This New Yet Unapproachable America

Even before the moment of first arrival in the New World, John Winthrop offered his fellow passengers on the Arbella in delivering his lay sermon, “A Model of Christian Charity” (1630), a vision of their projected community as a body. His words fashioned a proleptic covenant with the God whose Providence could ensure him and his accidental congregation safe landing on the threatening shore. We could, without much stretching, see this gambit as the first move in the American language game that would come to be called “pragmatism”: that is, the projection of a belief convincing enough to serve as a platform for action. For Winthrop and his hungry listeners, the body offered as “model” – the image anchoring the belief – was that of Christ. Within this conception, all the many members were to imagine themselves performing throughout their lives and into the generations following them – if God’s promise were to be kept on their “errand into the wilderness” – the multifarious functions necessary to the ongoing life of the one great spiritual body. Doing so would fulfill their continuing part in the covenant secured with their successful landing. Thus, the idea later to be inscribed as the motto of the pointedly secular republic, E pluribus unum, had already been articulated in the theological motive that gave birth to this variety of “American” experience. It should be noted that in this body the collectivity of ministers would serve as the “head.”