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McDougall surveys a variety of answers through a vast field of times and trials. He observes James Herrington's early defense of revolution on the basis of "virtue and property." He relates the struggle between "Old" and "New Lights" in 18th-century Congregationalism. He particularly emphasizes the role of George Whitefield in energizing the first Great Awakening by appealing to his listeners' sense of free will: "Liberty under God and before men." Whitefield's listeners, McDougall claims, "were, if only subconsciously, thrusting their clutches skyward to pull down heaven itself—down to America. You can't help but do well and feel good about it, in heaven."

This account of terrestrializing the ideal also decidedly influences McDougall's treatment of the American Revolution. As if to prove his case, he picks what some would see as an unlikely Gospel, Tom Paine's Common Sense. And McDougall's careful reading of the book's conflicts yields surprising results:

Paine's remarkable pamphlet cemented the alliance between the Awakened and the Enlightened, summoned them to a just war, and promised a kind of heaven on earth if they won. That is why some historians miss the point when they denigrate the role of religion in the American rebellion. … The American cause was profoundly religious for Protestants and Deists alike because both identified America's future with a Providential design and both entertained millenarian hopes.

In short, the evangelical attitude provided the spiritual engine for both camps. And, in McDougall's view, this enlightened evangelism continued to hold sway long after the revolution:

Traditional, orthodox Christians thought death a passage from the Church Militant to the Church Expectant. But Americans were already expectant, believing heaven on earth just a matter of time and deeming moral progress, like material progress, a matter of will.

Cooper and others might give progress its tragic due, but even then the shadows throw in relief the brightness of the hope.

Now, one does not have to wait until The Last of the Mohicans to sense the danger of worldly ideals; but in this respect, for all his edginess in making "hustling" his theme, McDougall seems rather coy. He does narrate Cotton Mather's complaint that "Religion brought forth prosperity, and the daughter destroyed the mother." But his treatment of Mather's successors and the Great Awakening proves a bit puzzling. McDougall makes Jonathan Edwards, who deeply criticized libertarianism, a simple proponent of the free will, and he pronounces, "Thus did Edwards sweep away all the Puritan pother about predestination, Arminianism, and Half-Way Covenants." A pretty odd judgment, considering that Edwards (who joyfully embraced predestination and the rest of Calvin's doctrine as a young man) rejected his grandfather Solomon Stoddard's practice of "open communion" and even the "Half-Way Covenant"—with the result that his congregation eventually fired him! Indeed, Edwards and later "Separates" combined evangelism with a strictness about church membership that limited choice rather than celebrated it. Nor, in all the attention he gives to Whitefield's evangelism, does McDougall acknowledge the great impression made by Universalist Hosea Ballou and "New Light" Samuel Hopkins, perhaps because the first preached strict determinism and the latter "disinterested benevolence." Concerns over selfishness, benevolence, and duty occupied center-stage in 18th- and early 19th- century religious discourse, but an indeterminate and unadorned "free will" hardly emerged as the most worthy idol of popular worship until much later.

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September (Web-only) 2004, Vol. 48