Summer is my least favourite season. Autumn is cooling and mysterious, and I love the whole harvest theme: Michaelmas, Columbus Day, Halloween, All Saints, All Souls, Martinmas and Remembrance/Veteran’s/Armistice Day, and the two Thanksgivings (Canadian and American) are a delight. Winter is wonderful – with Advent, Christmas, New Year’s, Epiphany, Candlemas, and Mardi-Gras. Spring emerges in temperate climes with a fixed succession: new flowers, then Lent, and finally Easter. But summer – other than those years when Easter comes late and forces Corpus Christi into June – has a paucity of major Church festivals, save St John’s Day. Beyond that, there is heat.
And, yet, there are attractions to the season. Resorts, memories of seersucker suits and boater hats (and sometimes not mere memories), lemonade and iced tea, barbecues, shore dinners, salads and chilled white wines – all of these are part of the summer experience. But for the American, crowning and including them all, is Independence Day. The Fourth of July, with its parades and – above all – fireworks, is our annual celebration of these 50 United States. Traditionally, it has been the central festival of our national religion of Americanism.
This American Civil Religion was very deliberately created to take the place of a shared religion (which neither the Founders nor those they brought into independence had) and allegiance to the king (which those same gentlemen had done away with). Its authors were those such as Noah Webster (who also created the unique spelling of the “American Language”). Anchored in a shared moral consensus, it provided the animating philosophy for the country – and, in keeping with standard religious history, spawned one heresy/schism: the “Lost Cause of the Confederacy”. That the two managed to co-exist until fairly recently is a testimony to our national flexibility.
But “fairly recently” is the operative term. This faith we celebrate on Independence Day was that of the country of my birth and youth: of the American Legion, the Elks, the Knights of Columbus, the Boy Scouts, the Rotary and Kiwanis, of Irving Berlin and Norman Rockwell. But the moral consensus upon which the whole unsteady mix depended collapsed in the 1960s and has not been replaced. The result, as any 2016 Presidential Election map – by precinct, rather than state or county – can show you, is the creation of two distinct countries. One is primarily urban with rural islands, inhabited by elites and the various underclasses to whom they promise the moon. The other is primarily rural, smalltown or suburban, hugely diverse, and more united by what they reject than what they favour. To the degree that they control the machinery of society, said elites have done their best to repurpose the American religion – while destroying elements with which they disagree (like Columbus) and attacking symbols of the Confederate faith. There shall no doubt be a reaction to all of this at some point – and who can say where it will end?
All of this, however, was predicted long ago by a man named Orestes Brownson (1803-1876). In his youth a Transcendentalist, Brownson was intimate with many of the formers of the nascent American mind: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, the Alcotts, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and many more. Yet this most Yankee of Yankees converted to Catholicism. In doing so, he lost friends – but believed he had gained the hope of Salvation. He also gained a great deal of insight.
As with Chesterton, Brownson left behind a huge body of work – which as with GKC well repays closer examination. But we mention here one, an 1845 essay entitled “Catholicity Necessary to Sustain Popular Liberty”, in which Brownson begins by declaring that the Constitution created a republic, which has been succeeded by a democracy. “No man, who is not prepared to play the demagogue, to stoop to flatter the people, and, in one direction or another, to exaggerate the democratic tendency, can receive the nomination for an important office, or have influence in public affairs.” As a result, “Your most important offices are hereafter to be filled by third and fourth-rate men – men too insignificant to excite strong opposition, and too flexible in their principles not to be willing to take any direction [which] the caprices of the mob – or the interests of the wire-pullers of the mob – may demand.”
After concluding that what is required is a reform of the majority, Brownson looks at what might accomplish that task, and settles on Catholicism, which – pace the Generation of ’68 in clerical robes with whom we are currently saddled – stands for immutable truth, without which nothing can endure.
The essay is easily available online. Read it as part of your Independence Day celebrations. It might just be the most patriotic thing you can do this Fourth!
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