Faith of Our Fathers

PURITANISM AND DEMOCRACY--Ralph Barton Perry--Vanguard ($5).

What is America? What does it mean to be an American? What is the essential faith of America? Today, by their very presence on distant battlefields, Americans raise these questions anew. This closely reasoned, lucid, lengthy (688-page) book is an effort to provide an answer. The work of a distinguished 68-year-old Harvard philosophy professor (whose Thought and Character of William James was a Pulitzer Prizewinner in 1935), it is a rigorous scrutiny of the foundations of American belief.

The Challenge. Today, says Philosopher Perry, the faith of our fathers has been challenged in every particular. History has been rewritten. Instead of a picture of heroic achievement it has become a study of capitalism in America--in which, if capitalism was questioned, so was Americanism. The profound Christianity of the early Americans has waned: not only are more Americans without religious adherence, but there is also a wavering and thinning of faith among church members. Moreover, it is now argued that human affairs are governed by passions, blind drives, fears or needs, "while rational purposes, moral codes, and philosophies are a mere facade behind which these more primitive and less reputable impulsions do their work."

Professor Perry believes that the ideas and ideals of America's founders are not obsolete in 1944. He believes with Stanford's Elton Trueblood (The Invention of America) that "the invention of America was more .important than the discovery of America." His purpose is to reconstruct the thought of the Puritans, to show its embodiment in American institutions, American government, American democracy. If writing can be "insipid with veracity," he says, "I am willing to be as insipid as necessary in order to be as veracious as possible. ... It is part of my purpose to rebuke cynics and satirists, but in so doing I cannot hope to be equally entertaining."

Moral Athletes. The essential faith of America came into being in the cold, clearheaded, spacious world of Puritan New England. Authoritarian though theocracy was, moral martinets though they sometimes became, the Puritans sailed their ships into the open seas. They cultivated their moral strength like athletes training, and they used that strength out of doors, in the world, as statesmen and soldiers. "We are still drawing upon the reserves of spiritual vigor which they accumulated."

Under the snowy New England skies, surrounded by illimitable forests, the Puritans found the meaning of life in the love of God. They did not frown upon card-playing, dancing, flashy clothes and the sexual appetite as evils in themselves, but because the love of God permitted no rivalry. They affirmed the doctrine of human depravity. But it remained for the 20th Century, uncovering the raw materials and forces of human life and making a cult of the uncovering ("as though there were some virtue in returning from modern plumbing to surface drainage"), to reaffirm the doctrine of human depravity without a gospel of redemption.

The Opposites. Professor Perry's conclusion: "The chief source of spiritual nourishment for any nation must be its own past, perpetually rediscovered and renewed. ... He who would reject these ideas [of puritanism and democracy] must be prepared to accept in some degree one or more of their opposites: a frivolous disregard of moral questions, together with aimlessness and inconstancy; a confusion or a promiscuity of values; a blurring of moral distinctions, and a lack of principle; a shallow optimism or a complacent self-satisfaction, bred by the ignorance or the condoning of evil . . . a reckless irresponsibility and indifference to the true well-being of one's neighbors; a cynical admission of failure, and acquiescence in the meaninglessness of life "

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