Leo P. Ribuffo: Obama's "Bitter" Believers -- What Would Increase Mather Say?

As everyone with an interest in politics and access to a newspaper, television, or Internet connection now knows, on April 6 Senator Barack Obama engaged in some off-the-cuff social psychology. Asked why small-town Pennsylvania voters failed to embrace his message, Obama said that after decades of economic woes, these men and women "get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people not like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton and countless commentators jumped on this remark as evidence of Obama's elitism. According to the prevailing standards of political discourse, we must profess to believe that the people do what they do just because they do it and, if the people do it, it must be a good thing to do. Although Clinton also spoke up on behalf of allegedly insulted hunters, the nub of her criticism -- and of the controversy generally -- has been whether or not Obama reduces religious faith to a mere social psychological symptom. On the contrary, Clinton declared, "People embrace faith not because they are materially poor but because they are spiritually rich."

Clinton's position certainly makes sense for a presidential candidate. Since at least the 1830s, flattery of voters has been a compulsory ritual for anyone who aspires to high office. Jimmy Carter was elected president in 1976 when he promised "a government as good as the people." He lost badly four years later after analyzing a national "crisis of confidence," a crisis he attributed in part to popular self-indulgence.

Among serious commentators instead of presidential candidates, the Obama controversy fits into an intellectual dispute bubbling since the 1930s about the virtues and/or vices of "the people." (Anyone interested in my thoughts on this aspect of the controversy can consult "What Underlies Obama's Analysis of 'The People,'"  History News Network, April 14, 2008.) According to George Will, Obama is (perhaps unknowingly) a disciple of historian Richard Hofstadter, the "iconic public intellectual of liberal condescension" who diagnosed an American "paranoid style" containing a large religious component. Charles Krauthammer and Michael Gerson go further, claiming to see an affinity between Obama's off-the-cuff social psychology and Karl Marx's reference to religion as the opium of the people. In their professed dismissal of any social, psychological, or historical explanations of human behavior, Will, Krauthammer, and Gerson mark another low point in the degradation of intellectual conservatism into "populist" Republican hack work. Where is Richard Weaver now that we need him more than ever?   

Obama is neither a Marxist nor a condescending liberal who reduces religion to social psychological symptoms (Hofstadter at his worst, though not always). Rather, he fits neatly if perhaps unknowingly into a different intellectual tradition. Not only does Obama offer an off-the-cuff social psychological explanation of why bitter Americans "cling" to familiar beliefs and behavior in hard times, but he also gives a (longer and more nuanced) social psychological explanation of his own adult religious conversion -- yes, that's the right word -- in Chapter 6 of his book The Audacity of Hope. This is not the place for a full analysis of Obama's conversion. Very simply put, however, after growing up in a family of free thinkers, Obama felt the absence of a "community or shared tradition" until the African-American church provided a "vessel for my beliefs." Yet this self-analysis in no way denigrates those beliefs that Obama holds as a declared "devout Christian." The intellectual tradition Obama belongs to is pragmatism -- in the William James Varieties of Religious Experience sense, not the Chris Matthews let's make a deal sense.

As this controversy has gone on and on, I have become less interested in what pundits have to say than in the responses Obama's remarks might have elicited from some early American Protestants -- the Puritans, like John Winthrop, whose famous 1630 lay sermon envisioned a shining "city upon a hill" and thus inspired Ronald Reagan to cut taxes and win the Cold War. OK, OK, I understand that Winthrop's metaphorical city wasn't "shining," that he wasn't talking about foreign policy, that he didn't like economic individualism, and that he took his famous phrase from Jesus' Sermon on the Mount. But you know the folks I mean.

The Puritans thought a lot about the psychology of conversion and the social circumstances that might open hearts to God's grace. Although God could directly save anyone without preparation, He usually chose to operate through humanly intelligible "means." Good sermons were probably the best means. In many of them, clergy contemplated the Puritan meaning of what a more secular age would call social circumstances. God sent plagues, ship wrecks, failed crops, and other suffering to prod the people (whose first reactions might be mere bitterness) to repent of their sins. Only then would their hearts be open to God's grace (if He chose to offer it). As Rev. Increase Mather explained, Massachusetts had to suffer through long Indian wars in the 1670s until the people became "fit for deliverance."

Would Obama's social psychology of religion have caused the Puritan elders of Massachusetts to drive him out of the colony along with such riffraff as Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson? Perhaps so, depending on exactly when during the seventeenth century the various theological factions convened their focus groups. Obama's analysis does sound awfully Arminian, and his own conversion narrative lacks a sense of sin and personal humiliation.  

Yet unlike most mainstream commentators in 2008, the Puritan elders would have understood what Obama was saying. Certainly they would have been wary of the notion that the people do what they do just because they do it, and if the people do it, it must be good. Indeed, such smug thinking might have looked like the work of that old deluder Satan.  

But why should we pay attention to the likes of Increase Mather who was, after all, an elitist president of Harvard?  

Leo P. Ribuffo teaches history at George Washington University and is the author of The Old Christian Right: The Protestant Far Right from the Great Depression to the Cold War. He has written previously for Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly on speeches by Mitt Romney and Barack Obama.