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Sanctimonies
A Review by Jackson Lears

I.
Occasionally adolescent high jinks affect the history of thought. Consider the episode recounted by Augustine in his Confessions. "There was a pear tree near our vineyard, loaded with a fruit that was attractive neither to look at nor to taste. Late one night a band of ruffians, myself included, went off to shake down the fruit and carry it away.... We took away an enormous quantity of pears, not to eat them ourselves, but simply to throw them to the pigs." Augustine agonized at length about the sheer perversity of his motives. "Could I enjoy doing wrong for no other reason than that it was wrong?" Certainly, "it was not the pears that my unhappy soul desired. I had plenty of my own, better than those, and I only picked them so that I might steal. For no sooner had I picked them than I threw them away, and tasted nothing in them but my own sin, which I relished and enjoyed. If any part of one of those pears passed my lips, it was the sin that gave it flavor." And so a boyish escapade became a primary text of Christian thinking about sin.

For what became known as the Augustinian view, sin was a subjective experience, a self-satisfied pride that allowed the sinner to take pleasure in acts that actually alienated him from God, the source of all being. To be sure, sin had a social dimension, too. Stealing the pears by himself, Augustine wrote, "would have been no fun and I should not have done it." The desire to have "partners in sin" made it harder to exercise moral responsibility, "because we are ashamed to hold back when others say `Come on! Let's do it!'" But at bottom the Augustinian conception of sin was more psychological than social: it was an elusive but innate perversity — a tendency toward estrangement from all creation — rooted in every human soul, which could only be transcended with the aid of divine grace.

Of course there have always been other ways of thinking about sin. The chief alternative to Augustine's inward emphasis was the notion that evil is a palpable entity outside the self, one that could (and often did) take material and even fleshly form. The purest form of this belief in Augustine's time was the Manichaean heresy. Augustine had been a Manichee himself for ten years, and much of the intellectual drive of his autobiography arises from his struggle to free himself from the Manichees' materialist conception of evil by developing a subtler one. But subtlety never translated easily into the idioms of popular Christianity, which imagined sin embodied in either an actual devil or a demonized other — the witch, the infidel, above all the Jew. Though theologians condemned the Manichaean heresy, the Manichaean tendency to divide the world into a virtuous "us" and a sinful "them" flourished in Christian tradition, animating absolutisms, inspiring crusades, and consigning the other to flames in the next world and sometimes in this one.

Still, Augustinian ideas survived, too. They sustained the doctrine of original sin, which despite its sometimes devastating impact on the human psyche at least preserved an emphasis on the universality of human corruption, refusing to isolate sin in particular groups of offenders. For centuries, when Christians thought seriously about sin, they turned to Augustinian tradition. The English Puritans who settled North America, for example, were nothing if not serious about sin. They insisted on a covenant of grace, not of works. This meant that the performance of apparently moral acts was mere mummery without a regenerate heart. The key to salvation was not morality, it was piety — the spiritual state that resulted from an intense inner search for union with the deity.

This was precisely the sort of struggle that Augustine described, and it was at the core of American Puritanism. Oscillating between an exalted experience of divine grace and a deep sense of human depravity (including one's own), the Augustinian strain of piety dissolved the comforting delusion that evil could be situated outside the self. The attempt to live virtuously required constant questioning of one's own motives, constant awareness of one's own capacity to confuse self-interest with self-sacrifice. Sin was fleeting, insubstantial, evanescent — but ever-present, in the hearts of the pious as well as the prodigal.

