Theodore Roosevelt may have called him a “filthy little atheist,” but Tom Paine’s pamphlet “Common Sense” got right to the heart of the American world view. Common sense is more than a political slogan in the United States; a belief in common sense is basic to democracy as we think of it here in this country. Americans generally believe that the common people are sensible and that the most important truths are common to everybody. The basic wisdom needed to navigate the world isn’t hidden away among small groups of experts and aristocrats; every person is gifted with a basic ability to calculate his or her own interest, understand basic religious and ethical truths, and form an educated opinion about the issues facing the community.
A strong belief in common sense was a necessary piece of mental equipment for the Americans who set out to build a new kind of government and society on the fringes of the known world. The history of Europe was a history of institutions, of top down control over the anarchic actions of ordinary people. An established church, linked to the state and possessing coercive powers to force conformity if not quite belief, ensured that everyone was taught proper doctrine and morals. A strong state, anchored in the powers of society’s wealthiest members in every rural district and town, ensured that the unpropertied rabble kept its proper place.
That wouldn’t work in the United States; society was somehow going to have to run itself. The colonial governments and, outside New England, the churches had always been weak. Without widespread primogeniture and entail, estates tended to be divided equally among children, rendering the growth of a powerful aristocratic interest largely impossible. The abundance of land weakened the dependence of the poor on the rich; labor was in perpetually short supply and those who felt mistreated and oppressed could always light out for the wilderness. The Revolution had further weakened both church and state, and with the end of British attempts to restrict westward migration, the vast lands across the Appalachian mountains beckoned more invitingly than ever.
In the United States, there was really no choice: if American society was going to hold together at all, it was going to have to organize itself on a new basis. When the Declaration of Independence said that governments depended on the consent of the governed, this wasn’t just a piece of rhetoric or a pious hope. In the thirteen colonies, government simply could not work without that consent.
This is where the idea of common sense comes in. British social thought in the 18th century had focused increasingly on the idea that all human beings had the ability to understand basic natural, political and moral truths. This ‘common sense’, a set of abilities and ideas that rich and poor, educated and uneducated shared, could provide the basis for a new kind of political organization. The average person could be trusted, most of the time, to know and to do the right thing — and the votes of the average common man could sustain a stable government that would protect the property and interests even of the rich.
In politics, this led people towards faith in Jeffersonian and Jacksonian democracy. The honest common sense of the average person, not the special wisdom of the social and professional elites, was the safest guide for the commonwealth. American institutions were built low to the ground, intended to be open to popular pressures so that the common sense of the people at large would shape the laws and policies of the country as far as this could be arranged.
This idea remains today the bedrock conviction of American democracy, and as always there’s a certain tension between the idea that commonsense reasoning by ‘common’ people can resolve everything, and the reality that many complex and important problems cannot be comprehended without serious study and reflection.
American religion has been as deeply shaped by the concept of common sense as American politics. Historically, European Christianity was a kind of mirror image of European states. The people needed to be guided and governed; a complex hierarchy developed to maintain the orthodoxy and regulate the behavior of society at large. This wasn’t an option in the New World; religion like government was going to have to learn to base itself on the consent and support of the people.
Without the structure and the financial resources of an established church, religion had to compete in the marketplace of public opinion. Influence in American religion flowed to denominations and preachers who could craft messages with broad appeal. In America you didn’t need to have a degree from a famous seminary to be a famous and successful preacher; you didn’t need the approval of the hierarchy of bishops or denominational elders. You just needed to have a lot of people come to your church.
This unstructured, competitive environment made religious preaching in America dynamic and ‘results-oriented’ and kept the churches close to the values and aspirations of the population at large. At the same time, because the social elite could not control the expression of popular religion, religious organizations became the places where the poor, the marginal and the immigrant communities could establish a space they controlled. The people on the frontiers had churches that escaped the control of the coastal elites. Churches were among the first institutions that African-Americans, slave and free, established and controlled.
Within a very short period of time American religion had developed a denominational and theological diversity without precedent. But virtually all the new denominations agreed on the importance of common sense in religion: an untrained layperson, reading the Bible carefully and prayerfully, could understand true religion. Just as human beings were made in such a way that they could form accurate ideas about nature and politics, the great and simple truths about God could be understood by ordinary people without special training. The pioneer woman in the Appalachian hills could read her Bible by the light of her fireside, reflect prayerfully on what she read, and determine for herself what was true and what was not. No theologian, no bishop, no man had the right to make her believe something that her own common sense told her was evident and plain. No white person had the authority or the right to tell an illiterate slave what the words of the Bible meant. Every human being had the ability and the right to follow his or her own conscience towards God.
American religion rejoiced in its populism, in its freedom from the genteel limits that elites wanted to impose. American camp meetings were festivals of popular music, emotional preaching and populist ideas. Scholars like Gordon Wood, Mark Noll and Nathan Hatch have written brilliantly about the American synthesis of democracy, Protestantism and capitalism in the formative years of the American republic. It’s clearly true that this uniquely American twist on north European Protestantism remains one of the most influential forces in our culture and politics today and we probably owe the continuing vitality of religion in American life in large part to the intersection of democratic ideology, market competition among religious denominations and the democratic theological perspectives that common sense reasoning opened up.
