| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

James A. Morone. Hellfire Nation: The Politics of Sin in American History. New Haven: Yale University Press. 2003. Pp. xii, 575. $35.00.
This is a big book both in length (560 pages) and ambition (covering the sweep of American history), and it offers arresting insights into our understanding of the history of American moral politics. In researching this book, James A. Morone reports discovering the power and attraction of the Social Gospel. The moral politics of the right, however, what he calls neo-Puritanism, is what he had set out to impugn (p. x). But irrespective of his personal preferences, Morone makes clear that American politics at the highest levels has been regularly moved by a religiously based morality that challenges the myth of an omnipresent liberalism.	1
"Political life," Morone argues, "constantly gets entangled in two vital urges—redeeming 'us' and reforming 'them'" (p. 3). In the first, society causes sin, and in the second, the individual is held responsible. But here and throughout this work, Morone fails to grasp a crucial element of Reformed theology: the central role of original sin (there is no mention of it in this work). From this perspective, the dominant one in colonial North America, only the Holy Spirit and a community of fellow Christians could help the individual believer walk a righteous path. Thus, rather than two models of moral politics, as Morone suggests, there have been at least three in America: the incipient utopianism of those Christian and secular thinkers who reject original sin; the Reformed Protestant understanding resting on a confident belief in the ubiquitous deformation resulting from original sin; and a liberal individualist view that rejects corporate oversight and holds the individual personally responsible for his or her failings. Morone conflates the latter two, and this confusion haunts his analyses throughout the book.	2
In five sections and fifteen chapters (plus a lengthy introduction and brief epilogue), Morone describes conflicting patterns of moral political life in America. In the first section of three chapters, he begins with New England. Without any original contribution to this literature, Morone does usefully demonstrate that "the old world pushed tolerance while New England resisted," inverting "one of the most basic myths about American political culture" (p. 72). This is an argument that deserves repeating. Yet, despite the section's strengths, there are also major difficulties. There is no mention of American history between 1740 and 1840, nor is any colony other than Massachusetts discussed. Possibly the latter omission might be excusable, for Morone holds that the Puritans founded American moral politics and that they "articulated attitudes and organized institutions that—in constantly evolving ways—reach across American time" (p. 31). Less defensible, though, is his apparent unawareness of the research of the dozen or so political scientists, such as Donald Lutz and Daniel Elazar, who have already plowed this field. But the most troubling oversight in these early chapters is Morone's failure to acknowledge the Hebraic and Reformed concept of a "national covenant." Because of this, Morone cannot understand how communities can and must exercise legitimate moral oversight over their wayward members.	3
The next section of the book, chapters four through seven, covers the years 1800–1865. Here, Morone makes much of the burden that America's elevated moral goals placed on it (p. 129). He also launches into an exploration of the prominent role of women in the abolitionist movement and how this, in turn, did much to challenge gender norms. He writes that his biggest surprise "in surveying American moral crusades is how regularly sex wars run through them" (p. 166). This is one of the most powerfully argued findings of his book.	. . .

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