Modern Age - Fall 2014 - 21

PROMISED LAND

merce with all nations, but otherwise mind
our own business. Would such a modest
foreign policy serve the United States today
or just hasten the world's descent into chaos?
It is not my purpose to pronounce on the
relevance of the Promised Land or Crusader
State model, much less to suggest how Barack
Obama should deal with Egypt, Syria, Iran,
or China. My aim is to get the history right,
unlike those on the Left and putative Right
who contrive a "usable past" in order to push
their present agendas.

T

o get the Founding Fathers right we
must begin with their own history. For
150 years after the founding of Jamestown,
the ACR was an extension of the BCR: the
British civil religion, developed during the
tumultuous Tudor and Stuart dynasties.
First the English tamed Christianity by mak-
ing their king the head of an Anglican (not
Catholic) church. Then they tamed the mon-
archy by asserting parliamentary supremacy
in 1688. The upshot was a Protestant, Whig
commercial culture dedicated to the release
of the national energies in pursuit of wealth
and power. The BCR's patron saints included
Richard Hakluyt, Walter Raleigh, Francis
Bacon, Isaac Newton, and John Locke, and
its implicit gospel was that the kingdom of
God is of this world.2 The English baptized
themselves the providential vanguard of
human progress and then seemed to prove
it by the stunning rise of their navigation,
science, and colonization, imbued with what
I call "the four spirits of English expansion."
The first spirit was economic: a hustling
rural and commercial capitalism that taught
an ethic of self-improvement and ultimately
inspired the Scottish Enlightenment's free-
market and pursuit-of-happiness philoso-
phies. The second spirit was religious: the
Elizabethan compromise that mobilized a
broad church behind the Crown and ulti-

mately inspired the Glorious Revolution.
Under the Whig ascendancy that followed,
England became Great Britain and rose to
power and glory on the strength of a "fiscal-
military state" supported by voluntary taxes
and a floating national debt. The third spirit
was strategic: the pursuit of New World
empire that caused all those French and
Indian Wars from 1689 to 1763. The fourth
spirit was legal: the common-law judgment
that only improvement of land conferred
ownership, hence as John Locke argued in
his Second Treatise on Civil Government,
colonists had every right to dispossess indi-
gent Indians.3
Needless to say, those four spirits were bred
in the bones of the mostly Anglo-Protestant
settlers in America. But ironically, the British
Empire's climactic victory in the Seven Years
War, the conquest of Canada, tore it apart.
After 1763 the British Crown and parlia-
ment enacted reforms to appease their new
French and Indian subjects, while imposing
restrictions on the territorial and commercial
growth of their own colonists! It seemed to
Americans that they transgressed all four spirits of their expansion and became apostates
in their own church! No wonder colonial
Patriots stopped drinking the health of King
George and instead damned his eyes. They
included Presbyterians, Congregationalists,
Baptists, and low-church Anglicans newly
inflamed by the First Great Awakening, as
well as Unitarians, Deists, and Freemasons
drawn to the philosophies of the Enlighten-
ment. But whether awakened, enlightened, or
both, Americans put their lives, fortunes, and
sacred honor on the line because they believed
their liberty, self-government, free enterprise,
and expansion (that is, ideals and interests
alike) were sanctioned by the Laws of Nature
and Nature's God. The American struggle for
independence was a species of holy war.4
The American colonies had long displayed
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Modern Age - Fall 2014

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Modern Age - Fall 2014
