The name of Horace
Bushnell (1802–1876) was so well known in nineteenth–century America that when
residents of Hartford, Connecticut, visited other cities they were often greeted
with, “Do you know Horace Bushnell?” Bushnell, pastor of Hartford’s Congregational
North Church from 1833 to 1859, was a towering figure in mainline Protestantism
at a time when it played a central role in shaping American culture. Yet today,
outside the field of American religious history, few Americans would recognize
the name. This is not simply because Americans have lost track of their cultural
heritage. Bushnell was a contemporary of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Theodore Parker,
and Orestes Brownson, who, like Bushnell, were central figures in American religion,
and those names still register at least some response.
Why has Bushnell
become so obscure? In reading Robert Bruce Mullin’s biography of Bushnell, The
Puritan as Yankee, we find some clues to an answer, and, more importantly,
get a panoramic glimpse of American Protestantism during a period of rapid transition.
Mullin’s is the latest of many Bushnell biographies since the first, by his
daughter, Mary Bushnell Cheney, in 1880. Robert L. Edwards’ 1992 biography is
perhaps the most readable of them, but Mullin’s serviceable prose does a better
job of helping us see the unifying themes in Bushnell’s life and work.
His title sums
up Mullin’s characterization of Bushnell’s lifetime project: to preserve Puritan
core beliefs while reworking them to make them more palatable to the liberal
heirs of Puritanism, particularly the Unitarians. A recurring trope in the book
is Bushnell as Yankee “tinkerer.” The label applies quite literally to Bushnell,
who held two U.S. patents on home heating devices, entered into contemporary
debates on the best means of ship propulsion, and inspired the creation of Hartford’s
city park (now Bushnell Park).
But what most
interests Mullin is the kind of doctrinal tinkering Bushnell did with the mainline
Protestantism of his time and place. Orthodox Calvinists, who held to the central
doctrines of Reformed Christianity—predestination, God’s inscrutability, man’s
depravity—were battling the Unitarians, who rejected not only these hard and
perhaps harsh inflections of Christian doctrine but also essential elements
of orthodox Christian belief. Then there were evangelicals, Baptists and Methodists
mainly, whose doctrines could be Calvinist or Arminian, but who were mainly
distinguished by their emphasis on the “conversion experience,” the dramatic,
emotional moment when the sinner becomes a Christian. Finally, there was a renewed
interest in Anglicanism, renamed Episcopalianism, which was becoming fashionable
among the upward–bound.
Bushnell had
little use for Anglicanism, which he considered reactionary and un–American,
but among other sects he hoped to find some common ground. Unfortunately for
Bushnell, his way of seeking commonality was not appreciated by some prominent
Congregationalists, who charged him with heresy. In 1849 he was tried before
the Hartford Central Association of Ministers, and, though acquitted by an overwhelming
majority, was all but shunned by other Congregationalist ministers in Connecticut,
who wouldn’t let him preach at their churches. Only in his later years, when
doctrinal differences no longer excited much passion among Congregationalists,
was he readmitted to full fellowship.
What got him
into trouble was a book he published at the beginning of 1849, God in Christ.
In the book it was apparent that Bushnell’s method of bridging doctrinal differences
was to denigrate all doctrine. Bushnell regarded “dogma” as the enemy of religion.
It crept into Christianity by way of “Greek learning” (“Nothing met the Greek
mind which was not doctrine”) and ossified it, turning it into a collection
of sterile formulas and definitions. A person of true genius, Bushnell suggested,
understands that definitions can never be hard and fast. Only an “uninspired,
unfructifying logicker” insists on definitional precision and logical consistency.
Years earlier,
Mullin notes, Bushnell had discovered the work of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and
from that point, much of what he wrote paralleled the great Romantic poet’s
dismissal of “reason” for a broader, faith–based “understanding.” By the end
of God in Christ Bushnell was suggesting that religion can’t be presented
“in the form of logic or in speculative propositions” because it is inherently
“poetic, addressing itself to the imagination, in distinction from the understanding
. . . a matter of feeling, addressing itself to the esthetic power in the soul.”
Not that he wanted “to abolish all our platforms and articles, and embrace every
person who pretends to be a disciple.” All he wanted was “to relax, in a gradual
manner, the exact and literal interpretation of our standards; to lean more
and more . . . towards the side of accommodation, or easy construction.”
To many of the
orthodox, Bushnell’s “accommodation” and “easy construction” sounded very much
like an anything–goes approach to theology, and despite his assurance that “‘unity
of the Spirit’ will suffice, without any human formulas, to preserve the purity
of the church,” his ecumenical project ended in failure. Mullin notes that “Unitarianism
and orthodoxy were no closer now than they had been before, and the orthodox
seemed even more divided than they had been.”
