GOD'S COUNTRY

When in the course of divine events God saw fit to punish his wayward New
Englanders in the 17th century, he sent them drought, disease, crop
failure, Baptists, Quakers and, of course, "barbarous heathens," whom we
now politely call Native Americans.

And the New Englanders, being hip to the ways of the Lord, knew exactly why
they were being punished. "Children and servants . . . are not kept in due
subjugation," pointed out a 1679 synod of ministers. 'Christians . . . have
become too like unto the Indians" -- wild clothes, immodest displays of
flesh, adultery, the works. Family values were in abeyance. "Most of the
evils that abound amongst us, proceed from defects as to family
government," the synod explained.

More than three centuries later, apparently we still haven't learned. When
thousands of Americans lost their lives in terrorist attacks on Sept. 11,
2001, the Rev. Jerry Falwell knew exactly why.

"The abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will
not be mocked," he said. Pagans, feminists, gays and lesbians -- "I point
the finger in their face and say 'You helped this happen.' "

The idea that God takes a personal interest in local affairs is hardly
unique. Indeed, the notion that there is a covenant between us and the
deity is at the heart of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic-Western tradition. But
other nations grew, in a haphazard, organic way. We were founded, and
founded by people who had a very specific goal: to get it right. "We must
consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill, the eyes of all people are
upon us," said John Winthrop, governor of what became the Massachusetts Bay
Colony, while still at sea.

And from that mindset flows practically everything that has followed,
argues James A. Morone, a political science professor at Brown University.
It has long been a commonplace that American moral attitudes somehow,
despite growth, change, education, immigration and the Internet, derive
from our Puritan ancestors.

But Morone goes farther. Surveying American history -- from the decks of
Winthrop's flagship, the Arbella, to the crumbling towers of the World
Trade Center -- he sees a nation continually driven by moral fervor,
advancing in an almost Hegelian way from crusade to backwash to synthesis
to the next crusade.

I admit to a certain fascination with unified field theories of history,
such as last year's intricate and compelling "Measuring America," in which
Andro Linklater finds "the promise of democracy" in the surveyor's
measuring chain invented by Edmund Gunter in 1607.

But Morone's book is especially persuasive.

It explains almost everything: why we prefer to ban rather than to
regulate, why we throw rocks at economists in Seattle, why the Vietnam War
had to be opposed as evil rather than merely stupid, why the jeremiad is
the theme song of right-wing talk radio (and why talk radio is right-wing,
for that matter), and so on, right down to why public comment at local
school board meetings often focuses on the presumed mendacity of officials.

We're not good at understanding systems; we prefer personalities. On the
larger scale, that inadequacy is played out in the supremacy of the gospel
of individual responsibility -- if you're poor, it's your own fault -- over
what Morone calls the social gospel -- if you're poor, it's society's
fault, and how can we help?

Moral conflicts -- "slavery, purity, the rise and fall of liquor
prohibition -- rarely got resolved by splitting differences," he writes.
"The partisans stuck to their sides. Instead, shifts in the larger
political economy pushed the old debate into a new framework."

Thus, free-labor Republicans in the mid-19th century melded the fiercely
moralistic debate over slavery into a new economic vision and, later, the
Hoover administration wedded its economic vision to Prohibition -- a
blunder that allowed the Depression to make both Hoover and Prohibition
irrelevant.

Interwoven with our moral obsessions has been a persistently Manichaean
vision of a world divided: between us and them, men and women, black and
white, patriots and traitors. Those who disagree with us are not merely
damned fools, but damned. As one preacher put it not long ago: America --
"You're either for her or against her. There is no middle ground." As it
happens, the preacher was country musician Charlie Daniels, but John
Winthrop couldn't have put it better.

For the Puritans, them quickly became anyone who disagreed with the elders
theologically or (the two were basically the same) politically. A man's
inability to "crucifie his lusts" made him an enemy. Without self-control,
a man was nothing but an Indian.

As for women -- well! Sex and gender wind through American history, as
Morone tells it, as prominently as race and class do. The Puritans insisted
they were hanging Anne Hutchinson for preaching heresy, but her real crime
was having the temerity to preach at all. And once they started looking
into her religious beliefs, which seem pretty orthodox from our
perspective, they were able to see with perfect clarity that she was not
merely wrong but evil. Sound familiar?

The abolitionist movement was bitterly divided over the gender issue. It
was all very well for women to oppose slavery -- women, with their higher
moral purity and tender sensibilities, were naturally shocked at the
cruelty of it all -- but that didn't mean they should be up on the platform
preaching about it. Why, who knows where such promiscuity might lead? When
Victoria Woodhull, long after the Civil War, ran for president with
Frederick Douglass, their intergender/interracial ticket brought into high
relief all the twisted strands of sex, politics and race that troubled
abolitionists in the 1840s (and conservatives in the 1960s).

As each American crusade swells like a giant wave and then subsides, it
leaves the shoreline permanently altered for the next wave that will come
along. The Post Office shocked Puritan sensibilities by delivering on
Sundays. Later, in the great purity movement of the last third of the 19th
century, the Post Office would become the nation's morals police, as
Congress passed sweeping laws about what could and could not be mailed --
and, therefore, published -- and turned their enforcement over to the
leading crusader, a former postal clerk named Anthony Comstock.

The great white-slavery scare of the early 20th century gave a fledgling
Bureau of Investigation something to do. (The bureau's first name, Federal,
came later.) The 18th amendment to the Constitution, and the Volstead Act
Congress passed to enforce it, turned the FBI into the nation's liquor
cops, and by association -- since liquor, its consumption, creation,
importation and sale and the crime waves associated therewith were the
chief evil in the land in those days -- its moral police.

It was a short step from J. Edgar Hoover's FBI to the launching of a
federal War on Drugs and the creation of a vast police bureaucracy to fight
that war, and an even shorter step from the Drug Enforcement Administration
to a Department of Homeland Security equipped with the power to hack into
e-mail systems and browse library records. Not the least of the ironies
that attend politics in modern America is the fact that those who bray the
loudest against big, intrusive government are generally those who demand
the creation of its some of its biggest and most intrusive agencies, all in
the name of what's good for us. Cotton Mather, meet John Ashcroft.

"Hellfire Nation" is long and repetitive. Morone could, I suppose, have
made his point in an essay rather than a book. But his style is lively and
his examples entertaining (how delightful to find John C. Calhoun,
historian Paul Johnson's candidate for the ablest public man America ever
produced, explaining that slavery is good for the slaves).

The book has the force of its repetitiveness. With each new detail, Morone
is able to show how this connects with that -- the First Great Awakening
with the American Revolution, the Second Great Awakening with the
abolitionist movement, the Women's Christian Temperance Union with the New
Deal -- until the reader is not just convinced of Morone's truth but
chagrined at not having thought of it himself. I will listen with new
insight to the Austin Lounge Lizards' anthem, "God Loves Me (But He Can't
Stand You)."

[SIDEBAR]

HELLFIRE NATION: The Politics of Sin in American History

By James A. Morone, Yale University Press, 576 pp., $35