This was not a worldview likely to launch moral crusades. Manichaean tendencies re-surfaced from time to time, as in the Pequot War and the Salem witch trials, but what is surprising is how long Augustinian ideas continued to check tendencies toward self-righteousness among the Puritans and their successors. Well into the early nineteenth century, as the historian Karen Halttunen has discovered, ministers characterized condemned murderers as common sinners, whose evil deeds were simply a particularly vile example of the vileness in all human beings. It was only with the spread of the Enlightenment faith in human goodness that the murderer began to be seen as a monster, "a fiend in human form." If human nature was inherently benign, then sin might be the result of inhuman monstrosity or (later in the nineteenth century) racial inferiority — unless one took the reformist view, which traced even radical evil to a poor environment or a weak character, which could be strengthened or improved. In this way the waning of belief in original sin paved the way for the demonization — but also the reform — of the other. Moral crusades against sin depended on the peculiarly modern assumption that sin could be eradicated. This was a far cry from Augustine.

Augustinian ideas continued to deepen American Protestant thought, as Christopher Lasch and Andrew Delbanco have reminded us by illuminating the philosophical lineage from Jonathan Edwards to Martin Luther King Jr. But among more pedestrian thinkers, a new and easier conception of virtue emerged. Protestant theology gave way to Protestant ethics, which in turn became barely distinguishable from bourgeois conformity and respectability — a self-satisfied moralism that has shaped our public discourse down to the present, though it would have appalled Augustine. Occasionally it has even appalled American moralists themselves, who have periodically demanded that attention be paid to slaves, child laborers, destitute families, and other victims of the vagaries of fortune.

Yet such humanitarian sympathies could be only fitfully sustained in a society given over to the pursuit of private gain. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the spread of market-based individualism had sanitized self-interest, transforming it from a source of sin to a seat of virtue. In the emerging utilitarian moral climate, sin was less a complex mental state than a set of nasty habits, all of which involved straying from the hard path of self-control into the swamps of sensual self-indulgence. Guardians of official virtue became a recognizable social type, from Anthony Comstock (who saved us from the menace of birth-control literature) to William Bennett (who saved us from the menace of marijuana). These were men whose public passion for righteousness provoked suspicions of hypocrisy, and delight among sinners when evidence of it was found — as in the recent revelations concerning Bennett's particular vice.

Another pillar of rectitude had been exposed as a hypocrite, it seemed, and yet a fuller criticism of the gambler Bennett rests on more than charges of hypocrisy. After all, Bennett never condemned gambling, and his own Roman Catholic tradition fostered a certain cautious acceptance of it (though not of his fantastic excess). The irony is that while the gambler's ethos may have sometimes encouraged forgiveness for human imperfection and generosity toward people who were down on their luck, Bennett the moralist never showed a trace of such empathetic and expansive traits. Apart from his gambling, he was as dedicated as any fundamentalist scold to enforcing a narrow and thoroughly politicized version of the Protestant ethic — kicking welfare mothers off the dole, imprisoning pot smokers, impeaching libidinous presidents.

Bennett's disgrace is a characteristic episode in American cultural history. Has any other country produced so many experts on sin? Certainly no European country — or at least so Bennett claimed at the height of his clamor for Clinton's impeachment. "Morality is central to our politics and attitudes in a way that is not the case in Europe," he wrote. Indeed, "our moral streak is what is best about us." It gives us the gumption to save the world from fascism and communism. And now "worldly wise" and "sophisticated" liberals were dismissing the president's peccadilloes, denying our American moral heritage, and threatening to turn us "European." The contrast between American virtue and European vice has been a key notion in the American rhetoric of national self-congratulation since the days of the early republic. It reveals the Manichaean tendency at work in international affairs, creating an exceptionalist myth of American innocence amid a corrupt world. Like generations of American moralists before him, Bennett linked the public fate of the nation with the private sins of its citizens.

Long before feminists formulated the slogan "the personal is political," moral reformers were enacting it. For centuries, the minor missteps of ordinary folk had been beneath the notice of the governing classes. But in a democratic nation increasingly enveloped by an intrusive ethic of self-control, smoking, drinking, gambling, and even masturbation became matters of public debate. The politics of sin, in sum, is as American as cherry pie. So argues James A. Morone in his new book, and he is surely right. But the larger issue, which he never addresses, is whether the very notion of a "politics of sin" requires a simple-minded Manichaean definition of evil — that is, whether politics inevitably trivializes sin. Certainly Augustine would suspect as much, and the evidence amassed by Morone would support his suspicion.

