advocated the display of the flag in and on churches. On September 30, 1889, for example, the Central Illinois Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church adopted the resolution to “recommend that the American flag be placed in our churches and Sunday-schools as an emblem of our Christian civilization.”66 Many church bodies followed suit, leading to the common sight of American flags in sanctuaries to the present day. In the long wake of the Civil War, the oratorical pyrotechnics mounted as veterans and patriots intensified flag piety. Newton Bateman, Illinois superintendent of public instruction and longtime friend of Abraham Lincoln, maintained that “the true American patriot is ever a worshipper. The starry symbol of his country’s sovereignty is to him radiant with a diviner glory than that which meets his mortal vision . . . . Where that ensign floats, on the sea or on the land, it is to him the very political shekinah of his love and faith, luminous with the presence of that God who conducted our fathers across the sea and through the fires of the revolution to the Pisgah heights of civil and religious liberty.”⁶⁷ The intermingling of flag and faith grew so fervent that the loss of the Bible from the public schools was forgotten by those who felt the totem of the flag was a stronger device for fusing the immigrant nation into a militant uniformity.⁶⁸ Accordingly, the DAR and the GAR undertook the sacralizing of the flag as a civilizing ritual to be deployed in public schools as a way of making citizens. Manuals appeared in the 1880s and 1890s to guide school officials and teachers in the administration of flag display and veneration, and state legislatures quickly codified anti-desecration laws.⁶⁹ Imagining nationhood became a powerful ritual for shaping students, and also for shaping new citizens. We see it at work in photographs of school children from the 1890s, standing as a single body in a powerful corporate act of recitation and bodily attention (figure 41). The Pledge of Allegiance, written in 1892, was modified in 1923 in order to capture the pledger’s imagination and eliminate any ambivalence about the referent of the ritual utterance. The words “to the flag of the United States of America” were added to the opening phrase “I pledge allegiance” since advocates felt the original lack of signification might allow new citizens to hold in their mind allegiance to their former nations.⁷⁰ Imagining the proper nation at the moment of sacred oath was considered crucial in the minting of new citizens, whose loyalties were to be bound by the ritual. Imagination was a powerful act, intermingling soul and nation in an utterance. In order to clarify the object of commitment, flags were prominently displayed in the ceremony and citizens were typically made to stand in attention, recalling the formal recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance performed each morning in schoolrooms.

During the nineteenth century the Vatican preferred that the Catholic Church around the world avoid close ties to the emergence of nationalism and the ascent of democracy as the political culture of modernity. Owen Chadwick has succinctly summarized the view of Pius IX in 1848: “The Pope wanted Italy to be free of foreigners, and to prosper, but saw that a fully constitutional government was not compatible with the temporal sovereignty of the pope.”71 Buffeted by reaction to his refusal to endorse a war of liberation against Austria, Pius IX fled Rome. In 1849, the revolutionary government of the republic of Rome stripped the pope of temporal power and declared that Catholicism was no longer the state religion. When Pius IX returned to Rome in the following year, Garibaldi and Mazzini having fled the peninsula, “a once liberal-minded pope,” as Chadwick put it, “became a resolute conservative.”⁷² Pius IX joined many other popes before and after him in targeting modernity and liberalism as challenges to the sovereignty of faith and the authority of the Church. Driven by the alarming violence and institutional upheaval across Europe as a long series of political revolutions helped form secular nation-states, or states in which the traditional position of the church was limited or even eliminated, Pius IX issued the “Syllabus of Errors” (1864), which catalogued “the particular errors of our age.” Among these were the claims that “the entire government of the public schools in which the youth of any Christian state is instructed . . . can and should be assigned to the civil authority” and “the best state of civil society demands that the peoples’ schools . . . should be exempted from all authority, control, and power of the Church.”73 On matters of government, the papacy aimed directly at the legacy of the Reformation on national sovereignty, rejecting the view that “kings and princes are not only exempt from the jurisdiction of the Church, but they also are superior to the Church in deciding questions of jurisdiction.” In a statement with direct relevance to American national history and constitutional law, the syllabus opposed the idea that “the Church is to be separated from the state, and the state from the Church.”⁷⁴

FIGURE 41

Frances Benjamin Johnston, Schoolchildren Reciting the Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag, Washington, DC, 1899. Courtesy of Library of Congress.

