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From The Times

August 4, 2006

“Americans reveal their Puritan roots whether it's in business, sex or war.”

George Walden

ANYONE WHO THINKS of American foreign policy in the Middle East as cussed,

overzealous, hot-headed and hypocritical will be unconsoled to learn that this was the kind of

thing people were saying about Puritanism and its adherents some four hundred years ago.

Like so much else in modern America, its actions abroad should be viewed through the prism

of the country’s root religion, Puritanism.

To understand its continued centrality, imagine an America with no Mayflower and no New

England. The national temperament would be less earnest, less moralistic, gentler. There

would be fewer people in jail, and no executions. There might also be fewer Republican

presidents and Bible literalists, and because a non-Puritan America would be less mesmerised

by sex and introspection, less pornography and fewer psychiatrists’ couches.

An improvement on the America we have got, you may say. But the country might also have

been less energetic, less enterprising, less rigorously democratic, less uncompromisingly

freedom- loving. A poorer, milder America would be less able to do good as well as harm in

the world. More reluctant to become engaged in Vietnam, it might also have been less

tenacious in its pursuit of the Cold War generally. It would certainly not have been in Iraq, but

that would be small comfort to its French or British critics, because a softer, non-Puritan

America might well have resulted in a Europe submerged by Hitler, Stalin, or both.

But America is what it is, a country that is still 60 per cent Protestant. This could be a handy

guide to its behaviour, except that Puritan doctrine was notoriously contradictory. All you can

be sure of is its tendency to fly to extremes. “Its theory had been discipline,” R. H. Tawney

wrote, “its practical result was liberty,” and listening to the maledictions of right-wing

evangelists on the La-La- land lifestyle you hear echoes of the same tensions. Whether the

subject is sex, business or foreign policy, never have the conflicts within America’s warring

soul been more apparent than today.

Nowhere are the paradoxes of the Puritan conscience more flagrant, or more entertaining, than

in the sexual sphere. That Hugh Hefner had a Puritan upbringing and that Alfred Kinsey’s

father was a preacher explains a lot. Now absolute sexual freedoms are demanded in the same

self-righteous spirit as the Puritans insisted on absolute repression, and the determination to

dispense with the inhibitions of the past has begun to assume the earnestness and intolerance

characteristic of the Puritan originators of their problems. “Self- realisation” (a very Puritan

concept) can be energising, or it can be a pretext for promiscuity, sexual egotism,

exhibitionism and self- indulgence.

In New England, illicit sex was repressed, but in business the sky was the limit, in many

senses. For Puritans commerce was a holy pursuit, a way of busying themselves in the world

in the hope of showing themselves as members of the elect who would be saved, rather than

as damned from birth (“losers” in modern parlance). The characteristics of pious business folk

have changed little over time. Now they are frequently church- going pillars of the community

earning their salvation through media companies that specialise in sexually risqué but

financially rewarding products or a dot-com enterprise selling God knows what.

Abstemious in their own lives, they take brief working holidays in Mexico or Montego Bay,

where their conversation is laced with laments about the drinking, drug taking and sexual

improvidence of the young and the poor. To minimise contact with “losers” they live in gated

communities, send their children to private schools and bequeath them just enough to provide

a headstart for becoming upstanding self-made men, in the image of their fathers.

Scepticism about Puritan sanctification of commerce began in the 17th century and continues

today. America has been called “the country where the Cross is only a plus sign”, and that

American employers have taken to praying with their staff, or that Ken Lay, former chairman

of Enron, rediscovered God before he died, somehow does little to remove doubts.

In foreign policy, too, the New England retrovirus remains active. Like the Puritan whose

economic self-seeking and psychic self- immersion were always in danger of divorcing him

from the more altruistic aspects of the creed, America has long oscillated unnervingly

between isolation and engagement with the world. For a people who believed that most of it

was inhabited by the Antichrist there were reasons to stay aloof. Many countries still appear

to America as backward nations whose souls it makes intermittent attempts to save, but that

often turn out to be beyond redemption.

Proclaiming itself a beacon of hope has rarely inhibited a pugnacious foreign policy, it will be

objected, but then America cannot win. If it behaves like the French and puts self- interest

cynically to the fore it is damned for selfishness. And when its actions are genuinely altruistic,

it is accused of buying the world’s favours. If there is one thing America is accused of more

frequently than imperialist interference, it is of not interfering enough.America’s Puritan

origins do much to explain why it is the maddening and exhilarating, ancient and modern,

progressive and conservative, sophisticated and simplistic, creative and destructive country it is.

It explains why it finds itself in the throes of religious revival when secularism is advancing across Europe.

At exactly the moment when their Puritan habits of thought are in crisis Americans are being enjoined

to return to their religious roots. A case not only of the cure being worse than the disease, but of the cure reviving the malady.

But that is how America is. In dealing with it, as with anywhere else, we must take account of

its national temperament. Above all we should remember that, as Alain Minc, the French historian put it, anti-Americanism is the internationalism of imbeciles.

DEVOIR II

Separation of state and church ????

Read the following text and answer the questions

When we see social needs in America, my administration will look first to faith-based programs and community groups, which has proven their power to save and change lives. We will not fund the religious activities of any group, but when people of faith provide social services, we will not discriminate against them. As long as there are secular alternatives, faith-based charities should be able to compete for funding on an equal basis and in a manner that does not cause them to sacrifice their mission.

President George W. Bush on January 29, 2001, when announcing the creation of the White House office for religion- based and community groups that perform social services.

1) Define the term “secular alternatives”

2) Isn’t G.W Bush endangering the notion of separation of state and church? Give your arguments.

3) Why do you think he created this White-House office? How does it show his pragmatism?

4) Translate the text

5) Comment on the following cartoon

( text of the caption:” Care to sign a petition to have a balanced budget as the eleventh commandment?”)