Religion and Literature, 1790–1945

Abstract

In the early 1960s a young man from a self-described “Yiddishist-left-wing” Canadian family arrived in the United States to begin doctoral studies in literature at the Claremont Graduate School. Named in honor of Sacco and Vanzetti, the Massachusetts anarchists whose execution had caused an international uproar in 1927, that student, Sacvan Bercovitch, would go on to become a distinguished scholar of American literature and religion. What astonished this young Canadian when he landed in the United States was the degree to which late-twentieth-century American culture kept casting its experience in a seventeenth-century framework. A debate “full of rage and faith” was going on about the nation's destiny, Bercovitch recalls, with conservatives busy ferreting out un-American attitudes and radicals righteously recalling a wayward nation “to its sacred mission.” In that era of the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement, the plea of the ancient Psalmist met the promise of the New World: “When is our errand to be fulfilled? How long, O Lord, how long?” The Christian cries coming from all sides of the political debate made Bercovitch feel like he was “Sancho Panza in a land of Don Quixotes.” The American dream was a “patent fiction,” but nevertheless it involved “an entire hermeneutic system.” Unlike any other modern nation, “America was a venture in exegesis. You were supposed to discover it as a believer unveils scripture.”

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