Pius IX had issued the syllabus on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, a date that recalled his formal proclamation in 1847 of Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception as the patroness of the United States. That proclamation endorsed the 1792 placement by the bishop of Baltimore, John Carroll, of the United States in the protection of the Blessed Virgin under the name of the Immaculate Conception. As Jay Dolan has suggested, two models of Catholicism competed in nineteenth-century America: what he calls “republican Catholicism,” which was shaped by Enlightenment thought and advocated an indigenous national church, and Tridentine Catholicism, which insisted on a strong papacy and “stressed the authority of the hierarchy and the subordinate role of the laity. The medieval monarchy, not the modern republic, was its model of government.” The latter won in what Dolan calls “the Romanization of the Church.”⁷⁵

An image captures U.S. Catholicism’s configuration of authority and nationhood at the time of the first Vatican Council, 1869–70. Issued in German and English, The Eternal Rock of the Roman Catholic Church (figure 42) was created by August Hoen, an established lithographer in Baltimore, and published in 1872 by F. Schummer & Co., also of Baltimore. Pius IX had convened the council to affirm the church’s stand on doctrinal issues in the face of spreading revolutions and the advance of political agendas that supported nationalism, secular states, and scientific and philosophical materialism. No less important, in an age of crisis for authority, the council also endorsed the doctrine of papal infallibility. The Schummer lithograph reads like a billboard affirmation of the reactionary nature of the council and the pope who planned it. The submission of kings and princes to the power of the church, the authority of the pope based on apostolic succession and the original decree of Jesus, the centrality of the ecclesiastic institution in matters of faith—all are visually registered in the lithograph. On the far right, Constantine, the first Christian emperor of Rome, hails the apparition of the cross, which enabled his victory over a pagan rival, and commends it—with its Latin inscription, “Conquer under this sign”—to his fellow “heroes of the true faith,” Charles V and Henry II. On the far left, Jesus hands Peter the key to his kingdom, announcing that he will build his church on this rock, in text running up the contour of the central mountain and into the image of St. Peter’s basilica on its summit. Behind Peter appears the long line of subsequent occupants of the throne of Peter, vanishing in the distance behind the rock. In the two upper panels, the Blessed Virgin receives the Annunciation and is crowned by the Trinity. Across the front of the elevated altar space appears an iconostasis or screen of images that separates the viewer from the mysteries of the altar and proclaims the central moments of Jesus’s life: his birth, entry into Jerusalem, the Last Supper, his trial, crucifixion, the lamentation of angels over the dead Christ, burial, Resurrection, and Pentecost. Consistent with what Jay Dolan has described as the “siege mentality” of the Romanized Catholic Church in America throughout the nineteenth century, the image suggests that the church is a fortress protected by faithful rulers and the unbroken line of papal authority going back to Christ. The centrality of the magisterium and clerical authority could not be clearer.76

FIGURE 42

August Hoen, Der ewig stehende Fels der Römisch Katholischen Kirche (The Eternal Rock of the Roman Catholic Church), lithograph (Baltimore: F. Schummer and Co., 1872). Courtesy of Library of Congress.

While Pius IX and some of his successors opposed the modern conception of the sovereign nation, with its clear distinction between church and state, many American Catholics were able to imagine a happier relationship between American democracy and the church. Though republican Catholicism was a thing of the early national past, there were Catholic intellectuals like William George Read who saw religious liberty as a Catholic heritage and could see Catholicism as belonging to the American landscape of cultural ideals. A visual example of this stance is Fr. Raphael Pfisterer’s mural, Mary Immaculate, Patroness of the United States, painted in the Church of St. Francis Xavier in Buffalo, New York in 1920 (figure 43).⁷⁷

FIGURE 43

Father Raphael Pfisterer, OSB, Mary Immaculate, Patroness of North America, in St. Francis Xavier Church, Buffalo, NY, 1920. Courtesy of Buffalo Religious Arts Center, Buffalo.

