FA I T H A N D T H E A C A D E M Y: E N G A G I N G T H E C U LT U R E W I T H G R A C E A N D T R U T H
Lincoln appealed at Gettysburg to the blood of fallen soldiers as marking a new birth of freedom for a nation, based on its rededication to the proposition that all men are created equal. Their blood may indeed have bought, for a time, a more temperate spirit among Americans, North and South, who shared a living memory of their sacrifices. But when our historians and citizens believe the propositions of our founders were null and void, and their promissory note a fraud, what else can we conclude but that the Civil War’s dead died in vain. Others may seek to avoid reopening the endless cycle of recriminations owing to blood drawn from the lash that may not have been repaid by the sword; these may call for a resurrection of the political faith of Abraham Lincoln. But even this is not enough. Neither he nor anyone since could make the claim that the blood shed at Gettysburg fully atoned for the national sin of slavery. Instead, only the blood of Christ can atone, redeem, and heal the scourge of sin. As Christians we live under the promise of a new heaven and a new earth, in which the old order of things will pass away, and there will be no more death or mourning (Rev. 21:1-4). But we must endure, for a time, the reality of suffering in a fallen world. Part of this suffering is remaining bound in the flow of history that can never wholly be disconnected from an old order of things. At times when the burden of waiting for the fulfillment of Christ’s promise can seem unbearable, Christians may be tempted to take the radical step of attempting to hasten the coming of that new heaven and new earth — of asserting our own moral perfection and calling on the moral repudiation or condemnation of those whom we believe have fallen short. The more radical way, though, is for us all as Christians to accept our own fallenness, to accept the forgiveness of Christ, and to play our part in the work of redeeming this fallen world by forgiving one another. This is the foundation for working together, in faith, that the promises of liberty and unity are not the promises of mere men, a birthright handed down only to their own children, but are the promises of God to all His children. If these promises are to be made more real in this fallen world, it will only be through the work of Christians to transcend the law of an eye for an eye, to redeem our Constitution as a promise of the liberty and unity of all Americans, and thus to reclaim the real exceptionalism of our identity as a people called to a new covenant with one another and with God. Under this covenant the Puritans, following God’s call to build a city on a hill, believed we would
“rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, as members of the same body.” Only under this covenant can the American people “keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace.” And only then “The Lord will be our God, and delight to dwell among us, as his own people.”12
These setbacks include the denunciation of its thesis by several eminent historians, the New York Times’ own correction of one of the project’s central claims, and the revelations that the Times and the 1619 Project’s lead author rejected the advice of their own fact checkers, then surreptitiously deleted some of the Project’s claims that had fallen under public scrutiny. 1
2 Nikole Hannah-Jones, “Our democracy’s founding ideals were false when they were written. Black Americans have fought to make them true.” New York Times, October 8, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/ interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/black-history-american-democracy. html. 3 Michael Barkun, Crucible of the Millennium: The Burned-Over District of New York in the 1840s (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1986). Spencer Klaw, Without Sin: The Life and Death of the Oneida Community (New York: Penguin Books, 1993). 4 Ernest Sandeen, “John Humphrey Noyes as the New Adam,” Church History 40, no. 1 (1971), 82–90. 5 “John Humphrey Noyes to William Lloyd Garrison, March 22, 1837,” quoted in Wendell Phillips Garrison & Francis Jackson Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison: The Story of His Life, Told by His Children. Vol. II, 1835-1840 (New York: The Century Co., 1885), 145-48. 6 William Lloyd Garrison, “Fourth of July in Providence.” The Liberator, July 28, 1837. 7 Garrison and Garrison (1885), 151-2. 8 Moses Thatcher, “Address to the New England Anti-Slavery Society,” The Liberator, February 18, 1832. 9 Jason Ross, “William Lloyd Garrison’s Shattered Faith in Antislavery Constitutionalism: The Origins and Limits of the ‘Garrisonian Critique,’” American Political Thought, 9 no. 2 (Spring 2020): 199–234, https://doi.org/10.1086/708444. 10 James Oakes, The Radical and the Republican: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the Triumph of Antislavery Politics. (New York: Norton, 2007). 11 The intellectual link between Garrison and the 1619 Project is in the scholarship of historian and New Left activist Staughton Lynd. His 1965 article, “The Abolitionist Critique of the United States Constitution,” resurrected Garrison’s interpretation of the Constitution as having been intended to be pro-slavery (in The Antislavery Vanguard, ed. Martin Duberman (Princeton University Press, 1965, 209-39). Lynd later highlighted the agreement between Garrison and Noyes on the necessity of rejecting “the framework of national allegiance,” and on their introduction of teachings into the American conversation that Lynd recognized as proto-Marxist, in Intellectual Origins of American Radicalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1968), 130-38. Lynd’s work has been continued by the self-styled “neo-Garrisonian” historian David Waldstreicher, whose book Slavery’s Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification (New York: Hill and Wang, 2009) is directly quoted in the 1619 Project’s lead essay. Waldstreicher has celebrated Lynd’s work in print, and the two have co-authored multiple articles. 12 John Winthrop, “A Modell of Christian Charity,” Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society (Boston, 1838), 3rd Series, Vol. VII, 47.
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