II.
"What makes the United States distinctive?" Morone asks. "There are plenty of celebrated views, but most ignore the restless American quest for heaven." Yearnings for salvation spill into the public arena, creating a morally charged political life filled with pitched battles between the worthy and the licentious. This is the story that Morone tells. From the tragic Civil War to the farcical "culture wars," American politics has been pervaded by passionate indignation. "For better and for worse," Morone writes, "moral conflicts made America."

Morone's argument will come as no surprise to anyone familiar with American religious and cultural history. Since the era of Perry Miller in the 1950s, historians have been identifying the furious moral and religious energies at the heart of political controversy. They have demonstrated that to inspire popular support, the American Revolution and the Civil War were rhetorically transformed into apocalyptic crusades. They have shown how longings for salvation could intensify social movements — as evangelical perfectionism led to demands for immediate abolition of slavery. They have dissected the missionary impulses in American diplomacy, the biblical resonances in the civil rights movement, and more generally the centrality of Protestant Christianity in American political culture.

Morone's book usefully synthesizes this historiography for those unfamiliar with it, which apparently includes much of the political science profession. From his own perspective inside that profession, Morone implies, American political history looks like a secular landscape of pragmatic compromise, pluralistic consensus, and coalition-building. From the Enlightenment rationalists who framed the Constitution to the contemporary lobbyists who scuffle for a place at the deregulation buffet, American politics has been characterized by the bland, deal-making ethos of interest-group liberalism. (Just as James Madison said it would be.) To counter this misconception, Morone has assembled a catalogue of revivalists and precisionists, bluenoses and witch-hunters and scolds, mixed in with a handful of heroes.

There is something intriguing about this promiscuous assemblage. It almost lives up to the jacket-copy promise of "the story of a brawling, raucous, religious people." Millennial utopians crowd up against bureaucratic administrators, politicians against ideologues. Frances Willard marches cheek by jowl with Comstock and Woodrow Wilson, William Lloyd Garrison with Lincoln and Walter Lippmann. But none ever comes to life, perhaps because Morone is intent (like a good social scientist) on repeatable patterns rather than idiosyncratic details. Morone finds "exactly the same cycle — persuasion, prohibition, and state power — in the campaigns against slavery or segregation or nineteenth-century abortionists." Efforts to stamp out sin always enhanced the health of the state.

The only distinction that Morone makes among his dramatis personae is between evangelicals who wanted government to coerce individual compliance with moral norms and social gospelers who wanted government to make better citizens by transforming their economic and cultural circumstances. The evangelicals located moral responsibility in the soul of the sinner; the social gospelers spread it around and sometimes (according to their critics) made it disappear. It is not clear from Morone's book how these two radically different points of view arose or diverged (they seem to drop from the sky), but there is no question which side Morone is on. He is pulling for the social gospel team, and by the end of the book — the present day — things are not looking good. The idea of society's collective moral responsibility for the less fortunate has been relegated to the dustbin of American political memory, along with the LBJ posters and other remnants of the Great Society.

Morone has unfashionably humane political instincts, but in the end Hellfire Nation disappoints. Its abundant typographical errors and misspellings of proper names would be tedious to enumerate. (The chief justice who handed down the Dred Scott decision, for example, is repeatedly identified as Tawney rather than Taney, a mistake that captures the idiosyncratic Maryland pronunciation at the expense of orthography.) It omits some of the most significant moral crusades, such as those for and against capital punishment; and it pays minimal attention to the enormously important subject of foreign policy. Morone observes that the Puritans' "city on a hill" became "an increasingly self-conscious exemplar to the world" from colonial times forward, but he fails to note the transition from exemplar to exporter of morality — an idea that energized Manifest Destiny and imperialism, and came to bitter fruition in the Vietnam War, and has recently been resurrected by the neoconservatives around the White House. Clearly there is a potent international dimension to the American politics of sin.