To either side of Our Lady appears, on the left, the Capitol building, and on the right, the future National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, whose tower slightly exceeds in height the cupola of the Capitol’s dome. It was an imagined juxtaposition, since the shrine is in fact several miles from the Capitol. Yet their proximity and symmetry in the image, arrayed beneath each benedictional hand of Our Lady, clearly indicates both their sympathy and their parity. A pope affirms the Virgin and a gathering of Native Americans at her feet acknowledge the protection of Our Lady. The imagery is historically resonant. The presence of Native Americans recalls the theme, sounded by Read and others in the nineteenth century, of the benevolence of the first Catholics in America toward the native inhabitants.78 The reproduction of Pfisterer’s image in a brochure promoting the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in 1920 suited the vision of the diversity of the Catholic faith espoused by the shrine’s planners.⁷⁹ Whereas contemporary Protestants admired in Boughton’s painting the drama of armed Puritans poised for attack from hostile “savages” (see figure 39), devotees of the Immaculate Conception celebrated the docility of Native Americans. With the American flag spread below her, Mary’s presence also echoes the founding of the colony of Maryland in honor of the Feast of the Annunciation. In that context, the flanking church and government buildings might even be taken to refer to the Maryland Toleration Act of 1649, which mandated freedom of religion for all Trinitarian Christians, a configuration of church and state that Calvert, sponsor of the first settlers in Maryland, wished to install there to prevent the episodes of persecution that plagued Catholic and Protestant alike in sixteenth and seventeenth-century England. The image suggests that benevolent establishment of Catholicism on American soil, distinguishing it from the aggressive Romanism of the Schummer lithograph (see figure 42). The faith is not, Pfisterer’s image argues, inimical toward democracy. Nation and Mother of God bear a special relationship: the cloud of her glory is gathered up in the American flag below her. Emblems of the forty-eight states surround the scene. The implication is that the cohesive force bringing the nation together is Mary. The nation, represented by the gathered people, but especially by the flag that is used to receive her glory, is like a vessel in which her grace is contained.

The idea of nationhood as a modern vessel, a medium of revelation fashioned to contain a new dispensation of an ancient truth, also shaped Black nationalism among Christians and Muslims in the twentieth century. Imagining a diasporic nation of wayward sons and daughters of Africa, cast to the winds by the long industry of the slave trade, became a powerful way out of centuries of enslavement, enslaved mentality, and social inferiority for many Blacks in the Western hemisphere. Whether it consisted of creating a separate and sovereign state, liberating Africa from colonial rule and mentality, or transforming one’s consciousness from a state of racial inferiority to a celebration of international Black culture and history, Blacks in the Caribbean and the United States, from W.E.B. DuBois and Marcus Garvey to Elijah Muhammad, encouraged generations to think beyond their citizenship in a dominant white nation.⁸⁰ For Black nationalists, the logic of nationhood proposed an irreducible polity, able to actualize the inherent liberties and possibilities of a people racially defined. Religiously, nationhood was the medium of divine intention or providence, the communal form for experiencing covenant or promise between a race and a deity. Modeled on the Hebrew Bible’s conception of Israel’s relation to Yahweh, Black nationalism, whether Christian or Muslim, understood race and religion as the indispensable ingredients of national identity and political self-determination. “The Negro,” wrote Marcus Garvey in his “Appeal to the Conscience of the Black Race to See Itself” (1923), “needs a nation and a country of his own, where he can best show evidence of his own ability in the art of human progress. Scattered as an unmixed and unrecognized part of alien nations and civilizations is but to demonstrate his imbecility, and points him out as an unworthy derelict, fit neither for the society of Greek, Jew nor Gentile.”81 To this end, Garvey founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in 1914, dedicating it, as he wrote a few years later in his newspaper, The Negro World, “to champion Negro nationhood by redemption of Africa.”⁸² Included in the organization’s aims was the desire “to promote a conscientious Christian worship among the native tribes of Africa.”⁸³ Dedicated to working “for our racial salvation,” the UNIA was a fraternal organization that aimed at practicing the American ideal of self-reliance. In his “Appeal,” Garvey embraced a Social Darwinism, boldly declaring that “the best of a race does not live on the patronage and philanthropy of others, but makes an effort to do for itself. The best of the great white race doesn’t fawn before and beg black, brown or yellow men; they go out, create for self and thus demonstrate the fitness of the race to survive.”⁸⁴ Garvey employed the religious trope of “racial salvation” in service to a secular rhetoric, suggesting that races around the world formed a competitive social system in which nationhood was the principal measure of progress. Without a discrete nation, Blacks could not better themselves and show their improvement. Yet Garvey also understood nation in the religious terms of salvation. Rather than requiring all Blacks to return to Africa, the UNIA regarded Africa as a topos, a cultural ideal to which people might return imaginatively, on spiritual pilgrimage, recognizing thereby their lost unity. Nationhood was therefore the means of envisioning a social redemption of the race. To imagine belonging to a Black nation was the critical visual move toward realizing it.