Nevertheless, this is Lent, and it’s a good time to reflect on what’s wrong with American religion rather than bask comfortably in the reflection that religion remains a more powerful force here than in other developed countries. In fact the tradition of common sense theological interpretation of the Bible is a little trickier than it looks, and some of the enduring weaknesses in both liberal and conservative American Christianity can be traced back to it.
Historically, Christian theological reflection has been seen as coming from the interplay of three sources: the written word of God, the tradition of the faithful, and the exercise of reason. Different Christian groups place different degrees of weight on the different legs of the stool. Catholics give tradition, as embodied in the authoritative teachings of the magisterium, a definitive place, but the magisterium itself incorporates both scripture and reason in the process of theological study that leads the church to authoritative conclusions. Protestants sought to replace tradition with scripture as the most important source of theology; over time with the development of distinctively Protestant traditions of theological scholarship and the accumulation of authoritative creeds and writings by important figures in church history, both reason and tradition reasserted themselves.
The American common sense approach sought to reduce the traditionally three legged theological stool to only two legs. There was to be no more room for tradition. To the American mind tradition was suspect. This is what kings and popes pointed to in order to justify their claims to special authority. To become free, we had to throw tradition overboard: the independent American would bring common sense to the reading of scripture and so come to a knowledge of the truth without any help from kings and priests, thank you very much. We’ve seen that this has been a liberating and creative force in the history of American religion; it’s important to realize also that it overlooks some inconvenient truths.
In particular, ‘common sense’ is not the pure exercise of disembodied reason. Common sense is not just about logic; it is also about a set of cultural ideas that shape our ideas of what is true. In 1800 almost no American Protestants, for example, read the Bible as allowing women to play a major role in the public worship of the church. Now virtually all of them do. The Bible hasn’t changed in the last 200 years; neither have the principles of logic. What has changed is our culture’s vision of the social roles that women can appropriately play.
There are other examples of changing cultural values changing American theology. In the 19th century most American Protestants had a broadly optimistic view of human progress and they thought that the spread of the Protestant and democratic principles of American life through the world were part of God’s plan to redeem the world and bring about the restoration of His kingdom on earth. Conservative American Christians like Jonathan Edwards had post-millennial eschatologies; they believed that by God’s grace humanity would achieve one thousand years of peace before the second coming of Christ to judge the living and the dead. From the Civil War forward, and even more into the twentieth century as the global scene became more threatening and as the family farm (where most Americans had once made their living) became an endangered species, many American Protestants became less sanguine about the world’s prospects — and more pessimistic eschatological views gained ground. The text in the Biblical books of Daniel, Ezekiel and Revelations did not change between the time of Jonathan Edwards and today — but the ‘obvious’, ‘common sense’ interpretations of these texts changed 180 degrees in the American church.
Slavery was not only the most contentious issue in the history of American politics; it was the most contentious theological issue as well, causing many of the leading Protestant denominations to split in the nineteenth century. Southern whites who grew up in a slave society, read the Bible by the light of common sense, and common sense told them that the Bible nowhere prohibited slavery. On the contrary: the great biblical patriarchs were slave owners. The laws of Moses regulated slavery; Jesus spoke not one word against it, and St. Paul returned a fugitive slave to his master. Nothing seemed more clear to many serious American Christians than that the Bible sanctioned slavery.
Many Northerners and African-Americans took their common sense to the Bible and came away with a very different read. Whatever may have been true in the long-gone days of the patriarchs, slavery as it existed in 19th century America was clearly a great moral and social evil. God is by definition is morally good; the Bible could obviously not be interpreted to give divine sanction to the greatest evil of the day. Simple common sense demanded that we interpret the Bible in a way that condemned the evil of slavery.
Common sense has to be understood as including various social, cultural and political ideas that are so widespread that they are largely unquestioned in a given society. That is, the idea of common sense is not an escape from the force of tradition. The ‘common sense’ of any community contains tradition as well as reason — but because common sense presents itself as pure reasonableness, Americans have often failed to understand the large and continuing role that tradition continues to play in American politics and American theology. Worse, because we fail to acknowledge and recognize the role of tradition in our thought, our theology is often simply the reflection of our general ideas about how the world works.
You don’t have to look far to see this tendency in the American church today. Both conservative and liberal American Christians often produce theological world views that simply reflect their secular ideas. Rick Warren often says that the church shouldn’t try to be the left wing or the right wing; it should aim to be the whole bird. That’s a commendable aspiration; to achieve it, American Christianity in both its blue and red state varieties is going to have to grapple with the unacknowledged role of custom and tradition in its theological life.
Common sense theology helped the American church adjust to life in a democratic, non-hierarchical society and it continues to give strength to important elements in American religious culture. But I think we need that third leg of the stool. We should recognize that the concepts that we bring to the study of Scripture don’t drop fully formed from the sky; they represent the cultural and political history of our society. As such, they have value and should not be cast lightly away — and as such, they need to enter into judgment with reason and scripture. Acknowledging the role that tradition plays in our ongoing theological reflection won’t empower tradition and subject us to the dead hand of the past. It will liberate us from the unconsidered power of our cultural and political traditions.
At the end of the day, we will still be a common sense people using common sense ideas in politics and religion. On the whole, that’s a good thing. Our society is going to rest on the consent of the governed and our churches (and other houses of worship) will have to persuade people to walk through the door rather than compelling them to come in. But maybe we can be a little smarter about common sense and think a little more critically about how sometimes the most ‘obvious’ ideas are the ones that need to be criticized in the light of both human reason and the word of God.