But the problem with this book is subtler and deeper than a catalogue of errors and omissions. Morone does not seem to understand the distinction between belief and morality, between yearnings for salvation in heaven and for a righteous community on earth. Never afraid of mixing metaphors, he writes that "what leaps out, loudest and clearest [in the American story], is the search for eternal salvation through Christ's grace. Morality mattered most in early America. It still matters — enormously — today." These statements are conceptually and theologically confused. The "search for eternal salvation" by no means required the imposition of norms on recalcitrant populations. For under a covenant of grace, moralism raised doubts that what moralists demanded was anything more than mere "works." Far from being an entirely secular enterprise, American liberalism has been tangled from the beginning in "the search for God, the moral urge," Morone remarks — but these two phrases describe profoundly different and even antithetical impulses. The search for God could run counter to the moral urge, or at least counter to the conventional version of it.

This was especially true when the seeker disdained religious institutions and sought to experience grace directly, by means of an ecstatic connection with God. In New England, such longings surfaced as early as 1637, when the Puritan mystic Anne Hutchinson challenged the orthodox for failing to sustain a covenant of grace. She was tried and found guilty of "antinomianism," the heretical notion that grace set Christians free from the need to observe moral law. The word has become scholars' shorthand for romantic rebellions in the name of authentic personal experience, spiritual or (more loosely) secular. The antinomian impulse was at the core of American Protestants' repeated revivals of "true religious feeling." Impatient with anything that obstructed direct experience of the deity, antinomians inevitably threatened ecclesiastical authority.

Though Morone finds antinomians everywhere in American political history, he never really approaches them on their own turf. He is determined to stay outside the individual religious consciousness. His focus on the politics of sin requires him to use the criterion of quick identification, of public opinion: what lots of people can immediately identify as sin is sin. This sociological determinism flattens his discussion, deprives it of psychological depth, and makes antinomianism even more baffling than it probably was. In the waves of revivals that swept across North America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the desire for a more intense and immediate identification with God ignited powerful challenges to the established moral order — deemed "dead" by the revivalists because lacking in grace. What was condemned as sin by the officially virtuous was in the eyes of antinomian rebels a more rigorous quest for the divine.

Among thinkers in the Augustinian tradition, antinomian piety also promoted a subtle and demanding definition of virtue as the disinterested expression of "benevolence toward Being in general," as Edwards put it in The Nature of True Virtue (1764). Sin was indifference to "the beauty of the Godhead, and the divinity of Divinity" — estrangement from God. Only a regenerate heart could truly produce virtuous acts, in the Edwardsean view.

But at about the same time profoundly different conceptions of virtue were acquiring unprecedented legitimacy. Benjamin Franklin, for one, was embarking on his "bold and arduous project of achieving moral perfection" through double-entry bookkeeping, carefully recording his accumulated virtues and vices. One can only imagine Edwards's bafflement. Yet Franklin's view would prevail. His utilitarian precision caught the commercial spirit of the age. Antinomians did not stand a chance against someone with that kind of moral clarity.

Hellfire Nation is largely the story of Benjamin Franklin's moralism, not Jonathan Edwards's piety. This is mostly because Morone is determined to understand sin in sociological categories — specifically the "race, class, and gender" mantra that dominates contemporary scholarship in social and cultural history. The problem with much of this scholarship is not that those categories are unimportant, but that too often they are deployed as if they exhausted all possible interpretations of human experience. With respect to sin, this will never do.