In terms of doctrine,
Mullin’s characterization of Bushnell as a “Puritan” seems inappropriate. The
original Puritans, the preachers and teachers of old New England, would never
have dismissed doctrine as unimportant or “unfructifying.” The Puritans entered
into very intense arguments over doctrine, convinced, as they were, that their
very salvation depended on getting it right. Not one of them would ever characterize
religion as primarily “a matter of feeling.” Jonathan Edwards, whom some consider
to be an eighteenth–century Puritan, did have a place for “religious affections,”
but Edwards argued his case systematically, combining Lockean epistemology and
Pauline soteriology. We can agree or disagree with Edwards but at least we have
an argument in front of us. With Bushnell we get what Mullin, after struggling
at length to find some clarity in one of his treatises, ends up calling a “gospel
of opaqueness.”
After his failed
attempt at ecumenism, and in declining health, Bushnell embarked upon a series
of restorative travels. He spent the winter of 1856–57 in California, where
he enjoyed the climate but deplored the “barbarism” of the region. Whatever
his doctrinal departures from orthodox Puritanism, there remained some psychological
remnant of it in his temperament: he was horrified by lawlessness and disorder.
Years earlier he had preached against “the law of the bowie knife” in the old
Southwest; now, in his “Sermon for California,” he declared that Californians
could either continue down the path of lawlessness or adopt a set of values
that stressed community, education, law, and industry. “Like John Winthrop on
the Arbella in Boston harbor 224 years earlier,” Mullin writes, “Bushnell
offered a choice. Which would they follow?”
The California
trip seemed to mark a turning point in Bushnell’s life. Over the next decade
his passion for order and moral authority began moving him in an increasingly
conservative direction. He hated slavery but was put off by the “indiscriminate
raving” of abolitionists. He entertained dreams of gradual emancipation (prompting
Mullin to sarcasm: “It required no revolution or sacrifice, just a bit of tinkering”).
When the Civil War came, Bushnell became an ardent supporter of Lincoln, but
on the basis of a rather different social philosophy. For Lincoln, the Declaration
of Independence was America’s grand moral charter, but Bushnell regarded it
as a dangerously abstract document whose logical outcome was John C. Calhoun’s
doctrine of nullification.
By the war’s
end he had begun to envisage the nation in organic terms, emphasizing the importance
of loyalty and “public devotion.” Bushnell’s accommodationist, “easy” brand
of Christianity, which seemed so controversially liberal in his 1849 book, was
now pretty tame stuff. The cultural changes that had swept over liberal Protestantism
in the 1860s, which included the influences of Darwin and the German “historical”
schools, recalibrated the scale of “right” to “left” among the heirs of Puritanism.
The center had moved left, and the left, represented by Unitarianism, had moved
to a point where it was no longer Christian in any particular sense.
Bushnell’s theology,
which once pushed the envelope of liberal Protestantism, no longer created much
controversy. In any case, what worried him most now was not “dogma” but the
increasing egalitarianism of American society, or at least certain forms of
it. One of his last books was entitled Women’s Suffrage: The Reform Against
Nature. Bushnell favored women’s higher education and participation in professions
such as medicine and law (though he insisted that a woman should not be a trial
lawyer because “she is not wicked enough”). But only the abstract individualism
of the Enlightenment—the same doctrine that he had earlier attributed to Jefferson
and Calhoun—could have led anyone to think that a woman, born for nurturing
and love, could belong in the vulgar world of politics.
At his death
Bushnell was remembered not for these cranky social views but for his contribution
to the liberalization of American Protestantism. His early attempt to tinker
with orthodoxy just enough to get it in line with liberalism was now more or
less irrelevant. The liberalism of 1849 had moved too far by 1876 to be reconciled
with any kind of orthodoxy. So it was largely for his negative work of discrediting
the latter for which he was hailed. Mullin regards Bushnell as something of
a pioneer “who opened the wilderness, but left few lasting physical marks,”
leaving it for later generations to “replace the rude cabins and mud trails
. . . with fine buildings and great highways.”
It is an odd
simile, and not very flattering. People who dedicate their lives to preaching
and writing generally hope to leave behind more than “rude cabins and mud trails.”
As for those later “fine buildings” of liberal Protestantism, where are they
now? “Great highways,” indeed, there were, but people travel highways to arrive
someplace. Where did liberal Protestantism go, and did it ever arrive?
Whether or not
these questions can ever be answered, they do suggest an answer to the question
I posed at the beginning: Why is it that we are more likely to recognize the
names of Emerson, Parker, and Brownson than that of Bushnell? One of the reasons
we remember Emerson and Parker is that they finally arrived: they converted
from Christianity into a pantheistic religion of “nature.” So, in the opposite
direction, did Brownson when he converted from Transcendentalism to Catholicism.
But Bushnell rode the mainstream, even a little ahead of it at first, until,
in the end, it moved too fast for him. The pioneer was left in the wilderness.
George McKenna is Professor of
Political Science at City College of New York and coeditor of Taking Sides:
Clashing Views on Controversial Political Issues (2003).
