Maps of Heaven, Maps of Hell

Religious Terror as Memory from the Puritans to Stephen King

Edward Ingebretsen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317465256
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

From its beginnings in Puritan sermonising to its prominent place in contemporary genre film and fiction, this book traces the use of terror in the American popular imagination. Entering American culture partly by way of religious sanction, it remains an important heart and mind shaping tool.

CHAPTER ONE
Nostalgia and Terror: Holy Ghosts

There are terrible spirits, ghosts, in the air of America.
—D. H. LAWRENCE, “EDGAR AUDGAR POE”

We shall be made a story and a by-word through the world.
—JOHN WINTHROP, “A MODEL OF CHRISTIAN CHARITY”

To know God is to be struck with horror and amazement, for then and only then does one realize his own character.”
—CITED IN SAGE, P. 74

A Troubled House

How like an iron cage was that which they called Liberty.
—HAWTHORNE, “MAIN STREET,” P. 1031

Old habits die hard, although none die so hard that they can’t be resurrected in new guises, as people in addictive processes discover. So it is not surprising that after three hundred years, a cultural habit of religion, legally silenced, still speaks loudly enough to be heard. Like the vampire, that ironic cultural icon (also a religious image, once removed), the discourse and rhythms of religion seem unkillable, endlessly adaptable. On the one hand, a habit of religious reading encouraged budding young naturalists like Jonathan Edwards (and his errant student of the spiritual, Thoreau) to read into the world of nature “some kind of moral order” (Coale, In Hawthorne’s Shadow, p. 37).¹ Indeed, discerning the “Shadows of Divine Things” in the woods and hills of western Massachusetts, Concord, and other places has produced a genre of writing distinctively American in style and content. However, the “inexpressible weight of things Eternal” (Richard Baxter; cited in Caldwell, p. 136) also helps shape and fence other landscapes, too—notably the darker geography of the imagination.² For instance, it was the habit of looking for God in all the wrong places, as it were, that prompted Cotton Mather to scan the streets and skies of Salem for God’s will. Then, endlessly confident that he had found it, to decry the “wonders of the invisible world” breaking through into witch-plagued Salem. His action would dramatically shape the subsequent American political imagination.

Chapter One considers the politics and consequences of this theologized imagination. It examines the way metaphors of spirit and body entangled, and the practical confusions that resulted, when the earliest religious immigrants to this country established the civitas in spiritual terms. To Perry Miller, “Puritanism” was “not only a religious creed,” it was, additionally, a “philosophy and a metaphysic … an organization of man’s whole life, emotional and intellectual” (cited in McLoughlin, p. 24). And so, however discreetly, religious discourse continues to be an all-purpose, civic narrative of self-description, populist motivation, and terrible self-haunting. As we shall see, the rhetorical pattern of the Puritans’ zeal is still written in civic self-address; their moralistic energy still fills movie theaters and sways public emotion.

Although economics and religious motives were deeply mixed even in 1630, the actual land setded as a religious sanctuary and called New England was somewhat less important than the various new worlds of rhetoric and cult derived from it. Even before the Puritan migration, of course, the crucial attraction of the New World was, really, that it was a never-never land in the classic sense: a utopic geography perfectly situated in the mind’s eye to be unrestrained by problematic conditions of land and weather, while at the same time being free from the messy gravitas of earthly politics. In short, the Puritans sought a spiritual landscape, perhaps even a fantasy one. However, they were not the first to yearn for Utopia; nor were they alone in blending desire for a new world with nostalgia for the old: “‘America’ entitled a carnival of European fantasies” (Bercovitch, “The Puritan Vision of the New World,” CLHUS p. 35).³ It was just that the unworldly hopes of the Puritans differed from other European visions, so they thought, because theirs had biblical warrant.

The Puritans read history in reverse, beginning with Revelation—the end. Biblical typology explained to these strict religionists the complexity of their lives, and even lent a measure of authority to their history that it otherwise lacked. To a culture long on reading and short on books, allegory was a necessary habit and the Bible, life’s primary text: “All demarcations of the Sacred, all ways of linking nature, man, and God, rested on moral allegory” (Hall, Worlds of Wonder, p. 212). For the dispossessed Puritans the newly vernacular Bible offered a template from Genesis to Revelation, from origin to apocalypse. It made possible an easy-to-follow map through a geographic wilderness that metaphorically embodied a range of issues—psychological and emotional, nationalistic, civic, even religious: Who am I? Where am I from? Where am I going? Manifest Destiny would later become a nationalistic rallying cry, even a cliché. But it could be applied to exterior geography because for decades it had already expressed popular sentiment about being able to read the soul’s destiny righdy.