Yet Morone seems intent on reducing the politics of sin to a series of pitched battles between "us" and "them." Though sexual anxieties often complicate the picture, the central conflicts are racial and ethnic. As early as 1752, Franklin fretted that the disagreeable Germans were taking over Pennsylvania; and Morone takes this ball and runs with it. Franklin's complaint revealed "a fundamental question about American community," he maintains. "Can we be a single — special — people? With them? Or will their lax values undermine our virtuous community?" These are the questions that increasingly dominate the book and eventually take it over completely. They are not trivial questions, but they trivialize the question of sin. They reduce wrongdoing to a violation of community values.

Of course this is a legitimate, if limited, definition of evil, and Morone gets some good mileage out of it. No student of American history can deny the centrality of morally charged conflict between insiders and outsiders, respectable folk and pariahs — the latter often defined in racial terms. At decisive moments, the response to a dark-skinned other has played a crucial role in maintaining a dominant (white) consensus. Talking about race has been a way of not talking about class. Manichaean moralism has repeatedly created, re-affirmed, and revitalized American identity by posing a virtuous "us" against a sinful "them." This interpretation can be made persuasively, but like most it can also be oversimplified. Morone's book does both, gradually losing focus as its story nears the present day.

III.
Morone begins his tale in the colonial era, leaping from the city on a hill to the witch trials, from the Great Awakening to the Revolution. When he reaches the abolitionists, though, he adopts a more leisurely pace. These are people whom he can more easily harness to his progressive purposes. "The new [anti-slavery] organizations raised all kinds of hell: They recruited women and black people. They promoted radical ideas, like racial justice and feminism." Their transgressive power intensifies when we consider their sexual radicalism, actual or alleged. Seeing white women and black men mingling at anti-slavery meetings, established male elites slid into sexual panic, howling that "amalgation" was at hand. Abolitionists pushed America to an "existentialist [sic] crisis," not just about slavery but about the nature of black people in society (women too), and finally "about the nature of the United States and its most fundamental principles."

Despite his political sentiments, Morone does not assume that history is a tale told by an enlightened liberal, signifying progress. He untangles the race and class issues provoked by the rising anti-slavery debate, finding ignoble intent on both sides. He recognizes that both Northern free labor and Southern slavery were methods of social control based on distancing and controlling a racial other. "Even as northerners marched to the Civil War they had no design for freeing slaves and no desire to live with black people." The postwar "betrayal of the Negro" was really a fulfillment of the prewar Republican vision of a free-laboring commonwealth, and the key to sectional rapprochement was racism. After Appomattox, North and South alike found ways to turn the economic gap between the races into a question of vice and virtue. The righteous community purified itself by enforcing the ethic of self-control and keeping the sinful other at bay.

Though this story is familiar and depressing, it bears retelling. But does it really have much to do with sin, except the simplest social meanings of sin? Attitudes toward sin had a more complex historical significance than merely the maintenance of white power and bourgeois respectability. The waning of belief in original sin in antebellum America not only transformed public views of crime and moral responsibility, but also fostered agendas of personal and national perfection — agendas bolder and more arduous than Franklin's. Antinomian perfectionism drove Garrison and other abolitionists to risk disgrace and reprisal in their campaign against slavery. But perfectionism could also reinforce complacency by feeding dreams of national purification, especially in the North — the belief, for example, that the Union armies were "the armies of the Lord." Once again, dualistic habits of mind kept sin safely at a distance.

The only political leader, North or South, who effectively resisted the Manichaean temper in morality was Abraham Lincoln. He sustained the Augustinian insight that no American was untainted by the original sins of slavery and racism. A tragedy on the scale of the Civil War was too vast to be reduced to a moral crusade. The staggering losses of the war, Lincoln concluded in his genuinely majestic Second Inaugural Address, constituted a national blood ritual of expiation. He found it impossible to isolate evil in any particular demons, even Southern slaveholders. All human beings, from Lincoln's Augustinian perspective, were steeped in sin but still susceptible to forgiveness and redemption. The amazing sentences are always worth reading again: "Both [sides] read the same Bible, and pray to the same God, and each invokes his aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces; but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered — that of neither has been answered fully." The Second Inaugural Address may have been the most profound moment in the American politics of sin, and perhaps in American politics altogether.