The relationship of religion and American political ideals continues to be variously construed. One religious group that has defined itself by grounding its religious ideology in American geography and nationhood is the Mormons, or Latter-day Saints (LDS), whose founder, Joseph Smith, believed them to be God’s chosen people. Neither Catholic nor Protestant, but in their own understanding quite Christian, the Mormons have charted a national story that redeploys the Bible in a national imagination that aligns the future of God’s people with an ancient past. In this history, Jesus came to preach to a wayward tribe of Israel in North America, then warfare resulted in the transcription of sacred scriptures, which were buried and revealed to Smith in the 1820s. It is not difficult to recognize a powerful connection between American nationhood and the Latter-day Saints, especially as configured around the person of Jesus in a fascinating painting by the contemporary LDS artist Jon McNaughton (plate 8). One Nation Under God is a picture fraught with doctrine and a sense of urgency, in what amounts to a homiletic occasion. Jesus stands at the center of a large gathering of Americans from past and present, holding the American Constitution. McNaughton states on his website that the Constitution was “inspired” by God, and the title of his painting endorses the claim dear to many that the United States is a Christian nation, a nation “under God.”85

In this painting, Jesus’s white tunic bears the golden silhouette of what the artist identifies as the “Tree of Life,” whose seven branches signify the seven dispensations of time, an official teaching of the Latter-day Saints.⁸⁶ His golden robe recalls the gilt statuary of the Angel Moroni, who perches on the steeples of many LDS temples around the world. Moroni, ancient Nephite prophet, was the son of Mormon and final author of the Book of Mormon. Before dying, he hid the sacred texts, recorded on golden plates, and returned as an angel centuries later to reveal their location to Smith. In McNaughton’s painting, Jesus displays the U.S. Constitution in order to remind Americans about its divine inspiration and the sacred nature of their nation, which the artist adamantly believes that Americans have forgotten. McNaughton’s painting may also function as a restaging of Christianity’s Last Judgment, showing the end of history on American soil? Mormonism was framed by its founder as an eschatological faith, arising at the end of time to complete God’s dispensational plans. The painting’s apocalyptic sorting of righteous and wicked to either side of the postresurrection Jesus (the nail mark is visible on the back of his hand) suggests the Last Judgment. Yet there is no hint of apocalyptic destruction. Rather, the image is a warning. The picture intones its message in the tradition of the American jeremiad: the nation must repented its sins and return to God’s providential plan for his chosen people, the new Israel.⁸⁷ McNaughton uses the motif of the Last Judgment and the scenography of a history painting to suggest that Jesus is vindicating the Constitution as well as affirming American history’s saints and martyrs. He condemns liberals—the professors, judges, lawyers, journalists, and Hollywood producers who hijacked America (all carefully identified and explained at the artist’s website)—and he extols those who have struggled to keep the faith: the schoolteachers, farmers, hardworking immigrants, mothers, doctors, and soldiers. It is they who recognize Christ’s hand in and on the Constitution. But the damned are not persuaded. Only the judge clasps his face in remorse, having cast aside the stack of papers, which represent, McNaughton’s text explains, decisions that eroded the Constitution’s original intent by according increased power to the Supreme Court and an “activist” judiciary.

McNaughton’s painting echoes the conservative politics of many Evangelicals in the United States who regret the loss of what they consider the nation’s originally Christian ethos. But ethos is a vague word. On the one hand, there is nothing in the Constitution to suggest that it was intended to promote Christianity or belief in God, though most of its signers believed in one. On the other hand, the separation of church and state is neither a simple nor an accurate description of the long relationship between the two in American history. The fact that “under God” remains on American money and in the Pledge of Allegiance (inserted during the 1950s, in Cold War opposition to “godless Communism”), that American presidents typically take the Oath of Office with one hand on the Bible and end their speeches by calling on God to bless America, and that sessions of Congress open with prayer by a Jewish or Christian chaplain, are all evidence that religion remains a fundamental ingredient in the national imaginary, and will continue to do so, however problematic and contested it may appear to many Americans. Nationhood and Christendom do not easily disentangle.