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Bonds of Affection: Civic Charity and the Making of America: Winthrop, Jefferson, and Lincoln (Religion and Politics) ReviewBonds of Affection: Civic Charity and the American Founding
Professor Matthew Holland has written a book with a great back cover filled with the effusive praise of well known political thinkers. The inside is even better.
He takes seriously both tablets of biblical religion (the vertical love of God and the horizontal love of neighbor) and proposes that American civic life is best understood as a form of this Christian love. He understands the Greeks but he is no Greek. With most thinkers, he does not find eros in political life but neither does he build civic bonds on the philia of fraternal friendship. When he says civic charity he means a civic life animated by agape-that distinctive Christian love that "includes concern for another's standing before God even when others mean us harm." This of course has implications for how we treat our enemies and our fellow citizens. Does this make Holland a hopeless romantic pacifist -not a serious player in an age of war? Conservative Robert Kaplan has written a book called Warrior Politics: why leadership demands a pagan ethos. Liberal Mike Nichols has made a movie-Charlie Wilson's War showing the continuing James Bond fantasy of the irreligious patriot warrior who kills the bad guys while hot tubbing with eager female flesh. Both of these writers are insulting and dismissive of the capacity of a full Christian ethic to deal with either the desires of a man's loins in lust or the demands of his chest in war. Not so in Mr. Holland's opus.
Holland finds agape informing the language and political goals of American leaders for two centuries by studying several key authors and texts: John Winthrop(1630-A Model of Christian Charity); Thomas Jefferson(rough draft of the Declaration of Independence-1776 and his First Inaugural Address-1801); and Abraham Lincoln(Second Inaugural-1865). Holland takes seriously Christian charity as a realistic way to deal with public life. He convincingly argues that for both Lincoln and Jefferson it was the realistic crucible of office which forged a deeper sensibility of the necessity of the bonds of charity in civic life. Holland's treatment of Jefferson is especially careful. Holland does not play the Christian alchemist turning Enlightenment rights into Christian love but he reminds us that even the most rights oriented of Jefferson's writings ends with a bond -"we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor." Holland reminds us this was no idle pledge. To secure that bond one percent of Americans lost their lives.
If Holland finds "bonds to the death" where others only found rights, he also finds analogical political forms in the New Testament where others tend to look for political narrative in the Old Testament alone. He quite rightly locates the sacrificial duties of soldiers in a pivotal moment in the Christian narrative-Christ's Last Supper when he commands mimesis and then sets out to lay down his life for his friends. Christian military men have always seen this obvious link--political scientists almost never do. This is one of the great strengths of the book that Holland is both attentive to religious sensibilities and appreciative of military sacrifice. In fact quite unlike the pagan warrior crowd he shows that the patriotism of soldiers and the sacrificial love of agape are interlocking constituents of civic charity.
This is really a great book (did I say that before?). Here are four important ideas I learned and four pleasant surprises. I may have heard variants on these ideas before but Holland's charity theme clarifies and deepens the political union of men as fellow citizens.
Ideas
1) All men possess rights but the point is to exercise them. This can only be done if we secure rights and this is done by entering into a bond of agreement-for this we institute governments. No agreement- no rights. No civic love- no individual liberty. Possessing rights might be universal but exercising rights only occurs where rights have been secured by forming a real government in some time and place. Because of evil in the world this can only happen when men pledge their lives to protect these liberties. This is not a contract calculation by an individual but an entry into a community od shared affections pledging personal honor and lives to each other and a new corporate entity.
2) Secular tyranny does not fear religion because it separates people but because it might unite us. Holland taught this by reminding us of de Tocqueville's insight-"a despot will forgive his subjects that they do not love him as long as they do not love each other."
3) Lincoln's speech to the young men in the Lyceum was about giving up hatred and passions by living inside the law. Men must be united by civic affection to governance as well as each other. I was newly struck in that speech (I have read it at least twice before) how much Lincoln felt he had to deal with men's hatred. Thus his language is built on authority and affection more than rights. At the Lyceum, Holland emphasizes that Lincoln does not sooth but is demanding of the assembled young men. See the brave acts of the ancestors--you benefit from this but as of yet you have done nothing to continue their work. (If only leaders especially so called conservatives would so speak to young men at our elite universities and think tanks with such demmands).
4) Here is Holland's eloquent description of political prudence in Lincoln: "To do this effectively meant for Lincoln assiduously gathering facts, contemplating history, anticipating implication, working out an argument against its best counterattack, and allowing time, circumstance, public promotion and private negotiation to settle things into a workable solution. His self chosen metaphor was pilots on a western river who knew they wanted to get downstream but only steered from point to point as they could see which was often not far."
Surprises:
1)) the role of Benjamin Rush in the continuing education of Thomas Jefferson and reconciliation of Jefferson and Adams.
2) A powerful and sympathetic treatment of the much neglected most important novel in American history-Uncle Tom's Cabin. This neglect is not because Uncle Tom is too shuffling-he is magnificently heroic for all to see. Holland helps rescue this classic of American literature and Christian love.
3) The crucial glue of civic friendship is first thickened by the brotherly love felt so deeply on the battlefield. Holland quotes from Washington's retirement from military service--"God ...would incline the hearts of citizens to entertain a brotherly affection and love for one another for their fellow citizens of the United States at large and particularly for their brethren who have served in the field. And finally that this would dispose us all to demean ourselves with that charity, humility and pacific temper of the Divine Author of our blessed religion..."
4) Lincoln's Gettysburg address is more than an extension of rights to a new class of people--though it is that. The language of a new birth of freedom which shall not perish and links the lives of the living to those who died for us is more biblical than enlightenment. As Holland says , "there are.. numerous images of life and death...and of giving life by sacrificing life. This apologue of birth/death/rebirth is one marbled throughout western culture , though it does not find expression in most versions of philosophical liberalism that raise the rights of individuals to a social intellectual position of unchallenged predominance. Rather such imagery finds its most vivid expression in the Bible where there reigns a continuing metaphysic of new and eternal life replacing old and mortal life... and where charity's highest call..asks one to lay down one's life for ones friends, notably modeled in the atoning sacrifice of Jesus Christ... "
Books
Finally, four books I would recommend to those who follow Holland's argument and believe this crucial language and virtue would deeply enrich our present public discourse. None of these books deal with charity in the manner of Holland's unique contribution but they buttress the thrust of his argument.
Stone of Hope by an atheist David Chappell about the triumph of biblical prophetic religion igniting the mid twentieth century civil rights movement. As Chappell says, it wasn't John Dewey progressives that ended racial segregation--it was a movement much more demanding, personal and God centered. American Providence by Stephen Webb -another writer who treats God as a living Being with real consequence in the life of the nation. Like Holland he treats neither God nor religion as a philosophical conclusion, utilitarian symbol or set of ethical principles.
Americanism: the fourth great western religion by David Gelernter calling for a return to the biblical narrative as the fundamental American political text.
The next work by Matthew Holland.
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