After the war, with slavery removed as a national moral issue, public talk about sin focused on patrolling the boundaries of personal conduct. Gusts of moral panic swept through American culture between the Civil War and World War I, creating feverish crusades against prostitution, gambling, drug use, smoking, and (most successfully) drinking. The national prohibition of alcohol marked the apotheosis of evangelical Protestant mores as the official American morality. This ethos defined sin in narrowly personal terms, granting government unprecedented power to intrude into people's private lives — for their own good, of course.

To Morone, all of this ferment was about asserting the power and the authority of the WASP bourgeoisie ("us") over European immigrants and people of color ("them"). This sociological perspective illuminates certain important connections between prohibitionist fervor and the lynching of black men (alcohol allegedly inflamed their lust for white women), or between anti-Semitism and the "white slave panic" of the early 1900s. (Jews from New York cruised New England and Pennsylvania, McClure's magazine reported in 1909, enticing country girls into lives of prostitution.) For fifty years after the Civil War, the sexual, racial, and class fears of middle-class white people intermingled in various dark demons.

Yet this purely social approach invariably flattens the personal into the political, oversimplifying the complexity of everyone's motives. One gets no sense that some of these reform movements involved self-culture — a vision of human aspiration and achievement — as well as self-control. Ideals of self-discipline were not merely imposed from above by blue-nosed elites; they also sometimes resonated with the desires of the less fortunate: for social status or moral improvement, for security or stability, even for simple survival. Motives of the reformed as well as the reformers were tangled and ambivalent. Yet most of the time the reformers had more power. They did not create the desire for family stability, but they could coerce the reformed into taking a particular path to that goal. They could pass laws and put people in jail for not complying with them. Complex private needs had straightforward public consequences. The personal and the political intertwined; but the really significant question is how to puzzle out more capacious connections between them.

One intriguing possibility (mentioned but not explored by Morone) concerns the increasing physicality of sin. Despite the inanity of so much contemporary academic talk about "the body," there is no doubt that nineteenth-century moral furor was focused increasingly on the flesh rather than on the spirit. By the early twentieth century, the dimensions of the debate about sin had shrunk to fit the bodily human form. Given reformers' obsessions with sex, drugs, and alcohol, it often seemed that what was most on their minds was what people did or did not put into their bodies. Purity crusaders seemed ever more insistent on creating and maintaining pollution taboos. A successful pollution taboo, as the anthropologist Mary Douglas argued long ago, depended on a symbolic linkage between the individual body and the larger community — social cohesion required purification rituals, which included the patrolling of individual as well as communal boundaries.

Just as the ingestion of certain pollutants could be forbidden for both social and personal reasons, prohibitions on alcohol, drugs, or interracial sex could serve different purposes in different contexts. By the 1910s, perfectionist impulses led in a variety of directions. While back-country fundamentalists preached striving for moral perfection, early corporate advertising presented images of physical perfection on the Anglo-Saxon model — the Holeproof Hosiery girl, the Arrow Collar man. This reversed Protestant procedure by reducing virtue to a matter of bodily appearance. World War I brought all the drives for national and personal purification together in a rhetoric of "national sacrifice and special virtue," Morone concludes, noting that wars offer special opportunities for enforcing moral conformity: "Convince the majority that they face wicked people, and the miscreants' rights evaporate." These last observations begin to raise some real questions regarding the politics of sin with respect to war — perhaps especially the wars conducted by modern industrial states, wars that are often fought at a distance and depend more on acquiescence than engagement among the populace. During the decades after World War I, it was possible for anyone without ideological blinders to identify the demonic dictators on the world stage — and pardonable to view them in Manichaean terms, as palpable embodiments of evil outside the self. But what about the faceless functionaries who implemented the incineration of civilian populations? They might be good family men, paragons of private virtue. And sometimes they might even be Americans.

