Reviews of Books

America's Original Sin

Reviewed by Larry Kutchen, University of California, Berkeley

In this erudite, densely argued, and richly multidisciplinary study, Colin Wells aims to recover a trenchant "voice of protest" (p. 15) against the "immense power" of the American "gospel of progress" (p. 14). That voice, a potent blend of New England evangelicalism and high-Augustan satire, issues from a little-understood mock epic poem, The Triumph of Infidelity, published anonymously in 1788 by Timothy Dwight, the clergyman-poet, theologian, and later influential president of Yale known to posterity mainly as the irritable "pope" of New England Federalism. Wells argues that to understand this poem in its full aesthetic and rhetorical complexities, its historical, philosophical, and theological contexts, and its extensive influence is to realize that at the core of early national debates about how best to secure the republic was the troublesome legacy of Calvinist despair about salvation. For Dwight, to secure the republic entailed preserving that legacy against the "infidelity" of Enlightenment skeptics, liberal Protestants, and radical democrats whose beliefs in moral progress, a benevolent Providence, and the assured salvation of all people promoted a corrosive self-interest. Eighteenth-century hopes for progress rested, in Dwight's view, on the same erroneous myth of human nature as "wholly innocent" (p. 8), capable of achieving virtue by its own efforts, that had been deluding thinkers all the way back to Pelagius, the fifth-century "antagonist" (p. 8) of Augustine and denier of original sin. The Enlightenment, with its trust in reason and science and its materialist confidence, was merely Pelagianism revived—and Dwight the self-appointed Augustine for the new age.

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But as Wells cogently demonstrates, the poem's satiric attack on these "infidels" is no simple conservative reaction against the secular forces of a "new progressivism" (p. 13). Inverting the critiques of revealed religion by skeptics like David Hume, Dwight sought to renovate the very meaning of "enlightenment" itself: only by being liberated from the comfort of a human-centered belief system, by "acknowledging the alienation and limitation of earthly existence," can a republican society thrive (p. 15). The United States republic, Dwight believed, had to be based on the unity of Augustan values and Calvinist tenets: republican virtue was to be inseparable from the rigorous self-examination of the faithful.

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