The Puritans struggled to build a society conceived as worship and the difficulties of the task soon became apparent. For one thing, a hidden assumption behind governance and theology became clear. So entwined were the two impulses of church and polis (state would be anachronistic in this context)—evangelical federalism, as it were—that in the new republic, laws would eventually have to be enacted precisely to keep church and polis separate.⁴ As if this were not complication enough, the social order rising on the Massachusetts strand implicidy presumed that God’s love—whatever else might be said of it—was so overwhelming that few individuals survived its revelation unchanged. And what could be said about individuals would be said about social orders, as well. The society rested, often uneasily, upon a politics of apocalypse. That is, as Puritan rhetoric put it rather more ingenuously, their world was to be radically converted by love to love. In practice, things did not always turn out that simply, of course. Grace was, in a word, devastating, even awful. Indeed, Salem would provide practical confirmation that metaphysics had civil consequences, and that the intrusion of the transcendent, whether demonic or divine, portended ill to individuals and to societies alike. Caution and restraint would prove theological necessities as well as civic strategies.

Nonetheless, to the conversion of love by love were organized the exclusions, denials, and prohibitions of their dissenting social polities. Further, the very idea behind Puritanism—an “emotion of dissent” (Heimert, p. 15)—casts light upon the Puritans’ greatest contradiction. As Larzer Ziff suggests, “antinomian belief [is] at the core of Puritanism” (Heimert, p. 13). Dissenters themselves, the Puritans showed zealous devotion to the law, relendessly pursuing the lawless, whether freethinker, Quaker, or other “perversely creative minds” (Starkey, p. 234). So by a curious reversal, the same antinomian impulse engendered both John Cotton, radical dissenter, originator and guardian of New England’s law, and Anne Hutchinson, herself a sharp-witted and formidable dissenter against the constraints of external law. The urge to dissent and to speak the soul freely produced the most law-conscious culture in the world, while making inevitable its necessary subversion. In time, even the Divine—inscrutable, unmanageable, and above the law, clearly an antinomian of sorts—would draw their fire.

The separatists and come-outers who fled war-torn England were not by any means, then, persons given to works of airy accommodation. John Demos notes the “ubiquity of conflict in early New England life” (Entertaining Satan, p. 297). Demos observes, for instance, that conflict was viewed “not simply as an invitation to God’s wrath but also as an expression of it” (p. 371). (Indeed, as one commentator suggests, Salem, which we will consider in the next chapter, was considered to be “one of the most contentious little communities in the Massachusetts Bay Colony” (Starkey, p. 26). This general attribute of the colonies was due in part to the naturally fierce challenges the people faced merely to survive, for the Puritans’ strenuous practice of Christianity seemed a fitting response to the rough weather in New England and rougher conditions at home. Nor did the vast spaces of the not-yet colonies appease or even much temper their contrariness. Further, it is crucial to understand that the first New Englanders neither sought nor hoped to find religious toleration; they “were in no sense pioneers of religious liberty” (Miller, American Puritans, p. 94), and freedom of expression, at least as we understand the term, was not what they sought. Quite to the contrary; it was precisely to demonstrate their bondage to the Covenant and their submission to God’s spiritual law that the Puritans undertook the Great Migration, choosing in literal fashion to follow the biblical injunction, “be not conformed to the world….” And so they were not, and would not be, ever; to be dispossessed and captive would always be their emblematic spiritual condition.

Still, while resisting the (new) world, these early immigrants rigorously imposed upon it a characteristic religious sense and shadow. It was, in Wallace Stevens’s phrase, as if they had left “with [their] bones…what still is/The look of things….” (“A Postcard from the Volcano,” p. 159). Fleeing popery in the Old World, they reinstated in the new a system of religious scrutiny as baroque as any old-world Catholicism. A zeal for hierarchy the Puritans lived out as submission. Although they escaped the burdens of priestcraft, they reinstated the weight of priesdy subjugation in the meetinghouse, whose very pews wrote out a pattern of conformity and hierarchy at the same time. And although they spoke long and eloquendy of God’s love, it was God’s unescapable terror that compelled their allegiance; and, as resistant to other people’s laws as they were, they considered submission to God’s inscrutable law—and, paradoxically, to his confounding mercies—their greatest virtue. The English expatriates who fled Queen Mary’s zealous persecutions, removing first to the lowlands, and then to New England, were indeed a ragtag lot of dissidents and separatists—fanatics, their own peers would call them. As Alan Heimert observes, “their name and even their sense of who they were” the Puritans received “from those who reviled them. Theirs was a movement invented…by its enemies” (The Puritans, p. 1). Indeed, their very name—“Puritan”—was meant as a derisive insult.

The Puritans were convicted—one must hear the word’s theological echo—by the need to write the Holy into the temporal order as civic principle, and their efforts to rewrite theological disputations as nationalist policies and governmental systems had precedent.⁵ As incentive, source, and model, they could draw upon various theologica...