In modern war, bureaucratic rationalization and technological sophistication combined to envelop violence in euphemism and to obscure personal moral responsibility. The division of labor in twentieth-century war machines, their tendency to dissolve moral choice in a bland porridge of process — these developments put a new spin on the old Augustinian suspicion of the desire to fit in. By hanging back, by refusing to prevent what should be prevented, could one be complicit in evil? In the century of total war, questions of complicity haunted Reinhold Niebuhr, Hannah Arendt, and other serious thinkers about evil and sin.

Morone gestures briskly toward the moral issues surrounding modern war, but he turns most of his attention to a more easily domesticated theme: the rise and fall of the social gospel effort to subvert the purity crusaders' definition of sin. From the New Deal on, "the fault line would run right through the rest of the century — vice versus illness, crime versus public health, individual sin versus social responsibility." By now Morone has nearly lost sight of sin altogether, as he traces moral conflict in recent American history through a series of familiar episodes: the civil rights movement and the white recoil against it; the movement to stop abortion; the war on drugs. The key to just about all these controversies was race, or so he insists. This preoccupation with race prevents Hellfire Nation from addressing the complex cultural sources of these moral conflicts. The war on drugs (or at least the war on marijuana) has not been simply a race war, but also a sustained effort to exorcise the countercultural demons that still haunt the imagination of the righteous community. The dream of a "drug-free America" resurrects the old agenda of national purification through the maintenance of pollution taboos. Nor is racial backlash a full explanation for the decline of the social gospel tradition. There were problems in the tradition itself, sentimentalizing and relativizing tendencies that left reformers increasingly vulnerable to moralists' complaints.

By the 1960s and 1970s, the social gospel version of reform politics had lost touch with Augustinian tradition, indeed with any sense of the intractability of evil. Arguments about the environmental causation of crime still had merit, but too often they were expressed in therapeutic clichés that undermined any sense of personal responsibility. When I taught in what was euphemistically called a "reform school" during the early 1970s, for example, the phrase "a cry for help" covered a multitude of sins — from cutting up in class to taking a swing at the teacher. The spread of psychobabble provoked thoughtful liberal criticism, but also a visceral right-wing reaction. Without a compelling moral dimension, the ethos of collective responsibility for the unfortunate fell victim to racially charged resentments. Morone has little or nothing to say about this attenuation of the social gospel tradition.

Nor does he have much to say about the moral struggles provoked by the Vietnam War. This is a curious omission. The war was perhaps the most dramatic episode in the recent history of the politics of sin, and it led some Americans beyond stale dualisms to a more profound contemplation of evil. Apart from a few perfunctory quotes from antiwar leaders, Morone treats opposition to the war as largely an extension of the "antinomian" antics of the counterculture. This dismissive view is consistent with present-day cultural fashion, but it hardly does justice to the evidence. All the theatrics of the counterculture notwithstanding, the effort to stop the Vietnam War created one of the most heterogeneous moral reform movements in American history, one that crossed racial, economic, and cultural lines and included previously apolitical housewives, businessmen, and union workers as well as students, peace activists, and Vietnam veterans.

Like defenders of the war, many antiwar spokesmen yielded to the Manichaean temptation. Civility was in short supply. For many Americans, however, the disaster in Vietnam offered an occasion for urgent but sustained moral reflection. Those who chose to resist the war often did so because they believed they had to end their complicity with government-sponsored evil, however passive and insulated from danger their position might be. Some of them may have even been implicit Augustinians, steeled against self-righteousness by awareness of their own imperfections but still capable of moral responsibility. It is an outlook still worth cultivating in this era of cocky strategic pre-emption and official American perfection, when Manichaean thinking seeps through the corridors of power, as if a simplification of conscience is required for our security or our identity.

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