Pietism and the American Character

Abstract

may be unique, if anything is, about the American character. And if I can demonstrate that the quality of pietism (or, in its broader formulation, pietistic-perfectionism) offers at least as many useful insights into the nature of the American experience as, say, the quality of pragmatism or of democratic liberalism or the influence of the frontier, then I will have made my point. While I am aware that in offering such a key I am in danger of explaining so much as to explain nothing, I prefer to leave the inevitable qualifications and exceptions to another time. I will say for this generalized approach only that the present stage in the renascence of the history of religion 2 in America seems to me to merit its consideration. American pietism had its origin in the protest of Protestantism against the ecclesiastical corruptions of the Christian church in the sixteenth century. Ernst Troeltsch, the German historian of religion, defined this dissenting spirit in terms of the sect-type versus the church-type of Christianity. And he listed as the salient features of the pietistic temper, its anti-institutionalism, its voluntarism, its exaltation of the individual's direct relationship with God, its aspiration after personal inward perfection, its hostility to worldliness and the kinds of compromise which the established church-type systems have to make with the state, and its doctrine of the priesthood of all believers. Pietism, said Troeltsch, disliked

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